Descartes vs. Kant — What is Transcendental Philosophy?

The significant breakthroughs made by Immanuel Kant are often gathered together under the title of ‘transcendental philosophy.’ Indeed, Kant himself used that word, Transzendentalphilosophie, to describe his own thought.

But what is meant by the phrase ‘transcendental philosophy’? The reader will be aware that, in the history of philosophy, the simple paradigm is common in which Rene DesCartes is the representative of ‘rationalist’ philosophy, while John Locke is the icon for ‘empiricist’ philosophy. Each of those two was joined by teammates. Alongside DesCartes were, e.g., Jacques du Roure, Geraud de Cordemoy, Francois Bayle, and Jacques Rohault. Locke’s fellow empiricists included, among others, David Hume and Thomas Reid.

The rationalist team distrusted empirical knowledge, arguing that sense-data was unreliable. The rationalists found certain knowledge in a priori reasoning.

The empiricists discounted a priori knowledge as largely vacuous, consisting mostly of tautologies like “a = a” and “all triangles have three sides.” They argued that meaningful content came from sensations.

A sort of stalemate between these two teams had emerged by Kant’s time. Kant hoped to find a third option in philosophy: his Transzendentalphilosophie.

Webster’s dictionary defines ‘transcendental’ as “of or relating to experience as determined by the mind’s makeup” or “transcending experience but not human knowledge.” Webster offers an important contrast between ‘transcendental’ and ‘transcendent’ — the latter being “beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge.”

Random House offers a similar distinction: ‘transcendent’ is “transcending experience, not realizable in human experience,” while ‘transcendental’ is “of, pertaining to, based on, or concerned with the a priori elements in experience that condition human knowledge.” Random House adds that ‘transcendental philosophy’ is “based upon the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered by the study of the processes of thought.”

Likewise, the dictionary of Funk and Wagnalls defines ‘transcendent’ as “lying beyond the bounds of all possible human knowledge,” and explains ‘transcendental’ as “having an a priori character; transcending experience.” According to Funk and Wagnalls,

Intuitive truths are those which are in the mind independently of all experience, not being derived from experience nor limited by it, as that the whole is greater than the part, or that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. All intuitive truths or beliefs are transcendental. But transcendental is a wider term than intuitive, including all within the limits of thought that is not derived from experience, as the ideas of space and time.

Significantly, Funk and Wagnalls directed the reader to a reference work by Charles Krauth and William Fleming. This book went through several editions, with slight variations in the book’s title. Henry Calderwood seems to have been involved in one of earliest editions. It is usually cited as Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences. Fleming and Krauth give extensive discussions of the word ‘transcendental.’

Eric Kandel offers a glimpse into Kant’s philosophy of mind, and into Kant’s epistemology:

The view of the brain as a creativity machine that constantly uses inference and guesses to reconstruct the external world — the view advocated by Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich — was a dramatic shift from the naive philosophical realism of the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke that dominated thinking about mind at that time. Locke conceived of mind as receiving all the information capable of being gathered by the senses, a view in which mind simply mirrors the reality of the external world. Kris and Gombrich’s view of the brain was a modern version of Kant’s theory that sensory information allows reality to be invented by the mind.

Kant perhaps would not have phrased it as Kandel does, but the point is made: Kantian epistemology sees the mind as active. The mind doesn’t passively receive sense-data and then process them into perceptions. Even at the earlier stage of sensation, before perception, the mind is shaping the sense-data by placing it into space and time — or rather, by creating space and time around the sense-data.

Without using the word ‘transcendental,’ Eric Kandel describes the Kantian epistemological process:

The biological study of learning raises some familiar philosophical questions: What aspects of the organization of the human mind are innate? How does our mind acquire knowledge of the world?

Serious thinkers in every generation have struggled with these questions. By the end of the seventeenth century, two opposing views had emerged. The British empiricists John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume argued that our mind does not possess innate ideas; rather, all knowledge derives from sensory experience and is therefore learned. By contrast, the continental philosophers Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and particularly Immanuel Kant argued that we are born with a priori knowledge; our mind receives and interprets sensory experience in an innately determined framework.

The definitions offered by Webster, Random House, and Funk and Wagnalls are compressed, intended for laymen, and somewhat simplified. They are not written by philosophers for philosophers. Eric Kandel is a brilliant and recognized neuroscientist, but his descriptions of Kant’s thought are not from the viewpoint of Kantian specialist and are not for an audience of Kant scholars.

