A History of Philosophy | 01 The Beginning of Greek Philosophy

the history of Western philosophy begins in that area of the world which I hope you recognize as the eg NC with Greece and Asia Minor the first known philosopher who's talked about at least say leaves of my Letus came from just about that location in the center of the west coast of the Asia Minor pan India in other words the Greek colonies scattered around the Aegean now question that one usually starts with is how do you account then for the rise of Western philosophy there in the eg an area in ancient Greece and there are several lines of explanation which are important one is of course that it stands at the crossroads between east and west where our traditional ideas would be challenged by the interaction with Eastern culture simply because of the way in which the trade routes came through Asia Minor and down the meander Valley the river meander meanders down to the sea so this is the meander Valley there and the trade routes come that way so alright cross-cultural stimulation led to the asking of some basic questions a second thing that is emphasized a great deal and I think appropriately is that the early Greek philosophers were really pre-scientific scientists they were asking questions about the natural world about the natural order about the natural processes they raise questions about basic elements what basic element or elements underlie all of the rich furniture of the heavens and the earth that we see what are the causal processes that account for the variation of things and the changes that occur that sort of question early philosophy of nature primitive cosmology questions about the origin of the cosmos as we know it began to arise and you could see how they could be connected with the differences between East and West and the stimulation that comes with the mythology of the two interacting and coming in to some degree of conflict but there is a third feature that is tremendously important and I think I've come to think increasingly particular importance the earlier Greek poets dramatists had the conviction that the cosmic order which we observe in nature is also a moral order a notion of cosmic justice is something that surfaces among some of those early literary figures in between the Odyssey and the Iliad it begins to appear in he odd it's explicit in Aeschylus and Sophocles it's present so that the question is whether there is an order to the cosmos that includes a moral order if this is a moral universe how do we explain that fact so then we have really two philosophical lines of thought in accounting for the origin of Greek philosophy here one that focuses simply on reflection about the physical cosmos and the other about reflection on the moral order which they believed to exist in the processes of nature so what I want to do today is to focus on the first of these their attention to the physical order and then next time to turn our attention to the moral order take a look at that okay now with that in mind take a look at the outline that I've just given you of the pre-socratic philosophers those prior to Socrates you notice I've grouped them where the principle grouping is in terms you notice of various kinds of monism under Romans one two and three as against pluralism that is to say the question as to whether there is one basic element that accounts for everything or whether there are many basic elements that would be obviously a kind of qualitative monism or pluralism it's the case maybe quality is the one basic element are the many basic elements but it also involves a quantitative question whether there the universe is numerically one all-inclusive solid kind of sphere or whether there are numerically many distinguishable things now that sounds abstruse for the simple reason that you think you are something different than I am which implies there are many different things so with a quantitative monism are going to miss is going to arise some a very fundamental question about the reliability of our sense experience because if sense experience tells us we are many in number but the theory becomes that everything is warm in number there's something wrong either with the theory that everything is one or else something wrong with our sense experience so that will arise later on when we get down to the group labeled le Attucks absolute monism named le Attucks after Elio which is in the toe of Italy where some of these people were so that quantitative issue arises there but at the outset we're dealing in that naive monism of the Malaysians with a qualitative pluralism or qualitative monism how many basic elements are now remember they've never been in the chemistry lecture hall they've never seen the table of the elements and impressed as they are by the ordered arrangement of things the initial tendency is to look for one basic element and as you read these materials and I hope you will have read through the primary and secondary materials on the pre-socratics by the end of this week as you read these materials you'll find that failings thought that everything was ultimately reducible to derived from the one element he called water now for the moment disregard the fact that you don't think it's an element h2o he wasn't to know that poor thingies you'll see it still sounds like rather a wild hypothesis everything composed of water well wait a minute water is a remarkably adaptable kind of thing it comes in liquid solid and Vina it is essential to life not only to your life buying but to vegetation notice how brown everything is around here you've had quite a drought this summer I think I've mowed my front lawn once since early June which is a welcome change but it's a tragic one yes II know water is so fundamental to everything that goes on that necessity though understandably Bailey's conjectured but maybe this is the basic stuff well he wasn't the only person in the business and you noticed the name of Anaximander who because he recognized that you have not only wetness you have only dryness you have also dryness he began to see you have opposing qualities and the same in other regards heat and cold light and dark male and female and in as much as if you have opposing properties no one can be more basic than the other he suppose that the basic element must be something that is undefinable and that's what the word at pyrin means it cannot be defined it cannot be delineate marked off the Greek world Paris means a border demarcation line the Alpha primitive makes it negative