The Pre-Socratics Epistemology
One can only begin to fathom the way of life in ancient Greece. The culture was well preserved, but that was it. Their way of thinking can only be speculated by our current vorhaben based translations of their documented, and their way of life is only a fragment of our fantasy of what we hoped they did and believed. I myself can only resort to imagination as I dream of what life was like in an ancient Greece city. As I read the texts of Aristotle Selected Works, Patricia Curd’s A Pre-Socratic Reader and Edward Hussey’s The Pre-Socratic, I find myself wondering how was such elaborate, and surprisingly accurate, knowledge was transferred, to who and why did they gain such a privilege. In the following paragraphs, …show more content…
He went further to describe the pre-Socratic in his book Metaphysics by stating, “Just as inexperienced soldiers in fights, rushing forward from all sides, often strike fine blows, but without knowledge, so they do not seem to understand what they say” (Met. 985a13–16). In his perspective, there were 4 main causes: Formal cause, Material cause, Agent cause and Final cause. These causes (αιτία) together were related to bring about his idea of the ultimate cause of the universe to which it is the very cause of itself thus the principle αρχή, Unmovable Mover, in which all things came to be. This perspective was meant to differ from the pre-Socratic as their causes were of material origin, like Thales who believed all things were made from water due to the moist origin of all beings. Taking the cause and seeing it as causes and their pursuit of the one thing, is a perspective that aided Aristotle in inserting his own interpretation in the works of the pre-Socratic. Though this method of knowledge transferring was and is majorly prevalent in modern society, it is not as instructive as it leaves a gap of knowledge between the understood and the interpreted and may lead to different understanding of what the initial message was. When we look at such work, one …show more content…
Patricia Curd believes the Pre-Socratic are the basis of scientific inquiry. According to Curd in her book, A Presoctatics Reader, “Thales…stands at the beginning of rational inquiry and critical thought about the world and the place of human beings in it that continues to the present day” (1). We see on the first page alone, where this quote was derived, that Curd already gives us a template to which we can compare and contrast the ideas of philosophers of the past to the present. Curd approached the ancient Greek texts only in a scientific perspective thus analyzing the works of the philosophers in either metaphysical or natural phenomenon’s and only gives us a glimpse on the ethical epistemology. In Curd’s approach we see how the philosophers built upon the knowledge of their previous predecessors but we fail to see the clear link between the selected fragments of each individual philosopher to their scientific way of thinking. The addition of a coherent link between the fragments and the general idea they provide would introduce the “change in paradigm” segment of the scientific paradigm as they would make clear what the pre-Socratics concluded and how they were built up. Indeed, this would
One can only begin to fathom the way of life in ancient Greece. The culture was well preserved, but that was it. Their way of thinking can only be speculated by our current vorhaben based translations of their documented, and their way of life is only a fragment of our fantasy of what we hoped they did and believed. I myself can only resort to imagination as I dream of what life was like in an ancient Greece city. As I read the texts of Aristotle Selected Works, Patricia Curd’s A Pre-Socratic Reader and Edward Hussey’s The Pre-Socratic, I find myself wondering how was such elaborate, and surprisingly accurate, knowledge was transferred, to who and why did they gain such a privilege. In the following paragraphs, …show more content…
He went further to describe the pre-Socratic in his book Metaphysics by stating, “Just as inexperienced soldiers in fights, rushing forward from all sides, often strike fine blows, but without knowledge, so they do not seem to understand what they say” (Met. 985a13–16). In his perspective, there were 4 main causes: Formal cause, Material cause, Agent cause and Final cause. These causes (αιτία) together were related to bring about his idea of the ultimate cause of the universe to which it is the very cause of itself thus the principle αρχή, Unmovable Mover, in which all things came to be. This perspective was meant to differ from the pre-Socratic as their causes were of material origin, like Thales who believed all things were made from water due to the moist origin of all beings. Taking the cause and seeing it as causes and their pursuit of the one thing, is a perspective that aided Aristotle in inserting his own interpretation in the works of the pre-Socratic. Though this method of knowledge transferring was and is majorly prevalent in modern society, it is not as instructive as it leaves a gap of knowledge between the understood and the interpreted and may lead to different understanding of what the initial message was. When we look at such work, one …show more content…
Patricia Curd believes the Pre-Socratic are the basis of scientific inquiry. According to Curd in her book, A Presoctatics Reader, “Thales…stands at the beginning of rational inquiry and critical thought about the world and the place of human beings in it that continues to the present day” (1). We see on the first page alone, where this quote was derived, that Curd already gives us a template to which we can compare and contrast the ideas of philosophers of the past to the present. Curd approached the ancient Greek texts only in a scientific perspective thus analyzing the works of the philosophers in either metaphysical or natural phenomenon’s and only gives us a glimpse on the ethical epistemology. In Curd’s approach we see how the philosophers built upon the knowledge of their previous predecessors but we fail to see the clear link between the selected fragments of each individual philosopher to their scientific way of thinking. The addition of a coherent link between the fragments and the general idea they provide would introduce the “change in paradigm” segment of the scientific paradigm as they would make clear what the pre-Socratics concluded and how they were built up. Indeed, this would