1) The Pre-Socratics: Milesians and Pythagoreans

welcome back any questions so far about like syllabus stuff those of you who are new anybody want a paper syllabus there's a digital one online as well paper raise your hand if you want a paper even if you were here before if you want another one maybe you know one for the home one for the office probably yeah if you lost the first one cancer good you lose the second one just stick with the digital version right anybody else syllabus syllabus syllabus okay I won't go over it there is a syllabus quiz if you have any questions about the syllabus quiz let me know is it Fahim welcome back all right so last time went around I got everybody's name I ask you some questions I kind of poked at you a little bit it was fun I don't know what you guys think was it was it fun wasn't it somebody somebody approached me after the class and said like is this pretty standard like is there gonna be this much back-and-forth dialogue and I was like I hope said this yesterday not yesterday Tuesday was definitely tilted a little more in this direction than our normal meetings will be there might be a little more in this direction but I'd like to have that sort of dialogue one difference that I would like to have is see if we could focus it because it was a little bit while it was fun and we were following ideas wherever they led and some of this had to do with that I was forcing everybody to talk even if they didn't want to but there was a little bit of kind of like let's go talk about this oh this I do have you ever had a conversation like that where you're trying to talk to somebody about something and they keep like you and you're like yeah back here we're talking about this thing one sustained conversation about one idea at a time please let's slow it down this is like a big mark of philosophy it's a slowing down of your thought process so that you can become a little more careful in your thought process philosophy is very slow this is why we're still in conversation with things that were happening like 2500 years ago right that's how slow the conversation is we still haven't stopped talking to the folks at the very beginning and that's what that's what this class is all about that's in fact that's what today's class meeting is all about we're gonna go like all the way back to the very very beginning we talked last time about this question in I tried to weave it into and cram it into the end of our little free-for-all conversation that sounded that sounded like I wasn't impressed with it our little free-for-all conversation it was good it was good for what it was this question about like why should we study ancient philosophy I kind of sketched out a couple of possible answers one if you'll recall was just a standard history of ideas sort of answer like if we want to know where we are if we honest want to understand who we are we need to understand like where we came from as a culture and this is like the moment where I think a lot of folks will be like what culture man like white European culture like male chauvinist culture and I'd be like yeah that's the code that's like where we come from a lot of us do come from even those of us who would challenge that sort of colonialist narrative like you can't deny that Western colonialism has been a really really big part of world history and hugely influential so like we need to pay attention to it even if we want to critique it perhaps especially if we want to critique it then there was the second answer which is that like these texts are not part of the philosophical Western philosophical Canon just because like it wasn't arbitrary they're actually like really good stuff that stood the test of time and the questions that they're engaging are timeless questions they haven't gone away we're still asking them we're still answering them in much the same way that the ancient philosophers did so we want to understand it in that way as well what I didn't really get around to was this third idea about like what it means to engage philosophically with really really old texts he is not this movie Good Will Hunting okay there's a scene in that where the late Robin Williams is talking to Matt Damon and he asks Matt Damon Will Hunting he says well do you have a soulmate and well it's like I got I got plenty he starts rattling off a list of like people who kind of like touch him not like physically spiritually spiritually touch him in it and his list is like John Locke Nietzsche Kant Pope O'Connor dead people right a whole bunch of dead people and Robin Williams character says like yeah but they're they're dead like you're not gonna have a real conversation with them that's an interesting little moment right there because I think that's not entirely true there's a way of reading this this stuff charitably that does make it come alive we're talking about having a conversation like a genuine conversation with somebody where I'm trying to see where they're coming from what the 20th century philosopher hans-georg gadamer will call a fusion of horizons this kind of moment where somebody else is talking about something and I try to take up their perspective and see it how they're describing it see what it is that they're talking about and think with them this is like a really impressive moment we might even say something like this is one of the most precious of human experiences this is this is the moment when we really connect with people I don't know if you've ever had like these long you know perhaps fueled by some controlled substance like long conversations to like 3:00 a.m. with somebody you stay it up in the dorm and you talk to it like these are your friends right the people that you have those conversations with these are the people who are kind of important in your life this is how you really interacted this is like the best way to interact with people there are other ways as well you can play tennis with them you know sex with them they're all but this is like there's something uniquely human about that trying to share perspectives and see where the other person's coming from and when you actually do engage that and it's not just a passivity where you're just like I'm just gonna see it the way that Plato says it in order to like understand it you need to kind of push back a little bit there needs to be a critique there needs to be a like he says this but like how could that be and then you're coming about all right see how we would Oh Oh and it's a back and forth and this is how it becomes a conversation this is how it becomes alive this is how your philosophical community your your community of interlocutors becomes bigger not just the people in your classroom certainly not just the people like we have this problem it's a contemporary social problem right that we have little bubbles it's almost exacerbated by by the way that we technologically mediate our our social sphere the whole bunch of eyes just glaze does nobody nobody care about layer are you familiar with this that we we work ourselves into bubbles we're the only ideas we ever hear are the ones that we like and somebody says something that we disagree with who more like you're out of the bubble and they join their own bubble and then it's just like we're all over here like what's wrong with them they're crazy but I don't know obviously remember and they're all over here like obviously they're idiots over here and so like that's a problem we need to like have those conversations be real and engaging and not just expanded to everybody