so at PI rod it has no definition undefinable you think and examinees on the other hand thought that air was the basic essential and so you begin to get this variety and what's surfacing if you're familiar with greek literature what surfacing is the fact that they are playing with the various elements that the greeks talked about even in their literature earth air fire and water those are the four classic Greek elements some have suggested that they represent the four necessities of life earth food air breath fire warms water something to drink nourishes or they are far and water for necessities of life but you notice that here we have an eczema knees here we have failings later on we'll find Heraclitus and some of the Stoics plugging in on fire Yesi in other words in terms of the elements as they conceive them the elements with which they were familiar which one of these is most basic or is it none of these as an ex amenda supposed well the Malaysians were asking these rather simple questions processes of change they thought could be explained in the case of air with condensation which produces moisture yes a there's are all sorts of possibilities in these proposals on the other hand Pythagoras and Heraclitus incidentally that's the Pythagoras you meet in mathematics the mathematician that produced what becomes known as Pythagoras theorem that the square on the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides remember that Pythagoras okay Pythagoras and Heraclitus seemingly independently of each other in the late sixth century that's the same the four or five hundred in the late sixth century we're saying that there is two to nature as it were two sides each of which is equally important a double aspect theory now you can get perhaps a rough idea of what I mean by double aspect if you consider the question about a object that's almost becoming rare in this culture a sorcerer you know this is the age of mugs rather than delicate English China with teacups and saucers but at least you know the shape of a saucer is a sorcerer concave or convex yes from one point of view looking down on it from above it's concave from the other point of view looking up at it as somebody carries it along it's convex two aspects to it so to say that a source a is both concave and convex is to talk about the double aspect nature of the source okay now what Pythagoras and Heraclitus are impressed with is that there are two aspects to everything in nature on the one hand everything seems to be in a process of change on the other hand there is order what we call uniformity of nature predictability Yesi oh yes - to think of that change Heraclitus suggested that the basic element is like fire you know fire is always changing have you noticed sitting around a fireplace in the winter you get sort of mesmerised by the flickering flames there are always changing yes it's almost hard to concentrate on reading philosophy around the fire for that reason constant change music yet on the other hand this is an ordered universe there's regularity you know how certain kinds of wood will burn and win though wet how they want so you have both change and order change and order and Pythagoras and Heraclitus independently of each other tried to talk about precisely that the way in which Heraclitus does it is to suggest that what we have is fire or some fiery vapor heat rising steam rising everything rising and changing and flickering and burning down and so forth fire plus some sort of intelligible traceable order that he calls Lagos now you've run across that word before that's the word that the Apostle John is going to use in the first line of his gospel in the beginning was the word he's in our KN ha Lagos the beginning the Lagos he'll say this is where it first begins to appear in Greek thought and John later adapts a great conception in the light of Hebrew conceptions to his purposes watch it now on the other hand our Pythagoras the mathematician also talks of things changing and the idea fari vapor is something he alludes to but instead of talking of Lagos what he talks about is a kind of mathematical order two things a mathematical order two things so that you can represent all sorts of different shapes numerically you think this is a mathematical kind of universe where you can trace out the mathematical order this is why he was interested in geometry is he so you have these two emphasizing that there is an ordered anis to Naevia for all the processes of change and footnote in anticipation of the theme next time that means that amidst all of life's change we should live a rationally ordered life yes a the ethic arises from this well Pythagoras and Heraclitus on the other hand when you get to the Ailey annex they want absolutely no pluralism no discrimination of two aspects no world of change and Parmenides in very forthright fashion declares that change is a loser plurality is illusory physical motion is illusory the senses are simply the way of illusion if you want the way of truth you have to think in abstraction from all of the senses think abstractly and if you want to see more of what is meant by thinking abstract ly well you can read the Parmenides selections and the Kaufman anthology but give attention to Z no because Ino tried to make the case for this absolute monism by posing paradoxes change is a paradoxical self-contradictory thing that couldn't occur for instance I take for instance a hair that is chasing a tortoise and does the hare ever catch the tortoise no because you see here is the line along which the tortoise is moving but the time it gets to there the hare has gotten that far now the time the tortoise gets there the hair gets that far but the time the tortoise gets there though here against that far and because their hair keeps advancing the tortoise because the tortoise keeps advancing the hare never catches the tortoise he's already eating it and that's illusory you think it does some a chicken of across the street no because if this much is the street then first the chicken halves the distance H al ves halves the distance then the chicken halves the remaining distance then it halves the remaining distance then it haves the remaining distance then the remaining then the remaining then never gets across the street you see millet seeds were regarded as the smallest seeds that there are not seeds now to show the paradoxical nature of pluralism Zeno poses this how much sound would one millet seed make if you drop it no sound all right drop a sack of 10,000 