A text coauthored by Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister points out that epistemology in general — and especially Kant’s epistemology in particular — is concerned not about what we know, but about how we know it, and the conditions which make knowledge possible:

Die Wende, die mit Immanuel Kants (1724-1804) Transzendentalphilosophie eingeläutet wurde, lässt sich am prägnantesten durch den Vergleich von Rene Descartes (1596-1650) und Kant nachvollziehen. Es handelt sich um den Unterschied zwischen Wissen und den Bedingungen von Wissen.

Roth and Schulmeister argue that DesCartes sought certain knowledge which can’t be doubted, while Kant sought the prerequisite which made knowledge attainable. Both Kant and DesCartes were concerned with the formal mechanisms of epistemology, but under the interpretation of Roth and Schulmeister, DesCartes was driving toward specific contents of knowledge as well as the form of knowledge:

Descartes ging es darum, sicheres Wissen zu erlangen, das nicht mehr bezweifelt werden kann. Kant hingegen fragte nach der Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Wissen.

DesCartes proceeded from the assumption that knowledge was possible, and so his questions were “What can we know? What do we know? Do we know what we think we know?”

Descartes setzte die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung als gegeben heraus. Ihn interessierte deshalb die Wirklichkeit von Erfahrung. Seine Frage lautete: Sind die Dinge wirklich so, wie sie uns erscheinen?

Kant, in contrast to DesCartes, focused on this question: “Can we know? How can we know? What are the mechanisms which would, or which do, make experience possible?” Understanding how experience is structured, or constructed, also points to the centrality of space and time in Kantian thought. Without space and time, there would be and could be no experience, and accordingly, early in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Kant explores space and time.

Kant rückte jedoch genau jenen Aspekt in den Vordergrund, den Descartes als gegeben hingenommen hatte, nämlich die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung. Seine Frage lautete: Wie ist die Erfahrung überhaupt möglich?

The questions “How do I perceive objects? How do my experiences arise?” is closely related to the question “Why is it that my experiences and perceptions happen necessarily in a certain way?” The observer will note that it is not possible to have an idea of a physical object without having an idea of it in space. The mind finds it impossible to conceive of a physical object which is not in space. Likewise with time.

Kant’s exploration begins, not by asking about the objects in the world, but rather by asking about the mind which perceives them.

Bevor man wie Descartes danach fragt, ob die Dinge, wirklich so sind, wie sie uns erscheinen, lautet Kants Vorschlag, dass wir zunächst klären sollten, wie es überhaupt dazu kommt, dass die Dinge auf eine bestimmte Weise erscheinen. Mit Kant lernen die Philosophen, nicht gleich nach der Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit zu fragen, sondern zunächst das eigene Denken zu untersuchen. Genau das ist der Clou der Transzendentalphilosophie, die sich nicht vorschnell in metaphysische Gefilde vorwagen will, bevor nicht die Frage nach den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von etwas geklärt ist.

The above summary of one part of Kant’s thought relies on Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister. The reader will ask, to which extent have those two authors accurately understood and expressed this part of the Kantian system?

Perhaps one of the main interpreters and advocates of Kant’s work is Carl Christian Erhard Schmid. Schmid is perhaps most responsible for explaining, and drawing attention to, Kant’s writings. Kant would have been much less well-known if Schmid hadn’t lectured and written about him.

Not only did C.C.E. Schmid offer a clear and influential exposition of Kant’s thought, but he is one of the few Kantian scholars to have published and lectured extensively during Kant’s lifetime. Schmid’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft im Grundrisse nebst einem Wörterbuche zum leichteren Gebrauch der kantischen Schriften appeared in 1786, one year prior to the second edition of Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Schmid’s book about Kant went through several editions, the exact title changing slightly.

Schmid was writing and teaching about Kant, not only while Kant was still alive, but during Kant’s most productive years. It is left as an exercise to the reader to find primary source documents to answer questions about the extent to which Kant was aware of, and familiar with, Schmid’s writings — and questions about whether or not there was any direct communication between Kant and Schmid.

What is clear is that there was no objection from Kant about Schmid’s explanations of the Kantian system. In a hierarchy of reliability, therefore, Schmid would be near the top. To cite Schmid is arguably to cite one of the most dependable secondary sources on Kant.

Schmid’s Wörterbuch articulates a similar distinction between ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental’ and offers a lengthy entry on the latter word. The entry includes:

Transzendental bedeutet überhaupt eine Vorstellung (Anschauung oder Begriff), Urteil, Wissenschaft a priori, so fern sie sich doch auf Gegenstände bezieht, und darauf anwenden läßt; die Erkenntnis von dem objektiven Gebrauche, der rein a priori entsprungenen Vorstellungen und ihrer Vermögen.

