ROBIN WATERFIELD'S 'THE FIRST PHILOSOPHERS: THE PRESOCRATICS AND THE SOPHISTS'

Started: 13/02/22
Completed: 20/02/22

- The Presocratics were philosophers and scientists who lived and worked in
various cities throughout the ancient Greek world, from southern Italy and Sicily
to the coast of the Black Sea, from the beginning of the sixth century BCE to the
time of Socrates in the late fifth century. Their works remain only in fragments.
They were among the first prose writers in the West, helping to develop the genre,
there were some however who kept to the traditional didactic medium of verse.
- The Sophists were itinerant (travelling from place to place) teachers and
writers, dating chiefly from the fifth century BCE. They achieved most recognition
in Athens. They offered effectively what was the first higher education in the
West.

Introduction
- The Greek word "logos" covers a wide range of meanings. It can mean
"account," in the sense of "story," or "amount" or "value," in the sense of "He is
of no account"; it can mean "word" or "speech" or "argument"; it can mean
"proportion," "principle," or "formula"; it can mean "reason," both in the sense of
the human rational faculty and in the sense of "explanation." The poet Friedrich
von Schiller laments that at some point "mythos" (that which was emotional or
intuitive) was replaced by "logos."
- In popular histories we hear of a revolution that took place in
Greece in sixth century BCE, the thinkers associated with the revolution are known
today as the "Presocratics" because they preceded Socrates, although the last of
them were his contemporaries.
- The Presocratics all lived between 600 and 400 BCE; Socrates lived
between 469 to 399 BCE.
- Doxographers are those writers who summarised and discussed the views
of earlier thinkers.
- The author of this introduction does not seem to like Plato or
Aristotle very much.

Select Bibliography
- Check for further recommendations.

Timeline
- Useful timeline is provided.

The Presocratics

The Milesians (Thales of Miletus, Anaximander of Miletus, Anaximenes of

Miletus)
- It would be a distortion to suggest that Thales, Anaximander, and
Anaximenes formed a school, or formed master-pupil relationships.
- The Milesian philosophers belong together (at the very least
Anaximander and Anaximenes) because they display a reductionist spirit - the desire
to make the world comprehensible by limiting the number and nature of the factors
used to explain phenomena - and by introducing the idea of cosmic order or natural
law.
- They claim the world arose out of an undifferentiated matter, which
itself had the properties of life and growth.
- Thales was regarding as a practical man although there is evidence
that he came up with a more theoretical set of ideas, some reference to water.
- Anaximander claimed the origin of the world has its source in the
boundless ("apeiron," literally "without limits").
 - The opposites emerge from the boundless (apeiron) so the boundless is
considered as qualitatively indefinite.
- The principle of cosmic equilibrium is suggested in a number of
Anaximander fragments / testamonia.
- Anaximenes theory was that the universe was the macrocosm to the
humans microcosm. This account parallels that of Anaximanders where he suggests
that human beings and the universe gestated at the same time: both enclosed in a
casing before emerging.

Thales
- Eudemus reports that Thales was the first to discover the
eclipse of the sun and the fact that the period of its solstices were not always
equal.
- Thales was a skilled mathematician.
- There is a story about Thales that he was looking up at the sky
and fell into a pot-hole, a Thracian serving-girl teased him for being considered
with what was up in the sky and not at what was right in front of him at his feet.
- For Thales the first principle of all things was water.

Anaximander
- Anaximander was claimed to be the first to discover the gnomon,
but this seems to not be true, as the Babylonians also had gnomon (A gnomon is the
part of a sundial that casts a shadow).
- Anaximander was the first to attempt to draw a world map.
- Herodotus conformed to the spirit of the Ionians in that he
undertook historia ("research" or "investigation"), it is because Herodotus called
his work "Investigations" that the word "history" in English means what it does.
- For Anaximander the first principle was the boundless.

Anaximenes
- Anaximenes shares the view of Anaximander that the underlying
nature of things is single and infinite; however, he claims the underlying nature
is not boundless, but specific, since he says that it is air, and thanks to
rarefaction and condensation that it manifests into different forms in different
things.

