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85 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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3 types of philosophical activity
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1. Physical Speculation – Pre-Socratic Philosophers
2. Reflection on Human Conduct and Human Nature - Sophists and Socrates 3. Critical Reflection and Synthesis – Plato and Aristotle |
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Milesian Location
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Resided and taught in the Greek city of Miletus, off the coast of Asia Minor.
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Main Insight of Milesians
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the discovery of nature, the idea that natural phenomena should be explained in naturalist rather than supernaturalist terms.
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Thales
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-Milesian Philosophy
-Absent-minded professor stereotype -6th cent. BCE in Miletus -noted for practical skills regarding money-making and military engineering |
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Thales
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-He is best known for making the claim that all things are constituted or caused by or are made of water.
-He may have come to the idea that water was the fundamental element by noting, by observation, that water is the one substance which we can observe in all three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas). -It is also essential for life. (Living things are nourished by water. Blood, semen, etc are “watery”. Living things tend to be moist, dead things dry.) |
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Three things that make Thales' philosophy novel
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1. He assumes there is and searches for a unifying principle, something permanent underlying change and multiplicity. This notion that all things are ultimately one is called Monism.
2. He adapts a purely secular point of view. He makes no use of divinities or the supernatural to explain the happenings of nature. He is moving away from a mythical view of the world. 3. As a corollary of #2, he proposes criticizable theories to explain nature. |
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Anaxamander philosophy
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-shared the three basic assumptions with Thales
-disagreed with Thales view of what the basic "stuff" of nature was -though it was a mistake to make any one of the basic elements fundamental -monist |
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Anaxamander
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-viewed the world as a struggle between the 4 basic elements
-According to him, the basic stuff was “the boundless”, “the indeterminate”, or “the indefinite” (apeiron). It was not identical to any of the elements and had none of their particular, observable characteristics. |
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Anaxamander
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His insight has influenced subsequent science is that the observable features of the world must be explained in terms of those that are not observable. He in a sense invents the distinction between observation and theory.
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Anaximenes
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- was a monist like thales and Anaxamander but replaced water with air.
His advance on his predecessors was in his tendency to reduce qualitative changes to quantitative changes. The other elements came from air by the process of condensation are rarefaction. In this way he introduced the idea of nature as governed by mechanical processes. Important to note that by air he means a continuous substance, not something composed of particles or atoms as the later atomists will hold. |
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Pythagorean philosophy
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-form or structure rather than matter.
-They had a lasting influence on science, encouraging the importance of measurement and mathematics in formulating scientific principles |
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Pythagoras
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shrouded in mystery and myth. For example, it is not clear what discoveries and contributions he made and what were made by members of his school.
-He was born on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor. He founded a religious community at Croton in southern Italy. |
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Pythagorean philosophy
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The community exercised considerable political influence and their structure, practices, and rituals showed the influence of eastern mystic movements from the Persian Empire.
-Its rituals and practices emphasized an interest in immortality (transmigration), salvation, a “monastic” or ascetic way of life which assigned a crucial role to learning in religious life. (Here note the influence on Plato’s Phaedo. Philosophy was a way of “dying”, liberating the soul from the body.) |
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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Science and philosophy were not solely matters of speculative curiosity, as had been the case for the Milesians, but were a part of religious practice.
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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-They influenced Plato in this direction and also in their view of the soul as immaterial and immortal as well as its imprisonment in the body
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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-They encouraged a kind of ascetic life which associated salvation and enlightenment with intellectual development.
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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-They had a lasting influence on science, encouraging the importance of measurement and mathematics in formulating scientific principles
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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They discovered the mathematical basis of harmonic cords. These relationships can be expressed in the relative lengths of string plucked to produce the notes. Dividing a string in half produces an octave.
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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developed the idea of mathematical proof as revealing the eternal, necessary, and static structure of reality.
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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They emphasized the importance of the ideas of harmony and proportion. Health, for example, was a matter of maintaining a harmony of opposites, an idea which fit in nicely with the Greek idea of moderation in all things.
This later developed into Aristotle’s idea of virtue as a mean, a proper proportion of emotions and desires ruled by reason. |
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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Number was also the key to understanding the cosmos
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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They saw numbers as kinds of points which made things up, as points make up lines and lines make up planes and planes make up solids.
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Pythagorean Philosophy
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1.If a finite line L is made of an infinite number of points, then if those points have size, L will be infinitely long.
2.But if those points have no size, then L will have no length. 3.But L is neither infinitely long nor without length. 4.Therefore, a line cannot be made of an infinite number of points. |
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Parmenides
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From Elea introduced some of the main elements in connection with the ancient Greeks’ (and our) understanding of motion. Examining the problems of understanding motion and multiplicity, he came to several counterintuitive conclusions, namely that the very concept of motion or change was contrary to reason and that motion, as well as multiplicity, was merely apparent, a kind of illusion.