Schmid’s detailed entry defining ‘transcendental’ merits detailed study, and is perhaps a powerful instrument for gaining insight in what is meant by the word Transzendentalphilosophie.

John Locke’s Epistemology: What Is Supernatural Knowledge?

In the long history of epistemology, many philosophers have asserted some form of a distinction between the knowledge humans gain through the five physical senses and the knowledge they gain through the exercise of reason. This distinction is drawn slightly differently from one philosopher to the next, and described in slightly different vocabulary, but the dichotomy is perennial one.

As an empiricist, John Locke looked to experience as the source of much or most of knowledge, and in some way, perhaps, the foundation of all knowledge. Yet Locke was aware of the complexities which arise when one uses this distinction in the careful analysis of knowledge.

There are relatively clear cut cases: The sense of vision may tell us that before us is a blueness; rational reflection may tell us that a = a. But between those extremes are a variety of borderline cases which are more complicated and do not always fall neatly into or or the other of those two categories.

One example is a perception which is the result of raw a posteriori sense-data which have been processed by a priori rational concepts, as J.L. Mackie explains:

The empiricist may, and Locke does, recognize that even the reception of ideas in perception is not wholly passive, but includes a considerable element of (unconscious) interpretation.

Locke shows how raw sense-data, which is a sensation and not yet a perception, needs to be processed by concepts in order to become a perception and eventually to become knowledge. A drawing on a two-dimensional paper of a three-dimensional object furnishes an example:

We are further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform color, v.g. gold, alabaster, or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us; what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figures of bodies; — the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes. So that from that which is truly variety of shadow or color, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform color; when the idea we receive from thence is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting.

There is a long series of thinkers in the history of philosophy who have written about this matter. Routinely, it is framed by some type of dichotomies: experience vs. reason, a priori vs. a posteriori, analytic vs. synthetic, etc.

As with any dichotomy, one may ask whether there are other alternatives in addition to the two given.

As William Uzgalis writes, “Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience.” Uzgalis is expressing the more-or-less standard understanding of Locke. It is worth noting that Locke, in most of his texts, hesitates to write that all knowledge comes from experience, but rather writes that all ideas come from experience: this nuance is worth noting.

In any case, however, another question presents itself: when Locke writes ‘experience,’ does he mean ‘sensory experience,’ i.e., from our five physical senses? Or does he leave room for some other types of experience?

Locke wrote about Paul, the author of several New Testament epistles, that Paul obtained something — ideas or knowledge — directly. Would Paul’s reception of propositions from God count as ‘experience’ for Locke? Locke writes:

Paul was miraculously called to the ministry of the gospel, and declared to be a chosen vessel; that he had the whole doctrine of the gospel from God, by immediate revelation; and was appointed to be the apostle of the Gentiles.

Even more direct, Locke uses the word ‘knowledge’ to refer to the content of Paul’s experience:

For his information in Christian knowledge, and the mysteries and depths of the dispensation of grace by Jesus Christ, God himself had condescended to be his instructor and teacher.

One could, then, begin to construct a paradigm with two categories of experience: first, the experience which arrives by means of the five physical senses; second, experience which arrives otherwise.

If there is such a thing as some type of experience distinct from physical experience, then what could it be? There might be more than one answer. Such non-sensory experiences could be emotional: experiencing happiness or sadness. They could be rational: the experience of calculating, for example. Locke speaks of ‘dictation’ to describe Paul’s experience: Locke says that Paul was “under the Spirit of God, that dictated these sacred writings.” Was this an audible dictation, i.e., the ordinary physical sense of hearing? Or was it somehow an experience of ideas: ideas arising without the five physical senses?

Rene DesCartes is often seen as the opposite of Locke, especially in terms of their respective epistemological systems. Locke however uses one of DesCartes’ more notorious vocabulary items when speaking of Paul’s experience. Cartesian scholars have long wrestled with how DesCartes uses the word ‘light,’ especially in the phrase ‘natural light’ or ‘light of nature.’ It seems to indicate, for DesCartes, an a priori bit of knowledge which is so obvious in its truth that it cannot be doubted. Critics of DesCartes accuse him of a deus ex machina move which begs the question of epistemological certainty when he invokes this natural light. Locke uses a similar phrase to describe the source of Paul’s knowledge:

He was full stored with knowledge of the things he treated of, for he had light from heaven, it was God himself furnished him.

