XENOPHANES

Xenophanes taught instead that there was a single supreme divine being who, without moving,
controlled the universe through his intellect. Xenophanes had a gift for observation that not all Greek
intellectuals shared. He found seashells and fossilized sea-creatures in rocks and inferred that there was
once a time when the sea covered the land, and hence the earth must have been subject to periods of
flooding and drying out. He may even have written a treatise on the subject.

The Unity of Opposites.

Heraclitus' teachings were notoriously obscure, but he was identified in the ancient world with a
number of doctrines. One doctrine maintained that the world was in a state of continual flux; his saying,
"Everything flows," made the universe akin to a moving stream. He also believed in the unity of
opposites: things that seem to be opposites are actually aspects of the same thing. This unity is
demonstrated in the seeming opposites of "heat" and "cold" which are interdependent: "cold" is the
absence of "heat." Once the continual flux that never ceases in the world removes "heat," we have
"cold." "What is cool becomes warm and what is warm becomes cool," Heraclitus wrote. So the young
and the old are aspects of the same, and so are the living and the dead, for the one becomes the other.
One of Heraclitus' axioms reads, "The road up and the road down are the same"—meaning there is a
single road with two-way traffic. It is the tension between opposites that allows living things to exist, just
as the string of a lyre will sound the correct note when it is placed under the right degree of tension by
drawing it in opposite directions. This interaction of opposites, which Heraclitus identified as strife, is a
creative force, and this belief probably explains one strange assertion of his: "War is the father of all and
king of all." Everything is created and passes away through strife between opposing forces. The world is
a mass of conflicting tensions but, at the same time, these contrary forces are bound together by a strict
unity. The strife between them results in a sort of balance which Heraclitus identified as justice, and
justice maintains order—hence Heraclitus asserted that the sun would keep its allotted course in the
heavens, for otherwise the Furies, the agents of Justice, would punish it. The unity of opposites is the
central feature of the logos that Heraclitus proclaimed.

The Eternal Fire of Heraclitus.

Heraclitus of Ephesus was inspired by Xenophanes' idea of an everlasting unchanging "One," but like
many philosophers of his time did not think this "One" was a being or a person, but was instead a basic
material that was transformed in some way into other kinds of material. Thales of Miletus had
pinpointed water as that basic material and Anaximenes had thought it was air; Heraclitus chose fire.
Fire, he claimed, was an infinite mass which was eternal—no divine power created it—and it was
kindled and extinguished according to fixed measures. The kindling and quenching of fire maintained the
world order. Heraclitus came to this conclusion after observing how flames, flickering in constant
motion, transformed wood into ashes and smoke, and yet the fire maintained its own identity as fire.
Once it was quenched, it could be rekindled. Like fire, Heraclitus' universe was subject to constant
change. Everything was in constant motion. One famous saying of Heraclitus was that a person cannot
step twice into the same river, for new water is constantly being carried past him by the flow of the
stream, and hence the river is never entirely the same from one minute to the next. Yet, like fire, the
river itself continues to exist.

PARNAMEDIES: The Universe

There can be no movement, for if an object moves, then there must be some empty space into which it
can move, and there is no empty space. So the evidence of our eyes that tells us that things in the world
that we see do move must be an illusion. The messages that our senses send to our brain about the
nature of the world must be wrong. The alternative would be to believe that the underlying assumption
of all the philosophers from Thales to Heraclitus—that the world of the senses was made from some
basic matter such as water, air, or even the "boundless" of Anaximander—had to be wrong.

ZENO

Another famous paradox proposed by Zeno was that of Achilles, a legendary Greek hero, and the
Tortoise. Achilles and a tortoise run a race, and the tortoise has a head start. Achilles cannot overtake
the tortoise, for when he reaches the point where the tortoise started, it has already moved on to
further point, and when Achilles reaches that point, the tortoise has already moved further on, and so
on through an infinite series which has no end. There is no final term to this infinite series and so
Achilles can never pass through the final term. Yet here, Zeno's logic ultimately proved itself faulty, for it
is a fair question to ask why, if there is no final term, does Achilles need to pass through it? It cannot be
necessary for Achilles to pass through a non-existent final term to overtake the tortoise. Yet the
relentless logic of the Eleatic philosophers was hard to counter.

