Editor's note: This continues a series, previous parts can be found in Library.
Before Socrates
This is a short summary of the first stages of the history of philosophy and of some of the people and issues that were involved in that history.
You almost have to feel sorry for the people who lived prior to 1 A.D. as marked on the European/Western calendar. Because of when they lived and the things that were going on around them, they will forever be known as people who lived B.C., Before Christ. It's as if they didn't really have anything going on of their own and so are relegated to being merely before someone else. A similar thing happens with some of the people who lived in Greece between roughly 650 B.C. to 450 B.C. in that they happened to land in history at a time when they were before Socrates, and they are named accordingly. In any book on the history of philosophy or of Greek culture they are therefore always called the Pre-Socratics.
The Pre-Socratics were the first on record to be called philosophers in European/Western history. This means that in a Mediterranean Greek society full of people who were concerned with everyday problems of life like basic survival, money, love, and warfare, they had special interests beyond these. They were people who stepped out and made their mark on history by asking questions and looking for answers on issues beyond ordinary everyday matters. In what came down as a tradition among many people who lived B.C., they will always be known by only one name, with names like Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Zeno, Empedocles, and Protagoras.
There are three significant things that the Pre-Socratic philosophers had going on that made them special and original thinkers. First is that they looked for explanations for what they observed through natural factors rather than what could be called "super-natural" factors, this latter being normal for explanations at that time. Second is that they looked for generality in explanations rather than special purpose accounts that fit only immediate or limited cases. Third is that they tried to address what they thought were conflicts between reason and experience to try to determine if there was some fundamental problem with either our rational or experiential capabilities, or even with both.
Here is an overview of the first two issues, having to do with explanations.
An explanation, by the way, is a story, whether it is true or not, of why something happens that attempts to identify the steps that lead up to it. To say that an explanation E explains some occurrence o is to say that E provides an account of the factors behind the appearance of o (whether that account is a correct one or not).
It is very important not to load too much into the notion of an explanation here in this context. In our modern thinking we often say that explaining something means identifying the causal steps that lead to something; that we find the causes. However, this understanding of an explanation is not something that everyone in history has always had, its an outgrowth of modern science. So we can't really apply cause-and-effect thinking like what we have today backwards on people in the ancient world who didn't have that same thinking. So the Pre-Socratics were not necessarily looking for chains of cause-and-effect the way that we do today. They were looking for accounts for things without any sophisticated notion of what this account had to include or what it could not include. In addition to this loose idea of what an explanation involves, note that explanations can include more than just causes but also reasons, and reasons are not causes; reasons are justifications.
Also we have to be careful not to think that having an explanation of something closes the books on it; that we are done with an issue and can stop once we come up with an explanation. There are two reasons for this:
(a) Nothing about the nature of an explanation E of occurrence o means that we are correct in assuming that it is o that is actually happening rather than some other thing r that is happening; we could be wrong in thinking that o is actually happening. So having an explanation E of occurrence o does not prove that o is actually there or actually happening as we thought. In other words, an explanation of something is not a proof of it, but instead just assumes it.
(b) Nothing about the nature of an explanation E of occurrence o means that we are correct in thinking that E actually gets right the story of the factors leading to o. The explanation could be wrong and it could be that some other explanation F is the one that gets the story right. It is always true that there will be a number of competing explanations for any occurrence because there will always be many different possible stories for why it is that something happens.
(1) Natural-factor explanations
It doesn't take any special abilities to observe what goes on in the world. Anyone can take note of the times of the tides or the signs of the rains or where is the most likely place to find game animals or the best ground to plant trees. To be able to observe is nothing special and does not make someone a specialist about anything in the sense of really understanding what is going on. In order to understand anything in the world it takes more than just observation, it takes explanation. To understand you need to know why it is that things happen, in addition to knowing what is happening.
Now suppose you are living in the ancient world and that you are very observant about the things happening around you, yet you are only familiar with a narrow range of explanations for why these things happen. Its likely that the explanations you are familiar with, the ones you hear from other people, are explanations that involve "super-natural" persons behind events in some essential way. For example, you observe that the waters of the sea change from a nice placid roll to a nasty raging mash, and the explanation you are given for this change is that some person, a very powerful supernatural person, is behind it, intentionally stirring up the waves. In short, the explanation you are given is that Poseidon, the god of the sea, was either angry or up to something and made this happen for some purpose. Or for example, you observe that your neighbor's wheat field had a much higher yield than yours did this year, and the explanation you are given is that there was some intervention by some person, another powerful supernatural person, in at least some part in this outcome. In short, the explanation you are given is that Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, favored your neighbor. The idea is that, in this ancient world, at least part of the account for the events of the world essentially involves persons who can be called gods, and so events are explained by the actions and intentions of the gods, in addition to some natural factors that happen to be involved.
The first major idea of the Pre-Socratic philosophers is that there should be a way of explaining what we observe without making essential reference to persons, whether they be gods or not; that maybe the events of the world are independent of the intentions of persons; that maybe persons, like gods and us too, are just a part of a natural world as a result of that natural world, not as agents behind it. The idea is that what we observe around us is explainable in terms of natural factors, natural factors being things that can be seen and touched and measured and broken apart. There may be gods, and the air may be full of them (that's from Thales) for all that matters, but all of the world is still accounted for by natural factors.
(2) Generality in explanations
Suppose that we take for granted that there is some fact in nature such as this: That the rain in Spain falls on the plain. Consider the following explanation for why this happens:
Explanation 1: The rain in Spain falls on the plain because the plains of Spain are highly magnetic, and the rain clouds there contain particulate iron, and so the effect of this magnetic force pulls water vapor out of the clouds and so makes it rain on those plains.