As Locke uses the phrase ‘immediate revelation,’ so he also here speaks of a ‘truth’ which has been ‘revealed’ — truth being one of the usual ingredients of knowledge, as in ‘justified true belief.’

Like Francis’s Bacon’s listing of the sources of experimental error, Locke also indicates that human perception is liable to error, and proposes reliance on revelation as one possible measure against such error:

We are all men, liable to errors, and infected with them; but have this sure way to preserve ourselves, every one, from danger by them, if, laying aside sloth, carelessness, prejudice, party, and a reverence of men, we betake ourselves, in earnest, to the study of the way to salvation, in those holy writings, wherein God has revealed it from heaven, and proposed it to the world, seeking our religion, where we are sure it is in truth to be found, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things.

John Locke’s epistemology, then, may have room for something more than the usual ‘experience vs. reason’ template to describe sources of ideas, of perceptions, and of knowledge. Or, at least, if he does limit the sources to those two, then he may be broadening the definitions of ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ to include more than one might at first suppose.

Schopenhauer: Metaphysician or Empiricist?

Authors who write about the history of philosophy often include Arthur Schopenhauer in a group titled ‘German Idealism’ or ‘Transcendental Idealism’ or something like that. Yet he bears affinities to thinkers like David Hume, who is often placed into a group titled ‘British Empiricism’ or ‘Radical Empiricism’ or similar words.

Schopenhauer’s empirical bent is revealed in his attention to observable data. He explores in detail the discoveries, findings, and methods of the natural sciences. His philosophy of language, likewise, is founded on linguistic data, much of it derived from historical philology and from explorers returning from obscure corners of the planet with new linguistic evidence.

Yet Schopenhauer’s terminology might mislead the reader. He relies on words like ‘Will’ — the capitalization hinting at the centrality of the concept in his thought. The reader can be forgiven for thinking that Schopenhauer is referring to a metaphysical entity instead of empirical evidence.

He has, however, so remade and redefined the word that it now serves as shorthand for a bundle of empirical data, as Lenart Skof writes:

The profound affinity between Schopenhauer and Radical Empiricism is documented by Schopenhauer’s method of observing reality and its phenomena and his reliance of on the achievements of the natural sciences of his time. In the second book of The World as Will and Representation, metaphysical ways of speaking like that of “objectifications of the Will” serve only as metaphors for a number of empirical phenomena, which already in the first book had been freed from the old epistemological modes of subjective knowledge.

Not only does the ‘Will’ seem like a suspiciously metaphysical concept for an alleged empiricist to embrace, but Schopenhauer even begins to discuss Platonic ideas — or ideals — which seem to place him in the middle of a metaphysical tradition.

One way, perhaps, to understand Schopenhauer’s seeming metaphysical discourse as compatible with the hypothesis that he is an empiricist is this: to see the ‘Will’ as being an abbreviation for ‘my experience of the Will.’ The empiricist will deny that there is a metaphysical object called the ‘Will,’ but the empiricist cannot deny that I have some experience of what I call the ‘Will.’

Likewise, I can have the experience of noticing similarities among different objects, and can label a list of those similarities as a Platonic idea. In this way, possibly, Schopenhauer does not follow the metaphysical path of trying to describe what metaphysical objects like the Will or a Platonic idea are, and does not attempt to create an epistemological system explaining how we can know about such objects.

Instead, he turns to concepts of art and morality, in a development which tempts the reader to think him a proto-existentialist. Lenart Skof continues:

The body, as the first representation, revealed to the thinker the world as Will — the immediate world as the effects of matter. However, by shifting into the world of Platonic ideas in the third book, Schopenhauer undertook a task that could only have one possible solution: Dismissing the principle of reason was now only possible through the brilliant artistic act, and through related forms of artistic contemplation of ideas, and, analogously through the world as suffering, and the related conception of his main ‘existentials’ (guilt, conscience, grace, the path of salvation) based on the negation of Will, or asceticism.

The Will, then, is not a metaphysical object, but rather an object of perception. The ‘World as Will’ and the ‘World as Representation’ together compose all experience — and all possible experience.

His own scheme of philosophy, in the development of which he proceeded around or, more precisely, over and above Kant, turns back on itself and can only boomerang. Thus, already in the second book, Schopenhauer is forced to start discussing Platonic ideas as the models of objectifications of the Will, although methodologically, these ideas do not yet belong there at all, as the theme discussed in this book is the world as Will.

