PL 201: Introduction to Philosophy

PL 201: Introduction to Philosophy

Course Requirements:

PL 201: Introduction to Philosophy

Course Requirements: ▪ Midterm Exam – 30% of grade ▪ Final Paper – 30% of grade ▪ Final Exam – 40% of grade

School of Athens – Raphael

The Pre-Socratics

The Milesians: ◼Thales ◼Anaximander ◼Anaximenes

◼Heraclitus ◼Parmenides

Thales of Miletus

▪ The earth rests on water. (De Caelo 294a28)▪ Water is the archê of all things. (Metaph. 983b18)▪ The magnet has a soul. (De Anima 405a19)▪ All things are full of gods. (De Anima 411a7)

Almost everything we know of Thales comes from Aristotle (all of our knowledge of him is based entirely on the testimony of others.

In 585 BCE he predicted an eclipse of the sun. He also predicted a successful olive harvest.

Anaximander

▪ apeiron – the single essential substance from which comes all things. He called it the indefinite, the boundless.

▪ The world is composed of opposites, earth and water (dry/wet), and air and fire (cold/hot). None is supreme, so there must be something that they came from. No one of the opposites could have been the archê, or its opposite would never have come to be.

▪ For example, if Thales were right and water was the essence of matter, how could dryness ever come about?

Anaximenes

▪ Keeps monist idea of a single substance, but rejects Anaximander’s apeiron.

▪ Air as the best candidate for the essential stuff of the world.

▪ By rarifying and condensing air, air takes the form of water, earth, and fire. By rarifying air fire is created. By condensing water, earth is made.

▪ Note – Anaximenes doesn’t require us to believe in an unobserved substance. Also, he gives a story of how.

Heraclitus - 540-480 BCE from Ephesus

◼ Fire is the essence of all things. - Figurative interpretation - Literal interpretation - Both interpretations are necessary for a full understanding

◼ The Logos - the world has a fundamental order that organizes it, even if it is difficult to comprehend. In this order change is constant, change that gives rise to the variety of things in the world.

◼ Doctrine of Radical Change – everything changes in every respect all the time. Change is not some factor to be explained away as something which happens to an eternal, primordial substance. Change is the essence of everything, that without which nothing that is now would have come into being. For Heraclitus it is not change that we should marvel at, but the seeming sameness of things from one moment to the next.

Parmenides - 515 BCE, polis of Elea

▪ Truth – “that it is and it must be”▪ Impossible – “that it is not and it cannot be”

▪ “For this shall never be proved: that things that are not are.”

▪ You cannot prove that things that don’t exist do exist, in fact it’s a mistake to think that you can conceive of something that doesn’t exist at all.

▪ ‘What is’ is uncreated, indestructible, eternal, and unchangeable.