Introduction to Humanities Lecture 3 Pre-Socratic Philosophy By David Kelsey.

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Introduction to Humanities Lecture 3 Pre-Socratic Philosophy By David Kelsey

Transcript of Introduction to Humanities Lecture 3 Pre-Socratic Philosophy By David Kelsey.

Page 1: Introduction to Humanities Lecture 3 Pre-Socratic Philosophy By David Kelsey.

Introduction to HumanitiesLecture 3

Pre-Socratic Philosophy

By David Kelsey

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Philosophical Questions & myths

• In the 6th and 5th century B.C. questions about the nature of the world began to take importance.

– Questions such as:• What is the meaning of life?

• Does life end in death?

• What is the best life to live?

– Prior to the 6th century B.C., answers to such questions came in the form of myths.

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Myths

• Myths:– a story told and retold as a part of tradition.

– Often involved the Gods in some struggle, either with each other or with human beings, and intervening in human life for good or evil.

• The Greeks and their Gods:

– Kronos, Rhea, Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Aphrodite…

– Myths often involve a moral lesson.

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An example of a myth

• An example in the first few lines of Homer’s Iliad (page 5 of Melchert):– Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

– murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

– hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

– great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds,

– and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

– Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

– What god drove them to fight with such a fury?

– Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king

– he swept a fatal plague through the army--men were dying

– and all because Agamemnon had spurned Apollo’s priest.• The Iliad, Book 1, 1-12

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Explaining Homer’s Iliad

• What’s Homer on about:– The theme of the Iliad: rage (the irrational anger of Achilles)

– The Greeks capture a beautiful girl in a Trojan raid and the army awards her to Agamemnon…

– Her father, a priest, pleads for her return…

– Agamemnon finally gives up the girl but demands Achilles prize, a lovely woman.

– Enraged, Achilles refuses to fight

– Patrocles pleads with Achilles to return to battle but he refuses.

– So Patrocles talks Achilles into letting him use Achilles’ armor to fight himself. During the battle Patrocles is killed by the great Trojan warrior Hector…

– Achilles rejoins the battle and wreaks havoc…He meets Hector in battle and kills him.

– Achilles then drags Hector’s body back to the greek camp...

– The story ends with Hector’s father, King Priam, travelling at night to the Greek camp to plead for his sons body…Achilles gives up the body.

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New Answers to Philosophical Questions

• During the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. there arose a discontent among some.– Not content with the myths as answers

• In early philosophical thought, certain questions gained precedence.– The Question of the one an the many:

– The appearance/reality distinction:

– Human reality:

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Thales

• Thales of Miletus (625-547 B.C.)• Held that:

– 1) the cause and element of all things is water• Water is underlying everything…

– 2) all things are filled with Gods• So the Gods are explanations for why things exist and happen, • Example:

– Problem for Thales’ view:• Why water?

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Anaximander

• Anaximander:– 612-545 B.C.

– from Miletus as Thales was.

• Held the following:– Given any state of things, Z, it had a beginning

– But then some prior state, Y, must have brought Z to be

– But Y must have had a beginning

– So some prior state X must have brought Y to be

– But this reasoning cannot go on forever

– So there is something that has no beginning

– What does Anaximander call this thing without a beginning?

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Anaximander’s boundless

• The boundless:– The beginning for all things– No beginning and no end– Called divine– Encompasses all things and steers all things– Indefinite in character– Swirling in a vortex like motion

• Swirling water in a pan…

– Why think that the boundless is swirling in a vortex?• Just look around.

– Problem: how can one such abstract cause account for all the variety we see in nature?

• Do we need one big cause?

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Pythagoras

• Pythagoras– 570-495 B.C.

– Lived in Croton (southern Italy) most of his adult life

– Had much influence on Plato

– Much influence on mathematics and music:• He and his followers first developed Geometry• Developed the Pythagorean theorem• Discovered the mathematical ratios of musical intervals: the octave, the fifth and the fourth

– Believed in Dualism.• The soul…• Reincarnation…• A Vegetarian…

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Heraclitus

• Heraclitus:– 540-480 B.C.

– Lived in Ephesus (north of Miletus, on the shores of Asia Minor)

– Wrote the book of Heraclitus

– His solution of the one and the many:• We live in a world of many. There is a multitude of apparently different, changing and

conflicting things.• This multitude of things is made one by the logos.• The logos is…

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The Logos

• The logos:• The law like or rational process or structure or pattern which governs all things.• The logos provides structure in chaos…

• Reality is a flux, structured by the logos– All things are in flux, like a river: ever changing, yet preserving an identity through the changes.– River metaphor: although the water that makes the river is ever changing, it is the same river. – The logos is the structure that unifies the many– In every one, many persist.– Example…

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The Logos continued

• The Logos continued:– The logos is a divine fire:

• Divine fire: – “All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things…” (DK 22 B 31, IEGP, 91)

• Fire both is the world order, I.e. the logos, and manifests itself in that world order

– Through the logos there is a harmonious union of opposites• Reality is in a state of constant change but All things come into being through opposition:

– Without tension, opposition and conflict, the world could not persist– Example:

• The divine world order guarantees a balance of opposites:– Example:

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Perceiving the Logos

• Perceiving the Logos:– Humans pay no attention to the logos.

– We perceive conflict, disorder and chaos.

– But there is structure behind the madness. This is the logos.

– The logos: • all that is and ever will be is ever changing.

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The Ethics of Heraclitus

• The logos and how we should act:– Always be at one with the logos in one’s actions and character. Act

according to a balance of opposites.

