The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

alright ladies and gentlemen thank you once again for coming out I appreciate it Monday Night Football they're here anyway the Tennessee Titans are at seven to zero I'll be glad to know I'll keep you updated no I but Esther they are up seven to zero um last time we did the origins of the Greek world from now on I'll do major figures as we go forward but I wanted to just lay out the background of where the Greek world is coming from and I think that'll be clear why I want to do that tonight as we prepare for Socrates everybody from zero to Socrates is called to pre-socratics which will give you an idea of how important Socrates is considered in the history of philosophy because like everything before Socrates and everything after the sort of the posts are cracks this is this is a you know sort of the estimation of his importance in the history of world philosophy so to begin we're going to go we're going to do two figures tonight an exam and ER who will stand in for the Malaysian school which is an entire school of philosophy that begins with Daly's and sort of culminates with the atomists and amok and Democritus is a major figure so but we'll Starla's an exam and err sort of the guy that represents them and then the Pythagorean Pythagoras who stands in for the Pythagorean school also known as the Italian school for reasons that we'll explain and so those two between them really give us the major threads of the origins of Western philosophy and hopefully that I can tease that out it's a lot of ground to cover if I'm going too fast please raise your hand because this is this is a big one I prepare like wow recovered a lot of ground tonight so to begin with remembers we have the Homeric heroes that we went over last time we have the Iliad The Odyssey we've got these anthropomorphic gods who behaved in sort of human fashion very human fact all too human fashion one might say create all kinds of troubles for Heroes the ethical life is clearly just defined as the heroic life what you want to do is earn Fame by by following the rules of heroism and either conquering your enemies in which case you win fame good or being defeated in which case you die early which is better than doing nothing there was no concept of an afterlife now the background of the Olympic gods is crazy I love it it's one of the great creation myths of all time and I want to run through that quickly because to get to the Greek gods in the beginning was chaos was figured as a character all this is moderately - very anthropomorphic and then through some manifestations chaos arises from chaos arises the abyss and arises eros love very early and this is sort of incarnate natural forces not quite you know physical human-like gods yet but sort of identifiable natural like you know abyss chaos love for rising up and they give birth through very strange modes to the Titans and there's a whole bunch of Titans but the most important thing about the bond Surya the the original forces give birth to the Titans I wrote these down there KO astreus Cronus Hyperion I paid us in Oceanus there's some women to men meze Phoebe ryo Thea Themis and toughest but Cronus importantly kills his father and becomes king of the gods so this is the Titans ruling the ancient world so you go from total chaos and natural horses to these really wild gods who do things like kill their fathers now there's sort of be steal God's big dangerous and scary well there is a myth or there's a it was foretold most of this comes from Hesiod by the way ah that is foretold that like Cronus was killed his father one of Kronos his children will kill him and usurp him on the throne this would be Zeus so he eats all his children which does not make his wife who's also a sister very happy as you can well imagine so he needs child after child after child in the pile ever get help mending a lot he's a lot of children when they're first born to prevent them from killing him so his wife becomes upset by this Rhea and and so instead of giving him Zeus when he's born she wraps her rock and swaddling clothes and gives it to him which he immediately swallows and thanks haha I have killed too since she shuffled Zeus off eventually Zeus grows up I don't know how you hide this anyway this grows up and and drugs his father on when he gets sick with the drug he throws up all his deuces brothers and sisters who have since matured inside of criminals to stop it was good stuff did I you can't make this up so ah so then Zeus um precedes the challenge Kronos to to battle which in various stories turns out various ways to common stories that Zeus cast rates him um and this this kills his father but that you don't like exactly what the story is there's many versions of this but most importantly Zeus and juices brothers and sisters then rule Olympus and this sets up a TV ology teleology is the idea that history has a direction um teleology is the idea that we're going someplace in this case you go from chaos total chaos and abyss and sort of madness to the Titans yeah not so chaotic but not so great either to the Olympic gods which are you know basically big scary dangerous humans that live forever um that's essentially what they are in the Greek mythos and this TZ ology is pretty clear that things are in fact getting better we're becoming more orderly and more civilized so as crazy as the Greek gods seem to us to the Greeks they seemed a lot better than what came before them the Titans and and like I said thick just chaos also it was a very big lot of improvement it was a change towards human abstraction from the various local cults and very sort of primitive mythological systems that the Greek world was displacing as it spread out and became more powerful and it's important to note here that the establishment of the Homeric God missed the gods from the Homeric myths was a state religion this was not like if you got conquered they didn't say hey how would you feel about believing in Zeus they said believe in Doozer kill you and so it was enforced as the colonies expanded and they spread out it was lit it was a state-sponsored state supported religion on that anywhere the Greek conquerors with which of course when you get Alexander in the