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| By 600 BC, the Greeks had made important technical progress, especially in architecture; Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems presented accounts of the structure and history of the kosmos |
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| Miletus was at the crossroads between the diverse cultures of the East and the Greek city-states. Thales, the originator of Greek science and philosophy, lived in the port of Miletus, Heraclitus traveled a short distance south to Miletus |
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| Heraclitus of Ephesus. In ancient times Ephesus was a Greek-speaking city-state (polis), i.e. a small independent country with a capital city and an agricultural territory around it. |
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| the Greeks, led by Athens, won over the Persian Empire in 490 and 480-79. As a result of those wars, the Athenians had established an Aegean empire, and Athens rapidly became the economic, political and cultural center of the Greek world. (Compare the U.S.A. after WWII.) During the half-century from 480 to 430 B.C., the Athenians developed democracy; created tragic and comic theater; and constructed, under the leadership of Pericles (495-428), a monumental crown to her imperial democracy on the Acropolis, replete with a Temple of Athena called the Parthenon. |
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By 494, when Pythagoras died, Croton was the center of a flourishing spiritual movement at once scientific, philosophical, religious, and political. “In Croton, a communal form of life arose of men and women bound together by the strict rules of the Pythagorean existence. Whoever entered such a group had to renounce private possessions; he underwent a five year period of silence; if he turned apostate, he was treated as dead, and a gravestone was erected for him.”
In Croton, the first utopian community in human history, the idea was born of a commune-state which nurtured the mind and the spirit, in which politics was an art of shaping souls through moral discipline and education. Democrats since ancient times have criticized this ideal, arguing that such a society is tyrannical, shaping human life according to one idea of goodness and virtue, when in fact there are many valid ways to live. In fact, the Pythagorean government of Croton apparently was overthrown by a revolution of the common people, who rejected and resented their puritanical laws. |
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| manifest in the sky and lightning, and also in justice and law |
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| marriage and feminine wisdom |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
Nature |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
Science |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
Algebra |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
the (immortal) soul |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
logic |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
anthropomorphism |
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| Xenophanes (580-530 BC) - human beings typically imagine their gods to be in human form, and that this is simply a projection of themselves. |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
trinity |
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Which of these ideas did the Presocratics discover or invent?
Platonic Ideas |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Democritus |
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| holds that the substances are so small they escape our senses. They have all kinds of forms and shapes and differences in size. Democritus identifies science with reason, and contrasts the reality of nature (physis) revealed by atomistic science to the illusory world of human experience and convention (nomos): “By convention (nomos), sweet; by convention, bitter; by convention, hot; by convention, color; in reality (physis), atoms and the void.” (#26.) The real world is the world of universal, necessary laws of causality discovered by reason and science, not its manifest image as revealed by the senses: “There are two kinds of judgment, one legitimate, one bastard. The following are bastard: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.” (#22.) It would seem that scientific reason somehow conceives of the real world of the atoms, which explain the manifest world known through the senses, which in themselves however provide a false picture of reality. |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Thales |
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| hydor, i.e. “flowing liquid matter” |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Anaximander |
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| apeiron for “the indefinite” |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Anaximenes |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Heraclitus |
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| “All things flow” (Panta rhei). They taught a doctrine of radical flux: that everything—matter, individual entities, social and natural laws, concepts and language—was undergoing change. |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Pythagoras |
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| The Pythagorean model of reality begins at the top, and looks vertically downward as follows |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Parmenides |
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| emphasized permanence or ‘being’ rather than change. Parmenides seems to have been a metaphysical monist, i.e. to have believed there is one reality, though he does not define ‘being’ (‘beingness’) nor say what counts as a ‘being.’ (Later Eleatics would identify ‘being’ with Universe, God, Soul, Atoms, even Truth.) Parmenides, like the Hindu mystics, seems to think that ‘ultimate reality’ alone is real, the world of ‘appearances’ an illusion, samsara. This contrast between appearance and reality is a core idea of metaphysics. |
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What was the basic idea(s) of ‘being’ or reality associated with each of these philosophers (e.g. being is “water” etc.)
Anaxagoras |
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| reality is heterogeneous—neither simply physical (as envisioned by the Milesians), nor simply ‘spiritual’ (as might be attributed to Pythagoreans). the world of nature itself points toward a divine intelligence, guiding and ruling over it. |
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