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Parmenides
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Reality was one and unchanging. His argument was based on several apparently reasonable assumptions.
1. Reality is fundamentally one. (That is, there is a unity that underlies the apparent multiplicity of things, an assumption that was presupposed by earlier Greek philosophers.) 2. What is, is. 3. What is not, is not. (That is, there is no nothing. “It” is not a thing and can neither be nor be thought.) |
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Parmenides
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1. Whatever is (Reality or Being) is uncreated. To assume otherwise is a contradiction. If it were created, it would either be created from nothing or from something. It cannot be created from nothing, for there is no nothing. (See 3 above.) Nor can it be created from something, if one assumes monism, for there is no something else from which it could come.
2. Being is indestructible. To assume otherwise would make what is what is not, i.e. nothing. But there is no nothing. He might also argue that destruction would imply being created because dependent. Moreover, destruction assumes that there is something else, which contradicts monism. . Being is eternal. This follows from its being uncreated and indestructible. 4. It is unchangeable. This follows from its being indestructible, since change presupposes transformation into something else which, according to 2, is impossible. |
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Zeno
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FromElea, a follower of Parmenides, set out to defend Parmenides by arguing that alternative views, especially those of the Milesians and Pythagoras, were self-contradictory and lead to paradoxes. Zeno’s strategy later developed into the standard reductio ad absurdum proof strategy in logic and mathematics.
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Zeno
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His arguments can be classified into two groups, one set aimed at refuting the view that there is a multiplicity of things, the other aimed at refuting the idea that there was such a thing as motion or change.
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Zeno's arguments against Pythagoreans
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If we assume that a line is composed of a multiplicity of points, then we can always bisect a line segment, and every bisection leaves us with a line segment that can also be bisected. Continuing with this process, we never come to a point, a stopping place, so a line cannot be composed of points.
If a line is composed of an infinite number of points, then if those points have size, the line will be infinitely long. But no line is infinitely long. However, if those points have no size, then the line will have no length. But no line is without length. Therefore, no line is composed of an infinite number of points. |
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n abate
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subside or moderate
If something bad or undesirable abates, it becomes much less strong or severe. The storms had abated by the time they rounded Cape Horn. |
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Eleatics (Zeno and Parmenides)
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Perhaps the most counterintuitive idea of --- was that there was no such thing as change or motion. These arguments were also problematic for Heraclitus who is sometimes taken to hold that the only reality is change.
If a thing moves from one point to another, it must first go half the distance and then half the distance again, and half again, and so on ad infinitum. It must then pass through an infinite number of spaces in a finite time, which is impossible. |
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Sophist
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professional teachers who traveled from city to city selling their services.
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Sophists
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They included Protagoras (485-415) of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini (483-376), Hippias of Elis (485-415), Prodicus of Ceos (470-400) and Critias of Athens (460-403).
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Sophists
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turned their attention to specifically human concerns, with ethics, law, politics, language, etc.
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Protagoras
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Sophist (Said this)
indicative of his humanistic or human centered view: “Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” |
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Protagoras
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not interested in fundamental questions about the cosmos, being ultimately skeptical about our ability to know the answers to those questions.
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Protagoras
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human beings were the center, the “measure” of all reality.
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Protagoras
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a relativist, holding that whether something was true or false, good or bad, right or wrong depended on the person or group of persons who hold that value or truth.
The truth of any belief depends on or is relative to the person making the judgment. The opposite of relativism is absolutism, according to which there is an objectively correct view of what is true or false, right or wrong, good or bad. Plato was an absolutist, for example. |
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Protagoras
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-taught rhetoric, the art of speaking well.
-Those views are “true” which you can persuade others to accept or agree to. There is no truth beyond that. -What he taught his students was “how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger” |
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Protagoras
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no single argument is decisive. Both sides of an argument can be argued equally.
-would teach students to argue all sides of every question. |
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Why did the Sophists flock to Athens
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It was a vibrant democracy.
It was powerful and wealthy. It celebrated and protected free speech. The Assembly was a body in which citizens could address any topic. In this environment, the skill of the sophist were indispensable and highly regarded. They were the “media consultants” and “political operatives” of the day. Democracy provided the perfect environment for the sophists’ skills. |
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Protagoras
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thought to have associated with Pericles who led Athens from about 460-430)
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Postmodernism
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often claimed to be the contemporary form of relativism
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Empedocles
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born in a Greek city in southern Sicily (Acragas, now Agrigento) around 490 BCE, thus living in the 400s BCE.