millet seeds how much sound will it make zero times ten thousand which is zilch no sound but you heard the third illusion rationally it's impossible the way of illusion is the way of the senses the plural at plurality of things that we see are a looser e as plurality processes of change and motion are illusory from a strictly logical standpoint there can be no change no plurality now I don't think that there are has ever developed school of thought known as Zeno ism or Parmenides ism because that those people represent a sort of a logical terminus that nobody wants to follow them to it's one thing to say that the senses are sometimes a losery it's one thing to say that sense perception is relative and changing sure and we'll find lots of people Plato and so on and so forth say that but to say that they are completely aloes array well if you say that why would you say it to whom would you say it and why other any sound in saying it if that position is correct why even record what Zeno and Parmenides say it if that position is correct it's self-defeating yes he but the point is not the position that they came up with but the kinds of issues they're posing what does it mean to say that everything is one whole that this is a uni verse well presumably it doesn't mean what Parmenides thought in it but on the other hand is this a world of radical pluralism with everything disassociated radical individualism in an anarchistic kind of cosmos with no law and order if it in effect what the pre-socratics did for us was to pose the issues and very often it's far more important what question surfaces were what answers surface it certainly is with these people well when you get to the pluralists you might say this is a breath of fresh air because here you have people in Peter Cleese and eggs a giris Democritus who see a multitude of different things empedocles in fact picks up on all 4/4 air fire and water all four elements and in order to explain the kind of process that's involved he comes up with some sort of a cyclically you of cosmic history you say seeing things going that way with integration and disintegration of the elements all the way through the history of the cosmos but the full of basic elements an X a giris on the other hand there thinks they're much be a basic element solve every kind of qualitative thing no matter how different he calls them seems so your body will have seeds of bone seeds of skin the seeds of flesh seeds of blood seeds of muscle seeds of hair so on so forth and there are some suggestions and it might be seeds of dark hair or seeds of light hair seeds of curly hair or seeds of straight hair we're going to stop this sort of pluralism but then having postulated such an infinite diversity of different things all of these seeds how are you going to account for the ordered unity of the human body and for that matter of the universe and so what an exodus does is to talk about what he calls noose or mind as if there is some cosmic mind drawing things into ordered unity in an ordered direction some sort of divine noose you can see that in groping for the source of cosmic order though groping towards some concept of a Supreme Being you'll see the beginnings of theology in the ancient Greeks in distinction from some of their mythology yes he but on the other hand when you get to Democritus the picture is different because while impede achlys and NX a giris were qualitative pluralists okay qualitative pluralists Democritus is a qualitative monist everything is of one on the same quality but a quantitative pluralist then is to say physical things are composed of infinitesimal atoms an atom the word literally means it cannot be split it cannot be cut an indivisible pellet of matter okay so physical things that we know are composed of a vast numbers of atoms indivisible pellets and the qualitative differences between cats and cabbages and collar flowers and kings you see the qualitative differences are due to the combinations of atoms producing those qualitative differences different combinations for a king than a cauliflower now the idea is that the atoms come in different shapes and whirling around in some sort of cosmic vortex natural kind of motion rolling around in this cosmic vortex collide hook onto each other combine so larger aggregates form and there is a result of sheer chance mechanical processes the whole body of things in heaven and earth has been formed over the course of history so what you get then in these last people is particularly interesting because whereas an ex a grouse is suggesting a teleological explanation a teleological explanation that is to say there is this cosmic mind that orders things in these intelligible ways okay on the other hand Democritus has a purely mechanistic explanation has a purely mechanistic explanation blind forces combining by chance to produce the kinds of conglomerates that make up the cosmos it's as if somebody took a whole bundle and bundles and bundles of individual letters and whirled around long enough and out came the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune you see that sort of explanation the sheer chance but obviously here you have two philosophers handing heading in vastly different directions yes he a mechanistic kind of materialism in which nothing exists but material atoms being moved by chance forces okay and on the other hand a teleological explanation which is pushing in the direction of either some kind of theistic metaphysics or some kind of idealism but some explanation which sees some immaterial reality of a rational sort accounting for the ordinance of the cosmos now there's been a quick rundown and before I pick up and pull some threads together let me pause did you get the story what do you want to get clearity Rosa yes because all of the atoms individual atoms are qualitatively the same qualitatively alike so a qualitative monist but a quantitative plural as many of them with all of them qualitatively alike yeah does that make sense getting the terminology under your belt and as part of your active vocabulary is part of the part of the task of this juncture whoo oh and pedicle ease okay I'm inclined to say no I think he's groping towards a teleological view for this reason that in that cyclic Allah of the elements combining and disassociating he ascribes that cyclically process to two forces that he calls love and hate attraction repulsion now depending how you take those terms love and hate they could be simply metaphorical terms for attraction and repulsion