Pre-Socratic Philosophers

The pre-Socratics, often called the first philosophers and scientists, explored the basic makeup of the universe.

Date: c. 600-400 b. c.e.

Category: Philosophy

Locale: Magna Graecia (present Greece), western Turkey (Iona), and southern Italy

Summary Inspired by various visions of the origin and order of the universe, these dozen or so early Greek thinkers, called “investigators of nature” by Aristotle and “pre-Socratic philosophers” by later scholars, shared a passion for discovering the root nature of things. Modern knowledge of their ideas is based on fragments of their writings, and scholars recognize that this understanding has been colored by such philosophers as Aristotle, who first analyzed their doctrines.

Through religious myths, ancient Greeks tried to answer such questions as how the universe began, what its composition was, and what caused its order. Repudiating supernatural explanations, the pre-Socratics answered these questions through natural rationales. The earliest pre-Socratics came from Miletus in Ionia. These Milesian philosophers believed that the universe’s unity was grounded in the material of which it was made: For Thales of Miletus, it was water; for Anaximander, the “indefinite”; for Anaximenes, air; and for Heraclitus, fire. Thales’ theory that water is the origin of all things was most likely derived from myths. Anaximander, who was critical of Thales, felt that if water were the originative stuff, then such things as fire could not have come into existence. For Anaximander, the universe was made not of any definite element but of the indefinite. Anaximenes tried to convince his fellow Milesians that the basic stuff was air, which produced all other things through condensation and rarefaction, and he was unbothered by the objection that condensed air is still air. Heraclitus modified the Milesian approach by explaining the unity of things through their structure rather than their material. Although he is famous for saying that no one steps twice into the same river, thus symbolizing his view that all is in flux, he also stressed a basic (though concealed) unity in the world. The river is stable in its flowing, and the flame is constant in its flickering.

Pythagoras was an Ionian who migrated to southern Italy, where he founded a school through which he taught the transmigration of souls and the numerical basis of all reality. According to his followers, he discovered that harmonious musical intervals could be expressed by simple ratios of integers. If music is numerical, then somehow the whole world must be. The Pythagoreans viewed objects as composed of geometrical unit-points (hence, numbers), which constituted lines, planes, and volumes.

Parmenides, who also lived in Italy, continued the pre-Socratics’ investigation into the nature of the ultimate reality. In a poem, he claimed that the only meaningful statement people can make about anything is that “it is.” To say “is not” is to speak nonsense, for not-being is inconceivable: From nothing, nothing comes. Parmenides thus rejected change, since any change caused its subject to be what it was not before.

Other pre-Socratics thought Parmenides’ denial of diversity went against common experience. Accepting the reality of natural heterogeneity, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists proposed a plurality of homogeneous substances to explain the world’s makeup—the four elements of Empedocles (earth, air, fire, and water), the “seeds” of Anaxagoras, and the atoms of Democritus. For centuries, Empedocles’ cosmic system was the most popular of these proposals. Anaxagoras and the atomists produced two different answers to the question of the ultimate composition of matter—the continuous and the discrete. Anaxagoras, like Empedocles, maintained that change is the aggregation and dissemination of matter, but unlike Empedocles, he believed that the ultimate constituents (“seeds”) were so arranged that between any two there was always a third. Unlike atoms, these seeds have no lower size limit.

Atomism, the culmination of the pre-Socratic movement, originated with Leucippus and was developed by Democritus. Unlike Parmenides, the atomists held that not-being, which they called the void, does exist, and furthermore, this void contains an indefinite number of indivisible atoms, which differed only in position, size, and shape.

Significance Though ancient atomism was not a progenitor of the modern scientific atomic theory, the questions that the atomists and other pre-Socratics investigated continued to concern thinkers for the next twenty-five hundred years.

Further Reading

Kirk, G. D., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

McKirahan, R. D. Philosophy Before Socrates. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett,

1994.

Mourelatos, Alexander P. D., ed. The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY.: Doubleday, 1993.

Osborne, Catherine. Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Rhees, Rush. In Dialogue with the Greeks: The Presocratics and Reality. 2 vols. Edited by D. Z. Phillips. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000.

Waterfield, Robin, ed. The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Robert J. Paradowski

See also: Anaxagoras; Anaximander; Anaximenes; Democritus; Empedocles; Heraclitus of Ephesus; Leucippus; Parmenides; Philosophy; Pythagoras; Thales of Miletus.