program that means everywhere it was enforced on people and so this is how it took over it's also important to note that an ancient Greek world they did not have any such idea as religion so that religion is a Latin word which means sort of to rebind or retie or the tie really tight not a Greek word in the Greek world they had no idea of belief I mean they knew people believed things they just had no interest in it it was what you did everything in the Greek world is what are you going to do this will come up when we get to Socrates this will come up when we had Pythagoras the notion of obeying the religious system of the Greek worlds was you do the right things at the right times there's a sunrise festival on Wednesday at 9:00 you're there with something to slaughter there's a sacrificial you know parade that goes on the first of spring and everybody brings a bale of wheat you're there with a bale of wheat it doesn't matter what you believe if anybody seemed Tibetan prayer wheels I love this idea they're these wheels that have prayers and Sprite on it you just walk by and hit them than praying right the wheel doesn't write the way you know and not about what you believe you don't have to W do you spin the wheel this is exactly what the Greeks this is where they were at it's not what you believe is not what you say is the specific actions that you carry out also it's not actions as in good and evil which they have almost no concept it's actions in the sense of do you go to the temple and do the right a best instance do you do you go on the right dates to do the right sort of things it's not about how you treat your neighbors you could go out and kill your neighbor every morning and then go to the temple and they would say well he's pretty good God right they would not it just because you're doing what you're supposed to do kill your neighbor is bad right they're going to be upset with you about that but you are still a perfectly good religious person so it had no prescription about behavior and this is importantly if you read eel in the Odyssey you'll see this because the hero will do crazy stuff and then they'll somehow offend a god near little whom they offender to God it was like well they just sacked seven cities and kill all the inhabitants and that didn't seem to bother anybody well it didn't because they did they didn't care but you know if you tip over a temple or take the wrong like the daughter of a priest of Apollo ooh kill everybody else let's see that's fine now you're in trouble because that's Apollo's person and so really their concept of religion was almost totally divorced from ethics as we understand it their ethical system was based almost entirely on the heroic ideals yeah we can we just ask have there been we like ask the question sure if there's a quick one he has two quick ones so that's the thing with you yeah you can't kill Apollo's you know person does that account after the fact like actors already been repercussions like they've now given their there's an excuse now why something bad has happened to you is probably because you did tell me back to the gods Yeah right so the repercussions never come from doing bad things to other people it always comes from doing bad things to the gods so so they did I mean I don't I can't think of a single instance and I owe the Iliad or the Odyssey where anybody got in trouble for doing anything to a person it's always you get in trouble for beating on in some way offending the gods and sometimes you even know you've offended the gods so this is one so they have no like said some no ethics as we understand it in that sense now this oops Arya did hold the city-states share the same God uh yes and no so again it was enforced it was a very top-down and as the you know like the Delian League from Athens spread out absolutely but every city had their own heroes and so there was sort of a mix of the overarching of the Homeric Olympic gods under written with local deities in fact Athena who's born out of Zeus's head there is there is an argument that that came about because Athens was too powerful to be forced to submit to the Olympic system because they worship Athena before that and so when Athens was incorporated into the Greek system larger Greek system which doesn't start in Athens they were forced to take in a theme it's the same way the Catholic Church became the Church of Mary is because the the Mary Colts were so strong all over all over Europe they couldn't stomp it out to find they just said well screw that we're gonna worship Mary we're gonna pretend like we did that bowl pie-ya is the same thing with athletes um so but but so it's usually a mix of local heroes with their own temples and the overarching Homeric dots which you had to follow in a very prescribed connect which brings us to about the sixth century or exactly the sixth century let's say exactly let's be arbitrarily exact um and and and a city called Meletis and this is the birthplace of the Malaysian school because it's home of Baileys an exam and ER and an exam it's I think it's a say his name but so I want to focus on an exam and er a sort of the spokesperson for the school the starts about sixth century now Meletis is important on your map if you look it's not actually on your map but you see where it says Asian my Asia Minor is that can you see that very good a map if you go left from Asia Minor - you hit the ocean that's Meletis right there just draw a straight line from Asia Minor when you hit the coast right there on the coast is Meletis now the reason I wanted to give you this map which you should bring every time assuming you ever come back again this is to get a sense of this if you go straight down from Miletus what do you hit Egypt right if you go right where it says Asia Minor that is Persia if you go straight up you're in two Thracia and Macedon does that make DC how that works it was a crossroads of the ancient world all the trade routes from Egypt the Overland trade routes trade routes from the Black Sea are passing through Meletis at this time so it's a big central city like a London or a New York a big trade Harbor lots of activity both overland and Seabourn and so there's a very practical turn of mind and they have problems all kinds