1. Pre-Socratics

2. GREEK PHILOSOPHY
They were interested in finding the unity in life-in both the material world and the spiritual world.
WHO AM I
WHAT IS THE WORLD COMPOSED OF
WHERE DID I COME FROM
WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE

3. Humanism in Philosophy
The social, religious, and political atmosphere made Greek philosophy possible.
The world is orderly (by observation) and Greeks search to figure out why
Unity within diversity-what holds reality together
The search for the unifying factor would lead the Greeks to search outside the divine realm and focus on what people can do.
Hesiod (both divine will and human will)Heraclitus (divine logos/thought allows us to understand reality)Plato (the forms are a perfect reflection of reality; humans know the imperfect world via the knowledge of these forms; therefore reality is a reflection of human thoughts/reason)Aristotle (Plato’s student; reject forms; only know reality by material world; like Heraclitus, the world is changing; human workmanship can mimic the changing world therefore human work is an extension of the divine)
Cosmos is orderly and philosophy is seeking to find that order.
What is the unifying substance to reality?
Pre-Socratics began to look at the material world rather than divine.
All the major philosophers had different ideas
Heraclitus: logos is the unifying factor in reality. It is a reflection of our thoughts.
Our rationality is perfect given by a perfect god therefore humans are capable of creating our own destinies.
Aristotle extended the divine to include material products of humanity because it was able to mimic the changing world.
The humanism would influence the Renaissance 2,000 years later and see the perfect as an outgrowth of human achievement.

4. Causes of Philosophy Miletus: Ionian city-state
Freedom of Thought promoted by:
Religion:
Not state-centric but dealt with in families
Homer wasn’t dogma (not quite like a Bible)
Politics
Written laws promoted rational debate
Written language not class specific
Miletus: Ionian city-state
Contact with Greece and the Near East
Astronomy, Orientalizing pottery, alphabet, religion
Continuous Greek culture passed down through the Mycenaean period
“Homeric” social structure, language, epics, and culture
Wealthy polis (shipping, trade, industry)
Aristocratic and secular
More causes for the beginnings of philosophy, science, and humanism/independence
Freedom of thought in absence of organized religion.
Reason promoted through written laws
Wealth encouraged specialization and leisure
Written language not class specific
Contact with other countries

5. Hesiod vs Thales the dark age and archaic connection
Wrote Works and Days and Theogony
these works give us the daily life and religion of the Dark Ages
More concerned about divine causes rather than natural causes (very oriental-copied Enuma Elish)
But order is seen as an outgrowth of human motivation rather than divine will
Early vestiges of Greek independence and arête.
Mixture of both divine will and human will
The gods ruled the world and Hesiod didn’t attempt to explain the world naturally
However, people were rather in charge of their own destiny
Humanism: humans are responsible for their own lives-not the gods

6. Pre-Socratics

7. Pre-Socratics: Humanism
Natural origins of life.
The divine wasn’t abandoned, however.
The search for the unifying factor would ultimately come down to the Logos and the Forms.
Humanism in the actual philosophy
Moved away from the Near Eastern ideas that the divine was a part of the general makeup of the world. For those in the Near East, gods were inseparable from the physical word. The sky was a god. The earth was a god. A god didn’t exist until it had a physical function and vice versa.
However, they weren’t abandoning the divine all together. They would develop a concept that a divine being was in charge of imbuing the material world with part of its divinity.
Thales: Water was the origin of life. In all things, seen in all three states. No beginning and thus divine
Pythagoras: Math was perfection. The soul was perfect reflection of god-a perfect being-therefore the soul was perfect. Only the soul is perfect and all material life are reflection of the perfect being.
Heraclitus: Logos is a unifying soul present in all things. It is the rational thoughts present in humanity and given by the divine. It is through our rational thoughts that we can understand the imperfect world. Even though all things change, we can still understand the world by understanding these divine rational ideas present within us.
The search for the unifying factor would lead the Greeks to search outside the divine realm and focus on what people can do.
Hesiod (both divine will and human will)Heraclitus (divine logos/thought allows us to understand reality)Plato (the forms are a perfect reflection of reality; humans know the imperfect world via the knowledge of these forms; therefore reality is a reflection of human thoughts/reason)Aristotle (Plato’s student; reject forms; only know reality by material world; like Heraclitus, the world is changing; human workmanship can mimic the changing world therefore human work is an extension of the divine)

8. To be or not to be; whatever is, is the Beginnings of Greek thought
Quest for order (Cosmos), unity within diversity, and monarchy
Searched within the material world and abandoned the divine
Early beginnings of science
What is the monarchy?
Physical one or many
Immaterial one or many