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Empedocles
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Perhaps his most lasting contribution was a pluralist theory of the elements which dominated western science until the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Empedocles
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Like most philosophers after the Eleatics (Parmenides and Zeno), while disagreeing with Parmenides, he still accepted a great deal of the Eleatic view. In particular he accepted the following two assumptions:
1. Nothing ultimately real is created or destroyed (a conservation principle.) 2. There is no empty space. Reality is a plenum. In this way, he differs from the atomists. |
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Empedocles
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argued that motion could take place, not by some things moving into empty space, but by one thing taking the place of something else
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Empedocles
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shown how motion could be possible, even if reality were a plenum. In addition he avoided denying that change or motion was possible by denying monism.
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Empedocles
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reasoned by modus tollens. Since motion does occur, monism must be false and pluralism true.
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Empedocles
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There are four elements or roots: earth, air, fire, water. Each of these is a kind of Parmenidean One and is eternal, indestructible, and unchanging.
There are two fundamental motions: Love and Strife (or uniting and separating.) The world process is cyclical, beginning with everything “mixed up”, united. |
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Empedocles
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Love is dominant. Gradually elements are separated out so that all air is together, all earth, etc. Here Strife is dominant. Then the process is reversed.
This view is the origin of the idea that “everything seeks its natural place” which helped form Aristotle’s cosmology which dominated Western science until the 17th century. The present world is at neither extreme. His vision of comic history has some similarity to the big bang theory of modern cosmology (with the universe “pulsating”, first expanding, and then contracting.) |
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Empedocles
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had a crude kind of theory of evolution. Survival and adaptation were not the result of design (a view he would have considered superstitious), but of a kind of natural selection following upon the “luck” of chance combinations. This lack of design or purpose in the natural order was later criticized and rejected by Plato and Aristotle.
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Empedocles
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However different from earlier monism, there is still some continuity here. While many are not reduced to one, they are reduced to a few. And like the earlier monists, such as the Milesians, the familiar things of ordinary experience are not fundamentally real. They are composites of what is ultimately real, namely the four elements.
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Anaxagoras
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a pluralist who was in certain respects a follower of Empedocles and in other respects a critic. He was born Clazomenae in Asia Minor and was probably a Persian citizen.
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Anaxagoras
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He may have been in the Persian army which would explain his presence in Athens about 480 BCE.
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Anaxagoras
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before him, philosophy seemed a Greek colonial affair. After Anaxagoras, Athens became the center of philosophy, even for non-Athenians like Aristotle, who was a Macedonian.
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Anaxagoras
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teacher of Pericles, which got him in political trouble. He was brought to trial by Pericles’ opponents on charges of impiety.
He claimed the sun was just a stone, that the moon was made of earth, etc. He was condemned, but managed to get out of prison, probably with the help of Pericles, and returned to Ionia. |
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Anaxagoras
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Like Empedocles,he accepted the Parmenidean theses that what was ultimately real was eternal, indestructible, and unchanging.
Like Empedocles, he rejected Parmenidean and Milesian monism in favor of pluralism. Like Empedocles,he believed that motion and change are real and are the result of a mingling of elements. |
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Anaxagoras
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But unlike Empedocles, he didn’t limit the elements to four. He believed that everything that has parts that are qualitatively identical to the whole is an element. (E.g. gold is an element, horse is not.) This conception of element has a strikingly modern sound.
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Anaxagoras
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Anaxagoras criticized him for not being able to account for the kind of change we experience solely in terms of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water.
-explained these sorts of things in terms of his view of many elements, their mingling and separating, when one element becomes dominant over others in any combination of elements. Thus, for change to be possible, everything must contain a portion of everything else. Thus, in place of Empedocles’ four elements, we have indefinitely many qualitatively diverse elements. |
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Anaxagoras
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In place of Love and Strife as the moving causes of the uniting and separating of elements as in Empedocles, he substitutes Mind or Nous. Here is where heseems original, where otherwise he seems a mere variation on Parmenides and Empedocles.
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Anaxagoras
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Nous, while still a material principle for him, pervades all and has power over all.
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Anaxagoras
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While his idea of elements was original and pointed to difficulties in Empedocles’ attempt to explain change, to many Greeks he seemed to do so only by giving up the search for a simpler, unifying principle. This seemed almost like giving up the philosophical/scientific enterprise.
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Leucippus
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The apparent originator of Greek atomism
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Democritus
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wrote first known detailed exposition of atomism
a contemporary of Socrates, from Abdera, a city in Thrace, a coastal city on the northern Aegean Sea. Abdera was also the birthplace of Protagoras, one of the most famous sophists. |
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Atomism
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attempted to combine the Milesian effort at unification of the many under one single principle, but with the relentless use of Eleatic logic.