of problems right for instance they don't know how to draw maps very well well if you want to trade over the ocean what you'd really like is a good map with maybe some pipe markings on it that would be excellent so that you could do this more regularly and so they start working on these things and what they give birth to is what becomes known as natural philosophy dailies in an exam and ER or the founders of the schools of natural philosophy and exam and earth being the most important person there so he's bored forget about 600 and he pauses this is one breakthrough that's almost hard for us to imagine so up to this point I said you've got the narrative myths that we've had Egypt has similar creation myths a different set of gods but but similar if you go into Persia they have the Zoroastrian myths slightly different but still you've got creators you have these sort of an Tamar for God's doing anthropomorphic things and Bailey's but more importantly an exam and ER says you know what I think that's not right comes up with two great ideas one I don't think the world is chaotic I think the world is orderly now in the ancient world this is the dumbest thing you could say they're like okay plagues famines war drought we don't know how the tides work every once in while the Sun goes dark for god knows what reason ah you know what are you talking about though it's an orderly world and he said no no the early natural philosophers it's just like for us where we are today it's hard to imagine what an incredible breakthrough this was to go no I think underlying this apparent chaos that we live in is a set of orderly rules that drives everything and what we should be doing is figuring those out again this has runs into two problems it runs counter to all human experience which is why it's sort of an amazing breakthrough and thought and two it runs counter to all the religions local here the persian religion the Egyptian religion and this will come up repeatedly six Socrates is not the only guy that gets put to death through this or has to flee but what you're what he ends up saying is look uh and this is gradual he doesn't deny to gods initially but in what you can see that what he's doing is the absolute germ of denying the gods in implication all the religious people recognize this immediately that's why they started getting in immediate trouble he's like oh no I believe in the gods I just believe this other - I'm pretty soon it takes until you get to Epicurus is more or less the first person history who sips all that God stuff is nonsense they didn't like him either ah but but this breakthrough this positive of an orderly world which underlays everything we see this is two elements one it's material he called this the appearing one or a parry on anybody speaks briefly okay the appear er which is this material stuff that everything in the universe is made out of everything rises from it and everything will be rican sumed into it again the implications of this are radical work for the time one it means if you can figure out how the stuff works you can figure out how everything works and so the weight placed on careful observation a careful measurement attention to detail just grows immediately and again this was grew out of their problem with all the technical problems they faced this was a very hands-on culture they're trying to solve real technical problems - it means this myth of teleology is gone the world doesn't get better the world doesn't change whatever rules operate in the appear you are all the rules there ever are how the world was ten thousand years ago is how the world will be today is how the unity in ten thousand years it posits a constant set of rules that govern the entire universe forever but this is I mean this is the foundation of modern science and it's Daley's and an exam and particularly an exam and ER who just sort of go you know what I think I think this I have no evidence but here's why I think it and they start working this is crucial thing is they start working hard to just to figure this out now they come up with some crazy things uh-huh because of course they're starting from Ground Zero and they don't have a lot to work with but a few of the observations I want to point out that they do make one is they think men must have arisen from fish which is amazing and if they thought this for a couple of reasons but primarily wherever you look in the Greek world you find seashells tops of mountains middle of mountains seashore and so they said well logically enough everything must have been under water at some time whole world must have been under water at least our world must have been under water hence we must have evolved from fishes a very straight reasonable chain of deduction also there's these things called mud charts which the ancient Greeks were fascinated by but they lay an egg and then take it back inside of them with an umbilical cord and so they saw these things and they went that looks like a sort of creature that would be somewhere between egg-laying fish type things were saying you about and humans that have umbilical cords and our womb born and so they just took an exam and ER early pauses hey look we must have come to eat fishes now you didn't have a lot of good evidence for that but but again this is the beginning this is it where they just start looking and saying well what can we observe what can we deduce from what we observe assuming the world universe is more or less constant and the rules never change which again is exactly contrary to everything that have been taught also it levels gods and men because it's not that gods are immortal and men are mortal they operate by their rules and laws we offer about our rules and laws and exact matter as far as we know never explicitly said there weren't gods but the clear implication if everybody operates by the same rules by the same material stuff then we must be the same everything must be essentially the same it also makes the primary interest of your intellectual research matter because the matter of this table is the matter that I made out of is the matter that this is made out of is the matter the stars are made out notice what it is again this is like a mind-boggling breakthrough because if evening