– Moderation is the greatest virtue• It is never good for man to get all he wishes

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Parmenides

• Parmenides: – from Elea (now the southern part of Italy) &

– lived from 515 B.C. to roughly 450 B.C.

– The first Rationalist: wants to see where reasoning and argument takes us

• An argument for Monism:– Monism is the metaphysical view that there is only one type of thing as opposed to

more than one.

– 1. Thought and being are the same

– 2. You cannot think “nothing”

– 3. Things don’t ever come into being.

– And 4. Things don’t ever fall out of existence.

– Thus, 5. Things don’t have beginnings or endings and change is impossible.

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There is only the One

• So what follows from this argument:– Time is an illusion

• what is must exist all at once in a continuous present

– What is, is indivisible

• The one has no parts

– There cannot be things of different kinds

• There is only the one. It is eternal, indivisible and unchanging.

– The appearance/reality distinction is also solved:

– So Parmenides view is counterintuitive…

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Atomism

• Democritus and Leucippus were the originators of Atomism.– Not much is known of Leucippus

– Democritus:• 460-360 B.C.• lived in Abdera in the middle of the 5th century B.C.

• Atomism gives us a solution to the one and the many problem which isn’t counterintuitive like Parmenides solution.

• Atomists think we can grant that being and not being are opposites and that not being is not.

– But they think that from this monism needn’t follow

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An Ambiguity

• Atomism calls attention to an ambiguity in Parmenides argument:– The ambiguity is in the term “what is”.

• For Democritus, what is can be either body or empty space.

• So space can be empty in that it contains no things and yet it can have being of its own.

– Democritus calls empty space “the void”

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Atomism vs. Monism

• Here we see the contrast in views:• Parmenides Atomism• • Being Not-Being Being Not-Being• Is Is Not Is Is Not

Thing No-Thing • Body Void

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Atoms

• So for Atomism, reality consists of atoms and the void.• Bodies that we can see and touch are composed of atoms.• Atoms:

– Tiny, indivisible, indestructible and exist eternally

– In constant motion…

– Mechanical laws…

– Can differ in 3 ways…

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How Atoms form into bodies

• Atoms combine and hook together to form the bodies we can see and touch:– Atoms move about in the void

– Atoms can hook into each other

– If enough atoms get hooked together, they can form bodies that are visible to us

– Bodies differ…

• An explanation of change:– A body comes into being:

– A body passes away:

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The Implications of Atomism

• Here are some implications of the view:– 1-there is no room for intelligent design or purpose in explaining events or

actions:• The laws of motion and freedom of the will…

– 2-Everything in the universe must be explained in terms of materialist terms, I.e. there is only atoms, the void and the mechanical laws that govern their behavior.

• So the mind and the soul must be explained in completely materialist terms.

– Sensations, mental states and qualia…

• Other problems:

– Ghosts, angels and reincarnation

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The rise of Athens

• During the 4th & 5th centuries B.C. Athens becomes the center of Greek cultural life– Greece was composed of city states, which included…– The city states each had their own citizens, armies, etc.– Democracy…

• 499 B.C. = Eastern Greek city states (on the shores of Asia Minor) rebelled against Persian taxation.

– Athens sends 20 ships to defend against the Persians and burns Sardis to the ground.– The Persians respond…

• 480 B.C. = The Persian king Xerxes took an army of near 200,000 to defeat Athens– Leonidas lead Spartan soldiers to meet the Persians at Thermopylae: many Persians killed but the

Spartans are defeated– The Persians are defeated by the Athenians in a sea battle– The Persians returned a year later to be defeated again

• As a result, Athens gains prominence and wealth.– Athens forms the league for the future defense of Greek lands & rules the sea

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The Sophists

• The Sophists were teachers.– Popular during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.

– Protagoras was one of the greatest

– Taught virtue, politics, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, music and philosophy

– Most notably taught rhetoric• The uses of rhetoric…

– Rhetoric are the principles and practice of persuasive speaking.• By using the principles of persuasive speaking, one can make a case for any position at all.

– Rhetoric was taught:

– The Sophist claimed to teach how to turn the weaker argument into the stronger one

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Man is the Measure of All Things

• The Sophists thought man is the measure of all things:– Since any position can be made to persuade, there are only opinions

– So humans are confined to appearances and we cannot discriminate truth from opinion

• Can we gain truth at all?

– So man is the measure of all things:• There is no criterion, standard or mark by which to judge except ourselves

• This is the view known as Relativism– Says truth is relative to the individual, group or culture

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Physis & Nomos

• Physis: – The characteristics of the world or things in general independent of what human

beings impose on it

• Nomos:– custom or convention

• Example…

– Things for which humans alone have decided that they be so

• For the Sophists, morality, virtue and justice were a question of Nomos not Physis.

– Right and wrong, just and unjust are merely a convention because we sort such questions out by consulting the laws.

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The Peloponnesian War

• The Peloponnesian War:– Between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta

– Occurred between 431 and 404 B.C.

– Death and killing was pervasive throughout…

– Lead to the defeat of Athens and the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Greece

– The peace treaty and the Thirty…

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The Thirty

• The Thirty:– Were supported by Spartan men-at-arms

– Carried out a purge of criminals and wrong doers

– Executed criminals and persecuted many…

– Lasted almost a year…

– The thirty were finally defeated but Athens would never recover…

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Results of the Thirty’s reign of terror

• Results of the reign of terror on the people of Athens and Greece:– Athenians lost confidence…

– The world and human affairs seemed beyond managing…

– Disillusionment at Sophistry…

– A Greek known as Aristophanes wrote ‘The Clouds’…

– To Aristophanes, argument was nothing more than a contest that the most persuasive will always win

– The central concern of Socrates…