Lecture I.2: The PreSocratics (cont d)

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1 Lecture I.2: The PreSocratics (cont d) Housekeeping: We have sections! Lots of them! Consult your schedule and sign up for one of the discussion sections. They will be c people apiece, and start next week. You will be asked to write a lot for this class; your section leaders will work out the details with you, but expect to write at least 4 short papers, which will be critiqued and returned to you. The major requirement will be a final paper of words. I d like to call your attention to Book I of Aristotle s metaphysics (pp of my book) where in 9 chapters Aristotle gives his interpretation of the figures we have been reading this week. Quiz: Associate one of our authors with each of the words below: Atoms Mind (nous) Fire Being Water Air The 4 elements The unlimited number Outline: Go through our figures Pythagoras Xenophanes I: Heraclitus He s kind of hard to talk about; he s so full of quotable quotes that it is really tempting just to repeat what he says in the same way that he says it. Let s assume he has a unified view: it would look something like this: He offers a general account of the world, nature, what exists; a uniform whole, with an indwelling spiritual element (logos) [hylozoism of logos and fire?] He can do it by explaining what is the nature of things, everything Most men are ignorant of it, and are generally confused. a there is a law common to all things like, or identical with, divine law. It is an ordered world, and a rational one. b If he was a monist, like the people who preceded him (the other Ionians) it was FIRE. c He seems to have had an underlying THEORY OF FLUX not just that things change, but everything changes, and everything always changes, is always changing (in some respect). i. Not a theory of extreme flux, although a guy who was supposed to have such a theory of extreme flux, Cratylus, is described as a Heraclitean. He is supposed to have maintained

2 that everything was always changing in every respect. So nothing was one thing, in any identifiable or stable respect. As a consequence, you could say nothing truly about anything. He is supposed to have been reduced to silence, merely able to waggle his finger. d Our sources speak of a theory of the unity of opposites, as well. e There is a hidden harmony of nature, restoring harmony and balance from the contraries. Flux and opposition are features in the nature of everything essential to it, and explanatory of its properties. (falsifiable, but not by everyday observation ) Barnes on Heraclitus: All identifiable x have an identifiable constituent a stuff, or amalgam of stuffs. Eg,, rivers are made up of water; fields are made up of earth The powers and properties of identifiable x are determined by the stuff of which they are made. Boats are held up by water; fields are fertile because of earth Observation supports the hypothesis that these constituent stuffs are always changing in some respect or another and that these changes are essential to their being the kind of thing they are. If we consider the 4 elements, for instance, this seems to be observably true. Psychology/ethics/religion: Man s soul, animating principle, is fire (which returns to the world-soul upon death). No personal immortality. Use of reason better than, more reliable than, use of perception. Limits of human knowledge: Difference between true understanding (of the underlying nature), and opinion. Happiness in individuals and order in the state depended on obedience to that law which is common to all things, analogous to the divine law. Zeller calls Heraclitus a pantheist: the fundamental ideas of this pantheism are unity, eternal change, and the inviolability of the laws of the world order. II: Parmenides In terms of the schools, Parmenides is considered the second of the Eleatics (Italian coast), Xenophanes, whom we discussed briefly Tuesday, being the first. Whereas Heraclitus spoke in aphorisms and riddles, Parmenides, like Xenophanes, was a poet, and he utilizes a mythical tone and setting to present an extraordinarily hard logical argument about the nature of everything. Parmenides is born in a chariot to the gates of the path of night and day, guarded by justice; and there he is addressed by a goddess, who promises to reveal to him the truth about the nature of reality.

3 There are only two alternatives: being, and not-being. (Ordinary mortals assume that something can both exist and not-exist; but they are mistaken.) In order to be a possible object of inquiry, [something] must exist. IF it exists, 1--it cannot come into being or pass away. a. For it cannot come from nothing, because nothing doesn t exist. b. And when would it come into being, because there is no reason why it would come to be earlier rather than later. [=timeless] 2. Nor does it have any parts. It is indivisible, continuous and undivided a whole, complete in space and time. 3 it is motionless, unchangeable; there is no becoming 4 it is bounded, like a well-rounded sphere. It s not infinite in extension; the bounded bit probably suggests something like in balance, even. Thought is completely adequate to it: The same thing is for thinking and for being. One of the most provocative associations with this whole thing is the extent to which it calls attention to various uses of the verb to be. We will explore that at greater length in the weeks ahead. Was he misled by language? Or did he call attention to something about language that had not been sufficiently considered up to that point? The contrast between Heraclitus and Parmenides is about as sharp as any contrast can be. Extreme positions: everything is change, everything is static. Being v becoming as the ultimate nature of things. Both are calling attention to an underlying truth that ordinary mortals had not noticed calling their readers to a deeper different understanding, a new way of looking at the world. Melissus Zeno III The Pluralists The people who followed are termed pluralists. View them as trying to get the best parts of their predecessors; and reading the passages, you have probably been reminded of several elements in the people we ve already discussed. Cosmology: Empedocles hypothesized as the basic stuff from which all else was made the traditional 4 elements, water (T) air (Anaximenes) fire (Heraclitus) and added the fourth, earth. He agreed that they did not come into being or pass away; they were eternal and deathless; and they were the opposed principles of love and hate, through whose agency the things we think of as things animals and tables and mountains and such come into being and pass away. He is thought of by Zeller as being a kind of mystic; he seems to have had a rather dualistic world-view, with a material world put together (and then disassembled again) out of the 4 elements, through his two forces; but a spiritual world above it, with gods

4 and souls. The two realms constitute the universe. There are Orphic traces in his works, although I couldn t find many of the things Zeller describes in the fragments that are reproduced for us. The spiritual world is the best; when the spiritual elements are combined with the material, it constitutes a kind of punishment. Transmigration, and its associated vegetarianism. He seems to have thought of the world as going through cycles of unification and dissolution. founder of modern chemistry, and precursor of Darwin. Anaxagoras: Another pluralist reconciler Said to have brought Ionian thought to Athens, where he became very well known. As we will see when we read the Phaedo, Socrates claims to have bought his book. He was not a mystic, though, but considered pretty much a materialist. Like Empedocles, he did not think there could be a complete creation/destruction; so his basic components, his stuff, too, was eternal, uncreated, undestroyed. But instead of explaining change and the variety of experienced world by the combination of 4 elements, he thought that the basic stuff couldn t change quality, so he explained the presence of different things by a collection of seeds of that kind into that thing. So all things have seeds of everything in them but in different proportions. The organizing principle and explanation of change he called NOUS, mind or reason. But as Socrates will later complain, it too was primarily mechanical. Some contrasts: Monists / Pluralists 1 What is the basic stuff underlying all things? a. Is it one thing or more than one? b. If you hypothesize one a mono-cosmology, as we were saying about the Milesians where do the other components of reality come from? c. What about the process of change from the One to everything else? d. Logical problem of REGRESS. If the earth rests on water what does the water rest on? Like the hypothesis that earth rests on the back of an elephant. What does the elephant rest on? Well he stands on the back of a turtle. What does the turtle stand on? Well It s turtles all the way down 2 Our figures all hypothesize some mechanism for, explanation of, change (unless they deny it exists ) Being / Becoming / the puzzle of non-being

5 You have read some very difficult texts in this first week, and should congratulate yourselves.

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