Early Greek

Views on the
Human
Person
1. THE IONIAN TRADITION
• THALES, ANAXIMANDER, ANAXIMES, HERACLITUS
2. THE ITALIAN TRADITION
• PYTHAGORAS, PARMENIDES,
3. THE PLURALIST TRADITION
• EMPEDOCLES, DEMOCRITUS
IONIAN The first Philosophers

TRADTION
They were called “physicist” because they were
concerned with the physis or the nature of things

They were the the first men to put religious thoughts

out of their heads and wonder about what the world
was really made of

Identify reality with some sensible substance, that is

with some substance that we can see, touch, hear, and
smell.
Thales Thales of Miletus, (born c. 624–620 bce—died c. 548–
545 bce), philosopher renowned as one of the legendary
Seven Wise Men, or Sophoi, of antiquity. He is
remembered primarily for his cosmology based on
water as the essence of all matter, with Earth a flat
disk floating on a vast sea.
He concluded that material objects, including man ,
must be made of a primary substance and he thought
that the substance must be water
• Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in
Miletus, a city of Ionia. He belonged to the Milesian school and
Anaximander
learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales
and became the second master of that school where he counted
ANAXIMENES and, arguably, PYTHAGORAS amongst his
pupils. 
• Anaximander was the first astronomer to consider the Sun as
a huge mass, and consequently, to realize how far from Earth it
might be, and the first to present a system where the celestial
bodies turned at different distances. 
• He says that the first principle is neither water nor any other of
the things called elements, but some other nature which is
INDEFINITE ....
Anaximenes Of Miletus, (flourished c. 545 BC), Greek philosopher of nature and one of three thinkers
of Miletus traditionally considered to be the first philosophers in the Western world. Of the other two, Thales
held that water is the basic building block of all matter, whereas Anaximander chose to call the essential
substance “the indefinite.”
• Anaximenes substituted AER (“mist,” “vapour,” “air”) for his
predecessors’ choices.
• he believed in degrees of condensation of moisture that
corresponded to the densities of various types of matter. When
“most evenly distributed,” aer is the common, invisible air of
the atmosphere. By condensation it becomes visible, first as mist
or cloud, then as water, and finally as solid matter such as earth or
stones. If further rarefied, it turns to fire. Thus, hotness and
dryness typify rarity, whereas coldness and wetness are related to
denser matter.
• Anaximenes’ assumption that aer is everlastingly in motion suggests that he
thought it also possessed life. Because it was eternally alive, aer took on

Anaximenes qualities of the divine and became the cause of other gods as well as of all
matter. 
 • Heraclitus, (born c. 540 BCE, Ephesus, Anatolia [now Selçuk,
Turkey]—died c. 480), Greek philosopher remembered for
his cosmology, in which FIRE forms the basic material principle of
an orderly universe.
• Though he was primarily concerned with explanations of the world
around him, Heraclitus also stressed the need for people to live
together in social harmony. He complained that most people failed to
comprehend the LOGOS (GREEK: “REASON”), the universal

