The Intellectual Revolution

The term "Intellectual Revolution" is used to refer to Greek speculation about the
"nature" in the period before Socrates (roughly 600 to 400 BCE). Hence, the
alternative, technical terms are "pre Socratic" or "non-theological" or "first
philosophy". Bear in mind that the "philosophy" in question has little to do with
ethics, and much more to do with what we would call physics or logic.

There are three characteristic features of this form of speculation. First, the world is a
natural whole (that is, supernatural forces do not make things 'happen'). Second, there
is a natural 'order' (that is, there are 'laws of nature'). Third, humans can 'discover'
those laws. I will develop these concepts more fully in class.

Although the texts have been translated as prose, much of what survives is actually
verse.

All of these pro-Socratic philosophers reached maturity in the colonies, east and west.
Was the "colonial" mentality more intellectually adventurous than that found in the
mother country?

Though these thinkers thought in non-theological terms that does not mean that they
were atheists, most were not, but rather that they viewed the natural order as reflecting
some underlying intelligence, the Logos (loosely: "the rational principle").

The earliest of these thinkers lived in Ionia, on the western coast of modern Turkey, in
the town of Miletus. The Ionians were concerned with two issues: What is the
underlying and primary 'substance' (Greek: arché)? And, second, how can one explain
change and transformation, given that what we perceive derives from one substance?
One should note the modernity of these questions. Physicists still seek the primary
particle; science still attempts to explain how natural substances 'change'.

Thales, ca. 585 BCE, argued that the primary substance was 'water' perhaps
observing that water can be observed in liquid, gas or solid form. Whether he believed
everything was truly based on water or whether he used water an analogy, is not quite
clear. Consider, too, that the use of water as a primary substance is not far removed
from the primary substance of many creation myths. Here is what Aristotle says:

"Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of

matter were the only principles of all things: for the original source of all
existing things, that from which a thinking first comes-into-being and
into which it is finally destroyed, the substance persisting but changing
in its