in our community but expanded to people who are outside of our community expanded to people who are dead long long time ago this is a 2500 year long conversation and it's still going on and in order to really get what philosophy is all about in order to get as much as you can out of this sort of course it needs to be more than just stamp collecting for you it needs to be more than like faily said this and Anaximander said this and anacs M&E said this and the pythagorean say this this is these are all their positions that's not philosophy philosophy is not just knowing what people said that's philology that's just the study of what people said philosophy is love of wisdom there's an engagement there right it's not just that I know what they said it's that I struck up a conversation with them okay that's the introduction to the class that we took 50 minutes to kind of sort a sketch out on Tuesday and hopefully I just kind of compressed into a little diamond for us just now does that sound about right does that sound like this sort of think like I'll spend a semester doing that okay I am NOT a cartographer oh yes okay so they're not scale okay that's the medic the general Mediterranean right as like we are like oh that's what he's talking about thanks for the person who recognized Italy right off the bat that's what I say you got to start with the boot right you got to start with the booty tons of islands out here just just lousy with islands which is a big part of like how Greek civilization began um this is this is geographically what we're talking about it's particularly important for when we're talking about the pre-socratic philosophers pre-socratic philosopher what are we member that well the ones who came before Socrates and in reading Baird my hope is that like you got a sense of that there's some ambivalence I think amongst most ancient philosophers about this term pre-socratic it's almost like not fair to the pre-socratic philosophers that we're like Oh what are they all Ivan coming wow they're all before Socrates it's just like if imagine if your parents talked about you as anybody have an older sibling or a younger sibling or something like that yeah imagine if you were just like your siblings brother or sister right some of us might have experienced like coming up through school oh yeah that's Adams sister my sister hated that um so yeah it's almost not really fair to the pre-socratic Fosters there's something genuine going on there but I'll also say that once we hit like you know hopefully you'll notice once we get to Socrates there's gonna be a noticeable shift a kind of a quantum leap forward where like we're doing something perhaps qualitatively different at the very least like it's almost like we're in the early stages of philosophy it's starting to come together with the pre-socratics by the time it's hit Socrates it's definitely going this question about like who the first philosopher is it's a really weird and delicate question it's the sort of thing that first of all we don't we don't know who all was saying what and like no matter who you pick as like I think that person is the first philosopher somebody's gonna be like wow somebody came before or well I don't know if it was quite philosophy at that point yet part of what we need to answer this is to have some idea of what a philosopher is and what philosophy is we talked about this a little bit at our last meeting too that it's we had all kinds of answers but one thing that we stuck on that at least seems etymologically resonant is this idea it's the love of wisdom for the Greeks and I think for the this story of Western philosophical thought and the story of its beginnings I think a lot of times this gets cached out as a movement from mythos to Lagos with us to Lagos with muthos is just it's the it's the dominant myth of the day right it's it's what's anybody do any studying in classics or ancient history like no oh okay Theogony no nobody knows the yeah Janee okay are you familiar with Greek mythology all right so that's this and it's that like it's all the stories that everybody is telling well it's about like Zeus who overthrew his father Cronus and Chronos and in the The Clash of the Titans and Cronus overthrew his father ran us by yeah he cut off his testicles with a scythe and threw them into the ocean what a jerk he did that to his own father oh my gosh um but to be fair its father was horrible tried to eat everybody and it was so anyway so that's it that's the mythos and we're moving into Lagos which is something else like whole books have been written about like what do the Greeks mean by Lagos we see some of its sense in the echoes at work its way into our language now would you like what is logon so what does it remind you of logic yeah obviously so logic is yeah so sometimes um Socrates will talk about where Plato will talk about Lagos in the sense of an account he wants it to be like a telling this also comes from the rule again Lagos and lagaye and kind of bring a whole bunch of really interesting ideas together Lagos is frequently used to talk about speech that's this kind of the same idea as an account and the route again comes from this we see a lot of uses of it kind of being to gather things up and put them into an order like to gather up sticks for firewood and put all the small ones together and the medium ones together and the bigger ones together that would be to like goal again some sticks and you're like okay I get them and then I order them and this is kind of this kind of that this provides some provocative ideas about what we're doing when we use language when we give an account right you're gathering things together you're organizing them and you're kind of like presenting them an easy-to-use way so it's this movement from your thoughts to Lagos what is the mythos you can learn a lot about a people by looking at their gods tell me about the Greek gods those of you who know a little something about the Greek gods I think you read I don't know maybe you read The Iliad maybe you read Theogony yeah they're awfully human right yeah they do make a lot of mistakes then they're petty right they're petty they're yeah anything else with you let's try this real quick O'Neill catch the microphone okay all right I think they represent the different parts of humans like emotions and mental states basically that make up humans as a whole okay yeah I like that too there's like yeah there's and this kind of gets it this idea that Omar was getting at to that there's a kind of a humanist to them right you can just hold on to it put it down and we'll pass it to whoever else wants to talk next Jews in the back um yeah petty awfully human kind of capricious right how predictable are humans very anti depends on it depends on like your major I suppose right all the psychologists are like pretty predictable I hope all of the performing artists are like completely unpredictable how comes the glitter I should have had glitter in my pocket that would've been great yeah that's true um this says an awful lot about somebody's world view that like so like why do things happen why does the Sun go across the sky why do the stars move the way that they move why was there an earthquake why was there a flood why did a plague come and wipe things out because the gods made it happen and what about the gods the petty their capricious who knows what they're gonna do there's a kind of a mysterious in this about this and if you can imagine living in I don't know 600 BC Greece and like your kind