Heraclitus
CHANGE is not just a part of
life in Heraclitus' view, it is
life itself. All things, he
claimed, are brought into
and pass out of existence
through a clash of opposites
which continually create and
destroy.
principle through which all things are interrelated and all natural
events occur, and thus lived like dreamers with a false view of the
world. A significant manifestation of the logos, Heraclitus claimed, is
the underlying connection between opposites. For example, health and
disease define each other. Good and evil, hot and cold, and other
opposites are similarly related. 
ITALIAN
TRADITION
• Practical men fully involved in the
affairs of their cities
• Very dogmatic in approach
• They worked out in their heads
what they believed to be the truth
and then pronounced it so beyond
doubt?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 - 490 B.C.) was an early Greek Pre-Socratic
 philosopher and mathematician from the Greek island of Samos.
He was the founder of the influential philosophical and religious movement or
cult called Pythagoreanism, and he was probably the first man to actually call
himself a philosopher (or lover of wisdom).
As a mathematician, he is known as the "father of numbers" or as the
first pure Mathematician, and is best known for his Pythagorean Theorem on
the relation between the sides of a right triangle, the concept of square
numbers and square roots, and the discovery of the golden ratio.
• Pythagoras saw his religious and scientific views as inseparably interconnected.
He believed in the theory of METEMPSYCHOSIS or the TRANSMIGRATION
OF THE SOUL and its reincarnation again and again after death into the bodies
of humans, animals or vegetables until it became moral (a belief he may have
learned from his one-time teacher Pherecydes of Syros, who is usually credited
as the first Greek to teach the transmigration of souls). He was one of the first to
propose that the thought processes and the soul were located in the brain and not
the heart.
• Another of Pythagoras' central beliefs was that the essence of being (and the
stability of all things that create the universe) can be found in the form
of NUMBERS, and that it can be encountered through the study
of mathematics. For instance, he believed that things like health relied on
a stable proportion of elements, with too much or too little of one thing causing
an imbalance that makes a person unhealthy.
 Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 - 450 B.C.) was an early Pre-
Socratic Greek philosopher and founder and chief
representative of the ELEATIC School of ancient Greek
philosophy.
He is one of the most significant and influential (as well as the
most difficult and obscure) of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and
he is sometimes referred to as the FATHER OF METAPHYSICS. He
particularly influenced Plato (and, through him, the whole
of Western Philosophy), who always spoke of him with
veneration. Perhaps his greatest contribution to philosophy
was his method of reasoned proof for assertions.
• Parmenides' only known work, a poem written in hexameter verse around
475 B.C. and entitled  "ON NATURE" , has only survived in fragmentary form,
with approximately 150 of the original 3,000 lines of text remaining today . It is
divided into two main sections, describing the two ways or two views of
reality,  "The Way of Truth"  (which accounts for most of the surviving lines)
and "The Way of Appearance/Opinion" , along with an introduction.
Parmenides argued in favor of the Way of Truth and against The Way of
Appearance.
• In the poem, Parmenides argued that the every-day perception of the reality
of the physical world is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is  "THE
ONE", an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole. Likewise, the
phenomena of movement and change are simply appearances of the real
static, eternal reality. He further asserted that the truth cannot be known
through sensory perception, only through pure reason ("Logos").
 The Pluralist
• Identify reality with a plurality of
substance while that each of these ,
at least, is a being and thus one and
immutable

• Empedocles : was the first to posit the four traditional elements

as principle of all things: EARTH, AIR, FIRE, AND WATER
• Democritus : who advocated the first atomic theory, explaining
that everything arises mechanically out of a sort of coagulation
of an infinite number of irreducible atoms
 • He is perhaps best known as the ORIGINATOR OF THE COSMOGENIC
THEORY of the four classical elements of the ancient world: EARTH,
AIR, FIRE, and WATER, which became the standard dogma for much
of the next two thousand years. He is also credited with several  prescient
ideas in physics which have since proved quite prophetic.
• Empedocles was very familiar with the work of the Eleatic School and
the Pythagoreans, and particularly of Parmenides. Like Pythagoras,
Empedocles believed in the transmigration of the soul  (reincarnation
between humans, animals and even plants), and that all living

things were on the same spiritual plane, like links in a chain. He therefore urged a vegetarian lifestyle, believing
that the bodies of animals are the dwelling places of punished souls. He believed that wise people, who have learned
the secret of life, are next to the divine and that their souls, free from the cycle of reincarnations, are able to rest in
happiness for eternity.
• Democritus (c. 460 - 370 B.C.), sometimes known as
the "Laughing Philosopher", was a Pre-
Socratic Greek philosopher from Thrace in northern Greece.
Along with his teacher, Leucippus, he was the founder of the
Greek philosophical school of ATOMISM and developed
a Materialist account of the natural world.
• Although he was a contemporary of Socrates, he usually
considered Pre-Socratic in that his philosophy and his
approach were more similar to other Pre-Socratic thinkers than
to Socrates and Plato.
In the Atomist version, there are multiple unchanging
material principles which
constantly rearrange themselves in order to affect what we
see as changes. These principles are very small, indivisible
and indestructible building blocks known as atoms (from
the Greek "atomos", meaning "uncuttable").

All of reality and all the objects in the universe are composed of different arrangements of
these eternal atoms and an infinite void, in which they form different combinations and shapes.
There is no room in this theory for the concept of a God, and essentially Atomism is a type
of Materialism or Physicalism, as well as being atheistic and deterministic in its outlook.
However, Democritus did allow for the existence of the human soul, which he saw as composed
of a special kind of spherical atom, in constant motion, and he explained the senses in a
similar manner.