Ancient Greek Philosophy

Front 1

Thales

Back 1

Material monist/Naturalist. The one that creates the many is Water. Everything is water and all comes from water.

Hint 1

Objections to Thales:

1) If all is water, then how can there be dryness? Fire? Thirst?

2) Even if this is correct it leaves unanswered the question of how water becomes the many things of experience. What process or mechanism is at work?

Front 2

Monism

Back 2

What is there really?

There is just one kind of thing in the world.

Front 3

Milesian Naturalists

Back 3

Material monists and naturalists. Just one thing, matter related.

Naturalism: The world can be explained by reference to things within it.

Front 4

Logos

Back 4

Rational account/ study of/ intelligibility.

A logos involves reducing the plurality to a unity, some one unifying principle a material arche.

The origins of all appearances, what all the appearances come from. And the constituent stuff of all appearances.

Front 5

Anaximander

Back 5

Refuted Thales because water is too specific, invariable and particular to account for everything. Cannot substitute with some other one substance.

It must be something indefinite or boundless.

Hint 5

Objections to Anaximander:

Its not really a solution to the one many problem. To say that everything is everything does not make the concept of the one any clearer for us, and is therefore not a logos. The infinite variety of diverse objects that can be found in the infinite may account for the diversity of appearances, but it is not definite enough to be a one.

Front 6

Anaximenes

Back 6

Concerned with the process or mechanism by which the one becomes the many.


The one is Air. More important is the mechanism by which air becomes the many: the change is caused by condensation and rarefaction, or increase and decrease of density.

Fire > air > wind> cloud > water > earth > stone

The qualitative differences are reduced to quantitative ones: the variety of things are reduced to one concept: density.

Hint 6

Objections to Anaximenes:

1) What causes condensation and rarefaction to occur?

2) The condensation and rarefaction can only be a description not an explanation for causation

3) Disconfirmed experimentally

Front 7

Pythagorianism

Back 7

Concerned with form (size, dimension, purpose) versus matter like the Milesians.

(Ontology) What is there really?
Numbers, which provide the order, structure, or form to matter.

Rationalists. Knowledge is the apprehension of the supersensible, not of the material domain of the corruptible and changeable.

Front 8

Supernaturalism

Back 8

Some phenomena, or the whole universe, can be accounted for by reference to something outside the domain of everyday events. (Hesiod, mythology).

Front 9

Heraclitus

Back 9

All is flux. The one or unity is the orderliness with which things change. It is not a material arche, but a process which underlies the diversity of objects.

Fire is the symbol of this flux.

Change itself is what is really real, and all apparent being is actually a sort of becoming.

Hint 9

Objections to Heraclitus:

1) Reification: the error of treating as a "real thing" something which is not a real thing, but merely an idea or abstraction.

2) If all is flux then there is nothing with which to attribute change. If there is no stable referent picked out by the word "all" in "all is flux" then the sentence has no meaning. This is a self-referential paradox: I am a liar.

3) Not very fruitful for expanding knowledge. If all is flux then how and what do we investigate?

Front 10

Parmenides

Back 10

Rationalist. Elaticist. Conceptual monist.

The real, the one is: uncreated, indestructible, eternal, and unchangeable.

1) There is no such thing as nothing.

2) All change requires a nothing or non-being because the process involves something becoming what it was not and the something disappearing. "Nothing" allows this object to disappear into it or emerge from it.

3) There is no nothing or non-being.

4) There is no change.

Hint 10

Objections to Parmenides:

Does absence of evidence (for a nothing) entail evidence of absence? (that there is no nothing, and therefore no change).

It is possible that there is a nothing.

Front 11

Zeno

Back 11

Elaticism. Zeno's paradox:

1) If motion were real then objects would have to traverse an infinite number of distances (and thereby take an infinite amount of time)

2) It is impossible to traverse an infinite number of distances

3) Motion is not real.

Hint 11

Objections to Zeno:

Perhaps the paradox is solved by the distinction between a theoretical infinite and an actual infinite. (Infinite: equivocation).

Zeno applied the theoretical infinite to this problem by dividing say, one meter, infinitely, thus making it conceptually impossible to transverse said one meter. But the actual distance is still one meter, physically, not conceptually, making it a finite one meter. The problem is solved based on the way it is interpreted. If it is a finite one meter, an actual one meter, then there is no problem traversing from point a to point b.