of hum along like oh this is your like the Sun go so the Sun goes down there's a nice regularity to it holy-shit and eclipse oh my god what's happening or oh my god all the crops just failed we have no idea why that's cuz this guy was rude towards the gods that's what it was ostracize him and then the crops came back next year we did her eye thing all right good all right so this is the way that we're thinking through things and it's through a kind of a popular storytelling that that arises organically people start telling stories their crossover characters it's like one big huge fan fiction orgy and then he see it puts it all together in one book and that kind of becomes like that's that's what the gods are like moving away from that kind of storytelling to Allah Gauss is something that's yeah it's kind of that line gets blurry I'm not sure like why does the Sun go across the sky like that Apolo drives it in this chariot there I gave a Lagos right I gave an account of what's happening why was there an eclipse because Apollo was angry where does the Sun go when it land there in the West like yeah I'm giving them account right so it's not clear that we're like mythos is completely divorced from the Lagos but notice what happens when we start getting into these early pre-socratic philosophers any questions so far where we are where we are now we're here ah that's a little off we're here yeah is read an okay choice here connect in folks in the back read this okay good what about can we get it is it showing up on them yeah that's readable okay good then my lesions so called because they were from the city of Miletus we're starting about 600 BC BCE however it like sometimes I'll interchange between the two but six hundred years before Year Zero in the city of Miletus we have something that kind of pops up and it's three philosophers at the very least they have this in common they're all from the same city and they all know each other and they're all talking to one another there's a little bit of overlap the first one is staleys he's the older fellow and then after that ease comes Anaximander and then after Anaximander an XM anis they're weird names you'll have to do a little bit of work to remember him let's start with dailies because he came first Bailey's was a big deal actually Bailey's was one of known all over like the like all of the Greek territories as one of the seven sages like seven wise people that occasionally would all come together and meet to kind of talk you know inter political sort of affairs right if there's some talk of like what's going on here maybe the Persians are trying to invade from the east let's all get together and talk about it one of the big guys was Bailey's he was a statesman he was a military strategist did we get the fragment in our reading about how there was like a river and there everyone was like how's the army gonna cross the river and he like brilliantly says like well let's go right up to the edge of the river dig a trench behind us almost complete it and then connect the two and shut off the first word we've basically just like will move the river behind us and that's how we'll cross it everyone's like wow that's amazing Bailey's really cool hardly enough to call him a philosopher yet though I don't know I'm not not sure if that that'll do it he also was one of the first I don't know if the first but one of the first recorded people to allegedly predict an eclipse a solar eclipse so you can imagine how this might be the sort of thing where if the prevalent story is like because Apollo's angry or Zeus is angry or like there's feuding between the gods or somebody made the gods upset and suddenly they lease is able to predict when this is going to happen people are gonna be like whoa what just happened and he was quite clear about it about how he did it he said I did it by observing all of the patterns and reading through the histories of when all the eclipses were and trying to find some sort of pattern that would make a prediction he was pretty clear about it he also did the same thing with a there was a he predicted that there was going to be a really big olive crop one year and nobody else really thought that it was gonna happen or had any reason to suspect that the olive crop was gonna be really really big so way in advance he buys up all of the presses and when there is a big olive crop and everybody wants to take their I was like olives all by themselves don't last all that long olive oil very very useful easy to transport so when they brought all their olives to press to make into olive oil Bailey's was there the only person who was in control of the presses and he charged exorbitant feeds and made tons and tons of money not because he wanted the money but because he wanted to prove to everybody else that if a philosopher wants to make lots of money they totally can it's just not the sort of thing that they're interested in it's just kind of like a demonstration be like I could do this if I wanted to I can make lots of lots of money but that's that's not the best use of my talents that's not the best application of wisdom if we want to and for a lot of our pre-socratics we're going to be able to do this we're gonna kind of like cliff note summarize them and are really sort of a violent wave with just like one little nugget one little phrase and for almost all of them there's going to be this idea of everything is like we can think of a lot of the the pre-socratic says their positions being some kind of elaboration on this fragmentary sentence everything is for dailies it's everything is water before we talk about like why fail ease thought that everything was water and why we would even talk about such a ridiculous idea let's talk about that everything is part most of the pre-socratic philosophers are after what the Greeks called an RK where do you recognize this word from architecture right so what does it mean what does our K mean our structure yeah its structure yeah now yeah what is yeah what does this word mean you might be something I don't know Roosevelt tell me you're the teacher what it means is or and there's some debate like they're like whole books on like what exactly the pre-socratic notion of RK was if we can think of it as a foundation as a fundamental principle a fundamental organizing principle in fact I like that let's start with that a fundamental organizing principle and in searching for this one of the things that were kind of tacitly articulating is that I think we can figure the world out I think the world makes sense I think it's not just random capricious acts of gods I think if we pay enough quota if we play close enough attention and if we're sufficiently rigorous in our inquiry we can figure out what the fundamental organizing principles of the cosmos are we can figure out everything everything can make sense if we just figure out what its structure is if we just figure out like what the basic building blocks of reality are all about that's an interest we'll move when we can see how it's part of this shift from mythos to Lagos and after storytelling anymore we're trying to crack the code we're trying to render nature intelligible we're trying to like strike up a conversation with nature itself in fact we might look at some of this that's thinking about like fundamental organizing principles of of the cosmos and especially look at the way that the my lesions do it we might think to ourselves that looks a little bit more like science than philosophy we'll talk about that in just a