was clear the ancient world stars are not made out of the same stuff that I why would you think that was true what possible reason could you have for thinking that but they made this huge intellectual leap and they said now I think it's all comes from the appearing and when it rises from the appearing in all shades say it shares the same material origin therefore it's the same matter therefore when you study matter anywhere you're studying some form of matter that makes up everything so you can learn about the humans from studying dogs or from trees or from the ocean or from the sky all connected a big unity everything is one so that is just as like I said amazing intellectual breakthrough that launches half of the philosophical growth growth of the ancient Greek world and wasn't profound profound break with the thinking that had come before now we know endings amanda wrote a book we have catalog from the Library of Alexandria and a couple of other writers that refer to it but we have no extant writing from an exam hander there's one two sentence message that may be from him but that's very controversial about whether it actually is something that he wrote or something that somebody wrote based on what they had read that he had written and so most of the information that we get about him like Pythagoras will come to us from Aristotle and other ancient sources 2nd 3rd 4th hand but what is clear is these these significant breakthroughs its material world universal laws origin in the same there's no development all material things are equal besides we're evolving from fishes as far as we know an examiner is also the first person to posit that the earth floats and basically avoid what floats in the vacuum version of the Imperium free in space which again is silly if they didn't clear the ancient world if I send down this cup I have to set it prong something and here's an examiner going no I just sort of hangs there and everybody said what I mean I guess a the ancient world had all kinds of great ideas like you know floated on the turtle the turtle swam in his sea and it's like well let's underneath the turtle it's turtles and Turtles all the way down right anybody but or it was on the back of Atlas you may be familiar with this myth but it clearly the things don't just float in space and demanders said no I think so he also thought the earth was a sphere not a sphere but a tube and was probably hollow in the middle on this create all kinds of problems for his attempt to do cosmology but but yeah that's that's the main breakthrough to break with this anthropomorphic view of the world the world is not ruled by human-like gods it is going in no Direction is basically defined by the matter and if you study the matter you'll learn about the world because everything is the same huge breakthrough yep did he did he look at group behavior like they look at the causes of war no that'll be wait till Aristotle then when we get to Aristotle that's really well played over there servings in but really Aristotle but we're on our way to that yeah so the second guy I want to talk about is Pythagoras everybody's heard of Pythagoras yeah okay so Pythagoras is almost an exact contemporary of an exam and ER and he is born in Samos this is important in about five seven this is important because Samos at this time it becomes in his lifetime becomes a very wealthy trading island and if you look at the map you go straight down from Meletis you'll go across a little isthmus and you'll see a big island that Big Island is Samos it's just off the coast of Lydia so again same trade routes same major thoroughfares as Meletis um Sambo's becomes ruled by a guy named Polycrates flicker DS is a tyrant ah but he's in a very efficient tyrant and so Samos becomes wealthy on trade and this is one of the things that begins to create a problem if you've read the Homeric Odyssey and Iliad you realize that they didn't do a lot of business dealings you know Agamemnon and Achilles were not like I tell you what if you give me fifty bucks someone kick your ass right it was not about payment it wasn't like I'll sell you some stuff it was all about violence inflicting violence or being prevented from afflicting violence on various people for various reasons well how do you translate that ethical system into a new world which is really based increasingly on technical ability to sail navigate no the wind and stars tins what's going on in the Malaysian school and now you have wealth you have poets you have writers cloth you're importing silks from Persia right that all the trade is coming up and people write well you know this ethical system based on stabbing each other is bad for business it really sort of upsets the balance of the social order is there a way that we can move away from that and one of the first thinkers to specifically basically say look this Homeric ideas are stupid we should do something else is Pythagoras and Pythagoras is great because he combines all kinds of things that you would think you couldn't combine he was a religious nut a mystic abstract mathematician and a politician right and he was successful at all of them which you would think how could that be but he was right there at the origin these things hadn't separated out well he doesn't get along with Polycrates of we don't know exactly why but he leaves but probably the reason why is because he wasn't a scenic and he believed in right action and injustice and Polycrates was a wealthy tyrant who believed that he should get what he wants everybody else would shut up or get stabbed and so thakura said I tell you what I'll leave and he travels what for the ancient world was a pretty good distance over to Croton now you see Italy over there on the left of the map if you look if you see the heel sticking down and you see a little bay there that right at the tip of that bay opposite the heel and where the foot begins that's Croton and he sets up shop there is about 40 at this point so he has to flee Polycrates when assumed he didn't choose to voluntarily migrate we don't know exactly why I left again but given his his history from this point on it becomes pretty clear um and when he gets there he's pretty welcomed with open arms and the first thing he does he sets