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Basic doctrines of Atomism
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Material things (really all things) are composed of separate indivisible (“uncutable”) bits of matter called atoms.
2. Empty space exists in which atoms move. 3. Atoms differ only in shape and volume, only in terms of quantifiable, measurable properties. In themselves they have no “secondary qualities” such as color, sound, taste, heat, etc. This view was adopted by later 17th century atomists like Galileo and Robert Boyle. 4. Change occurs by transfer of momentum from moving atoms and occurs only by contact. (There is no action at a distance as in the modern Newtonian theory of gravitation.) |
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Corollaries of the basic doctrines of atomism
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All change is ultimately caused by mechanical interactions of atoms.
Condensation and Rarefaction (Anaximenes) are explained by the empty space between atoms (the less space, the denser.) Pressure, therefore, leads to condensation. Bombardment (e.g. by fire) leads to rarefaction. This idea is still with us and became the basis of the ideal gas laws associated with Boyle and Charles. There is no empty space within atoms. |
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atomism
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Parmenides showed that change or motion required that being be many, not one, and if many, must be divided by non-being (space) into separate parts. (In essence the atomists take the arguments of Parmenides and Zeno to be a refutation of monism.)
Nature does change. Therefore, reality is divided into parts separated by non-being. |
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atomism
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Note how each atom is a kind of Parmenidean one, uncreated, eternal, and indestructible. Empty space or the void is Parmenidean non-being, which now has a kind of existence.
However, non-being can have no causal power and can offer no resistance. It cannot transmit anything and, therefore, there can be no action at a distance. All action must be the result of contact, of mechanical force. -a synthesis of early Greek natural philosophy. |
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atomism
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treated the body in medicine as a complex mechanism. Life itself was reduced to atoms and the void.
The soul was also viewed as material, represented as “refined” atoms that respond to impacts from the outside world. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) adopted this view later in modern philosophy. |
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atomism
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So-called secondary qualities, the immediate objects of sense, are not objective properties of bodies. They are relative and depend for their existence and character on a perceiving organism.
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atomism
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The world is purely material and mechanical and has no purpose. Things do not behave as they do because they are supposed to, because it is their function or purpose to behave in a particular way; they act as they do for purely mechanical reasons or causes.
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atomism
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Nothing occurs by chance, but all is the result of necessity.
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atomism
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identified the good life as a life in the absence of disturbance, a kind of contentment. Epicurus (341-271 BCE) and Lucretius (98-55 BCE) later modified and adopted these ethical and physical doctrines, forming the core of Hellenistic and Roman Epicureanism.
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problems with atomism
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cannot explain human action, since it proposes a world devoid of purpose, a criticism later presented by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo.
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problems with atomism
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cannot provide an explanation of how secondary qualities arise, a problem for modern atomism as well
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Ancient Atomism held that atoms are hard, solid, pure being containing no empty space.
Roman atomism (e.g. Lucretius in De Rerum Natura) held the same view. Contemporary atomism holds that atoms are “soft” and contain space. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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Ancient atomism held to a determinist view of the behavior of atoms. They are governed “by necessity.”
Roman atomists, in the interests of making the idea of free will possible, introduced the idea that atoms “swerve” un predictably. Contemporary atomists hold that the behavior of atoms is governed by laws that function probabilistically. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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aberrant
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abnormal or deviant
Aberrant means unusual and not socially acceptable. Ian's rages and aberrant behavior worsened. |
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Roman atomists held that weight results from a tendency of atoms to fall downward in space.
Contemporary atomists Ancient atomists held that weight results from centrifugal force in a cosmic vortex. hold that weight results from gravitational fields. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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Ancient atomists as well as Roman atomists held that space was pure non-being. In this sense they claim, contrary to Parmenides, that non-being in some sense is.
Contemporary atomists hold that space is a kind of field that has properties of its own. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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Ancient atomists held that atoms are mathematically and physically indivisible.
Roman atomists held that atoms are physically, but not mathematically indivisible. Contemporary atomists hold that atoms are both physically and mathematically divisible. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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The strongest point of the ancient view is its simplicity and clear logic.
The strongest point of Roman atomism was its ethical implications. The strongest point of contemporary atomism is its experimental confirmation. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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Ancient atomist held to a strict doctrine of the conservation of matter and energy.
Roman atomists held to a strict conservation of matter, but their belief that atoms “swerved unpredictably” precluded the conservation of energy Contemporary atomists hold to the conservation of mass/energy taken together. |
Comparison of Ancient, Roman, and Contemporary Atomism
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