Western Philosophy

 (Greek philosophia, “love of wisdom”), the rational and critical inquiry into basic principles.

 Philosophy is often divided into four main branches: metaphysics, the investigation of ultimate
reality;

 epistemology, the study of the origins, validity, and limits of knowledge; ethics, the study of the
nature of morality and judgment; and aesthetics, the study of the nature of beauty in the fine
arts.

 Western philosophy is generally considered to have begun in ancient Greece as speculation

about the underlying nature of the physical world.

 In its earliest form it was indistinguishable from natural science. The writings of the earliest
philosophers no longer exist, except for a few fragments cited by Aristotle in the 4th century bc
and by other writers of later times.

 Ionian School

 The first philosopher of historical record was Thales, who lived in the 6th century bc in Miletus,
a city on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor.

 Thales, who was revered by later generations as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.

 His scientific investigations led him to speculate that all natural phenomena are different forms
of one fundamental substance, which he believed to be water because he thought evaporation
and condensation to be universal processes.

 Anaximander, a disciple of Thales, maintained that the first principle from which all things
evolve is an intangible, invisible, infinite substance that he called apeiron, “the boundless.”

 This substance, he maintained, is eternal and indestructible. Out of its ceaseless motion the
more familiar substances, such as warmth, cold, earth, air, and fire, continuously evolve,
generating in turn the various objects and organisms that make up the recognizable world.

 The third great Ionian philosopher of the 6th century bc, Anaximenes, returned to Thales’s
assumption that the primary substance is something familiar and material, but he claimed it to
be air rather than water.

 He believed that the changes things undergo could be explained in terms of rarefaction
(thinning) and condensation of air.

 Thus Anaximenes was the first philosopher to explain differences in quality in terms of
differences in size or quantity, a method fundamental to physical science.

 Summary
 In general, the Ionian school made the initial radical step from mythological to scientific
explanation of natural phenomena.

 It discovered the important scientific principles of the permanence of substance, the natural
evolution of the world, and the reduction of quality to quantity.

 Pythagorean School

 About 530 bc at Croton (now Crotona), in southern Italy, the philosopher Pythagoras founded a
school of philosophy that was more religious and mystical than the Ionian school.

 It fused the ancient mythological view of the world with the developing interest in scientific
explanation.

 The system of philosophy that became known as Pythagoreanism combined ethical,

supernatural, and mathematical beliefs with many ascetic rules, such as obedience and silence
and simplicity of dress and possessions.

 The Pythagoreans taught and practiced a way of life based on the belief that the soul is a
prisoner of the body, is released from the body at death, and migrates into a succession of
different kinds of animals before reincarnation into a human being.

 For this reason Pythagoras taught his followers not to eat meat. Pythagoras maintained that the
highest purpose of humans should be to purify their souls by cultivating intellectual virtues,
refraining from sensual pleasures, and practicing special religious rituals.

 The Pythagoreans, having discovered the mathematical laws of musical pitch, inferred that
planetary motions produce a “music of the spheres,” and developed a “therapy through music”
to bring humanity in harmony with the celestial spheres.

 They identified science with mathematics, maintaining that all things are made up of numbers
and geometrical figures. They made important contributions to mathematics, musical theory,
and astronomy.

 Heraclitean School

 Heraclitus of Ephesus, who was active around 500 bc, continued the search of the Ionians for a
primary substance, which he claimed to be fire. He noticed that heat produces changes in
matter, and thus anticipated the modern theory of energy.

 Heraclitus maintained that all things are in a state of continuous flux, that stability is an illusion,
and that only change and the law of change, or Logos, are real.

 The Logos doctrine of Heraclitus, which identified the laws of nature with a divine mind,
developed into the pantheistic theology of Stoicism. (Pantheism is the belief that God and
material substance are one, and that divinity is present in all things.)
 Eleatic School

 In the 5th century bc, Parmenides founded a school of philosophy at Elea, a Greek colony on the
Italian peninsula.

 Parmenides took a position opposite from that of Heraclitus on the relation between stability
and change.

 Parmenides maintained that the universe, or the state of being, is an indivisible, unchanging,
spherical entity and that all reference to change or diversity is self-contradictory.