9. Thales Founder of Greek philosophy and science
Water was either the main material or the main source of all things
Has no beginning and thus is divine
Three states of being and all things need it (therefore all share in the divine)
A “soul” connects all things and is the cause of motion
Eclipse: May 28, 585 BC according to Herodotus’ account. Probably came from Babylon either by Thales visiting or vice versa.
Math: perhaps introduced the concept of proofs

10. Heraclitus “All things are in flux”
The only constant is change represented by fire
He is still looking at the material world for a unifying composition
Logos: what connects all people
Logos=Word/Reason/Thought
Thoughts were seen as part of the divine; perfect representations of reality given by “god” and therefore humans can understand reality
Logos is related to the word “to speak” word, statement, or story. Because to speak is related to reason, rationality, thoughts, arguments…etc. it can also be used for these things.
Language mirrors reality
Fire is the unifying principle

11. Parmenides What is not-is not. What is-is.
What is not –is not and can never be. Something can’t come from nothing. Coming into existence and ceasing to exist are impossible.
The appearance of the world is deceptive
Reality is “the one” unchanging, ungenerated, and indestructible
Movement and change is deceptive
Only truth is reason (logos) not senses
Parmenides' only known work, a poem written in hexameter verse around 475 B.C. and entitled "On Nature", has only survived in fragmentary form, with approximately 150 of the original 3,000 lines of text remaining today. It is divided into two main sections, describing the two ways or two views of reality, "The Way of Truth" (which accounts for most of the surviving lines) and "The Way of Appearance/Opinion", along with an introduction. Parmenides argued in favour of the Way of Truth and against The Way of Appearance.
In the poem, Parmenides argued that the every-day perception of the reality of the physical world is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is "the One", an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole. Likewise, the phenomena of movement and change are simply appearances of the real static, eternal reality. He further asserted that the truth cannot be known through sensory perception, only through pure reason ("Logos").
Parmenides set out the heart of his case in a worldview that (even by the standards of philosophy) is, according to Aristotle, "near to madness". He argued as follows: "What-is-not" does not exist. Since anything that comes into being must arise out of"what-is-not", objects cannot come into being. Likewise, they cannot pass away, because in order to do so they would have to enter the realm of "what-is-not". Since it does not exist, "what-is-not" cannot be the womb of generation, or the tomb of that which perishes. The "no-longer" and the "not-yet" are therefore variants of "what-is-not", and so the past and future do not exist either. Change, then, is impossible.
Equally, his argument continued, multiplicity is unreal, because the empty space necessary to separate one object from another would be another example of "what-is-not". And since things cannot be anything to a greater or lesser degree (which would require "what-is" to be mixed with the diluting effect of "what-is-not"), the universe must be homogeneous, a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Also, it must be finite and spherical, for it cannot be in one direction any more than in another (and the sphere is the only figure of which this can be said).
Thus, by a strictly deductive argument, Parmenides asserted that change is impossible, and that coming-into-existence or ceasing-to-exist are likewise impossible, so that everything that exists is permanent, ungenerated, indestructible and unchanging. His argument refutes all accounts of the origin of the world, and represents an early type of Monism.
Parmenides therefore made the ontological argument against nothingness, essentially denying the possible existence of a void, which led Leucippus and Democritus to propose their theory of Atomism (that everything in the universe is either atoms or voids) specifically to contradict his argument.

12. Pythagoras Later Gnostics merged his philosophy:
Soul is divine
Math was perfection; Geometry was the beginning of all things
Music was mathematical
Soul and world consisted of geometric shapes
Soul was perfect but if body was out of alignment soul would be tainted
Transmigration of souls (reincarnation until you recognize Truth)
Soul was the perfect reflection of “god”; body imperfect
Later Gnostics merged his philosophy:
Spiritual and Physical dualism (spiritual is perfect while physical imperfect)
Augustine would use Pythagoras and Plato’s idea of the soul and body to understand Christianity
From Samos 570.
His followers identified three types of people: gods, people, and people like Pythagoras
Died out in the 4th century except with the influence of Plato from the tyrant Archytas in Tarentum
Neopythagoreans in 50 BC through third century AD (took religious superstitions, numerological aspects and combined Plato) later absorbed into the Neo-Platonists in the third century
Divine soul continuation with the other pre-Socratics (all their unifying characteristics were made to be eternal and thus divine)
If the soul becomes to connected with the body, if the body become ill it will also die…however the soul was perfection and thus would survive outside the body at death. Need to care for all souls because we are all connected. Strive for the best possible care of one’s body/self to promote unity with the divine and stop reincarnations. Later the idea of Logos will mean equality of all people or a Natural Law for the Stoics and Enlightenment philosophers.
Christian thought: complicated! There was an intertwining with the early Christian fathers (Augustine and Aquinas) as well as others into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.