Xenophanes of Colophon
- Xenophanes was a poet who wandered the Greek world after leaving his
native Ionia after the Median invasion of 546 BCE. The idea that he was either a
Pythagorean or the founder of Eleatic monism is mistaken.
- He is best known as the first critical theologian. He critiqued the
Homeric religion, his own god was motionless, as to attribute motion to his god
would be blasphemy. This god has a body but is not anthropromorphic.
- Xenophanes is referenced in Plato's Sophist.
- Plato and Xenophanes agreed that it was wrong to portray the gods as
adulterers, theives, etc.

Heraclitus of Ephesus
- Heraclitus says the "logos" is something that one can hear, but
claims this is not his own account, it predates both his and everyone elses account
of it, it speaks through him and is also responsible for events on earth. This
"principle" is spoken eternally by the universe, for those with ears to hear.
- Heraclitus calls our normal waking state "sleep."
- According to the truth of the logos, all is one and there is
proportion and harmony throughout the world. The truth of all things is common /
universal.
- "I searched for myself," and found the logos, he suggests we can all
do the same.
- Heraclitus was skeptical of the senses reliability.
 - Plato often opposed Heraclitus' teaching on flux to Parmenides'
unitarian doctrine, although it seems to be the case that Heraclitus had a higher
level doctrine concerned with the underlying unity and stability of things.
- Heraclitus is said to be a monist.
- The logos governs things.
- Our soul is fiery according to Heraclitus.
- His divinised logos is like the Intelligence or "nous" of later Greek
philosophy.
- Heraclitus was the man who said that you can never step into the same
river twice.

Parmenides of Elea
- Parmenides was the first Presocratic philosopher of whose work we
have substantial fragments.
- Parmenides was concerned with what "is." "Is" could be meant as in
exists, or that it really is the case, or that it is something - that we can
predicate things of it.
- Parmenides denies that anything can come into existence from
something that does not exist. This appears to confuse the possibility of
something's coming to exist where it did not exist before - something turning pale
instead of dark - with the production of something by nothing (which is certainly
impossible).
- Parmenides deduces "what-is must be" from "what-is can be"; to him
the two propositions are more or less identical, since there could not possibly be
anything other than what can be.
- Plato and Aristotle understood Parmenides as a numerical monist. Curd
argues that this is not the case.
- Parmenides rejects the idea that creation takes place from what-is-
not, he also eliminates the only other possibility that creation takes place from
what-is.
- Parmenides recognised that the moon got its light from the sun.

Zeno of Elea
- Proclus in his commentary on Plato's "Parmenides" writes that Zeno
originally had forty arguments in his treatise, all with the purpose to defend
Paremenides' thesis that all is one.
- Four of Zeno's arguments are titled the Dichotomy, the Achilles, the
Arrow, and the Stadium (or the Moving Rows); they are criticised by Aristotle in
his Physics.
- The Dichotomy states that in order to comple any process of motion,
the moving object first has to cross half of the space on the way to its goal; it
then has to cross half the remaining space, and then again half the remaining
space, and so on, ad infinitum.
- The Achilles is probably the most famous of Zeno's paradoxes, it
relies on the same fallacy as the Dichotomy, and involves Achilles racing a
tortoise.
- The Arrow argues that an arrow cannot move, because at any given
moment it is at rest.
- The Stadium paradox requires a diagram which is provided p. 71.
- Aristotle describes Zeno as the founder of dialectic.
- Aristotle describes Empedocles as the discoverer of rhetoric.

Milessus of Samos
- Milessus was a conviced Eleatic (accepted Parmenidean monism), the
author of this work believes the lift Milessus lived demonstrates that Parmenidean
monism was epistemological - a state of mind, rather than an ontological statement
about the world.
- From the premise that something exists Milessus deduces that this
existest thing is not liable to generation and destruction, is of unlimited
magnitude, eternal, single, homogeneous, unchanging, and motionless.
- Melissus reached substantially the same position as Parmenides, but
by a somewhat different route.
- Simplicius preserved all the fragments of Milessus, some scholars
believe Simplicius made a mistake in saying that Melissus attributes
"incorporeality" to "what-is."
- Anything that is not complete cannot always exist.

