Ancient Philosophy
The existence of an abstract notion is actually its being thought. Being and being thought coincide in this way. Once you think about it, it must exist. This is what Hegel says; not what Parmenides says. You cannot rather say anything about things that are not. But rather, my thinking is limited to things that are. Meaning not that the things that are are notional, but rather the opposite, you need particular things to affirm existence, to affirm ’it is’ with your mind. The mind recreates the things that are there. If you now say that x is the sphere of that which is, anything outside of it that you find merely increases the sphere of what is.
The traits of what is is very much the same as what Plato distinguishes as the forms. However, Parmenides doesn’t distinguish between an abstract plane or a corporeal plane, he thinks that what is is fundamentally one body being. There is no notion of matter.
The only viable interpretation of Plato is that he has not either discovered Plato yet.
Parmenides in the second part may be saying that if you have to live in an illusion, then this illusion is the better one. And in the different spheres of the universe for Parmenides, there is a gradation of light unto darkness, what is, the kernel, is light knowledge itself, whilst the seven bodies of heaven turn around the earth which are further from proper being.
Aristotle critiques Parmenides: he does not think that Parmenides can properly be a student of nature. He is talking about nature has it has been discovered from the 6th century onwards. How can anyone say about nature that there is no coming to be or perishing? This is absolutely absurd for Aristotle. He is absolutely right, but not about nature. The existence of things without coming to be, is a question to another form of enquiry prior to the study of nature. The discipline in which there is no change is the metaphysical studium. They present themselves as people talking about physics, but they aren’t speaking of physics. This is only true if you detach it from any physical appearance, ie. at the level of a metaphysical speculation. In Aristotle, no principle of one science can be used in another unless you specifically prove that it is possible.
Fundamentally denying the mobility of the world, the essence of the science you do, is nonsense.
They immediately applied a notional description of things to the things themselves. He is talking about them making a categorical mistake.
The weight of Parmenides will be so heavy that no one will be able to say anything in philosophy from now on without replying to his logic. What we see is actually that the next generations of philosophers try to escape the problems that Parmenides presents.
In the historiography of ancient philosophy, we then talk about the pluralists. People who accept a plurality of principles is rather what it means. Rather it is the opposite of Parmenides.
Parmendies’ logic
Nothing proceeds from non-being. It is or it is not, and there can be no place for non-being.
There can be no emptiness in Parmenides, everything is one undifferentiated continuum of what is.
If you have a unity, it cannot be plural. If something is, then it is unitarily.
There can also be no motion unless something explains it. In principle the pluralists agree that unities cannot hvae motion.
Those four elements which are literally rephrasings of what Parmenides says will remain for a long time.
The point here is going to be to say that this is absolutely true, except for the fact that there is more than one unity. There are several elements for which this description accounts. The amount of primary principles and units are more than one. Once you have a primary unit, there is no plurality to that unit.
Empedocles.
A sicillian who never left the island.
A very special figure in the history of philosophy. We are actually dealing with people who are contemporaries of Pericles. In a Greek world which has gained some self-consciousness through the defeat of the Persians, and he is from accragas. He was a philosopher, a mystic, a poet, a doctor and a god.
He represents himself as having climbed up mount Etna, where he jumped into the crater, afterwards the mountain erupted at which point a golden sandal came back. This was to prove himself as a god.
He wrote two large poems. On Nature, and the other is called Purifications. It is not always clear which fragment belongs to which work of his.
In 1999, in Strasbourg, in a basement of a museum, a mummy was unravelled and the papyrus had some of his poems on it. 52 new fragments. Many of the texts that are now part of on nature seem to maybe be part of purifications now and it is very confusing.
It is probable that purifications was about a cycle of purifying nature starting from a particular problem. It seems to have been the original evil of bloodshed for food. Empedocles may have been a vegetarian. There is a transmigration of souls until there is a kind of purification taking place. Empedocles claims to have basically been everything around before. There is a kind of cycle of rebirths from which we have to purify ourselves.
It could have been the case that purifications and on nature may have been the same work.