Schopenhauer frequently compliments Kant, and it is clear that he has embraced parts of the Kantian system, while rejecting some other parts. In any case, space and time, as the prerequisites for any experience, and as formed by the mind to make experience possible, are central to Schopenhauer and are also the constituent ingredients for causality.

Considered in this way, Schopenhauer is an empiricist or a phenomenologist. He seems to have wrestled with slightly different understandings of Kant’s Ding an sich, at times under the influence of Gottlob Ernst Schulze.

On the one hand, as a student of G.E. Schulze, Schopenhauer was tempted to join Schulze and write that the Ding an sich is an illegitimately postulated construct, and that we have no valid reason to assert that there is such a thing.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer is tempted to retain the Ding an sich in his own system, but to redefine it substantially. Since the Will is behind our sensations and perceptions, as objectified Will, then perhaps the Will is the Ding an sich. If the world is will and representation, then every representation is the will: the will is the cause of, or lies behind, every representation.

If we understand Schopenhauer to assert that even the self is composed of will and representation, then it is only another small step to say, that for Schopenhauer, “I am the Ding an sich.”

Innate Ideas and Musical Taste: Prenatal Auditory Experiences

Walter Murch has a long and successful career in Hollywood. He is a “sound designer” and worked on films like The Godfather, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, and K-19: The Widowmaker.

Sound design is different from finding or composing music for a film. It is the creation of a sound environment, including ambient noises, and the acoustic properties of settings for dialogues or action.

The study of audiology and acoustics, which informs Murch’s work, originates with psychologists, engineers, musicians, physicists, and philosophers. Biologists and physicians — otologists and neurologists — study both the physical and mental process of sound perception. Murch explains how deeply sound is embedded in the mind, starting four-and-a-half months before birth:

We are conceived. We develop in the womb, and four and a half months after conception, the hearing switch is turned on.

The sounds which are heard prior to birth make a distinct impression on the mind. Immediately upon birth, a baby can recognize its mother’s voice, and when held by the mother, the baby responds to the sound of her heartbeat.

But music is also distinctly heard prior to birth, which gives rise to a series of questions about the formation of musical taste. Is a child born with preferences for certain types of music based on in utero experiences?

Murch notes that, of the five senses, hearing most decisively shapes prenatal experiences:

Sight is not turned on. We live in darkness in the womb. Smell is not operative in the womb. Touch is a kind of a slippery mucal feeling, but hearing is as fully articulated at four and a half months as it will be later. So, the child developing in the womb is a fully auditory creature. And so, each of us in this room was born into consciousness. The developing fetus is a conscious being, developing a sense of the self and the world, such as it is in the womb. All through the process of hearing.

Philosophers have long debated the question of innate ideas: Are there ideas already present in the human mind when a person is born? To analyze this question, the distinction between birth and conception must be examined.

In any case, at birth, one would say that a child must have some ideas — auditory ideas, the memory of auditory experience. Which might lead to a question about what philosophers — like Descartes and Locke — meant when they wrote about “innate” ideas. Did they perhaps mean ideas present at conception?

At birth, the child begins to connect its auditory ideas with sense-data arriving via sight, smell, taste, and touch. In this way, hearing may have a special place of privilege among the five senses. Hearing may be the foundational sense.

Walter Murch continues:

When you’re born, these other senses kick on. Primarily sight and you start to begin to develop this idea that the sound is caused by something. Your mother comes in, and you start to see these strange things called lips beginning to move, and the voice that you have heard in the womb comes out of these lips. And you begin to say, Oh, that’s what made the voice.

Murch’s remarks suggest both a possible argument for innate ideas and a possible reframing of the debate about “innate ideas” as “ideas present at conception” or as “prenatal ideas” — innate ideas cease to be controversial if the natal moment is preceded by months of sense-data and sensory experiences being processed into sensory memories.

His remarks also offer the possibility that musical taste is shaped by prenatal experiences.

Faraday’s Visual Approach to Science: An Allergy to Mathematics

Michael Faraday is credited with a number of discoveries and inventions, and has decisively informed the understanding of electromagnetism from the early 1800s until the present, and into the foreseeable future. Faraday’s discoveries and inventions are noteworthy in and of themselves, but beyond that, also because of his conception of scientific methodology.

As historian Geoffrey Cantor writes,

That Faraday expounded an empiricist view of science all commentators agree. Yet there are many incompatible strands within empiricism.

Faraday modified his views over the years, going from an initial allergy to mathematics to a tolerance of it. “Faraday’s rather complex, and apparently inconsistent, view on scientific method,” may be due to this metamorphosis.