ANAXIMANDER

(c. 610 BCE–after 546 BCE)

Anaximander is the first Greek scientist and philosopher whose thought is known to us in any detail. He
was born in Miletus c. 610 BCE and died shortly after 546 BCE. He was thus in his twenties in 585 BCE,
the year of the famous solar eclipse that Thales is said to have predicted. According to the ancient
tradition, Anaximander was the "pupil and successor of Thales"; but in view of our ignorance of Thales'
real achievements, it is perhaps Anaximander who should be considered the founder of Greek
astronomy and natural philosophy.

Anaximander is thus the author of the first geometrical model of the universe, a model characterized
not by vagueness and mystery but by visual clarity and rational proportion, and hence radically different
in kind from all known "cosmologies" of earlier literature and myth. The highly rational character of the
scheme (despite its factual errors) is best indicated by Anaximander's explanation of Earth's stable
position in the center: It remains at rest because of its equal distance from all points of the celestial
circumference, having no reason to move in one direction rather than in another. This argument from
symmetry contrasts not only with all mythic views but also with the doctrine ascribed to Thales: that
Earth floats on water. Here Anaximander is clearly the precursor of the mathematical approach to
astronomy developed later by the Pythagoreans, Eudoxus, and Aristarchus.

Pre Socratic Philosophy.

The term Presocratic philosopher is used to describe several thinkers who lived in the late seventh
through fifth centuries. They shared an interest in trying to explain natural phenomena, though many
were also concerned with the nature of the gods, healing, politics, and ethics. The earliest of the
Presocratics, including Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, lived in Ionia, and are
sometimes referred to as “Ionian nature philosophers.” Two philosophers, Xenophanes and Pythagoras,
migrated from Ionia to Italy; these and other philosophers living in Greek colonies in Italy (therefore
referred to as an “Italian” school) include Empedocles, Zeno, and Parmenides of Elea. Melissus, though
he lived in Samos (native island of Pythagoras), because of his philosophical affiliations with Parmenides
and Zeno, is usually grouped with the “Eleatics.” Knowledge of these philosophers is rather uncertain
and only fragments of most of their work remain, often filtered through a somewhat unreliable
doxographical tradition.

Characteristics . There are several striking characteristics shared by many of the Presocratics. The most
radical is that it they no longer accepted the world as self-explanatory, but rather sought explanations of
the diverse phenomena of ordinary experience in terms of simple underlying causes. Their explanations
were often mechanistic, though they could include some sort of divine or rational forces as principles
governing the material world. Several Presocratics attempted to achieve unified understandings of the
physical, divine, and human worlds. The recent discovery and editing of a partial papyrus text of
Empedocles’ poem, Purifications (fifth century b.c.e.), which almost doubles the number of surviving
lines of Empedocles known to modern scholars, demonstrates that even though the Presocratics lived
over two thousand years ago, new evidence can radically change perceptions of these distant figures.f
these distant figures.

Anaxagoras . The son of Hegesibulus of Clazomenae (an Ionian island), Anaxagoras moved to Athens in
480, where he became part of the intellectual and artistic circle surrounding the famous statesman
Pericles. He lived in Athens for approximately thirty years, until he was charged with impiety and
support of Persia. With the help of Pericles he escaped to Lampsacus, where he founded a school. He
wrote a single philosophical work, of which few fragments are extant; ancient accounts of his work are
contradictory and unclear. He thought that the physical world was composed of spermata (seeds) having
fixed qualities. These seeds are infinitely divisible, with each piece containing the qualities of the parent
seed. The cosmos began as a mixture of all types of organic and inorganic seeds (blood, bone, gold, or
other matter). Nous (Mind) alone is separate and unmixed. Nous set the primordial mixture rotating,
which separated the types of seed, with the dense, moist, cold, and dark ones tending toward the center
and the rarified, dry, hot, and bright ones moving towards the circumference. The sun, stars, and planets
are glowing rocks that revolve around a flat earth. He believed eclipses are caused by the moon’s
passing between the sun and the earth.
FRAGMENTS OF THE PRESOCRATICS

Heraclitus OF EPHESUS (flourished circa 500 b.c.e.):

Those who step into the same river have different waters flowing ever upon them.If it were not in honor
of Dionysus that they conducted the procession and sang the hymn to the male organ [the phallic
hymn], their activity would be completely shameless. But Hades is the same as Dionysus, in whose
honor they rave and perform the Bacchic revels.

