The Western philosophical tradition begins around 600 BC, in the Ancient Greek world, with the so-called ‘pre-Socratic’ philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and many more. Pythagoras can be credited with inventing the word ‘philosophy’ (which translates to ‘love of wisdom’) and gained a quasi-religious cult-like following in his time; he is still a familiar name because of his theorems about triangles. Most of the others are not so well known, which is a shame. That they are all bundled together under the term ‘pre-Socratic’ gives you a hint to how important Socrates is in the history of philosophy.
These thinkers did something that had not been done in this part of the world before: they stopped trusting their knowledge to religious or cultural tradition and started trying to explain the world using reason. They observed and they thought about things; they didn’t just take someone’s word for it.
Over time, this pursuit of ‘truth via reason’ got supplemented with mathematics and geometry, dialectical reasoning and demonstration, logic, and empirical observation, and the rest, as they say, is history. Much has changed since, but that core idea remains the same. Philosophy is the pursuit of truth via the application of reason.
Some of these early theories were a little wacky, especially the earliest attempts at an explanation of the physical world. There was a lot of debate about what the fundamental substance was. What is the essence of existence? What is existence itself made of? We can look around and identify various ‘elements’ in the world: earth, air, fire, water… But which one is the fundamental element?
An early candidate was water: look around, you’ll see at the edge of the earth is water as far as the eye can see; therefore, the earth must be sitting on water. What falls from the sky, as if from nothing? Water. Squeeze a plant and what comes out? Water. Cut us and what comes out? Well, blood, but that’s a sort of water…isn’t it? Deprive life of water and it dies very quickly. Water seems to be the most essential thing.
Or is it air? Air is everywhere, after all. And if you deprive living things of air, they will die quicker than if they are deprived of water. Heat water up and it seems to turn into air. Heat anything up, by burning it, and it seems to turn into air. Conversely, cool anything down and it becomes more solid. Cool air and you’ll get water; cool water and you’ll get ice. Air must be the fundamental substance, therefore, and it is only a matter of heating and expanding or cooling and contracting that gives rise to all things.
We could go on, but we won’t. It turns out that when you have very limited ability to make observations, basically just looking around with your eyes, you can get led astray into some strange conclusions. We can’t trust in only what we can see, as it turns out. But note what these early philosophers are doing and crucially what they are not doing: they are not appealing to religious revelation or mysticism; they are not appealing to established doctrine or tradition; they are not appealing to the judgement of popular opinion; they are thinking for themselves and trying to base their beliefs on a combination of reason and observation. They are trying to establish good reasons for their beliefs. This is what sets philosophy apart.
As philosophy developed, it gradually took on a more ‘rational’ approach. What I mean by this is that philosophers relied less on observation and more on pure thinking. The traditional point of transition here is the ‘Eleatics’ (so-called because they came from Elea, a town located in what we would now call Italy), but it was a gradual transition. Nonetheless, by the time we get to philosophers such as Parmenides and Zeno, philosophy is no longer basing its theories only on what it can see. In fact, the theories are starting to go against what we can see. These paradoxical (literally ‘against belief’ or ‘contrary to opinion’) theories follow reason where it leads… Which, as it turns out, is to somewhere quite unbelievable.
Parmenides, for example, is famous for arguing that, contrary to appearances, there is no such thing as ‘change’, ‘movement’, or indeed any different things at all: all existence is just one static unchanging thing. He demonstrates this using reason, not observation: conceptually, any change (or movement, etc.) would require going from a state of ‘being’ to ‘non-being’. If you want to take a hat off your head, you need to change from the hat ‘being’ on your head, to the hat ‘not-being’ on your head. But non-being, says Parmenides, is impossible. The clue is in the name: ‘non-being’. It literally doesn’t exist! There is no such thing as something that doesn’t exist… And therefore, contrary to appearances, there cannot be such a thing as the hat ‘not being’ on your head.
Clearly nonsense, of course, but again we can note what these philosophers are doing. They are trying to find good reasons for their beliefs. Since observation has led us into false belief, observation cannot give us good reasons for belief, so we should rely on thinking only. What results is a distinct kind of philosophical problem: the paradox.
A paradox is an apparent contradiction, something that seems to go against belief. Parmenides gives us a paradox when he uses reason to show us that change is impossible, something that flies in the face of the obvious: we see change happen all the time. So his theory goes against belief; it’s a paradox. Reason tells us that something is the case, whilst observation tells us it cannot be. Clearing up this muddle requires us to think it through, and this ‘thinking through’ is the task of philosophy.
Zeno of Elea, a student of Parmenides, gives us another famous paradox from this time. Imagine Achilles trying to catch a tortoise. Clearly, we would expect Achilles, the fast runner, to chase down the tortoise (famously slow) without difficulty. But is it that simple? Think it through:
Imagine both Achilles and the tortoise are moving in the same direction: the tortoise is running – well, strolling – away from the running Achilles. In order for Achilles to catch the tortoise he needs to get to where the tortoise is, and in order to do that he must first get half-way towards where the tortoise is. In fact, he must traverse an infinite number of points in space in order to get to where the tortoise is. This will take him some time. But in the time it takes Achilles to get half-way towards where the tortoise is, that point has become where the tortoise was, because the tortoise has strolled a little further. So now Achilles has to repeat the task and get half-way towards where the tortoise is now, which is a little further than it was. Again, however, by the time he gets half-way to where the tortoise is, the tortoise has moved a little further, and Achilles has to repeat his task again. No matter how many times we run this calculation through in our minds, we will never have Achilles catching the tortoise, because whenever Achilles manages to get half-way to the tortoise, the tortoise will have moved a little further again. The tortoise is constantly strolling beyond fast Achilles’ reach. And yet, clearly, Achilles would catch the tortoise. We know this. Reason goes against belief, and so we have a paradox.
A paradox is a confusion; it shows us that we don’t understand something properly. At this period in history, philosophy begins to focus on the discovery and resolving of paradoxes. Most of this can be done without the aid of any observation: it’s purely a thinking game.
A worthy mention is called for here. Because for all the, let’s face it, scientific ignorance of this time, one attempt to resolve the paradoxes presented by Parmenides and Zeno led to what turned out to be not far off the right answer. Democritus, around 400 BC, tried to make sense of Parmenides’ paradoxes – those that showed that change was impossible because ‘non-being’ was impossible – and concluded that change would be possible if the world were composed of distinct pieces that could be rearranged into different arrangements. None of these distinct pieces would ever be in a state of ‘non-being’, but if they moved around and rearranged themselves, then it would give the appearance of change. Everything keeps ‘being’, it just ‘be’ in a slightly different arrangement. He called these distinct pieces ‘atoms’, meaning something that ‘cannot be cut’, and he predicted that these things would be so small that we wouldn’t be able to see them with the naked eye. He wasn’t so far from the truth, but it would take us another 2,000 years to confirm it. And he achieved this only by thinking it through.
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