ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS by Kim Mariel J.

Tabora

1. Zeno of Elea
INTRODUCTION:
Slide 2
Zeno of Elea - born in (born in 495 BCE, died on 430 BCE) He was an important Pre-Socratic Greek
philosopher from the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy. He was a prominent member of the Eleatic
School of ancient Greek philosophy, which had been founded by Parmenides, and he subscribed to and
defended the Monist beliefs of Parmenides.

Slide 3
Best known today for his paradoxes of motion
Aristotle has called him the inventor of the "dialectic", the art of investigating or discussing the truth of
opinions.
He is a logician and historian.
Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, credited him with having laid the foundations of modern Logic.

He was praised as a "universal critic", skilled in arguing both sides of any question.
He devoted all his energies to explaining and developing Parmenides' philosophical system.

Slide 4
CONTRIBUTION TO PHILOSOPHY:

Slide 5
Like Parmenides, he taught the world of sense, with its apparent motion (or change) and plurality (or
multiplicity), is merely an illusion, that everything was One, that all belief in plurality and change is
mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion.

"Reductio ad absurdum"
Zeno's paradoxes were one of the first examples of a method of proof called reductio ad absurdum (or
epicheirema in Greek), a kind of dialectical syllogism or proof by contradiction.

He sought to prove the truth of his master's claim logically. Zeno set to prove the unity of existence
mathematically. Arguing against motion, the senses, and plurality.

Slide 6
He wrote 40 paradoxes showing how, logically, change and motion cannot exist. His best known are The
Race Course, The Achilles, The Arrow, and The Stadium, all of which prove the logical impossibility of
plurality and motion.

Slide 7
Zeno's paradoxes have fascinated mathematicians and logicians for hundreds of years and have yet to
be satisfactorily solved.
 2. Empedocles
Slide 8
Introduction:
Empedocles, (born c. 490 BC, Acragas, Sicily—died 430, the Peloponnese, Greece), Greek philosopher,
statesman, poet, religious teacher, and physiologist.

Slide 9
According to legend only, Empedocles was a self-styled god who brought about his own death by
flinging himself into the volcanic crater atop Mount Etna to convince followers of his divinity, as
dramatized by the English poet Matthew Arnold in “Empedocles on Etna."To his contemporaries he did
indeed seem more than a mere mortal.

Slide 10
Empedecles Contribution to Philosophy

Slide 11
Aristotle reputedly hailed him as the inventor of rhetoric, the art of persuasion
Galen regarded him as the founder of Italian medicine
Lucretius admired his hexametric poetry.
Nothing remains of the various writings attributed to him other than 400 lines from his poem Peri
physeos (“On Nature”) and fewer than 100 verses from his poem Katharmoi (“Purifications”).

Slide 12
Empedocles assumed that all matter was composed of four essential ingredients, fire, air, water, and
earth, and that nothing either comes into being or is destroyed but that things are merely transformed,
depending on the ratio of basic substances, to one another.

He believed that two forces, Love and Strife, interact to bring together and to separate the four
substances.
Strife makes each of these elements withdraw itself from the others;
Love makes them mingle together.

Slide 13
He said the real world is at a stage in which neither force dominates. In the beginning, Love was
dominant and all four substances were mixed together; during the formation of the cosmos, Strife
entered to separate air, fire, earth, and water from one another. Subsequently, the four elements were
again arranged in partial combinations in certain places; springs and volcanoes, for example, show the
presence of both water and fire in the Earth.

Slide 14
Apparently a firm believer in the transmigration of souls
Empedocles declared that those who have sinned must wander for 30,000 seasons through many mortal
bodies and be tossed from one of the four elements to another.

Slide 15
Escape from such punishment requires purification, particularly abstention from the flesh of animals,
whose souls may once have inhabited human bodies.