The Early Philosophers
The Early Philosophers
The Milesians . The philosopher-scientists whom tradition cites as being the earliest were all sixth-century Milesians, residents of the prosperous city of Miletus on the southern coast of what is now modern Turkey. Information about them is thin, and with the exception of a single phrase quoted nearly a millennium after the fact, we have no direct access to their work. Our fragmentary reports of their theories in fact usually come from summaries written much later, and from authors who had their own motives for attributing one idea or another to a particular thinker. Scholars must exercise extreme caution in presenting Milesian ideas and also in interpreting their meaning.
Heaven and Earth . Available evidence indicates two main directions or aims of Milesian research. On the one hand, they were concerned with the investigation of specific natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, lightning, and the behavior of animals. Here they seem to have collected evidence and searched for the simplest and most comprehensive explanations of what those phenomena were and how they operated. On the other hand, they also had much broader, cosmological interest in the ultimate nature of reality: what the universe is made of, where it came from, and what processes seem to govern how it works. Because of their abiding concern with physical reality, later generations of Greek thinkers referred to them as phusiologoi (natural scientists).
Thales . One of the Milesians, Thales, is said to have explained earthquakes by claiming that the flat disk of the earth floats on an ocean of water whose waves cause violent tremors on the land above. Although the story that he successfully predicted a solar eclipse in the year 585 b.c.e. probably credits him with greater astronomical skill than he actually had, it does point to an early interest in what later Greeks called ta meteora (“the things above the air”). Some sources in fact mention a book by Thales titled Nautical Astronomy—while others claim he wrote two books, On the
Solstice and On the Equinox—but since nothing has survived from any of them, it is impossible to determine their content.
Anaximander . Theories about lightning and thunder are attributed to his younger contemporary, Anaximander. This scholar also developed a theoretical model of the solar system: a flat-topped, cylindrical earth in the middle is surrounded by three concentric rings of fire. These rings are hidden by mist that thins out in spots to make holes through which the fire becomes visible to observers on earth. The closest ring has the greatest number of perforations, and thus offers a glimpse of stars; the next, with only one hole, shows the moon; and the most remote is that of the sun. Eclipses are caused when the holes either narrow or else completely (though always temporarily) close. Anaximander also assigned specific widths to each ring, calculated in terms of the diameter of the earth: the ring of stars is nine times its diameter, while those of the moon and sun are eighteen and twenty-seven times as wide, respectively. The geometrical ratio is important, since it indicates an interest in the use of mathematics as a means of uncovering and measuring physical reality. This interest remained a strong one throughout the history of Greek science.
Human Evolution . Anaximander is also said to have claimed that human beings first arose in a watery environment as fishlike creatures, and took on human shape only after a long period of gestation and development. Though this theory is hardly one of evolution, the account nonetheless suggests that Anaximander might have collected fossils and observed different species of marine life. If nothing else, it points to the great variety and breadth of Milesian interests, encompassing what are now the distinct sciences of physics, geology, meteorology, astronomy, and biology.
Aristotelian Influence . It is for cosmology—the theory of the origin and fundamental nature of the world—that the Milesians are best known. Here, however, the greatest caution is needed, since our main source for Milesian cosmology is the philosopher Aristotle, who lived some two hundred years later. In the course of his research, Aristotle in fact provided what might be called the first history of Greek science and philosophy. Though he is an invaluable source of information that might otherwise have been lost to us, Aristotle also tended to present earlier Greek thinkers as the precursors of his own style of thinking, and this in turn often tended to misrepresent their true ideas and motives.
Material Cause . According to Aristotle, each of the Milesians proposed a different answer to the question of what material things are made of—what he himself called the “material cause” of the world. Thales allegedly said it was water; Anaximander called it the Limitless (afeiron); and a third Milesian thinker, Anaximenes, claimed it was air. What exactly each thinker meant may be impossible to recover, but each was probably asking a different question from the one Aristotle later put forth.
Water . If Thales actually thought water was the key, in the sense of the primary substance out of which all things are made, no indication has survived as to how he explained the transformation of water into everything else in the world. Traditional myths of creation, including those told by the Greeks, usually claimed that the world had emerged from the sea, or else from a kind of watery, primordial soup. Thales himself may have had these traditions in mind in making his own claims. In any case, it may be more likely that he saw water as something that was temporally first in the order of creation, as the earliest source rather than the basic ingredient of things.
THE FIRST MANNED FLIGHT
In the following account, the Roman poet Ovid relates the tale of the tragic escape of Daedalus and Icarus from Crete.
[Daedalus] turned his mind toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature. He laid out feathers in order, first the smallest, a little larger next to it, and so continued, the way that pan-pipes rise in gradual sequence. He fastened them with twine and wax, at middle, at bottom, so, and bent them, gently curving, so that they looked like wings of birds, most surely. And Icarus, his son, stood by and watched him…. When it was done at last, his father hovered, poised, in the moving air, and .taught his son; “I warn you, Icarus, fly a middle course: Don’t go too low, or water will weigh the wings down; don’t go too high, or the sun’s fire will burn them. Keep to the middle way…”
Far off, far down, some fisherman is watching as the rod dips and trembles over the water, some shepherd rests his weight upon his crook, some plowman on the handles of the plowshare, and all look up, in absolute amazement, at those air-borne above. They must be gods!
They were over Samos, Juno’s sacred island, Delos and Paros to the right, and another island, Calymne, rich in honey. And the boy thought This is-wonderfull and left his father, soared higher, higher, drawn to the vast heaven, nearer the sun, and the wax that held the wings melted in that fierce heat, and the bare arms beat up and down in air, and lacking oarage took hold of nothing. “Father!” he cried, and “Father!” until the blue sea hushed him, the dark water men now call the Icarian Sea.
Source : Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University rress, 1955).
Cyclical Approach . With Anaximander the situation is more abstract, since he proposed an indeterminate, limitless material as the origin of what is. Rather than a specific substance, like water or air, however, the apeiron is the indefinite and undifferentiated source of everything in the universe. All things naturally come into existence from it through separation, and also dissolve back into it again at regular intervals. The process by which things emerge and return, moreover, seems to have been bound by a kind of moral principle as well, since Anaximander is said to have written (in what may well be our first direct quote from a Greek thinker) that this happens “according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the arrangement of time.” This theory suggests a grand, cyclic process of generation and destruction that ultimately preserves balance and symmetry, as if a law of conservation were at work.
Anaximenes . Evidence provides no clue whether Thales or Anaximander answered the question of just exactly how the universe came into being from water or the Limitless. It is with the third of the Milesians, Anaximenes, that this issue was addressed. His claim that aêr (“air” or “mist”) is the primary element might at first seem like a step backward from Anaximander’s more abstract apeiron. However, this step allowed the youngest Milesian to propose a mechanism for change. Later accounts report that, according to Anaximenes, the condensation and rarefaction of air bring the basic substances of the world into existence. In the words of a late commentator: “Made finer, air becomes fire; made thicker, it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones. Everything else comes into being from these.”
Creation . With Anaximenes, then, we have what might be called the first account of the mechanics of creation. The creation of the universe, along with all perceptible changes within it, are here reduced to the operation of two simple, physical processes acting on an equally simple, physical material. It is likely that direct, empirical observation of such natural events as evaporation and freezing offered support for his theory and might even have inspired it.
Sources
Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, U.K. &c New York: Penguin, 1987).
Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk and John Earle Raven, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).