Pre-Socratic Philosophy

(1) The Beginnings of Philosophy (2) Parmenides and Heraclitus (3) Philosophy vs. Sophistry

And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature cloud Purple, red, and greeny yellow to behold. Xenophanes, 21B32

Archē: the first principle or element of nature from which all things derive

Lightning steers all things. Heraclitus B64

Anaximander, archē: apeiron, indeterminate stuff The School of Miletus: Thales, archē: water Anaximander, archē: apeiron, indeterminate stuff Anaximenes, archē: air

[With Thales,] a departure from what is in our sensuous experience tales place; man recedes from this immediate existence. (…) [Before Thales,] man has nature before him as water, air, stars, the arch of the heavens; and the horizon of his ideas is limited to this. The imagination has, indeed, its gods, but its content still is natural; the Greeks had considered sun, mountains, earth, sea, rivers etc. as independent powers, revered them as gods, and elevated them by the imagination to activity, movement, consciousness and will.

This wild, endlessly varied imagination of Homer is set at rest by the proposition that existence is water; this conflict of an endless quantity of principles, all these ideas that a particular object is an independent truth, a self-sufficient power over others existing in its own right, are taken away, and it is shown likewise that there is only one universal, the universal self-existent, the simple unimaginative perception, the thought that is one and one alone. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (178-179)

On this [route] there are signs very many, that what-is is ungenerated and imperishable, a whole of a single kind, unshaken, and complete. Parmenides B8, 2-4

Nor was it ever, nor will it be, since it is now, all together one, holding together: For what birth will you seek out for it? How and from what did it grow? From what-is-not I will allow you neither to say nor to think: For it is not to be said or thought that it is not. What need would have roused it, later or earlier, having begun from nothing, to grow? … And the decision about these things is in this: is or is not; and it has been decided, as is necessary, to leave the one [route] unthought of and unnamed (for it is not a true route), so that the other [route] is and is genuine. Thus coming-to-be has been extinguished and perishing cannot be investigated. Parmenides B8, 5-21

This kosmos, the same for all, none of gods nor humans made, but it was always and is and shall be: an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures. Heraclitus B30 All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. Heraclitus B90

The same thing is both living and dead, and waking and sleeping, and young and old; for these things transformed are those, and those transformed back again are these. Heraclitus, B88 We step into and we do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are not. Heraclitus B49a Changing it rests. Heraclitus B84a

But even if it should be comprehended it cannot be expressed to another. For if things-that-are are visible and audible and generally perceptible and in fact are external objects, and of these the visible are comprehended by vision and the audible by hearing and not vice versa, how can these be communicated to another? For that by which we communicate is logos, but logos is not the objects, the things-that-are. Therefore it is not the case that we communicate things-that-are to our neighbors, but logos, which is different from the objects. So just as the visible could not become audible and vice versa, thus, since what-is is an external object, it could not become our logos. But if it were not logos, it would not have been revealed to another… Gorgias, On Nature, or On What is Not