Pre-Socratic Philosophers: Understanding Early Greek Thought
Philosophy is the result of trying to explain reality through reason, leaving aside myths and superstitions. Seeing the world in all its complexity, it emerged in Greek culture around the 6th century BC. Philosophy was created as a critique of conventional wisdom.
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus was the originator of philosophy, challenging the mythical classical Greek world depicted by Homer and Hesiod. He founded the school of Miletus. He is the first of the Pre-Socratics, who investigated the existence of a fixed reality behind a number of changes. His objective was to find a basic reality called physis. In the apparent world, he posited water as the fundamental element.
Anaximander of Miletus
Anaximander of Miletus, a pupil of Thales, identified physis with the indeterminate qualities common to contraries. The Apeiron is what unites and changes things, a cyclical process where the fate of the world is to be destroyed and reborn from raw substances.
Anaximenes of Miletus
Anaximenes of Miletus, also a pupil of Thales, worked with air as the backbone from which all qualities are derived.
The Pythagoreans
The Pythagoreans promoted the birth of mathematical and mystical philosophy. Their theory is based on the immortality and transmigration of souls. They saw harmony in the universe through mathematical relationships: chords, musical harmony, reality, and numbers, the latter being the arche and matter of things. Their philosophy is very similar to the Orphic religion, whose main objective is the purification of the soul.
Heraclitus
Heraclitus focused on the changing world as a source of knowledge, which is a perpetual flow and a continuous process of change. He emphasized universal dynamism and mobility. He identified the world with a great fire, fire as the arche. Under the conflicting elements in constant struggle lies a logos; after the struggle of opposites, justice appears.
Parmenides
Parmenides viewed the world and denied its change, seeking knowledge through logical reasoning, as this never changes. The path to truth is the way forward for the soul to reach the being, away from the route of opinion that disturbs it. Being is eternal, immutable, without beginning or end, as in reality. Thinking is like being; what is not cannot be thought. He gave no value to the changing world because it is a source of opinion.
The Pluralists
The Pluralists saw the world as a multitude of small, eternal, and unchanging objects, tied freely, moving randomly in space. Water, air, fire, and earth are the joint physis of the world, covered by love and hatred. There are as many types of primal elements as there are things.
The Sophists
The Sophists focused their intellectual pursuit on man and his social organization, leaving the study of the outside world. Their aim was the exact domain of language through rhetoric. They worked in education to live in a democratic social organization. They proclaimed the arete, or virtue. Their most important representatives are Protagoras and Gorgias.
- Protagoras espoused relativism, stating that each person has their own truth.
- Gorgias proclaimed skepticism, asserting that nothing exists, that we cannot know if something exists, and that if we could know, we could not communicate it. He denied reality, knowledge, and truth.
Socrates
Socrates had an epistemological optimism linked to human reason. He believed in stable laws that can be discovered. He had a great concern for education, believing that virtue is knowledge and that if you do not know, you cannot teach. He developed the Socratic method, which he called the art of dialogue, or maieutics.