As we saw in the previous tutorial, the birth of Western philosophy was characterized by attempting
to understand nature and the world around us through reason rather than myth, an endeavor that
began with Thales and his Milesian school. They influenced much of later philosophy until today,
starting with the Eleatic school, founded by Parmenides around the 5th century BCE, named for
its region of Elea, near current Velia in Italy. They were especially influenced by Xenophanes in
attempting to understand the nature of knowledge itself. Their perspective on existence was that,
much like their predecessors, everything in existence was composed of a single substance. This
is called monism. However, this “one” substance is eternal, indivisible, stagnant, and formless,
and isn’t perceived by our physical senses. Thus, empirical analysis was invariably false,
and nothing became or ceased to be, as everything was and always will be part of
the One. Perceived change is but a mistake, and only abstract intuition can adequately guide our
understanding of the world, since our thought is the same as our being. Thus, for them, everything
we can think of is real, for we cannot conceive of things that do not exist, as even the most extreme
conjecture must be in some form part of the One. His student Zeno, also from Elea, attempted to
“prove” this by what we might refer to today as “destroying his opponents with facts and logic”,
or invariably fallacious arguments – reductio ad absurdum as we will encounter in a future
tutorial – devised for public performance rather than serious philosophical debate. His best known
example to “disprove” the existence of movement was that, in order to move from point A to
point B, one must traverse to the halfway point between these. And from this point to point B,
there’s also a halfway point. Thus, if we are to always divide the distance between
two points by 2, no matter how small the number is, it will never be zero. According to him,
this mathematically proves that movement is but an illusion of the senses, as one can never actually
reach point B. This is currently known as Zeno’s paradox, or the Dichotomy paradox.
Some critics of early monists were the pluralists, which imagined not a single substance for all of
reality as their predecessors did, but rather a combination of many. They were strongly influenced
by Parmenides, adapting his theory into their own. Anaxagoras believed that four elements
composed everything, those being water, earth, wind, and fire, mixing and separating to create
different appearances, but also believed in many others such as blood, darkness, or even denseness,
which were eternal and manifested in the mixtures themselves according to their proportions. To him,
everything began in a limitless amalgam, being moved into different states by a “Mind” – a
separate cosmic entity – thus generating the sun, stars, and landmasses, and also the cycles of
life and weather. Since their causes are clear and analogous, as the same principles and contents can
be found in anything, we could tell reality from mere appearances with proper rational analysis.
Empedocles, on the other hand, believed in only the four elements, which he called “roots”,
which were blended and separated by the forces of Love and Strife.
He was so confident in this understanding that he offered recipes to create bones, skin, and other
parts of the anatomy, with different amounts of these two forces. Clearly, his cosmological
perspective was intertwined with an ethical and epistemological one, as knowledge arose not only
from understanding these principles, but also from embracing and enacting them within one’s own life.
The pluralist perspective set the stage for the first historic formulation of the atomic theory.
The Abdera school, with its former namesake city near current Abdera, Greece, arose by criticizing
the Eleatic conception of an unchanging whole by first introducing what would eventually
evolve to be the current understanding of an atom. Democritus, its most famous member, posited that
everything was composed of uncountable minuscule, indivisible, and eternal particles of existence
imperceptible to human senses, located in and separated by vacuum, or the Void. These atoms
had different shapes, and they moved, collided, and occasionally joined given their various
formats in this nothingness, shaping everything we know. Thus, every object is merely a socially
constructed convention of different arrangements of several atoms. This would also be a response to
Zeno, since indivisible parts could, according to Democritus, denote movement. Of course,
this notion of the atom was purely hypothetical and largely metaphysical, but it is fascinating
how a 2500-year-old supposition somewhat resembles our current scientific understanding of matter.
Other than those advanced ideas, they also thought Earth was a flat cylindrical drum in the cosmos,
and vortices of atoms would burn, and create the sun and stars at its edges. Other minor
sorts of atomism developed throughout ancient times, even with other thinkers like Plato,
but only Epicurus gave it significant attention, as we will see briefly later in the series.
The last of the “inquirers into nature”, named as such because Aristotle marked
the presocratics as being concerned with the nature of reality, was Diogenes of Apollonia,
an ancient city near current Pojan, Albania, returning to the beliefs of Anaximenes more
than a century later in affirming that air was the primordial element of all existence. However,
this followed the trend of more applied problems of knowledge and ethics. As we breathe air, we are
governed by it, thus the soul and intelligence are but a manifestation of it. Proper use of
intelligence is then inherently good, and orders things in a good manner, according to Diogenes.
Finally, the last known presocratic movement was the Sophists. Itinerant, or wandering thinkers,
speakers, musicians, mathematicians, and athletes, they were professional
intellectuals hired as tutors, diplomats, or mere entertainers who taught about virtue,
or intellectual values which could mold one’s character, or even the government itself,
toward a better life. They were responsible for shifting the focus of philosophical inquiry toward
political and ethical issues, though frequently resorting to rhetoric, or “embellishing their
lack of knowledge” so as not to forfeit the financial support of their patrons. Plato
later criticized the Sophists by contrasting them with Socrates, who would be a true philosopher,
inquiring merely for the sake of knowledge rather than material gains or fame, shaping most of our
perspective of them for centuries. Nevertheless, as rhetoric and argumentation were among their
most prized qualities, the sophists developed the first classifications of sentences according
to their “force”, from wishes and questions to assertions and addresses, as well as rudimentary
criteria for truth and falsehood, setting the stage for proper formal and informal logic.
Much is still to be uncovered and understood regarding presocratic
thinkers. As new evidence appears and further analyses and translations are developed,
we continue to advance in appreciating their role in the foundations of Western thought. The three
pivotal philosophers of the Classical period: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,
could not exist were it not for the previous development of philosophical inquiry – as is
evident by their thorough commentary of it, which comprises most of the sources
we have on presocratic philosophy. Now that we understand some of this foundation, let’s take
a look at these three enormous figures in Ancient philosophy, starting with Socrates and Plato, and
attempt to find out why they’re considered some of the most impactful thinkers in human history.