Presocratics I.1 Sept.

30 Rorty

Vocabulary: physis (nature, what is; every object of rational enquiry or object of experience except
products of human contrivance; what is not art; what is not divine; what is not human…)
Arche: origin, cause, beginning, principle my sources: Jonathan Barnes
Stoicheion: element GER Lloyd
Logos: reason, the Word Cornford & Zeller (again)
Psyche: life, soul, agency

Introduction to the presocratics

We stand this week at the beginning of our period—the beginning of ancient philosophy-
- but why does it start here? Why here? Of Thales, our first figure, we don’t even have
a surviving fragment. Of Anaximander we have one—one! --probable surviving sentence.
It’s a really neat sentence, but—I mean—it’s just one sentence.
(1) They represented an alternative to the Homeric stories of the gods and their
relation to men: what they were doing seems to have been a break with the
kind of explanation, the kind of answers that were being given to questions,
before their time—not entirely myth (although not entirely different from the
tradition, either). Barnes suggests that it was their use of “theory and
reason—not fables and dogma.”
(2) For another, the kind of thing they were doing seems to have been a kind of
joint enterprise, a mutually inter-referential project of some sort. It’s like that
thing Arlo Guthrie talks about in “Alice’s Restaurant:”1 By the time there
were three people doing it, it began to look like an organization. Nobody was
sure what they were talking about, but they were all talking about some
interest they had in common. And it is a kind of thing that WE moderns find
interesting. Lloyd considers them the first figures in the history of science;
the first ‘empiricists.’ Theologians consider them among the first monotheists.
Perhaps one of them was the founder of evolutionary biology.
(3) We know for sure that they were very much on the minds of the people with
whom we will spend the most time this quarter. Plato and Aristotle2, and even
our great unwritten third, Socrates--wanted to—and did—think of themselves as
connected with these people. They wanted to correct or supplement or refute or
praise or justify or ridicule or emulate them, by name. They picked sides. That
says something that these early figures did was important those who came after.
I’m not saying that they called themselves philosophers; that term seems to have come
into usage several hundred years after Thales. But Aristotle (“The Philosopher”) starts

1
“You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's
really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do
it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take
either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three
people walking in [singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant] and walking out.
They may think it's an organization.” And what if we all do it? It’s
an academic discipline.
2
Cf. pp 338-353 of our text, Metaphysics A chapters 1-9.
the first book of his Metaphysics with the sentence “All men desire to know.” And he
devotes the next 9 chapters to a discussion of the people we now call the presocratics.
(4)That seems to have been the key, really: they asked a different kind of
question than their predecessors; and gave a different kind of answer.
Bishop Berkeley said “All men have opinions. But few men think.” Barnes claims the
greeks discovered logic: the art of thinking, the laws of thought, the art of ratiocination.
That doesn’t mean, he qualifies in his introduction to his 700 page book on the
presocratics, that they were completely original. They used, in their rational way, the
material they inherited, the language, the ideas and concepts, the observations, even,
when it suited, the myths of their common culture. Nor does it mean that they were right
in their conclusions, or that they started from the right premises. But for this week, at
least, we’ll be giving them the benefit of the doubt, and trying to figure out, on the basis
of what they said, what they were doing.

The stuff we’re reading this week is hard going, in some ways; it’s fragmentary;
Barnes (whom I love for his prose, as well as for his passion) says of the presocratics:
“the fragments form an archipelago of islets in the dark sea of our ignorance.” Any
understanding relies a lot on what other people have said about them, the interpretations
of people who have their own interests, their own oxes to gore, their own projects to
further.
But frankly, you here, sitting in this room 2500 years after Thales wrote, are not at
too much of a disadvantage. If it is fragmentary, we are all, equally, interpreters; making,
as did our predecessors, what sense we can of what we find. The more you know of any
science or art, the more you can bring to your reading, the more likely it is that you will
find some reason to refer back to these foundational stones of our cultural edifice.
Interested in evolution? Consider Anaximander. In physics? Consider Democritus and
Leucippus. In math? Pythagoras—or for that matter, Zeno. Open your mind; consider
not so much their answers, but the questions they ask, and try to figure out why they
might have answered them the way they did. Are our answers any more irrefutable?
And if so, on what basis? Logic? Observation? Better theories? But what makes them
better?

Take a break: then we’ll talk about the various individual presocratics.

The Schools: the Ionians; the Eleatics: two (IMHO) giants, and some reconciliations

The Schools: the presocratics are grouped in a number of ways: chronologically; by

their academic geneaology, their doctrinal similarities; geographically; and, of course by
the interests of the various readers. The geographic and the chronological seem to
roughly fall together, and the order in which our text groups them is a good place to start.
The first “school,” then, is the three Milesians – geographically located on Asia Minor.