up a new constitution for them based on an aristocracy which is not really a democracy but what what you had before was a tyrant system having sort of an oligarchy or an aristocracy aristocracy by the way literally means rule of the best of course best always means richest with most partners but in this case the ideal of it is hey we get educated learning people who were probably wealthy lamp holding and we organized him into a small group and they rule and it's clear that Pythagoras set this up he set up a new constitution you actually minted a new form of money never been seen before tygris did that personally I'm pretty clear on that the archeological evidence is very clear um and he sets up this new state and then he sets up the Pythagorean Brotherhood which is a strange mystical cult dedicated to numbers and various other things and here's where we have sort of two crucial things one is the politics which we'll get back to he was very interested in politics but let's go to the numbers now one of the things that Pythagoras is credited with discovery is the if you word music of the spheres people for this term this is Pythagoras he discovered that you have a ratio strings of one to two that makes the pleasing octave if you have the ratio of 3 to 2 let's all try and get roughly right that makes it 5th and it should have 3/4 that makes the interval of a fourth in the length of strings and you get the harmonies the octave fifth and the fourth we make music like that ah now Sagaris this was a Marlowe absolutely he kind of comes back to the ocean again and again and again because it what it suggests that suggests when he argued an absolutely me look underneath everything just like the Malaysians what's going on underneath the Malaysian said there is this matter underneath that we can study and understand Pythagoras said no there's numbers underneath everything in the universe is numbers and if we can understand the numbers then we'll understand everything in the universe if you're familiar with modern of mathematical physics this isn't precisely the argument they still make to this very day Pythagoras is the father literally the founder of this idea we can pretty much trace it right to him because of this pipe through and notice what this does then this was amazing you also get here 1 2 3 4 & 1 2 3 & 4 2 addemup did you 10 at this point they're like well hell this has got to be true if they've ever thought we're any doubt at all that this was troubling this is true so you have this numerical seemingly abstract numerical relationship that produces explained sum that was never explained up to that time Barma native various tune strings and then it adds up using this very ordinary system in boom now we're rolling so they start looking for numbers everywhere but if you can look at anything look at the work that Einstein was doing Einstein's basic argument in many other physicists as well as will work with the equations when we get something out of the equations if we've done our math right that will be true and then we test it see how strange that is really you would think you would do it the other way around this is a difference between theoretical versus practical physics or any other break some scientists go out and do research they find data then they try to figure out what it means mathematical physicists and others they do the math and they say whatever the math comes up with will probably be right if you do it right it will absolutely be correct and this is what the Pythagorean said this is a staggering idea notice how bizarre this is the fact that it works is even more bizarre but notice how how absolutely astounding of a concept this is um that these abstract relationships produce actual explanatory local world I mean really not it so knock them off their feet that they were able to form an incredibly powerful and long live secret Brotherhood based on these kinds of reasonings now everyone's familiar with the Pythagorean theorem right a squared plus B squared equals C squared probably Pythagoras didn't come up with that but we'll ascribe it to him anyway like I said at this point the documents so hazy all on this site we may as well give it to him on what's funny about that is the pythagoreans he did this because let me take these nice numbers and you get beautiful harmonies let's say are two like two and three those are nice numbers so we may try to go with this beautiful harmonious relationship of two and three guess what that side is going to be square root of 13 this is not the kind of number you want if you're the first thing they did is with ten people back around this is that ain't six look smarter than that whatever matters at all 13 and that caused all kinds of problems for generations of Pythagorean thinkers yeah but wonder was an amazing discovery not less but it really they hated this they did not like this breakthrough amazing mathematical breakthrough that Pythagoras is famous for which is what's of hilarious about it they like to this nice ratios whole numbers real numbers they do not want abstract or irrational numbers it's really don't want an imaginary numbers good lord they can do that so you have this astounding breakthrough but what this means this is what's what's important to distinguish between the galician school and the Pythagorean school both of which again room flew in chill for hundreds of years original if you look at like this or something that's not really what does if you look at what and you look at a table and a chair that are made from wood wood is the matter it's the material substance this is what the Malaysians were were interested in they were interested in material things oh thank you they don't register sitting in the material guts right so wood itself is what they want to study the Pythagorean not interested in that at all they were interested in form this is matter this is for chair and a table is not a thing it's an organization of matter by an idea like we have the idea of the chair of this I'm glad the idea what a table is but it's not wood right what is not table a chair so if you just substitute form as in 1 & 2 for anything they were interested in in the structural form of things defined as memories whereas the Malaysian school was