introduction to humanities lecture 3 pre-socratic philosophy by david kelsey
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to HumanitiesLecture 3
Pre-Socratic Philosophy
By David Kelsey
Philosophical Questions & myths
• In the 6th and 5th century B.C. questions about the nature of the world began to take importance.
– Questions such as:• What is the meaning of life?
• Does life end in death?
• What is the best life to live?
– Prior to the 6th century B.C., answers to such questions came in the form of myths.
Myths
• Myths:– a story told and retold as a part of tradition.
– Often involved the Gods in some struggle, either with each other or with human beings, and intervening in human life for good or evil.
• The Greeks and their Gods:
– Kronos, Rhea, Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Aphrodite…
– Myths often involve a moral lesson.
An example of a myth
• An example in the first few lines of Homer’s Iliad (page 5 of Melchert):– Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
– murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
– hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
– great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds,
– and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
– Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
– What god drove them to fight with such a fury?
– Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king
– he swept a fatal plague through the army--men were dying
– and all because Agamemnon had spurned Apollo’s priest.• The Iliad, Book 1, 1-12
Explaining Homer’s Iliad
• What’s Homer on about:– The theme of the Iliad: rage (the irrational anger of Achilles)
– The Greeks capture a beautiful girl in a Trojan raid and the army awards her to Agamemnon…
– Her father, a priest, pleads for her return…
– Agamemnon finally gives up the girl but demands Achilles prize, a lovely woman.
– Enraged, Achilles refuses to fight
– Patrocles pleads with Achilles to return to battle but he refuses.
– So Patrocles talks Achilles into letting him use Achilles’ armor to fight himself. During the battle Patrocles is killed by the great Trojan warrior Hector…
– Achilles rejoins the battle and wreaks havoc…He meets Hector in battle and kills him.
– Achilles then drags Hector’s body back to the greek camp...
– The story ends with Hector’s father, King Priam, travelling at night to the Greek camp to plead for his sons body…Achilles gives up the body.
New Answers to Philosophical Questions
• During the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. there arose a discontent among some.– Not content with the myths as answers
• In early philosophical thought, certain questions gained precedence.– The Question of the one an the many:
– The appearance/reality distinction:
– Human reality:
Thales
• Thales of Miletus (625-547 B.C.)• Held that:
– 1) the cause and element of all things is water• Water is underlying everything…
– 2) all things are filled with Gods• So the Gods are explanations for why things exist and happen, • Example:
– Problem for Thales’ view:• Why water?
Anaximander
• Anaximander:– 612-545 B.C.
– from Miletus as Thales was.
• Held the following:– Given any state of things, Z, it had a beginning
– But then some prior state, Y, must have brought Z to be
– But Y must have had a beginning
– So some prior state X must have brought Y to be
– But this reasoning cannot go on forever
– So there is something that has no beginning
– What does Anaximander call this thing without a beginning?
Anaximander’s boundless
• The boundless:– The beginning for all things– No beginning and no end– Called divine– Encompasses all things and steers all things– Indefinite in character– Swirling in a vortex like motion
• Swirling water in a pan…
– Why think that the boundless is swirling in a vortex?• Just look around.
– Problem: how can one such abstract cause account for all the variety we see in nature?
• Do we need one big cause?
Pythagoras
• Pythagoras– 570-495 B.C.
– Lived in Croton (southern Italy) most of his adult life
– Had much influence on Plato
– Much influence on mathematics and music:• He and his followers first developed Geometry• Developed the Pythagorean theorem• Discovered the mathematical ratios of musical intervals: the octave, the fifth and the fourth
– Believed in Dualism.• The soul…• Reincarnation…• A Vegetarian…
Heraclitus
• Heraclitus:– 540-480 B.C.
– Lived in Ephesus (north of Miletus, on the shores of Asia Minor)
– Wrote the book of Heraclitus
– His solution of the one and the many:• We live in a world of many. There is a multitude of apparently different, changing and
conflicting things.• This multitude of things is made one by the logos.• The logos is…
The Logos
• The logos:• The law like or rational process or structure or pattern which governs all things.• The logos provides structure in chaos…
• Reality is a flux, structured by the logos– All things are in flux, like a river: ever changing, yet preserving an identity through the changes.– River metaphor: although the water that makes the river is ever changing, it is the same river. – The logos is the structure that unifies the many– In every one, many persist.– Example…
The Logos continued
• The Logos continued:– The logos is a divine fire:
• Divine fire: – “All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things…” (DK 22 B 31, IEGP, 91)
• Fire both is the world order, I.e. the logos, and manifests itself in that world order
– Through the logos there is a harmonious union of opposites• Reality is in a state of constant change but All things come into being through opposition:
– Without tension, opposition and conflict, the world could not persist– Example:
• The divine world order guarantees a balance of opposites:– Example:
Perceiving the Logos
• Perceiving the Logos:– Humans pay no attention to the logos.
– We perceive conflict, disorder and chaos.
– But there is structure behind the madness. This is the logos.
– The logos: • all that is and ever will be is ever changing.
The Ethics of Heraclitus
• The logos and how we should act:– Always be at one with the logos in one’s actions and character. Act
according to a balance of opposites.
– Moderation is the greatest virtue• It is never good for man to get all he wishes
Parmenides
• Parmenides: – from Elea (now the southern part of Italy) &
– lived from 515 B.C. to roughly 450 B.C.