Thales (624-546 BC): He didn’t write anything, although he was considered one of the
Wise Men of antiquity, a claim justified by the various practical accomplishments
attributed to him: he became a wealthy man by cornering the market on oil presses right
before a bumper crop of olives; and we can actually date him because he accurately
predicted an eclipse (on what must have been May 25, 585 BC). It was said “after him
men began to write.”
Two claims: (1) [a] magnet has a soul
(2) Everything is water
(1) Barnes on psyche: [=how to read] x ‘has a soul’ is as much as to say: x is alive; x is
animate; x is an agent; x has a sort of motor… because it is a source of motion for
something else. To be be-souled (empsychos) is to be living, animate, a cause of motion.
If x has a cause of motion, it is empsychos, has a psyche
Amber/magnet can move iron
Therefore amber/magnet has a psyche (is besouled)
Note, though—that doesn’t mean it is free or rational, choosing to act or
refrain from attracting iron….
(2) Barnes on ‘everything is water:’
a. Seeking a unitary explanation—a kind of mono-cosmology [not
monotheism, although the various things termed ‘divine’ have the epithets
of the gods—eternal and deathless, infinite (sometimes)]. GER Lloyd
{Early greek Science: thales to Aristotle} says of them “they leave the
gods out.” Not anger of Zeus or Poseidon.
b. –for natural events. What is “water” the answer to? Eg: Why is the earth
stable? Hypothesis: maybe it doesn’t fall because it rests on something.
Or: What causes earthquakes? Hypothesis: the earth is rocked by wave
tremors in the water on which it floats.
c. A different KIND of explanation. Not a myth. Not a genealogy. An
analogical argument or explanation: just as a leaf is born up by the water
beneath it, so, perhaps, might the earth be born up on the water which
surrounds it. Models, and metaphysics.
Zeller: considers these people “a complete fusion of philosophy (what we might consider
speculation) and science” (what we might consider empirical research). Their subject
was physis—‘nature,’ everything that is. They ask: what is the basic stuff underlying all
things?

Anaximander (c. 610-545 BC). Another practical man. To him are attributed a sundial
a map of the world and a globe of the heavens. He did write, apparently, but his works
are lost…BUT! We do have one preserved sentence: and it’s a doozy…
“The beginning of [that which is] is the Boundless [apeiron; infinite]; from which
[that which is] arises and must return—of necessity, giving satisfaction and
reparation to each other.”
Barnes: “First to write a book “on nature.”
(1) apeiron is both a principle (arche) and an element (stoicheion) of things that E
(2) It’s not one of the [traditional] elements
(3) That out of which things come is that into which they dissolve
(4) –making reparation to each other in the ordinance of time (to put it poetically).
“In the progression from Thales to Anaximenes, the problem of change became
increasingly salient,” says Lloyd.
And you can see why! If everything is water, what’s THIS? Doesn’t look like
 water to me! So we look beyond the basic “stuff” to ask the next question:
how do we get from that to everything else?

Anaximenes (585- c 524 BC)

(1) basic stuff of the universe: AIR, itself also the source of life and movement
(2) the mechanism of change: condensation and rarefaction.
Air
fire
(stars)
wind
clouds
water
earth… The earth
formed first, and is sustained by air…

What makes these three people a “school”? All of the things we mentioned, really; they
were geographically related; Anaximenes is explicitly reported to have been a student of
Anaximander. Doctrinally, they were sort of related too. They were looking for one
basic stuff underlying everything. Some of our sources call them ‘materialists,’ but more
frequently they are termed ‘hylozoists’—a compound of the word hyle, ‘matter’, and
zoon, ‘life.’ The one stuff that they came up with—water, air, the amorphous whatever—
was itself the stuff AND the principle of change and motion.
Think about it this way: If you take as your primitive terms, (inert) matter and an
(active) principle—if you separate matter from life—then you have to get them back
together again somehow. This is really one of the perennial problems: consider mind and
body. By refusing to separate and contrast life and matter, our milesians saved
themselves a great deal of bother.

We’ve been talking about the Ionians/Milesians, a school from Asia Minor. Pythagoras
(571-497 BC), an extremely influential figure, is also on the asia minor side of Greece;
we know a bit about him because he was the founder of a quasi-religious cult that
remained popular for quite a while and accumulated a range of doctrines (although it’s
unclear how many of them were actually from the Mouth of the Master). The most
famous are his mathematical investigations and his remarks about beans.