Pythagoras and Fifth-Century Pythagoreanism (Pythagoras of Samos, Philolaus

of Croton, Petron of Himera, Eurytus of Croton)
- There are no extant fragments of Pythagoras himself. He probably
wrote nothing.
- Later generations attributed all kinds of ideas and mathematical
theorems to Pythagoras, with no regard for historical truth.
- Many of Plato's ideas are Pythagorean in inspiration.
- Pythagoras became well known as a sage (someone who has attained
wisdom), he lived around the end of the sixth century.
- The doctrine of metempsychosis (the supposed transmigration at death
of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body of the same or a different
species) or transmigration of souls was not original to Pythagoras (as is sometimes
thought); in Greece, the idea first occurs in Pherecydes of Syros, who is sometimes
called the teacher of Pythagoras.
- Pythagoras was likely a teacher of perennial wisom, rather than a
Presocratic philosopher of the Milesean mould.
- Plato had "unwritten doctrines."
- The essence of Pythagorean arithmology is expressed in the centrality
of the tetraktys to their system. The tetrakyts is the decad considered as the sum
of the first four numbers, and is usually portrayed as a triangular number. See p.
89.
- Aristotle tells us that the Pythagoreans saw number as somehow the
principle of all things.
- Mathematics was considered esoteric.
- Pythagorean cosmogony show the opposites, limited and unlimited, are
primary. The imposition of limit on the unlimited creates the universe, the One,
which is both even and odd simultaneously. The other numbers, which are somehow
identical to things, proceed from the One.
- Even numbers are feminine and odd numbers are masculine.
- It is more likely that Philolaus said that the soul was a numerical
ratio rather than a blending of opposites that Plato ascribes to him in Phaedo.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
- Anaxagoras was a close friend of the great statesman Pericles. In
Anaxagoras' cosmogonic book, his theses were that all things, including humans, are
aggregates of the stuffs that were present in an original mixture, so that all
physical change is no more than a manifestation of what was previously latent; and
that there is no reason to not think that more worlds than out own might have been
separated out of the original mixture.
- It is possibly the case that by "seed" Anaxagoras was suggesting that
the original mixture contained all things in potential.
- For Aristotle, homoeomerous substances are substances that are the
same throughout, so they can be indefinitely divided and remain the same substance,
his primary examples of this are flesh, bone, wood and metal, and the four
elements.
- Anaxagoras generated plurality out of plurality. He also adopts a
strong form of Eleaticism, maintaining not only that what-is cannot not be, but
also that what-is cannot come from what-is-not so what-is must already have
existed.
- The principle from which things come to be is called "mind."
 Empedocles of Acragas
- More of Empedocles' work survives than any other Presocratic.
- It is debated whether his extant work was a single poem split into
two sections of two separate poems; the two separate poems are given the names "On
Nature," which contained all doctrinal material, wilst "Purifications" contained no
more than oracles and means of ritual purification.
- Aristotle referred to Empedocles the most in his work out of all the
Presocratics.
- Empedocles was the first to come up with the theory of the four
elements - earth, water, fire, and air. In his physics, Empedocles was a pluralist.
- Empedocles saw the whole universe as subject to an endlessly
repeating cosmic cycle, like a vast comsic inbreath and outbreath.

The Atomists (Leucippus of Abdera, Democritus of Abdera)

- Leucippus and Democritus are known as the "early" atomists to
distinguish them from their famous successors, Epicurus and his school, who
developed their teaching.
- We know very little about Leucippus.
- The basic premisses of the atomic system is that all that exists is
atoms and void, that both of these had always existed, that atoms are in constant
motion through the void, and that all things are made up of atoms and void. "Void"
may mean "empty space," other thinkers suggest that both "void" and "what-is-not"
refer to "negative-substance."
- The atomists argued that things were not indefinitely divisible.
- "Atoms" or "atoma" mean "indivisibles."
- For the sense in which the word "mechanistic" applies to ancient
atomism, see Furley [17], ch. 2.
- Democritus regarded the soul and gods as atomic compounds.

