PART FIVE
‘Philosophy, being nothing but the study of wisdom and truth . . .’
George Berkeley
The word philosophy derives from the ancient Greek for ‘love of wisdom’ and describes humanity’s eternal quest to uncover knowledge – about ourselves and the world around us. It is an extraordinarily broad-ranging discipline, encompassing everything from the nature of reality and knowledge to how we ought to behave and what sort of government works best. Nonetheless, William James felt able to reduce it to fairly simple terms, describing it as ‘our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos . . .’ Even as philosophy fails to answer all of our questions, we grow by knowing that which we do know and recognizing that which we don’t. In the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.’
The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers – literally, those who pre-date Socrates – embraced a disparate range of thought and are mostly known to us only through the recollections of later philosophers. Nonetheless, they were key figures in establishing the discipline of philosophy by seeking rational explanations for how and why the world is as it is, rather than relying on religious or mythological narratives.
Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 BCE) is often cited as being the first philosopher because he sought naturalistic explanations for the phenomena he witnessed. Where events in the natural world were considered the result of supernatural forces, he instead sought to understand them through a process of observation and reasoning. His most significant contribution was connected to the theory of monism: the idea that the universe is made from a single basic material. Seeking this ‘source of all things’ (or arche), he concluded that the fundamental building block of the cosmos must be variously capable of change and motion as well as able to support life. Water, he came to believe, was the mysterious ‘source of all things’. While we know this to be incorrect, it nonetheless stands as the first known attempt to decipher the world through reason and not revelation.
Thales’s influence was formidable. His pupil, Anaximander, continued his proto-scientific legacy (along with his friend Anaximenes) and also taught Pythagoras, another of the great Pre-Socratics who (see here) sought order in mathematics. Heraclitus, meanwhile, developed his theory of the Logos – an objective, universal cosmic law – and contended, in opposition to most of his contemporaries who believed in a fundamentally unchanging cosmos, that the universe was in perpetual flux.
Atomism
Other notable figures in the Pre-Socratic tradition included Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Gorgias, Parmenides of Elea, Protagoras, Zeno of Elea, and Democritus, who formulated the theory of atomism. It is through the actions of the atoms and changes in the void that all phenomena – from thoughts and ideas to natural disasters – may be explained. While many of their ideas may seem naïve and overly simplistic now, they were responsible for making vast strides forward in the history of human thought. By seeking answers that fitted with the available evidence and eschewing explanations reliant on supernatural causes, they paved the wave for the golden age of ancient philosophy that began with the emergence of Socrates.