This ordered universe [cosmos], which is the same for all, was not created by any one of the gods or of
mankind, but it was ever and is and shall be ever-living Fire, kindled in measure and quenched in
measure.

The changes of fire: first sea; and of sea, half is earth and half fiery water-spout.. . . Earth is liquified into
sea, and retains its measure according to the same Law as existed before it became earth.

To souls, it is death to become water; to water, it is death to become earth. From earth comes water,
and from water, soul.

Much learning does not teach one to have intelligence; for it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras,
and again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.

Sea water is the purest and most polluted: for fish, it is drinkable and life-giving; for men, not drinkable
and destructive.

Immortals are mortal, mortals are immortal; [each] lives the death of the other, and dies their life.

Democritus . Born sometime around 470, Democritus was known as the “laughing philosopher” because
his ethics emphasized cheerfulness. He is associated with the older thinkers, Protagoras and Leucippus,
in the ancient biographies, but the details ancient authors give are contradictory. According to Diogenes
Laertius, he wrote many books on such varied topics as ethics, physics, mathematics, music (including
philology and literary criticism), and various notes, handbooks, and miscellaneous works. Only a few
fragments of his works remain. Both Leucippus and Democritus (whose theories are often confused with
each other in ancient accounts) believed that the world consisted of atoms and the void. Atoms were
invisibly small, indivisible, undifferentiated matter, differing from each other only in size and shape. The
variety observed in the phenomenal world is due to differences in the way atoms are combined with
one another (dense or sparse, various shapes) to form larger objects. Atoms themselves do not change,
but they do move and suffer random collisions, giving rise to changing phenomena. This world is one of
many, and both the natural world and all life evolved gradually from random atoms to more complex
structures. The soul is made of small round atoms and perishes with the body. Sensation is the reaction
of the soul to eidôla, fine particles emanating from all objects and striking sense organs. Democritus
recommended that happiness consists of an untroubled soul, the atoms of which are protected from
sudden shocks and changes; thus, well-being is a product of moderation, good judgement, and cheerful
acceptance of external circumstances. His beliefs strongly influenced Epicurean philosophy.
LEUCIPPUS

Leucippus . Little is known of the life of Leucippus (died late fifth century b.c.e.), the teacher of
Democritus and the originator of atomic theory. His philosophies are so blended with those of
Democritus that it is difficult to distinguish what doctrinal differences, if any, they might have had.

PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

"Pre-Socratic" is the term commonly used (and the one that will be used here) to cover those Greek
thinkers from approximately 600 to 400 BCE who attempted to find universal principles that would
explain the whole of nature, from the origin and ultimate constituents of the universe to the place of
man within it. Yet 400 was the last year of Socrates' life, and among the Sophists, who are also excluded,
Protagoras and Gorgias were older than he and others were his contemporaries. "Pre-Socratic"
therefore indicates not so much a chronological limit as an outlook and a range of interests. This outlook
Protagoras and Socrates deliberately attacked, condemning natural philosophy as worthless compared
with the search for a good life, the discussion of social and political questions, and individual morality.
Socrates also dismissed its explanations as inadequate because expressed predominantly in terms of
origins and internal mechanisms. In his view explanation should be functional, looking to the end rather
than the beginning.