Diogenes of Apollonia
- Diogenes was a monist and sought to reinstance monism over pluralism.
He borrowed from Anaxagoras and Leucippus (although the Leucippus inspiration is
hard to see), and also from Heraclitus and Anaximenes. He believe everything shared
the same "underlying stuff," which in his case he considered to be air.
- The heart was the traditional Greek seat of perception.
- Diogenes is the last of the Presocratics.
- Diogenes was a thinker of the late fifth century, emphasising the
individual over the cosmos, and the physical over the metaphysical.

The Sophists

Protagoras of Abdera
- Protagoras was the first and greatest of the sophists.
- He was the founder of the Sophistic movement. He was part of the
intellectual circle surrounding the great Athenian statesman Pericles.
- Protagoras was known for his "man is the measure of all things"
doctrine.
- The Sophists often claimed to teach virtue, or the ability to be good
at some particular branch or branches of expertise.
- Protagoras asserted a strong relativism.
- If impressions are subjective and their truth cannot be denied by
another person, then all impressions are equally true, the law of non-contradiction
fails, and Protagoras' famous denial of the possibility of falsehood follows.
- Protagoras believed there was no such thing as external reality, only
our internal, subjective impressions.
- "Nomos" means "law or convention" whilst "physis" means "nature."

Gorgias of Leontini
- Gorgias was a rhetorician, a teacher of rhetoric and composer-speaker
of model speeches.
- He was a relativist about virtue.
- Gorgias claimed to prove that nothing has being, and that even if it
did have being it could not be comprehended, and even if it could be comprehended
it could not be communicated.
- Gorgias claims that we can have only beliefs about reality, not
knowledge.

Prodicus of Ceos
- Not much is known about Prodicus. He shares some essential features
of Sophists, he was a paid educator who worked in Athens and no doubt other places,
and he focused on logos, the spoken word.
- Prodicus attempted to establish the correct meaning of words, which
may be seen as a first attempt to develop a Greek dictionary, this impressed both
Plato and Aristotle.
- Prodicus denied the possibility of contradiction.

Hippias of Elis
- Hippias was famous as a polymath, who claimed to be able to answer
any question on any topic.
- Hippias effectively started the doxographic tradition which was
continued by Aristotle.
- A natural law is descriptive - it states what is simply and
unalterably the case - while a man-made law is prescriptive, since it states what
should be the case.
- Hippias advocates nature (physis) over convention (nomos).

Antiphon the Sophist

- It is wondered whether Antiphon the Sophist and Antiphon of Rhamnus
were the same person.
- Antiphon critiqued man-made laws, telling men to follow the laws of
nature and when possible to trangress man-made laws.
- Self-preservation is the ultimate natural law.

Thrasymachus of Chalcedon
- Thrasymachus was both an orator and philosopher, his lasting fame has
come about due to his memorable place in the first book of Plato's Republic.
- Thrasymachus likely believed that justice was the promotion of
someone else's good.

Euthydemus and Dionysodorus of Chios

- The word "sophism" has come to mean that which has the appearance of
a valid argument, but is invalid. Aristotle was more concerned with the Sophists
bad argumentation whislt Plato was more concerned with their misplaced ethics.
- In Plato's Euthydemus the sophist brothers intentionally exploit bad
arguments to confound their opponents.

Double Arguments
- This anonymous treatise was perhaps written in southern Italy in 400
BCE.
- An alternative title for this work would be "constrasting arguments."
- Interesting passage on the different things different states find
acceptable and unacceptable (p. 290).

Anonymous and Miscellaneous Texts

- Callicles was a historical figure towards the end of the fifth
century whom we know little about; he claims that the peruit of one's own interest
and advantage is natural justice.
- Critias was a famous oligarchic politician and associate of Socrates
from the end of the fifth century.
- The Anonymus Iamblichi is a stretch of prose from the end of the
fifth century embedded in the Exhortation of Philosophy of the late Platonic
philosopher, Iamblichus.