Early Greek Philosophy: The Presocractics and the Emergence of Reason

by Joe McCoy (Editor)

Overview

The scholarly tradition of the Presocratics is the beginning of the "Greek Miracle," the remarkable flowering of arts and sciences in ancient Greece from the 600s to 400s BC. Greek thought turned from pagan religion and the mytho-poetic work of Hesiod and Homer, to inquiry into the natures of things, to the world and our place in it. This tradition, starting with Thales (b. 624 BC) and proceeding through Democritus (d. 370 BC), is the unifying theme of this volume. The contributors, renowned experts in their various fields of philosophy, provide introductions to the Presocratic philosophers and discuss how this philosophical school was appropriated and treated by later philosophers.

Joe McCoy opens the volume with a survey of the historical developments within Presocratic philosophy, as well as its subsequent reception. The essays begin with Charles Kahn's account of the role of Presocractic philosophy in classical philosophy. Individual philosophers are then discussed, namely, Anaximander by Kurt Pritzl, Heraclitus by Kenneth Dorter, and Pythagoreans by Carl A. Huffman. Next are chapters on Xenophanes by James Lesher, Parmenides by Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Empedocles by Patricia Curd, and Anaxagoras by Daniel Graham. The collection concludes with an examination of the reception of the Presocratics in early modern and late modern philosophy by John C. McCarthy and Richard Velkley, respectively.

The philosophy of the Presocratics still governs scholarly discussion today. This important volume grapples with a host of philosophical issues and philological and historical problems inherent in interpreting Presocratic philosophers.

ABOUT THE EDITOR:

Joe McCoy is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada-Reno.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

"Digs deep into issues that will greatly interest scholars specializing in early Greek thought . . .Recommended." —Choice

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813221212
Publisher:	The Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	04/28/2013
Pages:	237
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Joe McCoy is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada-Reno.

Read an Excerpt

Early Greek Philosophy

The Presocratics and the Emergence of Reason

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By Joe McCoy

The Catholic University of America Press

Copyright © 2013The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-2121-2

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Charles Kahn

The Achievement of Early Greek Philosophy A Drama in Five Acts: From Thales to the Timaeus

ACT 1: FROM HESIOD TO THE MILESIANS

I want to survey with you the achievement of early Greek philosophy in the period from Thales to the Timaeus. I am old fashioned enough to believe that this was a unique and momentous event, the like of which has never happened elsewhere, before or since. The event in question is nothing less than the creation of Western science and philosophy as we know them. The closest parallel, perhaps, is the creation of modern science and philosophy in the seventeenth century, beginning with Galileo and Descartes. What is distinctive of philosophy in the West, from the sixth to fifth centuries B.C. and again in the seventeenth century A.D., is that philosophy took shape together with mathematics and natural science. In each of these periods, prominent individuals were active in both the scientific-mathematical and also the more strictly philosophical area— like Anaxagoras and Democritus in antiquity, and Descartes and Leibniz in the modern counterpart. In both periods, it was an age of immense intellectual creativity. But the Greek achievement is the more amazing, because they were doing it for the first time.

The first chapter in my story—shall we say, the first act in this intellectual drama—is the momentous shift from the mythic-poetic world of Hesiod's Theogony to the new world view created by the Milesians in the sixth century. My theme here is a familiar one: from mythos to logos, from mythopoetry to a rational account of nature.

The new enterprise began in the sixth century B.C. with a group of intellectuals around Thales and Anaximander, who set out to do what came to be called peri phuseôs historia, inquiry into the nature of things. Thus some of the early treatises were entitled peri phuseôs, the title echoed in Lucretius's Latin version: De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). We do not know exactly when this terminology came into use. Whatever the date of origin, this formula, peri phuseôs historia, provides an appropriate name for the tradition of natural philosophy that begins in sixth-century Miletus and represents something new: an attempt to understand the phenomena of nature in purely physical or mechanical terms, without magical powers, without monsters, and without anthropomorphic gods. If we compare the austere Milesian cosmogony, as reported for Anaximander and Anaximenes, with the rich and dramatic narrative of Hesiod's Theogony, we can easily see what has been left out. Gone is the coupling of Ouranos and Gaia, gone the emasculation of the father by Kronos, gone the battle between Olympian gods and Titans. Not so easy to see is what has taken the place of all this conflict and personification present in the mythopoetic world view. I suggest that the fundamental innovation is the concept of nature itself, the notion of phusis—as presupposed, for example, in the motto of Heraclitus: "nature loves to hide" (phusis kruptesthai philei).