We are finite creatures and distance on this planet is also demonstrably finite, so perhaps motion is real (in the world of the finite).

Front 12

Equivocation

Back 12

same word, two different (or more) meanings.

Front 13

Why pluralism over monism?

Back 13

To account for change and motion, which monism does not. Three arguments for false monism:

1) If all is one, then there can be no change.
2) But there is change.
3) Monisim is false.

1) If there is only the one, then there can't be the many.
2) But there is a many.
3) So monism is false.

1) If all is one than there can be no motion.
2) but there is motion.
3) monism is false

Front 14

Pluralism

Back 14

The ontological doctrine according to which the ultimate constitutions of reality are a many. Accounts for change and motion.

Front 15

Qualitative Pluralism

Back 15

There are many qualitatively distinct forms of matter or constitutive principles, familiar to us from our experience with objects.

Uses senses to account for objects.

Front 16

Quantitative Pluralism/ Atomism

Back 16

There are many "ones" that are small bits of extended matter. Qualitative change (temp, color, growth) is the rearrangement of uncutably small quantities (atoms) which are the real, uncreated, indestructible, eternal, and unchangeable. (these are qualitative aspects of the atom)

Front 17

Empedocles

Back 17

There are four ultimate, uncreated, and unchanging forms of matter that constitute the plurality of objects: Earth, air, fire, and water.

The process of change is the intermixing and separation of these four elements that make up the objects we observe.

Two forces are the compulsion for this change: Love, which mixes, and Strife, which separates.

Objects are thus unstable combinations of the primary elements.

Hint 17

Objections to Empedocles:

1) Love and Strife are anthropomorphic qualities that cannot be a logos, but has the quality of a myth.

2) Empedocles accounts for the qualitative diversity of the world with his theories, but in terms of quantity, or the reality of what constitutes a substance, he can’t be correct. To say that a rabbit is merely portions of fire, air, water and earth does not explain the multitude of other substances that appear to make up the rabbit that do not resemble those four elements. Due to the causal likeness principle which states that elements of the effect must exist in the cause, this theory does not account for many objects. Something cannot produce another thing that is entirely different from itself.

3) Replaces the one-many problem with the many-many problem: if many things create many things then what is the underlying unity to the world? If all the objects in the world are merely unstable combinations of these four elements, then all is apparently chaotic, and we are left with no solution, simply another problem.

Front 18

Anaxagoras

Back 18

Agrees with Empedocles on the following:

1) The stuff in the world is eternal.
2) There is a many, each uncreated, indestructible, eternal, and unchangeable.
3) There is motion and change.

He postulated that there is "in everything a portion of everything," that is, an infinite diversity of qualitatively different materials he calls "seeds."

The seeds are organized by an entirely different entity: the mind.

Improves on Empedocles by adhering to the causal likeness principle.

Hint 18

Objections to anaxagoras:

1)If his theory is correct then one could eat a tomato and then adapt the traits of that tomato because it becomes a part of us. And if fire comes from flint, then fire must exist previously in the flint.

Front 19

Similarities between Anaximander and Anaxagoras:

Back 19

Anaximander: Everything (objects) is everything (boundless, infinite)

Anaxagoras: Everything (objects) is everything (seeds).

Anaximander says that everything is everything, in that all objects come from the boundless or infinite. Anaxagoras says that everything is everything, in that objects come from seeds and seeds from objects. Anaxagoras also believes that these seeds are infinite in variety and eternal.

Front 20

Atomism

Back 20

Atoms vibrate in empty space and account for thought as well as matter.

Quantitative.

Appearance and reality become radically different.

The atomist answer to the puzzle of sameness and change is that everything is the same because everything is composed of atoms, while the appearances, or forms of perceptible objects change based on the way the atoms are held together. Therefore we are able to have both sameness and change.

Appearance and reality also both coexist, because we live in the world of appearances, the objects that we sense are the manifestations of the formations of atoms, and they are perceivable by us. The reality is that these appearences are really the compositions of trillions of tiny atoms interacting with each other.

The one and the many problem is solved because the one that unifies and underlies all things in existence is the atom, while the many are the appearances that are created through the interactions of the atoms.