10 Origins of Greek Philosophy
The Pre-Socratics
Video
Review Video — The Ionian Origins of Greek Philosophy by Daniel Riaño (11)
About 600 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia were the intellectual and cultural leaders of Greece and the number one sea-traders of the Mediterranean. Miletus, the southernmost Ionian city, was the wealthiest of Greek cities and the main focus of the “Ionian awakening” — a name for the initial phase of classical Greek civilization, coincidental with the birth of Greek philosophy.
The first group of Greek philosophers is a triad of Milesian thinkers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Their main contribution was the development and application of theory purely based on empirical observation of natural phenomena. They seemed to all agree on the notion that all things come from a single “primal origin or substance.” Thales believed it was water; Anaximander said it was a substance different from all other known substances, “infinite, eternal and ageless;” and Anaximenes claimed it was air.
Observation was important among the Milesian school. Thales predicted an eclipse, which took place in 585 BCE, and it seems he had been able to calculate the distance of a ship at sea from observations taken at two points. Anaximander, based on the fact that human infants are helpless at birth, argued that if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived: therefore, humans have evolved from other animals whose offspring are fitter. The science among Milesians was stronger than their philosophy and somewhat rudimentary, but it encouraged observation in many subsequent thinkers and was also a good stimulus to approach in a rational fashion many of the traditional questions that had previously been answered through myth, thus ushering in the epistemological and metaphysical world of the later philosophers. (3)
Aristotle, Metaphysics
Reading from Aristotle, Metaphysics
Book One: Section 1.983b–1.990a.
Most of the earliest philosophers conceived only of material principles as underlying all things. That of which all things consist, from which they first come and into which on their destruction they are ultimately resolved, of which the essence persists although modified by its affections — this, they say, is an element and principle of existing things. Hence, they believe that nothing is either generated or destroyed, since this kind of primary entity always persists. Similarly, we do not say that Socrates comes into being absolutely when he becomes handsome or cultured, nor that he is destroyed when he loses these qualities; because the substrate, Socrates himself, persists. In the same way nothing else is generated or destroyed; for there is some one entity (or more than one) which always persists and from which all other things are generated. All are not agreed, however, as to the number and character of these principles. (12)
The Milesians, Thales and Anaximander
Thales, the founder of this school o