1. Chapter 2: Reality The First Philosophers
Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition
Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

2. The First Greek Philosophers
Ancient philosophical traditions looked beyond ordinary experience for an understanding of “reality”
The first appeared in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.

3. The Ionian Naturalists
Pre-Socratics who lived in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. in and around Greece:
Thales
Everything is water
Anaximander
Ultimate reality: apeiron
Anaximenes
Everything is air

4. Monism, Materialism, and Immaterial “Stuff”
Monism: the attempt to reduce all of the varied things in the world to one kind of thing
All monistic views rely on materialism: reality is ultimately composed of some kind of material "stuff"

5. Heraclitus Conception of an immaterial “stuff”: fire
Fire represents flux or change
Change has a form that underlies all reality, called the logos

6. Democritus
Pluralist: more than one basic “stuff” makes up the universe
Universe is made up of tiny bits of stuff that he called atoms

7. Animism
All of these philosophers also believed in animism: all things, including rocks and animals, are living

8. Pythagoras Pythagoras: numbers are the real nature of things
Reincarnation and immortality of the soul
Emphasis on logic and thought

9. The Appearance/Reality Distinction
Underlying reality thought to be quite different from how the world appears
Thales–all is composed of water
Democritus–the unchanging and indestructible atoms
Heraclitus–perpetual changing world also has logos

10. Parmenides A monistic mathematician
Reality must be eternal and unchanging; therefore, the world of our experience cannot be real
The world of change should not be of interest to philosophy

11. The Sophists
Gorgias: there is no reality, and even if there were, we could not know anything about it
Protagoras: man is the measure of all things, meaning there is no reality except for what we take to be reality
Anticipated both pragmatism and relativism

12. Metaphysics These various theories are called metaphysical doctrines
Ask and attempt to answer the most basic questions about the universe and the “stuff” of which it is composed
Aristotle called this stuff substance
Ontology–concerned with being
Cosmology–studies the universe