The document explores the origins of Western philosophy, focusing on early Greek thinkers like Thales, Anaximander, and Plato, who sought to understand the nature of reality and change. It contrasts their ideas with contemporaneous Eastern philosophies and discusses the transition from a god-centered worldview to one influenced by observation and reasoning. Key themes include the pursuit of knowledge, the essence of existence, and the philosophical debates around materialism and morality.

1. PHL 215
Week One

2. What is this?

3. Why Greece?
1. No Priestly class censuring everything
2. After great tales like Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey, they had great imaginations (also
“theater” – Ten Greek Plays)
3. True seasons made them aware of change
4. An awareness to the point of pessimism
(Palmer, 1988)

4. Did it start with an
eclipse?
• It was May 28, 585 BCE – The sun grew dark!
– Thales may not have actually predicted the eclipse, but did
set the solstices and the seasons
– Wrote book on eclipses and other things.
– May have taught the earth was round ( O’Grady, 2004)
• Four primary elements: Water, Fire, Air, and Earth
• Old Gods no longer involved.
• If change occurs, and it does, there must be one thing that
changes more
– Must be water (water, steam, ice, deltas, wind)
– Either way, there was one ultimate substance (Palmer, 1988)

5. What else was going on?
• In the East
– Lao Tzu (ca. 600 BCE)
– Confucius (551-479 BCE)
– Buddha (563-483 BCE)
• In the Middle East
– Around 369 BCE second temple started (Ezra and
Nehemiah)
– Zoroaster (ca 600 BCE)

6. What’s it all about?
• What is the nature of reality?
• What is the nature of change?

7. More Pre-Socratics
Anaximander (c 610-546)
• If water, then all would have
returned to water
• Must be something else, not
a primary element
• Must be some unlimited but
indeterminate stuff
• But, this is no better than
nothing and nothing means
the search continued.
Anaximenes (c.545)
• Condensation and rarefaction
• Must be air, between the two
These three = The Milesians – First school
Core of Western thinking:
• Must be simple explanations
• Natural, non religious explanations
• Use observation to support ideas
• One, primary substance.

8. More Pre-Socratics
• Pythagoras (572-500)
– Human beans
– Music of the spheres
– Numbers rule! a2 + b2 = c2
• Heraclitus (C. 470)
– Element is fire, but reality is not things, but a process of
birth and death
– “Can’t step in the same river twice” “everything changes
but change itself – very pessimistic
– There is, though, a logic controlling all

9. Elements Rule

10. More Pre-Socratics:
Change? What change?
• Parmenides (c. 515-c. 440)
– Can’t step in the same river once
– Being is and cannot be where being is not
– Motion involves being going from where it is to where it is
not, thus impossible
• Zeno (c 490)
– Reductio ad absurdum
– Can’t get there from here.
– Achilles and a Tortoise
– Just can’t trust the senses and may challenge to monism

11. More Pre-Socratics
• Pluralists – more than one thing?
• Empedocles ( - c.440)
– Still 4 elements (roots), but needed to explain force behind
change
– Love and Strife (later adopted by Freud – Eros and Thanos)
– Love = unity / strife = destruction
– First theory of evolution – things destroyed can come back
together as monsters – survival of those who could.
• Anaxagoras (c. 500 – C.428)
– Not roots, but infinite seeds
– All objects contain some of all seeds, but one kind predominates
– Held together by nous, some intelligent order

12. Forces anyone?
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/funfor.html

13. More Pre-Socratics
• Leucippus (C 460 to ?) and Democritus (C. 460 – C. 370)
– All composed of “atoms” – Indivisible stuff
– These things are indestructible and move about in empty
space.
– Hard core determinism.
– Nothing exists but material things and there is no freedom
• Huge shift in cultural thinking from God ruled to something
else and
– Shift in political climates as aristocracy gave way to
merchants
– Birth of democracy

14. Sophists - Rhetoric
• Protagoras (ca 490 – ca. 422)
– Man is the measure of all things – relative to human
subjectivity
• Gorgias (Ca. 483-375)
– “there is nothing; If there was anything, no one could
know it.; and if anyone did know it, no one could
communicate it” (Palmer, 1988, p. 45)
– Proved nothing can be proved
• Callicles – morality is weak shackling the strong
• Critias- clever rulers trick the weak through fear of gods
• Thrasymachus – might makes right.

15. Enter Plato (Socrates)
• Socrates (469-399 BCE)
– Character or person?
– Wisest man alive, so says the Oracle
– Liked to ask questions he could not answer
– Death on a 280 to 220 vote
• Enter Plato (427-347 BCE)
– Started The Academy
– Teacher to Aristotle
– Otherworldly

16. The cave
• Watch this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTWwY8O
k5I0
• and in teams Read and answer:
– Who are the prisoners?
– What is the light?
– Why would those who remained try to kill
the enlightened one?
– What does that mean for reality?

17. Plato’s FORMS
Chair

18. Plato’s Simile of the line
Pure reason
The FORMS
Understanding
Concepts
Belief
Particular
Objects
KNOWLEDGE
OPINION
Conjecture
Epistemology (what can be
known)
Images
The
Intelligible
World
The visible
world
Ontology (what is real)

19. Oh, no you didn’t
•
•
•
•
•
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Plato’s student
Alexander the Great’s tutor for a while
Founded The Lyceum
Very different ideas of reality and
knowledge

20. Aristotle’s Forms
• Changing things are not changing because they are poor imitations of
what is unchanging
• Difference between form and matter however
– Separated only in thought
– They are IN the world
– Form (whatness) + matter (thisness) = Object in real world

21. Aristotle’s Causes
• Material Cause
– The stuff a thing is made of
– Clay
• Formal Cause
– Essence, form, what it “wants” to be
– A pot (mind of potter, or in the object)
• Efficient Cause
– Change causing force
– Potter’s hands
• Final Cause
– Ultimate purpose
– Antique Road show

22. So, what is real?
The great dichotomy
•
•
•
•
•
Plato/Socrates
Other worldly
Knowing is remembering
Mystical forces at work
Just seems to go on
•
•
•
•
•
Aristotle
This worldly
Explainable forces
Prime mover
Teleological – goal oriented

23. So?
• Of what is ultimate reality composed?
• What can be known and how can we
know it?
• Whose values are better?
• Does it all add up?

24. References
• O’Grady, P. (2004). Thales of Miletus. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retrieved from the IEP, http://www.iep.utm.edu/thales/
• Palmer, D. (1988). Looking at philosophy: The unbearable heaviness of
philosophy made lighter. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Pub. Co.