second but first Bailey's and this idea that everything is water why would anybody think that everything is water because there's a there's a lot of it comes down as where it comes out of the sky you dig down underneath the ground especially if you live in my Letus which is on the coast you dig down far enough like oh it's under the ground it comes out of the sky and some of the ground it's running all over the top of the ground yeah oh yeah water flows right and it changes it moved like it takes the shape of its container water could if you were looking for like one thing to say everything is made out of this it should probably be something that's like a little little flowy right something that can turn into lots of different things and yeah there's something almost alive to it mouse' says this one of the LEAs contemporaries like all the way out like far far away they're not talking to each other at all nobody nobody in East Asia is gonna be talking to anybody here in Asia Minor for a long long time but Laos is saying the same sorts of things about like the Dow is like it's in the movement of water right yeah Bruce Lee talks about this to be like water yeah yeah it's really intense more intense than hunger - yeah and if you don't get it you yeah you cease to exist as a person right like you die humans are now we know what is the it's like 70% like a a big print like we're a lot of water it's enough that like you don't want to go inside a microwave it's all over the it's all over the planet and it's also it's not just that it acts alive life happens where there's moisture and it doesn't happen like where there isn't moisture and we see like it's one of very few substances where we see all three of its phases and kind of like the normal everyday lives of humans and go up to the top of the mountain ah there's solid water we can it's ice right you go down to the CEO it's liquid you boil a pot of water you see a turn into a gas yeah okay I see where you're coming from he's got reasons here it's not just because the Oracle said so it's not just because I ate that plant and had a vision and that's what the gods told me he's got some reasons how plausible is this explanation here for the time remarkable maybe yeah everything's water and we're like well not everything but a lot a lot is well yeah you're right a lot is a surprisingly large amount is water is it the fundamental are K is at the fundamental organizing principle of all things biologically perhaps yeah wouldn't the Sun and the stars water fire maybe it's firewater I'm not sure exactly how hip bailey's was to this but I don't know have you ever like what is a fire all the chemists in the room what's yeah okay combustion yeah yes yeah fire is hot and as far as the chemists are concerned its combustion and one of the two products of every complete combustion no it eats oxygen and it produces carbon dioxide and water anytime you make a fire like water is being produced so I don't know if Daley's knew that in fact fire seems like it's a weird outlier for him in trying to explain everything but maybe the tools might have been there for him this kind of gets us into some territory where were like we're not sure exactly what they Lee said or how we would have responded to our question about like what do you do about fire there bro like have you done this experiment do you know that fire produces water that's really really interesting folks won't know that combustion is turning a hydrocarbon by combining it with oxygen into carbon dioxide water they're not going to know that for a long long time there's gonna be a whole wacky phlogiston theory before we can get to that theory of oxidation but um he's articulating a fundamental organizing principle and he's reducing it to just one thing one material thing if we recognize that everything is made out of water then the world will be predictable it will be wet when let's say you know they'll be moist and the world is moist in fact when we look for habitable planets what's the one thing we're always looking for is there water yeah all right that's they Lee's remarkable for his time remarkable for his time is a very polite way of saying stupid though right or uninteresting to us today what do you think about this project to try to figure out one thing that everything is made up do like does that even seem plausible is that like an old-fashioned idea or are we still thinking like is this question like what's everything made of is this still a question that resonates for us and do we still try to come up with like just one thing yep yeah and will it study the Animus there we got out another hundred or so years but yeah and here's another interesting thing here Daly's not an animist in fact none of my lesions were Adam is just yet so when I talk about a fundamental thing and we said we think in the terms of building blocks that's not really quite how they're thinking they're not thinking of like water molecules as Legos that we build everything like the Legos that the world is built from its water it's still it's a continuous substance for Daley's the same way that it appears to all of like I don't when you drink a glass of water are you usually thinking about the billions and billions of molecules rolling around each other or is it's just a it's just a wet continuous substance how do you think of water and I'm not talking about like well when I really think about it like just like you're naive impression of water is it made of atoms is it continuous it's just a thing one thing yeah I have some waters no nobody says that effo water I have a beer I have many beers but many beers is not like the glass of it's not the glass of beer it's like one beer - beer many beers right yes all right that's our friend Bailey's Anaximander it's one of his younger overlapping contemporaries Animax Anaximander like families before him did some really impressive stuff that my we typically don't talk about in terms of philosophical contributions but he was a wise guy and like really impressive he did an awful lot of like really big stuff in geometry if you get into the history of geometry especially history of Greek geometry Anaximander is a really big figure he whereas Ailey's predicted a solar eclipse Anaximander determines exactly when the vernal and autumnal equinox azar that's actually a really difficult thing to do it's relatively easy to figure out when the summer and winter solstices are you just kind of put a stick in the ground call them no no Mon and when the Sun is up at cast a shadow and as the Sun moves the shadow gets longer and shorter and the shadow moves and all you got to do is kind of pay attention to those shadows and at noon is when the shadow is going to be the shortest and at the let me see if we make sure I get this right yes at the summer solstice it's going to be the shortest of the shortest like the shortest noontime shadow and at the winter solstice the longest noontime shadow relatively easy to figure out exactly which day is the longest and the shortest day of the year you got to do this plus a lot of really fancy geometry to figure out which are the days where the Sun where the the day and the night are exactly equal and I know you might be thinking to yourself like how hard is it to figure out which like when is like the night exactly the same length as the day you just you just time it on your stopwatch right no not not 600 BCE you couldn't measuring time is not a thing that's going to happen for a very very long time as a matter of fact it's like not until like