The Milesian School

Pre-Socratic philosophy differs from all other philosophy in that it had no predecessors. Philosophy has
been a continuous debate, and even highly original thinkers can be seen developing from or reacting
against the thought of a predecessor. Aristotle is unimaginable without Plato; Isaac Newton, without
René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and many others. But with the Greeks of the sixth
century the debate begins. Before them no European had set out to satisfy his curiosity about the world
in the faith that its apparent chaos concealed a permanent and intelligible order, and that this natural
order could be accounted for by universal causes operating within nature itself and discoverable by
human reason. They had predecessors of a sort, of course. It was not accidental that the first pre-
Socratics were citizens of Miletus, a prosperous trading center of Ionian Greeks on the Asiatic coast,
where Greek and Oriental cultures met and mingled. The Milesian heritage included the myths and
religious beliefs of their own peoples and their Eastern neighbors and also the store of Egyptian and
Babylonian knowledge—astronomical, mathematical, technological. The influence of this heritage was
considerable

THALES

It is not surprising, therefore, that the first people to seek a universal explanation of the world along
rational lines assumed that it was in substance a unity from which its variety had been produced by
some process of segregation. The key, they thought, lay in identifying the single substance that must
satisfy the condition of being able to produce variety out of itself. Thales (active in 585 BCE), who chose
water or moisture, may still have had the myths at the back of his mind. For him the earth floated on
water as it did for the Egyptians. Little else certain is known of him, and we can only guess at his reasons.
Water can be seen as solid, liquid, and vaporous. Aristotle thought it more probable that Thales was
influenced by the essential connection of moisture with life, as seen in such substances as semen, blood,
and sap. With the removal of external personal agents, the world must initiate its own changes, and at
this early stage of speculation the only possibility seemed to be that life of some kind is everywhere and
that the universe is a growing, organic structure. This may be the explanation of the saying attributed to
Thales: "Everything is full of gods

ANAXIMENES

reflection led Anaximenes, the youngest member of the Milesian school, to a different conclusion about
the primary substance: It was air. In its elusiveness and invisibility as atmospheric air, it could almost
match the apeiron, and, whereas apeiron, once differentiated into a universe, could no longer be so
called, air could become hotter and colder, rarer and denser, and still remain the same substance.
Moreover, this theory allowed Anaximenes to break with the notion of separation, which was, at
bottom, mythical, and account for the universe by the extension of a known natural process. This was
condensation and rarefaction, the former of which he associated with cold and the latter with heat. Air
as it rarefies becomes fire; condensed, it turns first to wind, then to cloud, water, earth, and stones. In
other words, it is all a question of how much of it there is in a given space, and for the first time the idea
enters science that qualitative differences are reducible to differences of quantity. This is Anaximenes'
main achievement, although there is no evidence that he applied the principle with any mathematical
exactness.

With air as his basic, self-changing substance, Anaximenes could find room for the ancient belief that life
was identical with breath. Macrocosm and microcosm were animated by the same principle: "Just as our
soul, which is air, integrates us, so breath and air surround the whole cosmos."

The Pythagoreans

Pythagoras (c. 570–490 BCE) was also an eastern Greek but migrated from his native Samos to Croton in
southern Italy. As a result the western or Italian Greek philosophers, even when not actual members of
his school, became known for a characteristic outlook very different from that of the materialistic and
purely rational Milesians and stamped with the impress of his remarkable genius. He founded a
brotherhood dedicated to philosophia (the word was believed to be his invention) as a way of life, with a
strong religious, and also a political, element. Philosophically, his importance lies in the shift of interest
from matter to form. Inspired, it is said, by the discovery that the musical intervals known to the Greeks
as consonant (and marked by four fixed strings on the seven-stringed lyre) were explicable in terms of
ratios of the numbers 1 through 4, Pythagoras saw the universe as one glorious harmonia, or
mathematico-musical structure. Number was the key to nature. This idea had incalculable consequences
for science even if it led at the time to some rather fanciful equations of natural objects and moral
qualities with particular numbers. In spite of that, by the time of Socrates the school had made real
progress in mathematics. Since the cosmic harmony included everything, all life was akin. The soul was
immortal and underwent a series of incarnations, both human and animal. Philosophy was the effort to
understand the structure of the cosmic harmony, with the ultimate aim of integrating the philosophic
soul more closely into that harmony on the principle that knowledge assimilates the knower to its
object. This aim also demanded the observance of certain religious precepts of which the most
important was abstention from animal food.