 According to Parmenides, all that exists has no beginning and has no end and is not subject to
change over time.

 Nothing, he claimed, can be truly asserted except that “being is.” Zeno of Elea, a disciple of
Parmenides, tried to prove the unity of being by arguing that the belief in the reality of change,
diversity, and motion leads to logical paradoxes.

 The paradoxes of Zeno became famous intellectual puzzles that philosophers and logicians of all
subsequent ages have tried to solve. The concern of the Eleatics with the problem of logical
consistency laid the basis for the development of the science of logic.

 The Pluralists

 The speculation about the physical world begun by the Ionians was continued in the 5th century
bc by Empedocles and Anaxagoras, who developed a philosophy replacing the Ionian
assumption of a single primary substance with an assumption of a plurality of such substances.

 Empedocles maintained that all things are composed of four irreducible elements: air, water,
earth, and fire, which are alternately combined and separated by two opposite forces, love
and strife.

 By that process the world evolves from chaos to form and back to chaos again, in an eternal
cycle.

 Empedocles regarded the eternal cycle as the proper object of religious worship and criticized
the popular belief in personal deities, but he failed to explain the way in which the familiar
objects of experience could develop out of elements that are totally different from them.

 By that process the world evolves from chaos to form and back to chaos again, in an eternal
cycle.

 Empedocles regarded the eternal cycle as the proper object of religious worship and criticized
the popular belief in personal deities, but he failed to explain the way in which the familiar
objects of experience could develop out of elements that are totally different from them.
 He maintained that the active principle of this evolutionary process is a world mind that
separates and combines the particles. His concept of elemental particles led to the
development of an atomic theory of matter.

 The Atomists

 It was a natural step from pluralism to atomism, the theory that all matter is composed of tiny,
indivisible particles differing only in simple physical properties such as size, shape, and weight.

 This step was taken in the 4th century bc by Leucippus and his more famous associate
Democritus, who is generally credited with the first systematic formulation of an atomic theory
of matter.

 The Sophists

 Toward the end of the 5th century bc, a group of traveling teachers called Sophists became
famous throughout Greece. The Sophists played an important role in developing the Greek city-
states from agrarian monarchies into commercial democracies.

 As Greek industry and commerce expanded, a class of newly rich, economically powerful
merchants began to wield political power.

 Lacking the education of the aristocrats, they sought to prepare themselves for politics and
commerce by paying the Sophists for instruction in public speaking, legal argument, and
general culture.

 Although the best of the Sophists made valuable contributions to Greek thought, the group as a
whole acquired a reputation for deceit, insincerity, and demagoguery. Thus the word sophistry
has come to signify these moral faults.

 The famous maxim of Protagoras, one of the leading Sophists, that “man is the measure of all
things,” is typical of the philosophical attitude of the Sophist school.

 Protagoras claimed that individuals have the right to judge all matters for themselves.

 He denied the existence of an objective (demonstrable and impartial) knowledge, arguing

instead that truth is subjective in the sense that different things are true for different people
and there is no way to prove that one person’s beliefs are objectively correct and another’s are
incorrect.

 Protagoras asserted that natural science and theology are of little or no value because they have
no impact on daily life, and he concluded that ethical rules need be followed only when it is to
one’s practical advantage to do so.

 Gorgias

 “nothing exists”
 if it did, no one could ever know it,

 if anyone knew it, he could not communicate that knowledge to others

 The Sophists introduced and developed one of the earliest theories of knowledge.

 that knowledge was unattainable

 and therefore, man should not bother to seek what he can never find

 The Sophists taught their followers how to be a successful in the world even without certain
knowledge.

 They trained their students how to speak well and convincingly, how to win disputes and
generally, how to succeed.

 The Sophists’ denial of the possibility of knowing truth meant that the difference between
good and evil cannot be discovered.

 Hence, “man is the measure of all things”

 what we call good or evil, right or wrong, is a matter of arbitrary convention, of what one
happens to feel at the moment, or what is pleasant or unpleasant to you

 one answer is as good as its counterpart (as far as right or wrong is concerned)

 Reference:

 Borbon, V. L. (2000). College science, technology and society. Manila: Rex Book Store