Philosophy Manuscript (raw and unedited)

The Early Greek Philosophy

Philosophy is commonly known as the rational and critical inquiry into basic principles.  As used originally by the ancient Greeks, the term philosophy meant the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.  Philosophy comprised all areas of speculative thought and included the arts, sciences, and religion.  As special methods and principles were developed in the various areas of knowledge, each area acquired its own philosophical aspect, giving rise to the philosophy of art, of science, and of religion.

The term philosophy is often used popularly to mean a set of basic values and attitudes toward life, nature, and society —thus the phrase philosophy of life.  Because the lines of distinction between the various areas of knowledge are flexible and subject to change, the definition of the term philosophy remains a subject of controversy.

The Ionian School

The first philosopher of historical record was Thales (625 B.C.- 546 B.C.). A Greek Philosopher born in the City of Miletus, on the Ionian Coast of Asia Minor.  He was the founder of Greek philosophy, and was considered one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.  Thales became famed for his knowledge of astronomy after predicting the eclipse of the sun that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C..  He is also said to have introduced geometry in Greece.

According to Thales, the original principle of all things is water, from which everything proceed and into which everything is again resolved.  Before Thales, explanations of the universe were mythological, and his concentration on the basic physical substance of the world marks the birth of scientific thought.  Thales left no writings; knowledge of him is derived from an account in Aristotle's Metaphysics. 

Anaximander, a disciple of Thales, maintained that the first principle from which all things evolve is an intangible, invisible, infinite substance that he called apeiron, ”the boundless.”  He realized, however, that no observable substance could be found in all things; thus his notion of the boundless anticipated the modern notion of an unbounded universe.  This substance, he maintained, is eternal and indestructible.  Out of its ceaseless motion the more familiar substances, such as warmth, cold, earth, air, and fire, continuously evolve, generating in turn the various objects and organisms that make up the recognizable world.

The third great Ionian philosopher, Anaximenes, returned to Thales' assumption that the primary substance is something familiar and material, but he claimed it to be air rather than water.  He believed that the changes things undergo could be explained in terms of rarefaction and condensation of air.  Thus Anaximenes was the first philosopher to explain qualitative differences in terms of quantitative differences, a method fundamental to physical science.

In general, the Ionian school made the initial radical step from mythological to scientific explanation of natural phenomena; it discovered the important scientific principles of the permanence of substance, the natural evolution of the world, and the reduction of quality to quantity.

The Pythagorean School

Pythagoras considered as the first true mathematician.  He established a movement with religious, political, and philosophical aims, known as Pythagoreanism in 6th-century B.C. in Southern Italy that emphasized the study of mathematics as a means to understanding all relationships in the natural world. The followers of this movement, Pythagoreans, were the first to teach that the earth is a sphere revolving around the sun.  Born on the island of Samos, Pythagoras was instructed in the teachings of the early Ionian philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.  Pythagoras is said to have been driven from Samos by his disgust for the tyranny of Polycrates.  His philosophy is known only through the work of his disciples.

The Pythagoreans adhered to certain mysteries, similar in many respects to the Orphic mysteries.  Obedience and silence, abstinence from food, simplicity in dress and possessions, and the habit of frequent self-examination were prescribed.  The Pythagoreans believed in immortality and in the transmigration of souls.  Pythagoras himself was said to have claimed that he had been Euphorbus, a warrior in the Trojan War, and that he had been permitted to bring into his earthly life the memory of all his previous existences.

Among the extensive mathematical investigations carried on by the Pythagoreans were their studies of odd and even numbers and of prime and square numbers.  From this arithmetical standpoint they cultivated the concept of number, which became for them the ultimate principle of all proportion, order, and harmony in the universe.  Through such studies they established a scientific foundation for mathematics.  In geometry the great discovery of the school was the hypotenuse theorem, or Pythagorean theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

The astronomy of the Pythagoreans marked an important advance in ancient scientific thought, for they were the first to consider the earth as a globe revolving with the other planets around a central fire.  They explained the harmonious arrangement of things as that of bodies in a single, all-inclusive sphere of reality, moving according to a numerical scheme.  Because the Pythagoreans thought that the heavenly bodies are separated from one another by intervals corresponding to the harmonic lengths of strings, they held that the movement of the spheres gives rise to a musical sound.

