Pre-Socratic Philosophers Flashcards
I. General Theories of the Cosmos (attempt)
a. Use of observation and reason to construct general theories
b. Secrets behind the appearances in the world
c. Knowledge stemmed from islands
1. Ionian Sea
2. Coast of Persia
II. Problems about Pre-Socratic Philosophers
- Very little is known about them
- Accounts are inaccurate because of distortions
- Often contained anachronistic ideas
- Debatable fragments
580 B.C.E.
Colony of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor—today’s Turkey—in the sixth century B.C.E.
Thales
ca.
610–ca. 546
B.C.E.), also from
the city of Miletus,
Anaximander
(ca. 545 B.C.E.)
Anaximenes
ca. 572–ca. 500 B.C.E.), from the island of Samos, near Miletus,
Pythagoras
(ca. 470 B.C.E.) of Ephesus,
heraclitus
(ca. 515–ca. 440 B.C.E.)
Parmenides
(ca. 490 B.C.E -?)
Zeno of Elea
(?–ca. 440 B.C.E.), a citizen of the Greek colony of Acragas
Empedocles
(ca. 500–ca. 428 B.C.E.) of Clazom- enae, near Miletus
Anaxagoras
Leucippus (ca. 460 B.C.E.–?) and (ca. 460–ca. 370 B.C.E.),
Leucippus and Democritus
(ca. 490–ca. 422 B.C.E.)
II. Protagoras
(ca. 483–375 B.C.E.)
III. Gorgias
c. All things are composed of water
1. First principle
2. Basic nature
3. Valued for its form
“If there is change, there must be something changes, yet does not change.”
1. Unity behind the plurality of things
Thales
d. Ultimate reality
i. Elements have contrariety with one another
ii. Not unlimited
e. Boundless or the Unlimited (apeiron)
I. Unobservable, unspecific, indeterminate
iii. Opposed to nothing
iv. Everything is it
Anaximander
b. Air
i. halfway house between forms (primordial air)
ii. transformed through condensation and rarefaction
1. Project of reductionism
- Differences in quality
Anaximenes
c. all things are numbers
d. reality must be expressed in mathematical formulas
i. great-great-grandfather of this law
e. little is known of him
discovered ratios between musical sound and number
i. deduced a mathematical harmony (universe)
ii. doctrine of “the music of spheres”
iii. celestial bodies move
1. motion produces sound
2. motion is divine
iv. music is the eternal background sound
1. sound in the world is contrasted
Pythagoras
There is an exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things”
i. basic stuff of reality
Reality is composed not of a number of things but of a process of continual creation and destruction.”
c. “You cannot step into the same river twice.”
Heraclitus
a. you can’t step in the same river once.
b. “It is”
i. truth of reason
ii. cannot be denied
iii. “it is not”, then “it is”
iv. if nothing exists, it is not nothing (something)
Parmenides
b. Everything was made up of simplest parts (four roots)
i. water
ii. air
iii. eath
iv. fire
c. Forces to explain change and movement
i. Love
1. force of unity
2. brings together unrelated terms (new creation
ii. Strife
1. Force of destreuction
2. Breaking down old unities to fragments
Empedocles
impossibility of motion
ii. absurdity or contradiction
iii. even granting motion = never getting anywhere
1. E.g. door
- Halfway (infinity)
b. Race between Achilles and a tortoise
i. head start (tortoise)
ii. swift runner (Achilles)
Zeno
a. Replaced four roots to “infinite seeds”
i. object in the world contains seeds
ii. seeds predominate (element)
iii. “In all things, there is a portion of everything. . . . For how could hair come from what is not hair? Or flesh from what is not flesh?”
b. Replaced Love and Strife
i. Nous or Mind (mental)
ii. organized to an intelligent, rational order
iii. animate and inanimate world
1. Organic world
- Nous contained within it (self-ordering principle)
2. Inorganic world
- Nous ordered externally
Anaxagoras
a. Little piece of Parmenidean being (atoms)
i. set them moving through empty space
i. uncreated
ii. indestruvtable
iii. eternal
iv. indivisible
v. no holes
Leucippus and Democritus
Achievements of Pre-Socrats
a. Special kind of thinking
i. method
ii. content
iii. science and philosophy today
b. Theory of evolution
c. Effort to solve riddle
i. how mathematical numbers hold sway over the flux of reality
d. Undermine traditional religious and moral values
e. Old aristocracy
i. no longer interested in Honor, Courage, and Fidelity (virtues)
ii. power and success
1. Through politics
2. Access to political power
3. Study of rhetoric