well into the modern era are we going to have reliable standards of time for scientists to use so this is like there's a whole lot of remarkable ingenuity going on with these folks as they're putting into practice this idea of like finding an arcane moving from mythos to log us we're going to figure the world out we believe that it's understandable we believe that it's predictable we believe that it's not just a big mystery and we're at the win with the gods for Anaximander everything is everything is everything is appe Ron the infinite perhaps yeah that's that's oh yeah welcome to our how many do we have here how many words have we racked up where I'm kind of like oh we're not sure exactly what it means it's a mushy term we add well philosophy that's the first one right what the heck is that and then Sophia itself wisdom was something that we were like yeah we can kind of sort of sketch out but I don't know if I know exactly what it is Lagos gets tossed into the mix today our K and now app a run which sometimes folks will say as the infinite literally indefinite I think is maybe closer unlimited and it comes from like we can break it down into its its etymological parts here we've got an alpha primitive ah like like atheist or asexual or you get the idea right like that that primitive a prefix and then pay Ron which means a limit or a boundary if you think of what do you call what do you call the if you trace the outside edge of a circle what do we call that perimeter right yeah and not just a circle any yeah any shape the outside if we trace the outside we call it the perimeter yes we do call it the circumference as well the circumference is the length of the perimeter right okay and also this account circumference isn't yeah it's not anywhere in that word para but perimeter right perros is a limit a boundary everything is everything is everything is the infinite everything is the unlimited that this is the our our I see where this is coming from here the stuff that everything is made out of the Archaea the fundamental organizing principle is this unlimited stuff unformed matter right unlimited matter perhaps we might think that it's it's out of the indefinite things are we put boundaries around them when you think of it like this first there was this indefinite stuff then somebody took a little corner of it out and said like here I'll put a boundary around this now it's a thing yeah it's a square thing yeah it's a square it becomes it only becomes a thing when we put some bound to do you know any things that don't have limits this is a thing does it have limits yeah and like right around there yeah there's little it's got a boundary right the unlimited the unlimited what a weird idea how about mathematical infinity that seems to not be quite what he means just yet we'll talk a little bit about like why I think that might not be the direction that he's going in some of it has to do with the fact that the my lesions are usually regarded as kind of all sharing some certain assumptions one of the biggest hump shins that the my lesions all shared was there's one arc a there's a fundament there's like one single arc a this is the reason why we think of them as monists they are monists because they think that there is one fundamental organizing principle for Talese its water for Anaximander it's the up hey Ron the indefinite or the unlimited interesting thing here can you see the up hey Ron can you taste it can you touch it I don't think so there's a kind of a weirdness to this idea I'm not sure if it's the water is like a very tangible definite thing right pay Ron by its nature by definition by definition by the death by definition it's indefinite can you know the indefinite describe the indefinite to me define the indefinite can't be defined by lack of definition but then I just defined it now didn't I how indefinite could it possibly be it's not what anyway I want you pass the microphone over so just one more time for the folks at home so it's okay to define the indefinite as undefinable yes because it's tautological what do you mean by tautological for those who for whom that might be a new word when you use the word to define itself or like I can like an equivalence and are like a mathematical identity yeah you you don't really progress any understanding of the subject by it's like saying two equals two right I mean it's a true statement but it doesn't mean anything but what about two equals one plus one is that a tautology as well it's it's a more meaningful tautology but it's also a mathematical statement yeah in logic usually we talk about tautology says things that are necessarily true oh we don't even need to know what the terms mean we could just analyze its structure and we'll know that its pathologist so yeah all tautologies are tossed there's a nice xkcd comic the first rule of tautology Club is the first rule of tautology Club typically we use it as a kind of a oh that's an uninteresting truth when we talk about tautologies some of them are a little more interesting so what do we think of if it's true that we're gonna say the indefinite is definable as undefined is that an interesting tautology if I would say it's philosophically interesting but it doesn't get us very far on its own why is it oh I think you just gave like a backhanded complimented philosophy yeah it's a it's good for philosophy but not really interesting all by itself so what do you what do you mean by this if you don't mind pressing because this is this is fun so everybody okay over there like a rubber band blow up all right so what makes it philosophically interesting then if we have to like gin up some form like it's not genuinely interesting only philosophically interests but if I was interested in philosophical things say if I was a philosopher or an aspiring philosopher or just somebody in a philosophy class what's interesting about saying that the indefinite is definable as undefined is it because it seems mysterious right possibly self-contradictory that's a cool little moment because it's notice what it sucks you in right like it there's a kind of you're like hearing it daily since everything's Rahner are and i get it and then i like did you feel like something pull and that's like a metaphor did you feel something pull when we move from dailies to Anaximander everything's water well I guess I'm I'm explaining here like there and see where he's coming from then Anaximander says the appear on is it all of these things it's defined as the fundamental RK the order of all things is that it's undefinable suddenly we're just like that's a that's a riddle you have to pick it up and kind of look at it a little bit you don't just walk by and be like yeah that's dailies everything's water now we get this thing that's a puzzle when we get to Heraclitus we'll get like hella puzzles he that guy is like mr. puzzles Anaximander everything is a payer on an XM eni's everything is and what a disappointing step backwards one of the things that anacs Emma knees if we're going to include them in here is is adding to the conversation is now we've got a mechanism it's not just that like water can turn into everything like Daley says annex M&E says it does it by this process by compression and rarefaction when you compress air it turns into water compress it even more it turns into stone or earth ice if you take air and you rarefied you kind of stretch it out that's when it turns into fire and suddenly actually if we're thinking in atomistic terms this is pretty close to idea of phase changes