The Heraclitean School

Heraclitus (540B.C. – 480 B.C.), a Greek philosopher, who believed that fire is the primordial source of matter and that the entire world is in a constant state of change.  He was born in Ephesus, an ancient Greek city in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey.  Because of the loneliness of his life and the obscurity and misanthropy of his philosophy, he is also called the dark philosopher or weeping philosopher.

Heraclitus was in a sense one of the founders of Greek metaphysics, although his ideas stem from those of the Ionian school of Greek philosophy.  He postulated fire as the primal substance or principle that, through condensation and rarefaction, creates the phenomena of the sensible world.  Heraclitus added to the being of his predecessors the concept of becoming, or flux, which he took to be a basic reality underlying all things, even the most apparently stable.  In ethics he introduced a new social emphasis, holding virtue to consist in a subordination of the individual to the laws of a universal, reasonable harmony. Although his thinking was strongly influenced by popular theology, Heraclitus attacked the concepts and ceremonies of the popular religion of his day.

The Eleatic School

In the 5th century B.C., Parmenides founded a school of philosophy at Elea, a Greek colony on the Italian peninsula.  Parmenides took a position opposite from that of Heraclitus on the relation between stability and change, maintaining that the universe, or the state of being, is an indivisible, unchanging, spherical entity and that all reference to change or diversity is self-contradictory. Nothing, he claimed, can be truly asserted except that being is.  On the other hand, Zeno of Elea, a disciple of Parmenides, tried to prove the unity of being by arguing that the belief in the reality of change, diversity, and motion leads to logical paradoxes.  The paradoxes of Zeno became famous intellectual puzzles that philosophers and logicians of all subsequent ages have tried to solve.  The concern of the Eleatics with the problem of logical consistency laid the basis for the development of the science of logic.

The Pluralists

The speculation about the physical world begun by the Ionians was continued in the 5th century B.C. by Empedocles and Anaxagoras, who developed a philosophy replacing the Ionian assumption of a single primary substance with an assumption of a plurality of such substances.  Empedocles maintained that all things are composed of four irreducible elements: air, water, earth, and fire, which are alternately combined and separated by two opposite forces, love and strife.  By that process the world evolves from chaos to form and back to chaos again, in an eternal cycle.

Empedocles regarded the eternal cycle as the proper object of religious worship and criticized the popular belief in personal deities, but he failed to explain the way in which the familiar objects of experience could develop out of elements that are totally different from them.  Anaxagoras therefore suggested that all things are composed of very small particles, or seeds, which exist in infinite variety.  To explain the way in which these particles combine to form the objects that constitute the familiar world, Anaxagoras developed a theory of cosmic evolution.  He maintained that the active principle of this evolutionary process is a world mind that separates and combines the particles.  His concept of elemental particles led to the development of an atomic theory of matter.

The Atomists

It was a natural step from pluralism to atomism, the theory that all matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles differing only in simple physical properties such as size, shape, and weight.  This step was taken in the 4th century B.C. by Leucippus and his more famous associate Democritus, who is generally credited with the first systematic formulation of an atomic theory of matter.  His conception of nature was thoroughly materialistic, explaining all natural phenomena in terms of the number, shape, and size of atoms.  He thus reduced the sensory qualities of things, such as warmth, cold, taste, and odor, to quantitative differences among atoms.  The higher forms of existence, such as plant and animal life and even human thought, were explained by Democritus in these purely physical terms.  He applied his theory to psychology, physiology, theory of knowledge, ethics, and politics, thus presenting the first comprehensive statement of deterministic materialism, in which all aspects of existence are claimed to be rigidly determined by physical laws.

