Greek philosophy 1.Presocratics (Ionian and Eleatic philosophy) 2.

Classical philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) Presocratics (7th 5th centuries BCE) Investigators of Nature (Aristotle) Their scientific interests included mathematics, astronomy, biology, physics Presocratics emphasized the rational unity of things, and rejected mythological explanations of the world The first Greek philosophers were looking for the origin or principle ( arch) of all things Questions What is the nature of ultimate reality as a contrasted to the apparent reality of ordinary experience? What is the source of all existent things? How can different elements combine to produce features different from their constituents? Why do things change? Did the world exist always? The common features of philosophy and mythology Some elements of anthropological points of view on natural process Hylozoism belief in a kind of living matter Ordinary language The central presupposition that the world is coherent and intelligible The mythological idea that the different components of the world are connected with divine deities who have a traceable ancestry The distinctive features of philosophy An attempt to give a purely natural explanation of the world Understanding of the primary stuffs as the ultimate substances Hypothesis were based on speculations about real facts Speculations were based on proves and arguments Analogy and observation as the methods of investigation The common assumption was that the world possessed some kind of integral unity and determinability that could be understood in rational terms Speculative thinking expresses human curiosity about the world, striving to understand in natural terms: how things really are, what they are made of, and how they function Practical thinking emphasizes the desire to guide conduct by comprehending the nature of life and the place of human beings and human behavior in the greater scheme of reality Critical thinking involves a careful examination of the foundations upon which thinking of any sort must rely, trying to achieve an effective method for assessing the reliability of positions adopted on the significant issues Ionian philosophy: The Milesians (Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander) and Heraclitus Milesian School (Miletus the birthplace of philosophy) The world as we know it is the orderly articulation of different stuffs produced out of the original stuff To explain the world and its phenomena is to show how everything came from the original stuff The Milesians presented a view of nature in terms of observable entities (it is a scientific approach) The Milesians practiced a new style of discussion which encourages: questioning, debate, explanation, justification, criticism. Thales He was the first to give a purely natural explanation of the origin of the world, free from all mythological ingredients. What is the basic material of the cosmos? He put the problem of the nature of matter, and its transformation into the myriad things of which the universe is made. Water is the Primary Principle. Everything had come out of water. The many are related to each other by the One.

Anaximander He speculated about the Boundless as the origin of all that is The Boundless has no origin, because it is itself the origin What is the divine? That which has no origin and no end The ordered world (the cosmos) developed out of the apeiron (having no limit) something both infinite and indefinite (without distinguishable qualities) This state preceded the separation into contrary qualities (such as hot and could, wet and dry), and thus represents the unity of all phenomena Anaximenes Air is the origin of all things The other types of matter arose out of air by condensation and rarefaction Natural forces constantly act on the air and transform it into other materials, which came together to form the organized world The Hippocratic treatise On Breaths uses air as the central concept in a theory of diseases Heraclitus from Ephesus The Dark Philosopher The world itself consists of a law-like interchange of elements (water, fire, earth), symbolized by fire Fire is the primary substance which controls the transformation of the 3 great cosmic components: fire changes into water and then into earth; earth changes into water and then into fire. From fire all things originate, and return to it again by a never-resting process of development All things are in a perpetual flux Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and comparing existents to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river (Plato) The world was identified with an ongoing process governed by a law of change This perpetual flux is structured by logos (word, reason) The logos which structures the human soul mirrors the logos which structures the ever-changing processes of the universe This world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites (1) everything is constantly changing (2) opposite things are identical, so that (3) everything is and is not at the same time God is One. God is Universal Reason which holds all things in unity. God as Reason is the Universal Law for all things Eleatic school (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno) Monism the All is One Being is one and unique and all that there is or ever will be Being is unproduced unchangeable undivided whole homogeneous All that exists is a static plenum of Being as such and nothing exists that stands either in contrast or in contradiction to Being. A thing cannot arise from that which is different from it All differentiation, motion, and change must be illusory Xenophanes Men made their gods in their own image God is one God is the eternal unity, permeating the universe, and governing it by his thought Parmenides Reality is one undifferentiated whole The "things" and their changes that we observe through our senses are mere appearances or names Right reason (logos) maintains that Being is one and immutable The familiar world, in which things move around, come into being, and pass away, is a world of mere belief (doxa) Our ordinary observation reports are false; they do not report what is real Parmenides was the first Greek philosopher to place reason in opposition to opinion

Zeno of Elea Zeno reduced to absurdity the two claims (1) that the many are (2) that motion is Zeno offered arguments (paradoxes) that led to conclusions contradicting what we all know from our physical experience Achilles Paradox Achilles will never catch the tortoise. Motion is an illusion. Change is an illusion Empedocles The four-element theory of matter earth air fire water Each of the elements is eternal and unchanging Everything in the world is ultimately made up of the mixture of these four elements Empedocles world-view is of a cosmic cycle of eternal change, growth and decay Change takes place because there are two competing forces at work in the world Two cosmic forces engage in an eternal battle for supremacy Love (Philia) a force of attraction and combination Strife (Neikos)a force of repulsion and separation Anaxagoras The first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens Matter is a chaotic primordial mass All things exist in this mass, but in a confused and indistinguishable form of seeds (spermata) The order is brought to this mass by the power of Nous (Mind) Nous (cosmic intelligence) is the ordering principle which causes motion Pythagoras of Samos The world is a perfect harmony, dependent on number In each of the aspects of the world, Pythagoras saw order, a regularity of occurrences that could be described in terms of mathematics All things are numbers" The essences and structures of all things can be determined by finding the numerical relations contained in them The aim of human life must be to live in harmony with this natural regularity The atomic theory of the universe Democritus He was a pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos Atoms (from Greek atoma) "things that cannot be cut, or divided All things are composed of atoms. Atoms are physical particles invisible indivisible indestructible imperceptible to the senses infinite in number eternal different in size, shape, and weight The notion of the atom itself is an "eternal oneness" By joining together atoms produce perceptible objects, which are destroyed when the atoms separate. Change is real. It happens on account of the recombination of atoms Atoms have always been, and always will be, in motion Motion is eternal and not initiated by any outside force Atoms move in the void (empty space) Space is infinite in extent Time is uncreated Nature exists only of two things, namely atoms and the void that surrounds them The universe is temporally everlasting and spatially boundless, without beginning and without end in either space or time Nothing occurs at random, but everything happens for a reason and by necessity The Presocratic period ended with Democritus