interested in Macker the actual physical stuff if you want to know things usually any matter here if you want to know things you study form and Thackeray in school again the foundation of the hard sciences the foundation of metaphysical philosophy and mathematics it's just clear as an absolute fell this is the origins and the Malaysian and the Pythagorean schools the split between those that people often describe to Descartes or they say oh this is a modern development now let's started day one because as soon as you start thinking about this you I say well what do we want where do we think is most important we think it's matter physical stuff experience you can touch or at least posit that you can touch or is it structure organization ideal categories numbers mathematics so that that physical metaphysical set takes place again is it sort of amazing to see big one all the problem that we have today right there so the other thing that the Pythagorean school comes up with besides absolute emphasis on for his troops based on all the rules for mathematical proves again probably Pythagoras was responsible you know this evidence is tricky to trace to back to him because he was the founder of a great and important school and so his followers to describe everything to him right and so just this happens in all kinds of schools and so lots of here to him but this seems to be something that was likely that he would have come up with which is the notion that if you're interested in balancing your checkbook you look at how much money you have how much you've spent and how long until that cheque is going to clear all right well if what they were interested in is in the abstract notion of balancing all possible checkbooks in all time history again as far as we know first people or person to do this with the pythagoreans you can go back to the ancient Babylonians who had this sort of weird solution for quadratic equations for finding the areas of very strange land masses but it was written in the form of pays for steps this one in turn in those two steps that word it was not a general solution it was a physical acting out at the end of which you could count your steps and divide by the number of cows and sheep over here and here we come up with a rough guesstimate now that's a workable solution but it's not an abstract solution to all possible versions of that kind of problem which is one remove from that and this is what the Pythagorean school does a square plus B squared c-squared solves for all possible right triangles notice there is absolutely no use for solving for all possible right triangles this is a stupid thing to have what you're interested is it building crap because I mean who ever felt anything like this in the ancient world we want something that has one inch here and 17 miles there but you can solve that with this equation even though no one ever wants to solve that right that's the power of abstract mathematics it will solve things you don't want then reach that new path you may have this feeling no but what it does do is it gives you insight profound insight into the relationships between forms how sort of large complex bodies interact with each other in all possible manifestations so huge profound breakthrough for up conceptualising and reconsent slicing the world as represented by abstract equations and forms so that sort of for Pythagoras that's kind of half of his legacy the other half his legacy goes back for I mentioned before here you are you have the Homeric epics are everywhere held up as the ideals somebody asked about local gods the local heroes were all your local fighters genuine they were the generals that you had in the past who were the meanest and the best they were the guys who won the Olympic Games by the way there's a couple of boxes in the Olympic Games who's won so many events that eventually turn them into demigods they worship them while they were alive and built temples to them when they were dead but it was always or almost invariably about fighting and killing the Homeric ideal this is how he became a local god or demigod or saint equivalent pythagoras said no this is done this is this is not the way to do it so his second ocean is to come up with basically the first clearly articulated or wounding earliest clearly articulated notions of private ethics they said a couple of things one the soul is immortal notice this is not terribly far from an exam anders idea that that we rise up and return to the Imperium our stuff is important for Fabrice not surprisingly the more abstract Hans a lot of material stuff but some thing we can't feel like numbers our soul is immortal and it trans migrants which means that we're born again to get them again with the same soul it also transmigrates into animals so you can be reborn as an animal rather than a man Penn State we'll talk about this a second did you know vegetarianism becomes pretty important so you're immortal your soul transmigrates the quality of this is based on your behavior your ethics and that the purpose of philosophy of thinking is not to build better boats natural philosophy figure out the tides understand the in the rain understand the Stars the purpose of philosophy is to understand how to live better so that when your soul transmigrates which is immortal that process works better exactly whether they thought we came back as richer or happier healthier people or whether you eventually stopped being reborn and became an immortal God yourself it's not quite clear it's been at what point in the Fagor II in school you are who's reporting what they believed because it was a secret society so a lot of this is you know second and third hand so immortal transmigration and that this process is governed by how you behave in the world personally so you become an ethical agent who must decide for yourself I would say his or her self except for who cares balloon ah at this point not till we get to Epicurious do we care about women so you got a couple of hundred years ago hanging you or you are responsible and so philosophical introspection becomes about right actions and how do you figure out what right action is back to the mathematics you use your reason so if in a single blow overthrows just about everything