Questions about the proper method for pursuing science were very important to him and he felt obliged on numerous occasions to expound his views on this subject so as to defend himself and his scientific work against alternative, but false, conceptions of science.

Cantor notes that there may be some distance between Faraday’s “methodological pronouncements” and “the actual methods he employed in the laboratory.” But the distance, if any, is slight, for “the two were closely related.” If someone had asked him “why he held those views,” he most probably would have answered that he was forced to hold them by the weight of empirical evidence, and if his methods and views changed slightly over the years, it would be because of the discovery of new evidence.

Faraday expressed a distaste for imagination, arguing that fantasy has no role in science, and coming close to echoing Newton’s famous hypotheses non fingo. Yet, for a thinker who largely rejected any role for imagination in scientific method, Faraday’s method centered around images: the etymological connection between ‘image’ and ‘imagination’ is not without cause. Cantor argues that Faraday doesn’t exile imagination completely and that Faraday retains a tightly-governed “proper role of the imagination.”

The famous near-absence of equations in many of Faraday’s writings, and his numerous drawings and diagrams attest to the visual nature of his thought. By contrast, other scientists of Faraday’s era, as well as before and after his era, had embraced the marriage between mathematics and natural sciences — especially between mathematics and physics.

Newton (1642 - 1727) clearly is an example of this marriage, yet Newton attached some importance to visualization. Indeed, John Hutchinson (1674 - 1737) criticized Newton’s inclusions of diagrams in scientific texts. Hutchinson wrote that Newton’s diagrams were “a cobweb of circles and lines to catch flies in.”

To be sure, it can be argued that a visual approach and a mathematical approach to electromagnetism are not that different, because the fields which Faraday described in words and pictures can also be captured in equations. But to that argument it can be replied that diagrams and drawings might offer a more intuitive understanding than equations, and that the intuitive understanding might be in some ways deeper and might offer more insights into the workings of electromagnetism.

Jim Al-Khalili describes Faraday’s skills:

What Faraday lacked in formal scientific training, particularly in mathematics, he made up for by his exceptional talent as an experimentalist. And although he was initially distrustful of mathematics, regarding it as obstructing rather than helping our understanding of the workings of Nature, he would, later in life, change his view in the light of the work of James Clerk Maxwell. In fact, Maxwell himself regarded Faraday as being an excellent theoretician and claimed this was the reason he was able to put Faraday's theories into the language of analytical mathematics.

Faraday’s search for principles, and his formulations of what those principles are or might be, were shaped in part by his Sandemanian and Glasite beliefs, as Geoffrey Cantor notes:

In his writings Faraday made repeated attempts to express the divinely fashioned natural economy in terms of metascientific principles, most importantly his principle of the conservation of forces. In his work of the 1820s and early 1830s the economy of nature was more implicit than explicit. By the late 1830s, however, it was beginning to emerge in a variety of different metascientific statements and to take on a more fixed form. Only with his far more explicit formulation of the principle of force conservation in the mid-1850s do we see it proposed as an incorrigible principle and one which must take precedence over all scientific theorizing.

The conservation of forces would seem to be, at first glance, a quantitative and therefore mathematical concept. Yet it seems that Faraday might have arrived at it visually.

Questions for Ludwig Boltzmann: Entropy and Methodology

Boltzmann’s significant and sometimes counterintuitive advancements in spacetime physics and philosophy have been well documented by Lawrence Sklar in Space, Time, and Spacetime and Philosophy and Spacetime Physics, and by other writers as well. In Vorlesungen über Gastheorie, Boltzmann himself sets his ideas forth.

The reader will be aware that Boltzmann argues that the universe is mostly in a state of equilibrium, with only rare instances of imbalance:

Man kann sich die Welt als ein mechanisches System von einer enorm großen Anzahl von Bestandteilen und von enorm langer Dauer denken, so dass die Dimensionen unseres Fixsternhimmels winzig gegen die Ausdehnung des Universums und Zeiten, die wir Äonen nennen, winzig gegen dessen Dauer sind. Es müssen dann im Universum, das sonst überall im Wärmegleichgewichte, also todt ist, hier und da solche verhältnismässig kleine Bezirke von der Ausdehnung unseres Sternenraumes (nennen wir sie Einzelwelten) vorkommen, die während der verhältnismässig kurzen Zeit von Äonen erheblich vom Wärmegleichgewichte abweichen, und zwar ebenso häufig solche, in denen die Zustandswahrscheinlichkeit gerade zu- als abnimmt.

