BEGINNING OF A CHANGE- EARLY GREEK

PHILOSOPHERS
THE WORLD OF PRE-CIVILIZED HUMANS
 THE WORLD OF PRE-CIVILIZED HUMANS

Ways to make sense of life

Animism: Looking at nature as if • Spirit, Dreams, Magic

it was alive • Reification:
Anthropomorphism: Projecting something that could be
human attributes onto nature thought of must exist
 Humans have always needed to understand,
predict, and control nature. Animism, anthropomorphism,
magic, religion, philosophy, and science
can all be seen as efforts to satisfy those needs
 GREEK RELIGIONS

OLYMPIAN RELIGION:
Olympian religion consisted of a
belief in the Olympian gods
 GREEK RELIGIONS
2. DIONYSIAC-ORPHIC RELIGION:
The belief in the transmigration of the soul. One
version of this belief was that during its divine existence,
at which time it dwelled among the gods, the
soul had committed a sin; as punishment, the soul was
locked into a physical body, which acted as its prison.
Until the soul was redeemed, it continued a “circle of
births,” whereby it may find itself first inhabiting a
plant, then an animal, then a human, then a plant
again, and so on.
 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS

8
 PRE-SOCRATIC REVOLUTION
• The pre-Socratic
revolution was a genuine revolution—a paradigm
shift of the first importance
• A monumental
step in human thoughts when natural explanations (logos)
were offered instead of supernatural ones (Mythos).
COSMOLOGY AND COSMOLOGISTS
to the early Greek cosmologists,
the universe was ordered and pleasant to
contemplate.
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 THALES
THALES
• Emphasized on natural explanations and minimized supernatural ones. Thales said
that things in the universe consist of natural substances and are governed by natural
principles; they do not reflect the whims of the Gods.
• Although world appears to be made up of various elements (air, wood, stone, fire
etc)there is in reality only ONE element. The Greeks called this one element Physis.
• This element according to Thales was Water.
• His one area of interest; “what is the nature of reality?”
• According to him the universe was in fact knowable and within the realm of human
understanding.
• He showed that a knowledge of nature, which minimized supernaturalism, could
provide power over the environment, something that humans had been seeking since
dawn of history.
• Perhaps the most important thing about Thales, however, was the fact that he offered
his ideas as speculations and welcomed criticism. He invited people to criticise and
improve on his teachings.
• Interesting Fact: Thales lived near water.
 THALES

Thales: ‘This is how I see

things—how I believe that things are. Try to improve
upon my teaching’”
 HERACLITUS
• Impressed by the fact that everything was constantly changing or in a constant state of
flux.
• Fire is the thing which transforms everything into something else.
• Hence, Fire is the physis.
• Heraclitis was overwhelmed by the fact that nothing ever ‘is’ rather, everything is
‘becoming’
• Heraclitis believed that all things existed somewhere between polar opposites.
Night/Day, Life/Death, Winter/Summer, Up/Down, Heat/Cold. Only through injustice,
justice can be known and only through health, sickness can be known.
• So how can something be known if it is constantly changing?
• Does not knowledge require permanence?
• It was at this point that ‘senses’ became a questionable means of acquiring knowledge.
• Because senses were actually giving us information about constantly changing things.
• So one must understand the process, the truth about BECOMING rather than being
• Is a person empiricist or rationalist if they believe things are ever-changing?
“A man never steps in the same river twice”
• Heraclitus’s philosophy clearly described the major
problem inherent in various brands of empiricism.
• That is, the physical world is in a constant state of flux,
and even if our sense receptors could accurately detect
physical objects and events, we would be aware only of
objects and events that change from moment to
moment.
• It is for this reason that empiricists are said to be
concerned with the process of becoming rather than
with being.
 Being or Becoming
• BEING; A moral doctrine asserting that beyond the flux of changing human opinions
there are eternal truths and values that exist apart from humanity
• Idea of Permenance
• These truths exist in a realm of pure BEING; they simply exist! Changelessly

• BECOMING; no such truths or realms of pure being exist, instead the only constant
thing in this world is CHANGE
• Things never simply ARE but they are always becoming something else
• Those claiming that there are certain permanent and therefore knowable things
about the universe or about humans have tended to be rationalists.
• Those saying that everything in the universe, including humans, is constantly changing
and thus incapable of being known with certainty have tended to be empiricists
 PYTHAGORAS
• First to employ the term philosophy and to refer to himself as a philosopher
• Postulated that the basic explanation for everything in the universe was found in numbers
and in numerical relationships.
• Pythagoras thought health depended on the harmonious blending of bodily elements.
Therefore, illness resulted from a disruption of the body’s equilibrium, and medical
treatment consisted of attempts to restore that equilibrium.

• According to Pythagoreans, nothing is perfect in the empirical world. Perfection is just

found only in the abstract mathematical world that lies beyond the senses and therefore can
be embraced only by reason.

• The Pythagoreans assumed a dualistic universe: One part abstract, permanent, and
intellectually knowable (like proposed by Parmenides) and the other empirical, changing,
and known through the senses (like proposed by Heraclitus)

• Sensory experience, then, cannot, provide knowledge. In fact, such experience interferes
with the attainment of knowledge and should be avoided. Abstract knowledge according to
him was the best knowledge.
 PYTHAGORAS

• Pythagoras’ philosophy provides one of the first clear cut mind body dualisms in the history
of western thought. He claimed that in addition the flesh of the body we have reasoning
powers that allow us to attain an understanding of the abstract world.

• Pythagoras take on Mind-Body problem was that not only does soul exists separate from
body it is in fact being trapped by the body

• Body is a corrupting prison in which the soul was trapped. In an animal’s body a human
soul could be trapped. This is why they were also vegetarians.

• Hence purifying the flesh is needed which can be achieved by dietary restrictions so the
soul could easily attain truth
• Plato was a follower of Pythagoras
• The notion of transmigration fostered in the Pythagoreans a
spirit of kinship with all living things.
• It is for this reason that they accepted women into their
organizations,
• argued for the humane treatment of slaves,
• and were opposed to the maltreatment of animals.
 EMPEDOCLES
Regarded as founder of empiricism
• Believed that sensory sources of human body are “Ducts of understanding”
and information from world gets in brain from them
• However for him mind was in HEART or chest; the sensory information gets
in our bloodstream and hence mixes in us that leads to thinking~ giving a
physical explanation of mental activity
• Instead of one physis there are 4; earth, fire, air and water.
• Love and Strife are two causal powers of the universe. When love dominates
we seek unions, when strife dominates we seek separation
• Empedocles believed that we know reality by observing it (rationalist or
empiricist??)
• His theory of cognition is the most widely held in modern day cognitive
psychology
• Most cognitive psychologists today believes that perceptual processes create
mental representations which in turn influence us and make up our thinking.
• we perceive objects by internalizing copies of them.
 Atomists

• Says that complex ideas in psychology can be analysed as

collections of simpler ideas or even of sensations, that have
been associated together
• This assumption is an integral part of modern day
psychology paradigms, especially behaviourists, except
Gestalt School of thought which says ‘whole is greater than
sum of its parts’