today right compression rarefaction with some additional things like strange things that are happening between solid and liquid it's not always good like ice in fact there's a great example of like how an XM eni's might have thought he was on the right track but was precisely wrong in fact is that when you go from where are we all familiar with this liquid water to solid water like usually the phase change you actually have to expand a little bit to turn from water to ice this is why ice floats that didn't happen our oceans would be mostly frozen so everything's air and there's this process of compression rarefaction and that's kind of close to our idea today except that we still don't have an idea of atoms yet all these my lesions are Monas and they tend to be thought of as material monists that it's the matter it's some kind of material principle that is the fundamental are K that's the fundamental organizing principle of all things they lease its water and x17 its air Anaximander is it material it could be and it seems to me this is kind of like how he's thinking of it as a formless formless matter if that ever even makes sense that's you know it's defined as the indefinite that's a little puzzle and a riddle to kind of like think about while you're on the toilet another one to kind of like mull over is this question of is it material is uninformed matter is it matter is that is that like a sensible idea at all matter with no form at all matter before it has form can you even have unformed matter well will will hit that one head on when we get to Aristotle this question about what is the relationship between matter and form or material in form that's our time no that's not our time Tuesday Thursday class does go longer there's just a lot of people talking about science okay for a second there I was like good I'm Way behind this is the my lesions do we understand why people usually refer to them as material monists what's the monist part mean just one yeah 1rk yeah and what's the material part it's it's all material that's all all matter and if I asked like a short essay question to explain like tell me why it is that Anaximander is maybe like a questionable fit for the turret for the label of material monist do you think you could explain like why this is dicey and possibly why I would like why somebody might go either way like say like actually I don't think I'm a max manner should count as a material - or I think that he should you could do that yeah maybe think about it a little more that's it that's totally the kind of exam question that I would ask yeah yes how he is a material noticed yeah so in order for him to do we get do we get way as a monist yeah everything is like everything is if the way that you finish that sentence is like to talk about one thing you're gonna be amounted why is he material is that the part that's sticky for you the one thing is yeah it's the apparent right that which is without paris the that which was that that which is without limit and we've got to think of that in a way where we're thinking of like that's stuff it's the stuff that reality is made out of fundamentally all of the reality is that stuff but we're talking about it and it's completely unformed not yet anything stuff miss and its material stuff if this is a confusing idea for you you're not necessarily alone there are plenty of philosophers and like I said when we get to Aristotle Aristotle be like that don't make sense at all like how could there be stuff like how could there be stuff without form it's God I have some form even if it's like a blobby form yes can we can we pass you a microphone Thanks so we're thinking of it we should perhaps think of it like algebra like a mathematical infinity kind of well I'm not so much that but whereas the other two guys would use an actual number Anaximander was just saying X instead of five or two okay so yeah everything is though we might think everything is made of fives which is like what about the what about one but like yeah we can say something everything is made of ones everything is made of twos and then it's like Anaximander saying everything is number yeah which we might say well one of the things that we might identify here is that the confusion might be because I'm thinking of material and abstraction as somehow like incompatible that there is a there's a move towards the abstract for Anaximander and this is like one of the ways where we might kind of be like ooh something weirds going on there something distinctly philosophical is going on there these look like there may be proto scientific and this one looks maybe proto philosophical if not genuinely philosophical and one of the things we got to keep in mind here is that like there's no division between the two yet there's like science is being born and it won't really come into its own until I don't know what 1500s bacon somebody like that like we won't science won't fully hit its stride no one's gonna use the word scientist until like the late 1800s in fact science as we know today natural science was known for the longest times and at this time as natural philosophy so the two are not quite distinct but we can already see like two different trajectories here like a movement towards the concrete as an arc a of the cosmos some kind of concrete material stuff and here we have an abstract sense of materiality maybe like the abstraction of material maybe this is what the material of matter in its most abstract form is this this might be what he is thinking of so that might I don't know does that help kind of clear it up it's the abstract form of formless matter a now we're back into like little paradoxes again yeah what a dad was kind of about or annex Anaximander was coming from an operon I don't know how to compare Greece of this timeframe with China at this timeframe but I think there's some really interesting similarities between what he's saying in Greece and what I would see a saying in China yeah the way they cannot be named is not the true way yes and later Kony's I think part of the one things about that bran is the fact that it's definition contradicts itself illustrates a lot of what a Tron is that a parent is what it's inherently contradictory it contradiction comes along with it we're getting shades of Heraclitus already and I want to like I if there's a reason why I'm not indulging this thought process right now it's because we're gonna hit it in a really really big way in our next meeting with another guy who embraces that part of the reason why I'm up I'm kind of like I'm not sure exactly what Anaximander would have said about this is there something inherently self contradictory is there's something inherently paradoxical about the idea of a pay run because we only have like a couple of little fragments we don't have a whole lot from Anaximander most of it's secondhand it's a nice little quote here that adds one more thing that Anaximander was able to add into the conversation and it's the only surviving fragment that we have you had a question though yeah yeah have I ever considered Anaximander not fully grasping the concept of infinity oh yes and XM eni's yeah no say it say it n XM eni's one more time close much closer an XM eni's let's try it all together one and it's an XM eni's one two three that's great it's worth it to practice it to say the words so the question all right your question was is it possible that he's not understanding fully understanding the concept of a pay run I wouldn't say that and for a couple of reasons one I'm