Of course there is a slight chance that this may actually be the correct explanation for why it rains on the plains of Spain, but there is good reason to think it isn't. The big problem with this explanation is that it fits only one location and only one case; it doesn't explain why it rains in other places besides the plains of Spain. This is an example of an explanation that is ad hoc, which means that its proposed only "for this" case, and not others. There is a strong general theory that whatever factors bring the rain in one part of the world should be the same things that bring rain in other parts of the world. In other words, we very much believe that the correct explanation for an occurrence should be one that is generalized. For an example of that, consider some other explanations for this phenomenon:
Explanation 2: The rain in Spain falls on the plain because those plains are at a high elevation and are downwind from winds coming from the sea; and when winds from the sea, which carry a lot of water vapor, are forced upwards by highly elevated lands, they cool down and lose their ability to hold that water vapor, and so it rains there.
Explanation 3: The rain in Spain falls on the plain because those plains are where prevailing winds intersect, where winds from one direction with lots of water vapor encounter winds from another direction that are cold, and that mixing of air causes the water vapor to drop out and form rain.
What makes explanations 2 and 3 different from explanation 1 is that these explanations are generalized; they can account for why it rains on the plains of Spain and also a whole lot of other places too. Ideally, if explanations 2 and 3 and any other generalized accounts were combined into one overall theory of rainfall, that would explain why it rains anywhere.
This illustrates the second major innovative idea of the Pre-Socratics: A big problem with explanations that are essentially "super-natural" is that they seem to apply only to a few, limited cases, and that because of this, they really don't give good accounts of why things are happening. For example, one limited-case explanation for lightning is that it occurs because Zeus throws lightning bolts in order to bring attention to things he thinks are important, and also to show his anger. But this explanation does not account for why there is lightning in other places a long way from Greece, or any of a number of other places where Zeus would not be found and yet where lightning is found. The correct explanations for what happens in the world should be ones that are generalized and thus can account for happenings both in the immediate, local cases, and elsewhere. In other words, to favor a generalized explanation is to think that whatever factors bring the lightning anywhere should be the same factors everywhere.
The exact detail of the generalized explanations proposed by the Pre-Socratics was different from one of them to the next as they offered improvements to the general theory. In the end, their individual contributions developed the basic theory that the nature of everything can be accounted for by two fundamental things: elements and forces. This framework produces generalized explanations because elements and forces are things that by their very nature are supposed to be the same no matter where you go.
Notice that this concept of an element is actually really close to the same concept in modern science. An element is supposed to be a type of material stuff that has a unique nature and set of characteristics. Elements can be combined with others, but if divided they lose their unique characteristics. The different things of the world are supposed to be the result of elements combining and appearing in different ways to make the different things of the world.
This way of thinking all started when the first of the Pre-Socratics, Thales, proposed the idea that all things were ultimately composed of one common element (water), and that this element just appears in different formats to make the different things of the world. Thales would say, for example, that sea or river water is water as an element that is loose and uncombined with other water, that wood is elemental water that is combined in groups of some size, that rocks are elemental water in large tight groups, and so on. Thus he would have an explanation for all things using merely one common element.
Over time other of the Pre-Socratics expanded on this starting point by suggesting that one element wasn't enough to account for everything and that we should add another (air). So came the idea that different elements combine together in different proportions, the unique nature of the elements and the proportions in which they are found determine the nature of the things they form. That idea led to the further expansion of the table of elements to include others (fire and earth), with the result being a system where all things can be accounted for by some combination of the elements earth, air, fire, and water.
So, for example, the complete account of what makes up a tree is that it is composed of some w amount of earth, x amount of air, y amount of fire, and z amount of water. This made a lot of sense to people at the time because of what they directly observed when trying to find out what a tree is made of by breaking it down into small pieces. When you cut a tree up, you in fact find that there is water in it; water seeps out of cuts in wood, and you can tell that wood dries up over time, which is the loss of water. When you burn wood, even more water will come out of it, and when wood is fully burnt you are left with ashes, which looks a whole lot like earth. While you burn wood, you get a whole lot of fire out of it, much more fire than you started with, since its producing a large amount of heat, much more heat than it took to get the burning process started. So wood must have fire in it, which came out during the burning process. And in addition, while wood is burning, if you hold your hand high over a pile of burning wood you will feel air rising, so there must also be air within the wood that comes out during the burning.
The explanatory structure of the Pre-Socratic period was topped off by Empedocles. He was able to compile all the elemental theories that others had started, together with the idea of forces, specifically what we would call today forces of attraction and repulsion. The idea is that elements combine and separate according as these forces determine them to do so, forming some things at one time and then changing them over time. Thus a tree grows as the force of attraction brings elements into it. And also thus will a tree die and the force of repulsion will split elements out of it, eventually making those elements ready for the force of attraction to incorporate into something else.
By the time all is said and done about elements and the forces that drive them, there is in place an account for not only what makes things up, but also for how things change. Two of the three major innovations of the Pre-Socratics, natural factor explanations and generalized explanations, are covered so far, but the issue of change and what is involved in change opens up more issues. Specifically, trying to understand change opens up some conflicts between what our experience tells us and what our reason tells us. This conflict will show itself in the next phase in the history of the Pre-Socratics, and eventually, leads to Socrates.
(published 8/12/19)
Copyright © 2019 philosopherstree.com - All Rights Reserved. Site and all material.
Powered by GoDaddy