Even more significant is his claim that in these rare pockets of disequilibrium, change is as likely to increase entropy as decrease it. This amounts to saying that time is as likely to move forward as backward, because, for Boltzmann, the motion toward entropy is time. For him, motion toward entropy does not happen within time, but rather that motion is time. The source of our observable universe is an anomaly, development away from equilibrium: our observable universe is a pocket within a larger universe.

Describing Boltzmann’s views, Craig Callender writes:

Boltzmann, however, explained this low-entropy condition by treating the observable universe as a natural statistical fluctuation away from equilibrium in a vastly larger universe.

Surveying Boltzmann’s conclusions, then, many questions might arise. Among them are these three:

First, Boltzmann’s hypotheses about the universe are based on, or prompted by, his investigation in gas theory. To which extent is it a valid methodological move, to apply the principles of gas theory to the entire universe? Aside from the observation that the universe includes solids and liquids, and is not composed of gas alone, it seems in other ways, too, that it is a great leap to assume that the principles which govern and explain the behavior of a gas inside a glass container sitting on Boltzmann’s laboratory table are sufficient to explain and govern the entire universe. Can Boltzmann validly generalize to the entire cosmos from a sealed beaker filled with nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide?

Second, to which extent is Boltzmann’s assumption justified, that the universe is largely, almost entirely, in a state of equilibrium? And that any disequilibrium is a small, relatively microscopic, anomalous pocket within this larger universe? The glass container, filled with a gas, on Boltzmann’s laboratory table may well be largely, even entirely, in a state of equilibrium, but to assume the same of the entire universe seems again like an unwarranted generalization. Unlike the glass container in the laboratory, the universe contains near-perfect vacuums between galaxies, contrasted with the most dense possible compressions of matter elsewhere in the same universe. It contains the coldest possible and the hottest possible points. It seems that these would be pieces of evidence that perhaps disequilibrium is more pervasive in the universe than Boltzmann seems to indicate.

Third, do Boltzmann’s results contain a hidden assumption or requirement that there be some type of “meta-time” within which time operates? In order for Boltzmann to indicate that there would simultaneously be pockets within the larger universe, and that time in these different pockets could be going in different directions, there needs to be a larger meta-time in order for these to be happening “simultaneously.”

In addition to the above three questions, there are doubtless many more questions which can, and should, be posed both in order to understand and in order to evaluate Boltzmann’s work.

Faraday’s Method: Electromagnetism as Visual Intuitive Phenomena

In America — and perhaps in other parts of the world as well — secondary and postsecondary educational institutions have worked to create in the minds of students an almost instinctive or reflexive connection between mathematics and the natural sciences. Those who work in schools will automatically say “science” when prompted with the words “math and … ”

Yet the marriage between math and science may be merely a flirtation or friendship. The bond and similarity between the two is not as strong as is commonly supposed.

The thinkers who began the enterprises of modern mathematics and modern science saw them as two very different activities. The home of a priori rational certainty was found in mathematics, while approximation and tentativeness lived in the sciences.

The quadratic formula is the same in textbooks printed today or two hundred years ago — and will be the same centuries into the future. By contrast, the atomic weight of various isotopes of lead or gold, when calculated out to large numbers of significant figures, might be revised or refined over the years as successive editions of textbooks are printed for chemistry and physics classes.

There is a danger in overemphasizing the importance of mathematics in the natural sciences — and here one can also mean the observational sciences and empirical sciences. The non-mathematical aspects of scientific activity risk being ignored: the intuitive aspects.

There is an objection, of course, to say that seemingly non-mathematical properties like color and shape can in fact be reduced to mathematics: color is a wavelength which can be represented by a number; shape can be captured in an algebraic equation.

To this objection, one might respond by positing that a color is more than the number of its wavelength and a shape is more than its corresponding algebraic equation. As the human mind seeks correlations and systemic connections, a color or a shape functions differently, and is treated by the mind differently, than a number or an equation. It is in this seeking that scientific discoveries are made and insights gained.

Two scientists who were champions of mathematics — James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann — nonetheless praised the intuitive and conceptual work of Michael Faraday. Faraday’s discoveries and descriptions of electromagnetic phenomena were shockingly free of mathematics, as historian Alan Hirschfeld writes:

Maxwell, the consummate mathematician, nonetheless understood the power of mathematics to mislead when not anchored in experiment or observation. In Faraday’s Researches, he encountered science in its purest form, “untainted” by mathematical manipulation. Here, he decided, would be the entry point for his own investigations into electricity and magnetism. In a later reflection, Maxwell sounds almost relieved that Faraday had stuck to his particular brand of investigation, thereby blazing a trail that Maxwell himself could follow.