not sure if I fully understand the concept of a payor on so I don't know if I'm in a position to say who is and who isn't a little Socratic move right there another reason is because I'm not sure exactly what Anaximander thought of the appear on because we only get a few surviving fragments and second and third-hand accounts of what it is that he said so I can't say that's a that's a really really tough question to answer has he introduced an idea that inherently like demands to be picked up and examined and kind of like played with a little bit I think yeah definitely that and we can do interesting little geometrical projections to to think about this the surface of the earth is infinite like well what do you mean like well if you just like pick a direction and walk you'll never get to the end it's like completely there there's no Paris you'll not encounter anything we're like yeah but there's a surface area right there's definitely some limit and I call you have to think at a higher dimension there and so maybe this is like the direction that we go when we start thinking about the universe is being infinite as well obviously though still a concept that's rattling around in our philosophical consciousness right we still wonder whether or not the universe is infinite and how to think about that one of the other things that Anaximander added to this conversation was this idea and this is not right false started a couple of times there and this is the content of the only surviving fragment that we're pretty sure like came from him and it comes by way of simply kiyose in the 5th century it says whence things have their origin there their destruction happens as it is ordained according to the debt for they give justice and compensation to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time what we're saying here is when things come from the up a Ron there's a debt to be paid how do we pay that debt back to it got to put it back right it's got to go back to the up hey Ron things die things that come out of things that come in to form things that come into being also pass away they decay there's destruction there's creation and there's destruction and that creation and destruction is this coming out of and going back into the appear on the indefinite the infinite and that's justice yeah that's a concept that hasn't made an appearance yet at all right that somehow justice is involved there's a really thin sense of justice and he says kata talk crayon according to the debt it's not he's not talking about justice itself like the personified justice and the word that like Plato is gonna pick up when he talks about justice in the in the Republic it's D K so we have according to crayon according to the debt some maybe we need some scare quotes around this but something looking like justice has worked into the conversation now as well yes yes right right the question in case I didn't get picked up on the microphone is how can we say that the indefinite is in fact unlimited if things can come into and out of it same as we might say like if the universe is infinite what's outside of the universe but then it's not infinite right then there's a boundary there's a boundary between this universe and another universe we might say there's no if there's it doesn't make sense but we're kind of stuck with this idea of coming into and out of the infinite right or the indefinite and one way of thinking about it is that it's not that thinking about it as a physical movement into and out of might be a little bit of a metaphor and shouldn't be taken literally then it's more like there's indefiniteness and then like we form things out of it and then we destroy them when you destroy something kind of like when a person dies right when they return to the infinite did they go somewhere is it like a change of location that happens when you die before you are infinite then you became a particular finite thing and then you died and went back to the infinite no longer if I know we had shades of Heraclitus before we're getting shades of Parmenides now so like I'm gonna table this because we're dealing with fragmentary comments and we're spinning the next couple of steps already out of them good you guys are you guys are good like you're making approximately 100 years of philosophical progress in one hour I like it okay gotta get at least one more guy on the table and he is pythagoras pythagoras and the pythagoreans Pythagoras is rumored to have studied with Anaximander and part of that is because he grew up in Samos here a little island just off the coast of Crete and then eventually moved all the way over here to Croton part of the reason why I moved there was because he had founded a religion a cult a cult a cult he had founded a cult the Pythagorean cult which was kind of like a religion kind of like a bunch of other stuff like we'll see some stuff with Pythagoras where we're like this seems like a movement right back into the mythos man like the next philosopher is a cult leader give me a break but like it's a cult of mathematics which is a weird cult right like it's not what you usually think of when you think of a cult so Pythagoras and they were like they were not very popular like most cults are like the other folks around them are kind of like weirdos and they go to Croton mostly to escape persecution so what's going on with Pythagoras and the pythagoreans here are some of the things that they believed in their community they believed that the soul was immortal and that when the body dies the soul lives on not the craziest thing I ever heard they believed that you shouldn't eat animals because they might be a reincarnated friend or relative they believed that you shouldn't eat beans they believed in gender equality that was a really big deal at the time like not there wasn't a whole lot of that going on not just in Greece and Asia Minor but like anywhere on the planet there wasn't a whole lot of gender equality and we can start to see how some of these things go together right if you think that the soul is something that's distinct from an abstract thing not a material thing this is like one of the big moves that we get with Pythagoras and Pythagorean is huge shift towards the abstract towards something that is definitely not mathematical maybe we got some hints out at all there already from Anaximander but like Pythagoras and pythagoreans are making a huge shift away from the material and say like no no no you are not your body you are some other immaterial thing and when your body dies that lives on and eventually will be reincarnate carnate it in another body and this is why we don't eat animals and this is perhaps why we don't eat beans we were like why not beans and like if you eat a little bunch of beans they'll start speaking through you like there's some there's a life force going on there this is the sort of thing like we got got little shades of this also with Bailey's to Bailey's was fascinated with magnets and said like some kind of like interesting principle involving water of course is going on inside of a magnet and leads him to say a very famous quote from Bailey's everything is full of God's not not in the sense that there are like little Greek gods inside the magnet like doing stuff but that what we think of as gods this fundamental organizing principle is something that's a fused through everything and it's what makes things move when you see something move you're like where'd that come like what made that happen some natural force something that has got to be