He has 4 main claims. There is no coming-to-be or perishing. More or less in the exact same wording as Empedocles. He also agrees with Parmenides that there can be no void anywhere in nature. There is no empty place, ie. no non-being within being. However, Empedocles argues that the senses should in some way be trusted. The senses give us an accessway to reality. He even gives a detailed mechanistic analysis of sense-perceptions. If there are phenomena, there must also be a receiver of those phenomena. We must save the phenomena from the problems that were imposed upon them by Parmenides. What actually makes him a pluralist however is an ever-existing set of four elementary material things. He is the inventor of the theory of the four elements. The four elements is not the word he uses. Element is the Greek words for the letters of the element. Empedocles himself calls them divinities, as gods, or as roots, rhizomata. The four roots are one, eternal, indestructible, lack emptiness, and do not perish. However, there is some divisibility to them. If you have one and cut it in two, you end up with exactly the same. Divisibility without a change in nature. Air, Fire, Water and Earth explain everything in nature. He denies Thales in saing that water is the archè, and he denies Parmenides in saying that there can only be one thing, and so has four archai. Then how can you trust your senses? What we see are not these elements themselves. Through our sensory information, we find that what appears to us is always going to be a combination of those four. All of the characteristics of Parmenides’ one are transferred to these four archai. Empedocles uses the names of divinities in a very specific sense to refer to the elements (stoicheia).
It is not elementary in the sense that we have today. If we term it atomism, it must be a qualitative atomism, whilst quantitative atoms presuppose some motion in an empty space. If I want a colision of water with oxygen, I need empty space to explain that colision. However, the elements rather have qualities, and the only difference between them is qualitative. eg. Warm + dry = fire. If there is no empty place, everything is going to be full of qualitative elementary structures. There is no nothingness that seperates things. There is never going to be pure air really. The air has lots of moist and earth in it, or if it doesn’t it is dry and maybe smooth. It is always a pure combination of the four. If I stretch my arm, what I do is not push away the elementative structures that are there, but changing the qualities of that specific place. Most philosophers take over this theory of four elements and accept that there is no void after Empedocles. Everything is full of these roots in different qualitative constellations, and there is no place where there is nothing. The amount of one element in the universe is constant.
Aristotle takes over the theory of the four elements, however, he argues that Empedocles doesn’t understand that there can be internal changes to the elements. You can change the nature of an element to becoming damp or air for example. Aristotle has a notion of matter that underlies those elementary qualitative structures. This shows how elements can change from one into another. The point is that for Empedocles we are already adding something which shifts the theory into the direction of abstract matter, but we are not there yet. We are actually doubling the explanation by reducing bodies to their constituent parts of four elements, but there is still no notional bearer which means the transforming things.
Empedocles argues four elements are enough, just like painters only need four colours. Red, white, black. It isn’t that four colours correspond to four elements, but you just happen to need a limited amount of principles to explain the whole.
From there he derives a theory of perception, in the claim that like knows like. The particles of water in my eye see the water because there is water in my eyes. I have receptors to the four elements which correspond to those elements in their natural state.
Then Empedocles adds something spectacular. There are four elements, but I explain the existence of anything by their coming together. So I need to explain how they come to be together. For the first time in philosophy, Empedocles says we need a cause of motion. We need to explain how these elements display a motion that cannot be denied. In that sense we have to trust our senses and explain the difference between our understanding of nature as such and the things we see as combinations of them. He argues that there are two opposite causes of motion, love, and hatred. This helps him to explain the cosmos. We make the connection with on nature by introducing these causes of motion. Love and hatred are enemies of one another but they coexist. The universe as we have it now is a combination of love and hatred and goes between one or the other side. The elements are kind of subordinate to their forces. It is like in Homer where the gods are threaded by fate. It is a divine force that is in a sense master of the principles themselves.
If there is something and you perceive something, what you perceive is identical to how you perceive at this time. If I perceive the world as coloured, it is coloured.
The universe is a sphere for him. And then there are those forces of the universe which make their way toward the centre of the universe, and their motions are opposites. Their motions are like an austrian wheather house; the lady comes out when the sun shines and the man when it rains. You could imagine that the first stage of the universe was total love, when all the elements are together in the whole universe. One globe of combinations in similar proportion. As hatred makes its way to the center these combinations fall apart. When hatred takes part of love, there are four layers with the elements each in their own positions. And we are on our way to this situation. Our situation now, with sexual intercourse makes the elements come back together again, but things are falling apart generally. With love everything is everywhere, but with territories there will be a preponderance of war. However, the quantity of what is never changes. It is a cyclical process as was stated before for Empedocles.
He also has a peculiar explanation for species of animals. Anything could happen. Because sexual intercourse is a combination of elements. So in his theories, strange monstrous beings can come into existance from human intercourse. However, these die because they are not adapted. Aristotle will critique this because it gives place to chance in the explanation of the universe.
Aristotle also critiques Empedocles in that it seems weird that there are 2 causes of motion. If there was 1 it would be the same. The effect of hatred also seems to be a purification of the elements. So why would that be a bad situation? The effect of hatred seems to be a good thing?