Presocratic Philosophy and Beyond
Presocratic Philosophy
The philosophy appears in the sixth century BC Greek colony in Asia Minor called Miletus. It was a commercial port where people of all Greek religious absence countries lived. This enables the emergence of rational philosophy. Cities with diverse cultures. The first philosophers (also called Milesians or Presocratics by Socrates) lived in colonies away from Athens and focused on the study of nature (physis) seeking the ultimate and eternal principle of all reality (Arche). We have only fragments of their writings.
Thales
First Milesian philosopher. In the year 585, he correctly predicted a solar eclipse (the only known date of his life). He was a philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician and entered into legend as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. His Arche was water, arguing that:
- The earth was floating on it.
- No living being can survive without it.
- Water can become all states.
He is the first to break with mythology and offers an empirical explanation and material reality. His geometric knowledge evolved into creating the theorem of Thales.
Anaximenes
Considered air as the beginning. Through a process of rarefaction and condensation, it formed wind, clouds, water, and earth.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Believed fire is the arche and defends the existence of a universal harmony of conflict through the logos.
Anaximander
Created the gnomon and manufactured one of the first land maps. Explains the origin of life as an initiate in the sea and then spread to the surface. The fundamental principle of nature called Apeiron (meaning infinity, unlimited, and indefinite).
Pythagoras
Explained reality by the number, which is their principle. The Pythagoreans represent the number 1 as a point, 2 as lines.
They have features like:
- Metempsychosis: believe in the transmigration of souls.
- Essential kinship among all living beings.
- Community Rules: practice silence, studying music and mathematics.
They criticized mythological gods and affirmed the existence of a single God, not in human form, that is manifested in the circular motion of the stars and the spherical shape (perfection) of the universe.
Parmenides
Distinguished two skills: truth and opinion. The arche is being: being is impossible not to be, non-being is not and therefore cannot possibly be. Parmenides’ Being is immutable, eternal, unique, and continuous. Being is considered spherical (perfect).
Plato – The Constitution of the Universe
Atomism was rejected by Plato and Aristotle because the knowledge of nature was impossible. The cosmos, the order comes from disorder. His idea is that there is an intelligence officer, which Plato called Demiurge. The Demiurge does not create, if not acting on a matter that he has done, is no computer maker. The intelligence officer acts on an eternal matter, chaotic, Plato calls the space, which is a substrate material report, endowed with irregular movements, chaotic. The second principle: the ideas, all being smart that makes or builds something is manufactured in accordance with a plan or model. If the universe is not completely perfect because the material is always introduces an element of disorder and indeterminacy.
Theory of Ideas
This doctrine is the assertion that there are entities intangible, absolute, immutable, and universal regardless of the physical world. The Platonic conception of reality is dualistic: there is a world of ideas, intangible, immutable, and there is the physical, material and subject to change and movement.
Reality and Knowledge
They insisted on structures and relationships in mathematics as a principle of intelligibility of the universe, the distinction between what really exists and the changing universe that show the senses of Parmenides. Plato divided the ideas. Ideas depend neither in being nor in its truth or permanence of sensible things. The ideas are ideals that fail to be met squarely within the ambit of the sensible. The ideas are a system in which all are assembled and coordinated in a hierarchical gradation whose summit took the idea of good, the knowledge of ideas and their relationships is the true knowledge or science. The total and absolute knowledge is called Plato’s dialectic. The intellectual knowledge is able to grasp ideas, intelligible essences. The senses, for their part, we only offer impressions and images changing the physical world in constant evolution.
Reminiscence
Plato’s Anamnesis or claims that learning is remembering. This doctrine assumes that the soul has in itself the knowledge of ideas, knowledge that forgets to flesh in the body.
Ethics and Policy
The Moral Order
The moral concepts can be established rationally through rigorous definitions. The search for its definition is a primordial task. Three parts of the soul. Justice will be the proper management of these three parts of the soul. Prudence is the virtue of strength or value of reason. Moderation or temperance is the virtue of the spirit. The appetite and his spirits are subject to the dictates of their reason. When parties behave in this way, the soul is just and politically ordered.
Justice in the State
The structural correlation between the soul and the state: the producers that correspond to the appetite (engaged in economic activity), auxiliary guards that match the mood (dedicated to the defense and policing) and the rulers or guardians with reason. The government is for the wise philosophers. Identification of theoretical and practical knowledge. The idea of good, theoretical knowledge, because knowledge makes it possible to capture the order and structure of all reality, of practical knowledge, because knowledge of it provides the moral standards of any sort and political.
Aristotle – The Nature and Causes of Physics
Aristotle defines nature (physis) as the internal principle of motion (and rest) that occurs in natural beings. Artificial beings (artifacts) have in themselves the source of their own activity, its changes, and movements.
Nature and Teleology
Tends to be updated; beings tend to reach perfection all their own. Aristotle was Plato’s disciple and collaborator but rejected the theory of ideas by denying the existence of ideas.
Aristotle interpreted well as compliance with the trend in which all beings toward their own perfection. Teleology is immanent: the good that is natural beings tend their own perfection.
Nature and Movement
Aristotle, in physics, started to study the movement and discussing its potential refuting the position of Parmenides, defines the movement or transit as a step from potency to act.
- Substantial change: the generation of a new substance or the destruction of an existing one.
- Accidental change: no substances are generated or destroyed, only undergo changes.
The matter is power. The four cases are composed of substances matter and form. Form is the essence and nature of substances. Nature is an internal principle. Matter and form are intrinsic causes. Extrinsic causes, the efficient cause or agent, producer of motion, and the final cause or purpose, which is oriented to the movement.
Living Substances and Soul
Form and act. The soul is updated and potentially forms a living body. The union of soul and the body is a natural and essential unity, a single substance: the living. Denial of the immortality of the soul. Three souls: the vegetative (typical of plants and animals); the sensitive (typical of animals); and rational (proper to humans).
From Physics to Metaphysics
Primacy of form over matter, there are intangible ways, as the supreme God. It affirms the primacy of the act on the power. God is the unmoved mover of the universe.
Ontology
At what it is (being) a universal way. More general properties of the real and universal principles that govern reality. The basic reality is the substance individual.
Happiness and Virtue: The Ethics
Human Behavior and Happiness
The ultimate goal is happiness. Let each one determine by itself that can make you happy. Happiness consists in the exercise of activities of different morals.
Intellectual Virtues
Which perfect knowledge. Prudence.
The Moral Virtues
That enhance the character, the mode of being and habit. A habit to choose a middle ground consisting of us. Justice. The virtue of man who possesses all the justice. Justice is the fulfillment of laws. Arithmetic, the same thing. Justice geometric proportion to their merits.
Friendship (Philia)
It is a necessary virtue for something remarkable and beautiful. Life is perfection or excellence of social conviction, without friendship, there is a full and satisfying life.
The Policy
The Human Right: Ethics and Politics
The state has no other purpose than to provide citizens with the achievement of a good life, dignified, and fulfilling.
The Epicurean
Hedonism defended that happiness is to look at each moment the maximum pleasure and minimum pain, meaning any pleasure, whether corporeal or spiritual pain and any misfortune, but prefer the spiritual to the material by saying that, for example, a friend is better than money, and so on. We also chose the most lasting pleasures against the fugitive; were always figuring and said how much happiness you seek is not a match.
The Stoics
Said that happiness was repressed feelings, self-control of passions, and opting for a passive attitude before any event.