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ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 1

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ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 1: Cosmologies & Principles

Aristotle:

  • What does it mean for Thales to ‘begin’ philosophy? This is an arbitrary, Aristotelian decision.
  • Aristotle: philosophy can be distilled to Metaphysics, first causes and principles
  • Thales’ time: an intellectual milieu
  • Aristotle’s view is a bit reductive

Plato:

  • philosophy starts with the Socratic Circle

  • lover of wisdom, Socrates as the man who doesn’t know anything

  • ontology as the start: Plato & Aristotle, canonized metaphysics

  • the pre-socratics did not self-identify as philosophers, but paved the way

Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes:

  • scientists, natural philosophers
  • the ties between science and philosophy
  • for them, closer to scientific questions: How did the universe begin, etc.
  • often just fragments, quotations out of context, etc.
  • the invention of an independent, self-regulating, non-god explained ‘nature’
  • reason, not myth, observation and generalization

What is philosophy?

Germans:

  • turned these fragments into objective representations, but that was not the purpose of Plato/Aristotle
  • what we have are copies of copies (from Latin, Arabic, Hebrew)
  • D-K: Diels and Kranz

First:

  • nature & physis
  • in the colonies (Sicily, Turkey)
    Later:
  • logos, human nature, politics
  • Athens
    [Hellenistic philosophy, alter P/A returns to the presocratics and their imminent, physical principles]

THALES:

  • eclipse prediction, ordering of nature
  • contemplative, but became rich from olive presses
  • first principle: water/moisture; seeds of all have a moist nature
  • Hesiod/Homer/Mesopotamian Creation Myth: Oceanus as father of everything
  • but Thales makes no invocation of the Gods
  • proceeding by reasoning, abstraction, something self-same and universal
  • water is abstract and universal, a God is particular
  • in Aristotle archai constitutes everything (Material Form), so Thales only explains this
  • but Thales’ water: not just constitutive, but generative
  • generalized view of observations about life needing moisture
  • things alive due to breathing (animation is physical; so the principle of life is imminent, but for Plato/Aristotle it is transcendent)

Hylozoism:

  • all matter is alive, cosmos as animated
  • magnets’ movement, abstracted to all rocks, then all matter
  • nature as organic and dynamic

ANAXIMANDER:

  • laws of nature and regularity, aperion as cosmic principle
  • principle of beings: aperion (not clear how it makes things come about)
  • an unlimited nature (not specific element), originator and destructor of all elements
  • the self-contradictions of destruction, retribution by destruction
  • cosmos: self-regulation, harmony, order (not mythological infighting of Gods)
  • Aperion: underlying, unchanging, literally negation of boundaries (infinity)
  • in Mythology chaos comes first, made distinct and ordered
  • Earth is suspended, in middle of an aperion sphere
  • no hierarchy of spaces (like in Hesiod with Tartarus, Earth, Olympus)
  • explaining natural phenomena via guilt of aperion, destruction
  • but in comparison Plato deals with human matters
  • Aperion as principle: material, since all attributes are derived from it; temporal because it is different from the cosmos (like its chaos)

ANAXIMENES:

  • all is one and indefinite
  • principle is air
  • varied degrees of density and refraction
  • rarified - fire; dense - wind/cloud; condensed - water/earth/stone
  • what everything is made of, but also how [Natural Principle]

Philosophy-Myth-Science:

  • phil. & myth. - universal questions
  • philosophy: arguments, speech, observations
  • science and phl. → restricted and unrestricted domains; together: observations and generalizations
  • wisdom: unpractical knowledge for its own sake

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