The Sophists

Towards the end of the 5th century B.C., a group of traveling teachers called Sophists became famous throughout Greece.  The Sophists played an important role in developing the Greek city-states from agrarian monarchies into commercial democracies.  As Greek industry and commerce expanded, a class of newly rich, economically powerful merchants began to wield political power. Lacking the education of the aristocrats, they sought to prepare themselves for politics and commerce by paying the Sophists for instruction in public speaking, legal argument, and general culture.

Although the best of the Sophists made valuable contributions to Greek thought, the group as a whole acquired a reputation for deceit, insincerity, and demagoguery.  Thus the word sophistry has come to signify these moral faults. The famous maxim of Protagoras, one of the leading Sophists, that man is the measure of all things, is typical of the philosophical attitude of the Sophist school.

Sophists held that individuals have the right to judge all matters for themselves.  They denied the existence of an objective knowledge that everyone can be expected to believe, asserted that natural science and theology are of little or no value because they have no impact on daily life, and declared that ethical rules need be followed only when it is to one's practical advantage to do so.

Philosophy etymologically denotes “love of wisdom” in Greek but there are a lot of meanings and usage that tries to capture the full meaning of philosophy.  Some would say that it denotes the use of reason, while some would argue that such is a set of principles that governs human behavior, existence, perception and the material universe.  At the moment, all of them are partially right and maybe a hundred years from now, all of them could be absolutely wrong.

Philosophy tries to define what is the truth?  Philosophy is applied in religion, science, ethics as well as politics.  The first body of knowledge is bracketed as philosophy.  Branching out and specifications came after philosophy, but suffice it to say that at first, everything was considered a trunk of philosophy.

Philosophy includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, esthetics, ethics, politics and metaphysics.

Very briefly, logic is the study of ideal method in thought and in research.  These include observation and introspection; deduction and induction; hypothesis and experiment; and analysis and synthesis.  

Esthetics is the study of ideal form or beauty; this is more focus on the philosophy of art.

Ethics is the study of ideal conduct.  Here, the highest form of knowledge – is the knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

Politics is the study of ideal social organization and the way power is exercised.

Metaphysics is the study of “ultimate reality” of all things.  This deals about the real nature and final nature of matter, mind, and inter-relationship of mind and matter.

Though there were other philosophers before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  The relevant philosophers were always the aforementioned.

Socrates (C. 470 – 399 BC)

“One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing”

He is one of the most influential and remarkable figures of ancient Greece.  Some would argue that he is the first martyr of philosophy because, literally, he died in defense of what he believe is right.

The famous saying that could really be attributed to Socrates is the Greek maxim of “gnothi seauton” which literally means “know thyself”.  It was from his teaching philosophy that Socratic Method was lifted.  This method pertains to the asking of basic questions such as “What is justice?” “What is beauty?” “What is order?” and from such basic questions were the answers which finally becomes the platform for the definition of concepts, ideas, perceptions which later becomes further platforms for discussion and clarification.

Legends have it that Socrates always starts his lectures with the question to ti? (Which literally means “what is it”?)

The heir of Socrates in terms of pedagogy and philosophy is Plato.  There is no known work of Socrates that is published, much of what the world knows stems from the writings of his student Plato, who through his works had a character named (incidentally, also Socrates).  In the writings of Plato, the character of Socrates speaks of volumes about pertinent things, making it difficult to discern whether it is still Socrates who is speaking or Plato through the character of Socrates.

Socrates is always fixated on definition.  If you could define a concept or an idea then you understand it.  If you cannot define it then you simply have no idea what you are talking about.  For him, definition is a clear and a fixed concept.  Accordingly, the facilitation of knowledge is the main function of a teacher, the symbolism here is just that teachers are just like midwifes who assist in the birth of knowledge.

