The Pre-Socratics (6th-4th century BCE)
This is the first time in history that we see philosophers starting to ask really interesting questions about the world around them. The pre-Socratic philosophers come before Socrates and they generally lived around 600BCE. They were very important to the development of philosophy as a subject, but unfortunately their writings weren’t documented or disseminated very well after their deaths, so it’s difficult for us to know exactly what they thought about things. This is because their work was handed down orally through generations of students who took notes on what teachers said in classrooms. We have only fragmentary texts from them, which made it hard for me to write about these early Greeks! Anyway, here are some quick hits on each pre-Socratic philosopher:
Pythagoras (580 – 500 BCE): Pythagoras was born on an island called Samos off the coast of modern Turkey. I want to find a really good philosophy blog that talks about the similarities between Pythagoreanism and Taoism. If you know of one, please let me know in the comments! Anyway, Pythagoras was a mathematician and musician who developed a school of thought that revolved around numbers. He believed that everything in the world could be understood through mathematics.
Parmenides (5th century BCE): Parmenides came from Elea in southern Italy and he believed that everything is made up of one unchanging substance called ‘Being’. He wrote a poem called ‘On Nature’ which described a journey he took through reality, discovering things along the way. In this poem, he showed how his philosophy could be used to understand our everyday experiences. I wish I read more from him when I was taking metaphysics…I might have done better on my exam!
Zeno (490 – 430 BCE): Zeno lived in Elea with Parmenides but they had very different ideas about what kinds of things exist in reality. Zeno used paradoxes to show that change is not possible. One of the most famous of these paradoxes is called ‘The Dichotomy’ which shows that an arrow cannot move because it must first reach the halfway point before it can reach its destination.
Heraclitus (535 – 475 BCE): Heraclitus was one of the more interesting pre-Socratic philosophers. He thought that everything changes constantly and he said, “Everything flows”, which became a metaphor for his philosophy. His theories were very poetic and metaphorical but they were difficult to understand by later philosophers who tried to interpret them.
Anaxagoras (500 – 428 BCE): Anaxagoras was from Clazomenae, an Ionian city in Asia Minor, now Turkey. He was a philosopher who wrote books about cosmology and natural philosophy although few fragments survive today from his works. Although we don’t know much about him personally, we know he had a lot of influence on other thinkers like Socrates and Plato who came after him because he made many contributions to science and mathematics! Another cool thing about Anaxagoras is that he used this idea called ‘Nous’, or Mind or Intelligence, as the first principle of reality instead of Parmenides’ concept of Being as developed earlier by Parmenides.
The Sophists (5th century BCE): This is where philosophy starts to get…a little trickier to write about. This movement within ancient Greek thought is called ‘Sophism’ because the name of the school was called The School of Sophists. These philosophers were often itinerant teachers who travelled around ancient Greece speaking about ethics, politics, and rhetoric. They were very controversial because they taught students how to argue both sides of any case in order to make more money as legal advocates or political advisers. They believed that anything can be rationalized if you put your mind to it, but their beliefs led them into arguments with other philosophers like Socrates who didn’t think this was a good idea (he said that people should stick with what they know). I wish I had heard about these guys earlier!
The Presocratics are interesting for me because they developed ideas that became central themes in later philosophy like nature vs nurture and whether reality is made up of ‘Being’ or ‘Becoming’. Being vs Becoming sounds so simple but it’s also super deep when you think about what these words mean philosophically…which brings me nicely onto my next topic.
Early Greek Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics lead us nicely into early Greek philosophy which emerged after Socrates passed away by his pupil Plato who left Athens after being condemned for impiety and corruption by the Athenian democracy in his later life.
Later philosophers began to build upon the ideas of the Presocratics and create their own new philosophies about what kinds of things exist in reality. These philosophers include Plato (428-347 BCE), Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Zeno of Elea (490-430 BCE) and Democritus (460-370 BCE). They are all called ‘Presocratic’ because they came after Socrates but before Epicurus who comes next after them chronologically speaking.
Plato had a student named Aristotle who went on to tutor Alexander the Great later on in life. After Alexander’s death, his generals divided up his territory amongst themselves forming new kingdoms so that Greece itself became ruled by many different rulers with various levels of interest in education or philosophy for example after Plato’s time there was no longer any sort of political unity between Greek city states so each city developed its own curriculum based around their own interests instead….but that’s another story!