Mythopoetic World View

• Homer - epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey
• intended to entertain, not to be scientific treatises
• Hesiod - his epic poems included Theogony which established the 12 Gods of Mount Olympus
• capricious gods intervened in lives of humans
• responsible for earthquakes, storms and all natural phenomena

Early Greek Philosophers

Groups of thinkers or scholars began their own critical inquiry into their world:

• was the world made up of one substance or a combination of many?
• what was its shape?
• what was its location in the cosmos?
• where did it come from?
• how were things changed from one form into another?
• and what were the general explanations for phenomena like eclipses and earthquakes?

School of Miletus (Milesians)

• Thales (~625 to ~547 B.C.) - said basic "stuff" was water
• Anaximander (~610 to ~545 B.C.)
• Anaximenes (fl. ~546 B.C.) - said basic "stuff" was air

Significance of the Milesians:

1. they were ASKING A NEW TYPE OF QUESTION: what is the simple underlying reality that can take on a variety of forms to produce the diversity of substances that make up our world?
2. the GODS and personification of phenomena ARE LARGELY LEFT OUT of their explanations or given a more PASSIVE ROLE (not interfering)
3. the beginning of a tradition of CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Milesians began, not only to state their theories, but to defend their ideas against critics

Other scholars

• Heraclitus (fl. ~500 B.C.) - said basic stuff was fire
• Anaxagoras (~500 to ~428 B.C.)
• Empedocles (~490 to ~435 B.C.):

• saw all things made up of four "roots" or elements: fire, air, earth and water
• added two immaterial principles: love and strife which would induce the root elements to join together or separate
• in this way, from fire, air, earth and water: "sprang all things that were and are and shall be, trees, and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fishes and the long-lived gods too, most mighty in their prerogatives. For there are these things alone and running through one another they assume many a shape."

Atomists

• world made up of an infinity of tiny atoms
• reality was a lifeless piece of machinery where material atoms move according to their nature to create everything in the universe
• atomists had a mechanistic world view, devoid of freedom or choice

Pythagoreans

• prominent in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. in southern Italy
• argued that ultimate reality was numerical and not based on anything material
• mathematics was seen as a basic tool to investigate reality

- was orderly and predictable
- things behaved according to their nature = KOSMOS
- gradually replaced, to varying degrees, the mythopoetic world of capricious, divine intervention = CHAOS
- distinction made between the natural and supernatural worlds by these early philosophers

1. Question of Ultimate or Fundamental Reality
   • (see above for various ideas on basic "stuff")
2. Problem of Change
   • HERACLITUS believed everything is in a constant state of flux (no one can step into the same river twice: overall equilibrium or stability may conceal underlying change in the form of counterbalancing forces or a struggle of opposites
   • others, like ZENO disagreed: Zeno applied his refutation specifically to motion or change in space and used the Stadium Paradox to argue all motion is impossible.
   • notion that although we experience things, can experience be trusted?
3. Problem of Knowledge
   • what do we do if the senses cannot be trusted?
   • early philosophers theorized there are 2 kinds of knowledge:
     1. genuine knowledge or truth (i.e. via reason)
     2. and secondary or obscure knowledge (via the senses)

Plato's World of Forms

two worlds exist:

realm of forms or ideas (perfect) and the material realm (imperfect copies of ideas)