everybody else in their world believed in this is why I had to be a secret cult secret cult maybe not right secret society and this spread all throughout the ancient Greek world at the end of the thakura says life there was uprisings in many cities simultaneously against the pythagoreans many of the adherents were killed the government in Croton was overthrown he had to flee he died a little further on but what this had the effect of doing is as all the faggins are fleeing they just spread out the Pythagorean ideas all over the Greek world really had no impact they they actually increase the impact of Pythagorean fought on the ancient Greek world but once you have this notion that writing action depends on the reason the condition of your soul which is continually reborn grows out of this then reasoned reflection as an individual and your individually responsible becomes crucial the only two models again that exists in the ancient world at this time were one the Homeric God model which is like the trailer wheels you just do going to sacrifice the goat hate your and you're in good shape as you're going to get you don't know the gods are going to do but at least you did your part and destroyed your photos walk on the ventilation sort of the Orphic or lusus mysteries these were called mystery cults or a bunch of mall of the ancient world and they use event you went to a Lucis or you did something and you know you drank the potion you danced the dance you sang the songs and you were done you hadn't experienced that experience to the extent that you could be saved you were saved you didn't matter how you lived it didn't matter what you did Pythagoras said this was nonsense how you lived and what you do is what matters and you have a lot of rules like I mentioned vegetarianism also don't eat beans this is a controversial one because there's not clear exactly what you can find this there's a lot of that what he meant by this was don't eat beans brush the form of your body out of your bed don't let your nail clippings and hair clippings hang around you want to burn those well I mean a lot of rules of which makes sense about you know a healthy diet restricting yourself from violence a lot of it is just sort of like what the hell is you talkin about intonation hard to know avoid odd numbers because there were even numbers and odd there didn't have zero in the ancient world so they have even numbers and they had odd numbers and they thought odd numbers were odd and so you want to avoid them if at all possible and and you know lots of rules about how you put your sandals on because you have an even foot in an odd foot and so you want to put your even foot on first not your odd foot on and so some of this is quite hot yes do you think it's true that there was no concept of zero yeah no absolutely had no concept of zero yeah the earliest concept of zero as far as we know is Hindu mathematicians who are way ahead and if the reason you know this is because it creates I mean as you can imagine it makes your math weird and hard and so when you see them struggling through a perfectly simple problem you know o0 first group right that's and so this created innumerable walls that they couldn't figure out how to scale because it just you know don't happens you're a little bit and what they get negative numbers are really in business what's the back thinking Harley's back thinking about why that concept we've never come to them j-mo okay this is this is a great idea I mean a crucial idea if you want to go a little deeper in this is probably religious prescription because early counting is always coordinated with an object because it gives it back to the abstract mathematics no one ever counted x-squared sheep they always want to know how many sheep there are all our early record-keeping the first thing that's written down by the way people got all business today business bill might look man you go back is business all the way through the first thing people are writing down is how much stuff is in the granary how much how many sheep were brought in how much were they sold for how many do we have left this is all early written documents are almost invariably big storehouse lists and trading lists and receipt bills and all this crazy stuff money money receipts oh so that's the first thing you get well what would he give me zero for he brought in zero she's no you don't write that down right because they had no notion that there was this correlation to nothing and in most ancient civilizations the Greeks were very much this way but also the Persians also Egyptians there was a prescription about thinking about not like a vacuum this is why I am exam Anders breakthrough that the earth just sort of hangs out there is really an amazing insight because it suggests that there is this nothingness remember the turn of the century Michael and moral moral Michael and Michelson and Morley huh there we go ran a famous experiment that disproved the existence of an ether because in 1900 it was still hard to really get our heads around the know there might just be a big vacuum out there right so that's you know 2500 years later was still struggling with this issue it may not be true but but it looks like it is true and so the knot is always been a struggle and so the widely the general use of zero does not come about until I want to say like the 1500s I can look that data but it's really late in the game and that's because of we think because of double entry bookkeeping again then you really need to have a zero and so it becomes widely used because of advances in record-keeping and sophistication of trade so it's a good point because there's all these barriers that have been broken through for us as far as thinking about the world that we don't recognize anymore but this is the historical record of these guys sort of stepping back and going look maybe matter at all times ruled by the same laws again that's just an astonishing in fact at the time preposterous hypothesis on that turns out to work pretty well yeah so this is this is what's going on so this breakthrough of private ethics as goofy or as great you think as ethics are the key things that was private that is no longer the Homeric epics it's not the state telling