– The first Rationalist: wants to see where reasoning and argument takes us
• An argument for Monism:– Monism is the metaphysical view that there is only one type of thing as opposed to
more than one.
– 1. Thought and being are the same
– 2. You cannot think “nothing”
– 3. Things don’t ever come into being.
– And 4. Things don’t ever fall out of existence.
– Thus, 5. Things don’t have beginnings or endings and change is impossible.
There is only the One
• So what follows from this argument:– Time is an illusion
• what is must exist all at once in a continuous present
– What is, is indivisible
• The one has no parts
– There cannot be things of different kinds
• There is only the one. It is eternal, indivisible and unchanging.
– The appearance/reality distinction is also solved:
– So Parmenides view is counterintuitive…
Atomism
• Democritus and Leucippus were the originators of Atomism.– Not much is known of Leucippus
– Democritus:• 460-360 B.C.• lived in Abdera in the middle of the 5th century B.C.
• Atomism gives us a solution to the one and the many problem which isn’t counterintuitive like Parmenides solution.
• Atomists think we can grant that being and not being are opposites and that not being is not.
– But they think that from this monism needn’t follow
An Ambiguity
• Atomism calls attention to an ambiguity in Parmenides argument:– The ambiguity is in the term “what is”.
• For Democritus, what is can be either body or empty space.
• So space can be empty in that it contains no things and yet it can have being of its own.
– Democritus calls empty space “the void”
Atomism vs. Monism
• Here we see the contrast in views:• Parmenides Atomism• • Being Not-Being Being Not-Being• Is Is Not Is Is Not
Thing No-Thing • Body Void
Atoms
• So for Atomism, reality consists of atoms and the void.• Bodies that we can see and touch are composed of atoms.• Atoms:
– Tiny, indivisible, indestructible and exist eternally
– In constant motion…
– Mechanical laws…
– Can differ in 3 ways…
How Atoms form into bodies
• Atoms combine and hook together to form the bodies we can see and touch:– Atoms move about in the void
– Atoms can hook into each other
– If enough atoms get hooked together, they can form bodies that are visible to us
– Bodies differ…
• An explanation of change:– A body comes into being:
– A body passes away:
The Implications of Atomism
• Here are some implications of the view:– 1-there is no room for intelligent design or purpose in explaining events or
actions:• The laws of motion and freedom of the will…
– 2-Everything in the universe must be explained in terms of materialist terms, I.e. there is only atoms, the void and the mechanical laws that govern their behavior.
• So the mind and the soul must be explained in completely materialist terms.
– Sensations, mental states and qualia…
• Other problems:
– Ghosts, angels and reincarnation
The rise of Athens
• During the 4th & 5th centuries B.C. Athens becomes the center of Greek cultural life– Greece was composed of city states, which included…– The city states each had their own citizens, armies, etc.– Democracy…
• 499 B.C. = Eastern Greek city states (on the shores of Asia Minor) rebelled against Persian taxation.
– Athens sends 20 ships to defend against the Persians and burns Sardis to the ground.– The Persians respond…
• 480 B.C. = The Persian king Xerxes took an army of near 200,000 to defeat Athens– Leonidas lead Spartan soldiers to meet the Persians at Thermopylae: many Persians killed but the
Spartans are defeated– The Persians are defeated by the Athenians in a sea battle– The Persians returned a year later to be defeated again
• As a result, Athens gains prominence and wealth.– Athens forms the league for the future defense of Greek lands & rules the sea
The Sophists
• The Sophists were teachers.– Popular during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.
– Protagoras was one of the greatest
– Taught virtue, politics, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, music and philosophy
– Most notably taught rhetoric• The uses of rhetoric…
– Rhetoric are the principles and practice of persuasive speaking.• By using the principles of persuasive speaking, one can make a case for any position at all.
– Rhetoric was taught:
– The Sophist claimed to teach how to turn the weaker argument into the stronger one
Man is the Measure of All Things
• The Sophists thought man is the measure of all things:– Since any position can be made to persuade, there are only opinions
– So humans are confined to appearances and we cannot discriminate truth from opinion
• Can we gain truth at all?
– So man is the measure of all things:• There is no criterion, standard or mark by which to judge except ourselves
• This is the view known as Relativism– Says truth is relative to the individual, group or culture
Physis & Nomos
• Physis: – The characteristics of the world or things in general independent of what human
beings impose on it
• Nomos:– custom or convention
• Example…
– Things for which humans alone have decided that they be so
• For the Sophists, morality, virtue and justice were a question of Nomos not Physis.
– Right and wrong, just and unjust are merely a convention because we sort such questions out by consulting the laws.
The Peloponnesian War
• The Peloponnesian War:– Between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta
– Occurred between 431 and 404 B.C.
– Death and killing was pervasive throughout…
– Lead to the defeat of Athens and the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Greece
– The peace treaty and the Thirty…
The Thirty
• The Thirty:– Were supported by Spartan men-at-arms
– Carried out a purge of criminals and wrong doers
– Executed criminals and persecuted many…
– Lasted almost a year…
– The thirty were finally defeated but Athens would never recover…
Results of the Thirty’s reign of terror
• Results of the reign of terror on the people of Athens and Greece:– Athenians lost confidence…
– The world and human affairs seemed beyond managing…
– Disillusionment at Sophistry…
– A Greek known as Aristophanes wrote ‘The Clouds’…
– To Aristophanes, argument was nothing more than a contest that the most persuasive will always win
– The central concern of Socrates…