For Socrates, knowledge and virtue were the same thing.  If virtue has to do with “making the soul as good as possible”, it is first necessary to know what makes the soul good.  Therefore, goodness and knowledge are closely related.  But Socrates said more about morality than simply his.  He is in fact identified goodness and knowledge, saying that to know the good is to do the good, and that knowledge is virtue.  By identifying knowledge and virtue, Socrates meant also to say that vice, or evil, is the absence of knowledge.  Just as knowledge is virtue, so, too, vice is ignorant.  The outcome of this line of reasoning was Socrates’ conviction that no one ever indulged vice or committed and evil act knowingly.  Wrong doing, he said is always involuntary, being the product of ignorance (Stumpf and Fieser, 2005).

Socrates was charged with the following from which he was declared guilty:

1.    Of not worshipping the gods whom the state worships, for introducing new and unfamiliar religious practices;

2.   And, further, of corrupting the young.

He could have gone into voluntary exile, but instead, he went on and faced the enumerated charges.  He defended himself before a jury of about five hundred.  His defense was recorded by Plato through this work Apology.  The Apology showed the motives of his accusers and the inadequacy of their charges.

Plato writes in his Phaedo that “Socrates felt himself, and said that when it came to his heart, he should be gone.  He was already growing cold… and spoke for the last time.  Crito, he said, I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it…  Such was the end… of our friend, a man, I think, who was, of all the men of his time, the best, the wisest and the most just” (Stumpf and Fieser, 2005).

Plato (c. 429 – 347 BC)

He was one of the most prominent and remarkable student of Socrates.  He was the author of “Dialogues”, “Republic”, and “Laws” among others.  Similar to Socrates, he utilizes a Socratic method of teaching where instruction was facilitated by questions.

Historically, Plato was the first one to mention “utopia” (which denotes perfection where there is no want) in his writing and that such is impossible to attain because men are not content with simple life, because man by nature is acquisitive, ambitious, competitive and jealous; they soon tire with what they have and pine for what they have not, and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others (Durant, 1926).

Accordingly, human behavior flows from three sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.  The seat of desire is the loins, the seat of emotion is the heart and the seat of emotion is head.

In the book, the Republic, he advocated that the state is best served when it is ruled by philosopher - kings.  People who would later become rulers must be trained while they are children and accordingly must ascend to the next level until such time that they are ready to assume the mettle of power.  Families will be abolished, every child will be the children of all, and people who are physically and intellectually gifted must be allowed to father as many children as they can.

His other literary output includes Dialogues (early dialogues, middle and late dialogues), Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras and Phaedo, which became the platform of his metaphysics where he postulated the existence of unchanging and eternal objects; each form Plato regarded as the indivisible essence of particular thing or concept.

Democracy in the eyes of Plato means the perfect equality of opportunity especially in education.  Career will be open wherever, whoever, regardless of sex.  Plato died at the age of 80.  While attending a marriage ceremony, he simply slept in the corner and never woke up.

The most enduring contribution of Plato is the establishment of his school which he calls the “Academy” which became the basis of the present academic set-up or nomenclature. 

Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

“We are what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an act but a habit”.

Aristotle basically is a medical doctor by profession.  He became the teacher of Alexander the Great of Macedonia and he also founded a school called “Lyceum”.

He started the practice of collecting manuscripts, paving the way for the first recorded collection of works enough to sustain the tag of a library.  Aristotle is also the father of a relatively new science, which is now known as logic, “the art and science of correct thinking”.  Indirectly, he is also the father of syllogism (e.g. Francisco is a man, all men are rational beings, therefore – Francisco is a rational being).

Aristotle is so talented and productive that he is even credited to have fathered biology, embryology, and even organon (the organ or instrument of correct thinking).

He talked about the free will and the immortality of the soul and that the aim of life is not goodness but happiness.  He is also an advocate of medan agan, which means nothing in excess.  He also postulated that happiness is multiplied when it is shared.

One of the main tenets of his philosophy is that males are superior to females.  In his familiar generalization, he said that development of speech led to the development of society, the development of society led to the development of intelligence, the development of intelligence led to the development of order and the development of order led to the development of civilization.

After the sudden death of Alexander the Great, Aristotle was sent into exile where he died and with the death of the abovementioned, signaled the progressive demise of the Greek Empire.