you what to do it's that you would pause it that your behavior is rule by guidelines that you take on for yourself based on your reason let me tell you this is not even that popular today as far as I can tell sort of like this yeah and enough the defining about Pythagoras of course is he thought he was right and everybody should take on his ideas he wasn't like everybody should reason out their own he suggested that but if he also said that if you do reason but you'll do is realize that I'm right so we're not we're not this is this is Socrates's breakthrough by the way but who did not say that but at this point this is still a huge like quantum leap to say it's not what the tyrant says he flees Polycrates which is what you used to have it's not even what the aristocracy says it's not what homer and the gods say or the priests in the temple it's what your reason and your experience tells you is the right act and all of this happens Pythagoras and these schools in about 70 years both an exam and ER and Pythagoras were alive at the same time it probably didn't influence each other because their thinking was running very different lines but this is an unbelievable transformation and one that spread immediately these guys were talked about in their lives we do have references to them from sources contemporaneous with them and when you think about how few documents we have from this period is about 600 BC if you are remembered in references that means you are being referred to probably a lot because so few have come down to us it's like if all the big fire swept the United States and only 2% of the book survived you know a lot of them are going to be Tom Clancy I mean so thousand years from now historians would go out at Tom Clancy was a hugely influential thinker which would be embarrassing for us but then you're going to do did you see how that works right and so the notion that we do have references from all over the ancient world to both of these thinkers is significant oh okay so um since we're Robin so that was a lot right so but but here's here's the sort of take away part of this is you go from a system and this is not just true in the Greek world but if you were if you were in China at this time which is a very advanced and growing civilization if you were at the Harappan civilization is spread down to the Indus Valley at this point developing very rapidly in fact if you read the Fagor in and Hindu tradition they're very close um there are some evidence that Pythagoras may have influenced the development of Hinduism because of course Greeks ruled parts of India for a good period of time thanks to Alexander who took over an abandoned and left Greeks there to run it for a long time so you would have it's like the British Empire we have 20 Greek guys and 5 million other people but they influenced everybody because I ran the place um but it's not clear it made on the other way but probably not they may have just developed these ideas independently yeah the dates on now dates on the map oh those are the next lectures I'll get to those I'll get this that's right I just say just why do people have the next lectures so the key thing to take away sir you're in the system of teleology the world is going someplace that's developing you know the world rising out of chaos ruled by anthropomorphic gods who may or may not listen to us but they probably do occasionally at least human beings cannot rise to the level of God's notice in both the Malaysian systematic evaluation system you have an immortal soul which makes you essentially a god and what you're doing with your ethical actions is raising yourself inter trans migrations to the level of the gods which is to say there are no gods right if everybody can be a god you know are there really gods so this system of God separated for men natural process that we don't want to think about or worry about it's just it gets to really are three really amazing blows one right after another from the Malaysian school again this is a school not just an exam and er it goes on you get the foundations of natural philosophies the notion that the world is matter at this point they had not the mother they're called Hylas illest sif you would like the official term but the means they had not separated the notion of organic and inorganic or spirit driven and non spirit doesn't matter but the world is matter and you study matter to learn about everything because everything is matter huge advance they're both a Gurian side you get this emphasis on personal ethics because of the immortality of the human soul and that behavior determines that process and not unrelated leave that's diss moved towards mathematical abstraction that understanding forms rather than worrying about you know irrational gods or various patterns but forms that you study based on mathematical logic which is to say human reason will produce the results that you want both of these are quantum steps away from the traditional thought systems and behavior systems of the societies in which they are born and they pointed directly to like I said what we have not only in what will get to in the Greek world but what we have today which is the foundations of natural philosophy and insistence that everything is matter and when you get to Democritus by the way if you've heard that guy he's famous as an atom missed those are the fellows who then said look no matter is in fact inanimate and that you're studying mechanical processes and so that's sort of the final step in that development but it started by an exam and ER and then the emphasis on personal ethics not state ethics not religious ethics and the use of reason and abstract rationality and mathematics to think about things this kicked off almost simultaneously by Pythagoras those are the two chains that are going to cross and be at war with each other as we move through the next ones which will be Socrates Plato Aristotle Epicurus Plutarch and Seneca ha there you go thank you so I told you

Channel: Wes Cecil

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Keywords: Philosophy, presocratics, lectures, wes cecil, humane arts, pythagoras, thales

Id: To2JwmTp3X4

Length: 59min 24sec (3564 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 03 2012