part of the fundamental organizing principle all is full of gods and beans of course obviously full of spirits that's why tanks I was trying to be delicate about it but yeah it's way far yep that's actually not why I'm sorry just that's actually not waiting for it but yeah right oh yes well they believed in B they believed they didn't eat beans hard to tell exactly why cuz we just have a list of rules in here like where does that come from it might just be inconsiderate to your fellow cult members to eat beans it might be because we think that beans are like different than your ordinary vegetable in that they contain a soul or a spirit an accent emic 70 set that everything is air and we might think of like air seems like such a like an inferior principle to even something like water like Bailey says after all water and moisture is what gives life to everything why not air right why not air be our principle because it's its breath right like spiritus it all through the Middle Ages we're going to talk about the soul as spirit as breath and so that's sure why not with an axe Emma knees as well and we could say the same thing about beans that it's a sign that there's a soul in that bean then it talks yeah maybe I don't know I'm I'm trying my best to like think like what would a pythagorean say gender equality is one that totally makes sense because if you are not your body then these presumably superficial bodily distinctions between men and women are not important if you're just a soul man woman all the same kind of soul not everybody ends up agreeing with that but usually it ends up not all the pythagoreans seem to at least and tender equality and this idea of the soul is going to be something that's rattling around the rest of our conversation about Greek philosophy Pythagoras and the pythagoreans are a huge influence on Plato after Socrates dies he goes to Croton and spends like quite a bit of time studying with the pythagoreans and it's it's a big influence on his work well as we go through it will point out like there it is there's pythagorean ism everything is everything is water a pair on air everything is mathematical ratios because that is the tippy-top pinnacle that's as abstract as you get man is mathematical ratio and the story of how Pythagoras discovers this and there's no telling whether it's a true story or apocryphal is that he was walking through he was walking through the village and he heard blacksmiths banging on their anvils and he noticed that there like they were playing like a little tune it was like bunk bunk boom boom boom bunk bunk bunk boom boom and he was like that's cool and he goes over and he looks at the anvils and he realizes that this one that's like an octave higher than this one is half as big as this one and this one that's like an intermediary interval between this one and this one it's an intermediary mathematical like whole numbers like its size is kind of doing the same sort of thing as the sound and suddenly he just there's kind of a heat things to like and this is how flutes work as well and he realizes that mathematical ratio is first of all it's how we understand the world around us second of all it unites things like dislike a kind of what we might think of as a cold scientific description of like how the world is that mathematics is like the language of like the book of nature this is this is what's gonna be said about it in early modernity we'll start thinking about math and we think about it like that now right do we all do physicists at least businesses seem to think of like well what is the world like or at least how was it described well it's describable in terms of mathematical ratios fagor has got there early 500s BCE was talking about how everything was made of mathematical ratios and not just everything in the natural world around us but beauty and ugliness can be described this way as well so suddenly we have this notion of value we had something about justice before with Anaximander this idea of like cops Auto crayon according to the debt that which comes out of the up a Ron's got to go back someday um with Pythagoras we have something more like beauty and also they start playing around with this idea of harmony as more than just a metaphor for how we get along with one another in a community so justice maybe even in a stronger sense than the payment of debt or in a slightly different sense than the payment of debt justice in the sense of harmony is somehow describable by mathematical ratio as well unspecified exactly how we're going to flesh that out but beauty mathematics justice all part of the same thing it's all harmony it's all math and harmony is nothing more than mathematical ratio that's as abstract as it seems like maybe it's as abstract as you could get number numbers pretty abstract right quite a movement in less than a hundred years from because the gods were angry too hey I think the world is describable in mathematical terms and done without any of the tools like there were some experimental things that went on here they'll ease maybe in making some of his predictions looked a little scientific Anaximander is credited as having made the first scientific experiment famously by the late scientific popularizer Carl Sagan said that like the very first scientific experiment was Anaximander figuring out when the equinoxes were but something else is going on as well and I'll kind of draw our attention to it this is kind of like philosophy emerging out of this is that it's an engagement with nothing but the tools that we have in our minds with nothing but mathematical ratio rationality no accident that those two words contain the same roots ratio and rationality is a Latin root sometimes it in early latin uses of ratio and rationality what we're talking about is math literal mathematical ratio sometimes it takes on the flavor of whether or not things can talk to one another whether or not they're speaking the same language language ratio Lagos right is language giving an account speaking there's something about this idea of the orderliness of concepts and the way that we communicate ourselves through language not just to ourselves but to others as well in an orderly way so others can understand us and this is this new path that's coming out of mythos and this is the beginning of philosophy so the story says right who knows perhaps that started someplace else perhaps it was Lao Tzu and China perhaps it was Pythagoras is and this is a fruitful time all over the globe while Pythagoras is working we got Confucius doing his thing in China we've got siddhartha gautama finding enlightenment become the Buddha it's a spooky there's like something in the air you guys are fidgeting which means we're done is that wait yeah it was a question not a statement any questions yes can you well yeah I'm about to dismiss the whole class so yeah totally and for future reference um you don't ever have to ask if you need to use the restroom that goes for you guys at home as well just pause it and get up and go all right talk to you guys later have a good one keep your eyes peeled for a new reading assignment we didn't get to Z nominees we're gonna start talking about him and Heraclitus in our next meeting

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 27,927

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords: Ancient Philosophy, Pre-Socratics, Milesians, Thales, Anaximander, Anaxemines, Phythagoreans

Id: SI9zZu9aOY8

Length: 72min 38sec (4358 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2016