Thus the term phusis stands for a conception that is distinctively Greek, and subsequently Western, namely, the conception of a natural order of things, a kosmos "which no man or god has made" (B30), to quote Heraclitus again. Both terms, phusis and kosmos, are conspicuous in his fragments, which are our oldest prose documents for the new world view. Together with kosmos, phusis represents this positive conception of an order of nature that is self-grown, like a plant (hence the etymology from phuesthai, "to grow"). The negative move by itself, the escape from mythopoetry and from the personification of natural powers, is not unique to Greece; one finds parallels, for example, in the creation story from Genesis. In the Bible account, as in Milesian cosmology, the personified spirits of nature like Gaia and Ouranos have been eliminated. But what is lacking in the biblical version is precisely this positive conception of a natural order that is self-contained and independent of supernatural causation.

So the first and greatest achievement of early Greek philosophy is precisely this concept of the world as a kosmos, that is, as an order that is given "by nature," by phusis, independent of human and divine art, the order that no man or god has made, but that is nevertheless available for understanding. No one has made it, but humans can try to figure out how it works. That is the Greek perspective. The first expression of this view known to us is the cosmology of Anaximander. Anaximander was the first to offer a mechanical explanation of eclipses, thunder and lightning, as well as a semi-mechanical, semi-biological explanation for the origin of heaven, earth, and sea. His fellow Milesian, Anaximenes, goes a step further and explains the transformation of fire, air, sea, and earth into one another by a process of thickening and thinning, condensation and rarefaction.

In addition to mechanical explanations, what appears in both these theories, but most strikingly in the cosmology of Anaximander, is the idea of a geometric model for the heavens and for the movement of the heavenly bodies. The Babylonians had studied these movements with great care, and had accurately plotted the periodic path of the sun, moon, and planets among the stars. But they understood the visible motions of celestial bodies not in terms of geometry and mechanism but as the intentional activity of the gods. (It is no accident that the planets were named Zeus, Ares, and Aphrodite, and hence Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, after their Babylonian equivalents.) Astronomical knowledge was important for pre-Greek civilizations because it revealed the intentions of the gods. But the astronomy of the Babylonians provided prediction without explanation. By proposing, for the first time, a geometric model for the visible movement of the heavenly bodies, Anaximander (or perhaps some other Milesian not named in our sources) made astronomy in the modern sense, that is, as an explanatory science, possible.

The details of Anaximander's cosmic model seem to us childish and primitive. Thus the eclipses of the moon were produced by a circular vent of celestial fire that periodically opens and closes. But, as Karl Popper might have pointed out, Anaximander's scheme was at least falsifiable, and it was quickly corrected. Within a generation or two, by the time of Parmenides, it will be known that the moon borrows its light from the sun. This is a crucial discovery. One generation later Anaxagoras will give the correct explanation of lunar eclipse. Such was the rapid progress of observational astronomy within the first hundred years of the new world view.

There is a second, equally momentous innovation that seems to have occurred about the same time, in this first century of Milesian or Ionian proto-science, although in this case our documentation, and hence our dating, is very weak. I am referring to the notion of mathematical proof in its basic form, requiring a clear distinction between premises that are accepted without argument and inferences that are logically derived from these premises. The first explicit mention of this idea comes much later, with Plato's discussion of the method of hypothesis in Meno (86d–87c) and Phaedo (99d–101e). But Plato tells us he is borrowing this method from the mathematicians, and we have every reason to believe him. Nevertheless, the earliest surviving example of this form of argument, where the premises are clearly marked and distinguished from the conclusion, is found in a philosophical document, in the poem of Parmenides. Parmenides too
(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Abbreviations....................     ix     

Joe McCoy, Introduction....................     xi     

1. Charles Kahn The Achievement of Early Greek Philosophy: A Drama in Five
Acts: From Thales to the Timaeus....................     1     

2. Kurt Pritzl, OP Anaximander's apeiron and the Arrangement of Time.......     18     

3. Kenneth Dorter The Problem of Evil in Heraclitus....................     36     

4. Carl A. Huffman Reason and Myth in Early Pythagorean Cosmology..........     55     

5. J. H. Lesher A Systematic Xenophanes?....................     77     

6. Alexander P. D. Mourelatos Parmenides, Early Greek Astronomy, and
Modern Scientific Realism....................     91     

7. Patricia Curd Where Are Love and Strife? Incorporeality in Empedocles...     113     

8. Daniel W. Graham Anaxagoras: Science and Speculation in the Golden Age..     139     

9. John C. McCarthy Bacon's Third Sailing: The "Presocratic" Origins of
Modern Philosophy....................     157     

10. Richard Velkley Primal Truth, Errant Tradition, and Crisis: The
Presocratics in Late Modernity....................     189     

Bibliography....................     209     

Contributors....................     221     

Index of Sources....................     225     

Index of Names....................     229     

Index of Subjects....................     233