as we think of it in magnetism and electricity l see in which case it would be a mechanistic thing but on the other hand if you take love and hate to be some inner directedness because of natural affinity you'll see it doesn't have to be conscious any more than a daffodil growing up in the spring or turning to the light implies consciousness you'll see but as long as there is is an order that is end oriented then you could say this is the beginning of a teleology so I'm inclined to say that empirically is isn't out into the clear yet one way or the other but I think he's edging towards the the teleological view yeah okay now I want you to to get this general structure of the pre-socratic period down as well as you can when you're going to spend a lot of time on it just today and next time but we'll be referring back to it again and again it'll become point of reference okay so keep in mind the my lesions okay qualitative monists of a rather simplistic sort the my lesions the double aspect theories of Pythagoras and Heraclitus the le Alex they're absolute monism the pluralist suppose the mechanism versus teleology question and the reading that you'll doing will put the flesh on these bones the structure is important now what what I want to to underscore is the kind of question that these people are raising we we think of failings as about 600 BC okay Fey is about 600 BC by the time we get down to Socrates we're about 400 BC so we've got essentially a 200 year span in which the pre-socratics are at work two hundred year span in which in effect they are formulating the philosophical agenda that Western philosophy has worked with ever since they are formulating a philosophical agenda that Western philosophy has worked with ever since now maybe you're inclined to ask well why should we take their agenda well the thing is that it is so into woven into Western thought patterns in every discipline not just in philosophy in every discipline for the simple reason that the latest Sciences emerged as spin-offs from philosophy you see have you noticed how your science professors have Doctor of Philosophy degrees and many of them never saw the inside of a philosophy classroom except for people liked up to chapel here who audits philosophy courses bless her hurt yes he simply because natural philosophy so-called philosophy of nature natural philosophy the sort of thing that these guys are doing is the seedbed out of which the empirical and mathematical sciences developed subsequently yes he if you take dr. Spratlys courses in the history of science you'll find that the history of science up through all approximately the renaissance is essentially one strain of what we do in the history of philosophy yes then you begin to get the development of astronomy and physics independently of philosophy later of chemistry and of biology sociology doesn't begin until the mid-1990s century psychology as a science not until early 20th centuries laters 1910 what's now the journal of philosophy was called the journal of philosophy psychology scientific method etc I know that's a mouthful that's the way it was so the agenda that is created using but the pre-socratics was carried on in natural philosophy in ancient and medieval times and transmitted into modern times so there are since the question were asking is still what are the basic elements or if not basic elements what's the basic stuff yes he whether you want protons or quirks take your choice we're still asking the same kinds of questions and how do you describe the causal processes and the causal forces at work that produce change same type of questions well what is that agenda what is that agenda and I think you can see pretty clearly that it's the kind of agenda that you should have been introduced to more or less in your introductory course where we usually try to get questions in one we call metaphysics whether or not the label that way questions in metaphysics having to do with the nature of reality whether it be questions about the natural world mechanism and teleology or questions about whether matter is real in itself or not as George Burkley thought yesthey when a mind and matter are two different kinds of substances in the mind-body problem in talking of the nature of persons weather everything that occurs is due to causal processes in a deterministic scheme or whether there's such a thing as free well whether there is an ultimate source of cosmic order whether in fact God exists those are metaphysical questions and you can see that that is part of the agenda then posed by the pre-socratics now I've also suggested that secondly there is a further agenda under the surface in epistemology theory of knowledge where you find there are some of these ancients who are thoroughgoing empiricist saying all that we know comes from Sense experience and indeed Seeley's seems to talk like that certainly the pluralists do though they do have occasional speculation beyond that basically empiricists as distinct from rationalists like Parmenides and Zeno who disparage completely since experience and see that only abstract logical thought really gives us reliable knowledge is a and so epistemological questions are posed about how we know just how reliable is experience just to what extent can abstract rational thought provide knowledge how are these two related you see that agenda thirdly there is an agenda about ethics and about society if you like social philosophy because as I hinted both part both the Pythagoras and Heraclitus maintain that if this is a rationally ordered universe then we should live rationally ordered lives if we want to fit into the universe want to find our place yes II and even Democritus suggests that a life guided by reason is a value in a mechanistic materialistic universe how come well these blind forces cause pleasure and pain so if you gain enough understanding of the causal processes and guide your life by what you know of the causal processes you can then minimize the pain and pursue the pleasure but that takes a rationally guided life so out of these positions flow ethical positions what is the good life and what do we have to do to pursue it so the this whole agenda of Western philosophy then seems to be implied spelled out at least in its basic terms by these pre-socratics

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Length: 49min 18sec (2958 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2015

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These are great if a bit dry at times