Boltzmann explains one of Faraday’s many intuitive, i.e. non-mathematical, breakthroughs:

While the older system had held the centers of force to be the only realities, and the forces themselves to be mathematical conceptions, Faraday saw distinctly the continuous working of the forces from point to point in the intermediate space. The potential, which had hitherto been only a formula for lightening the work of calculation, was for him the bond really existing in space, the cause of the action of force.

Boltzmann uses the word ‘saw’ in the text above, emphasizing Faraday’s visual technique. Faraday’s work with magnetic fields was largely the work of observing patterns, e.g., the movement of iron filings. “By the light of his own clear conceptions,” Boltzmann writes, Faraday made “such great discoveries.” Boltzmann also explains Faraday’s effect on Maxwell:

Maxwell also, when he undertook the mathematical treatment of Faraday’s ideas, was from the very outset impelled by their influence into a new path.

Maxwell himself praises Faraday’s non-mathematical approach:

It was perhaps for the advantage of science that Faraday, though thoroughly conscious of the fundamental forms of space, time, and force, was not a professed mathematician. He was not tempted to enter into the many interesting researches in pure mathematics which his discoveries would have suggested if they had been exhibited in a mathematical form, and he did not feel called upon either to force his results into a shape acceptable to the mathematical taste of the time, or to express them in a form which mathematicians might attack. He was thus left at leisure to do his proper work, to coordinate his ideas with his facts, and to express them in natural, untechnical language.

Faraday was talented at drawing diagrams and sketches of magnetic fields and various configurations which were part of his experiments. The etymology of the word ‘intuition’ arises from verbs meaning to ‘see’ or to ‘look’ and Immanuel Kant chose the word ‘intuition’ — or rather, the German equivalent, Anschauung — which might prompt the reader to investigate any similarities between Kant’s thought and Faraday’s thought.

In any case, Faraday filled notebooks with drawings and illustrations, and it was in them and through them that he founded the modern science of electromagnetism and made his many significant discoveries: it was in and through the images and illustrations, not by means of equations and formulas.

Aside from Faraday’s visual method, there was a second feature of his thought which may have shaped his investigations and conclusions. His entire adult life was spent working in an organization known as the “Sandemanian” or “Glasite” church, as Alan Hirschfeld writes:

The Sandemanian church continued to hold a central place in Faraday’s life. He attended services and ritual feats, enjoyed the sense of community and, with rare exception, clung to its precepts.

The worldview of this faith shaped his exploration of electromagnetism. In the same way that a sort of spiritual humility caused Augustine to recognize the limits of human reason and caused Francis Bacon to formulate the sources of experimental error, so also Faraday was motivated to caution in his hypothesizing and to thoroughness in observation and experimentation.

Faraday understood the laws and principles of electromagnetism as being the products of God’s thought. He wrote: “for the book of nature, which we have to read is written by the finger of God.” Faraday understood lawlike phenomena, and nature’s laws, to be deliberately and rationally planned: “God has been pleased to work in his material creation by laws.”

There is a connection between Faraday’s intuitive approach to electromagnetism and his understanding of God. Verbs of sight were both metaphor and literally truth for Faraday in his investigations of electromagnetism: he was “looking” into God’s work and “saw” the rationality of it.

Boltzmann and the Direction of Time: Newton, Leibniz, and the Move toward Equilibrium

Historically, thought about time, like thought about space, emerged in the modern era in terms of a debate between Newtonians and Leibnizians. Those who followed the thought of Isaac Newton, who did his writing in the late 1600s and early 1700s, saw time as an absolute: as an independently existing framework within which objects existed and events happened.

Those who followed Gottfried Leibniz, who lived at approximately the same time, saw time as a relative measurement between events. If there were no events, there would be no time, because time is simply the separation between events.

Both views found ways to conceptualize the directionality of time. The Newtonians saw time as a one-way street: events happen at points on the timeline, and an observer is moving along the timeline in one direction only, from one event to the next.

The Leibnizians denied an independent reality to the timeline, saying rather that a later event and a prior event have a relationship to each other which is not symmetrical or reciprocal: an analogy to the parent-child relationship reveals that the parent and the child are real, while the concept of parenthood is a merely relative abstraction from the two real things. So it is also, Leibniz would suggest, with time.

When the question about the possibility of bidirectional time is raised — when one asks about time moving backwards — a challenge arises both for Newton and for Leibniz.

Attempts to explain the directionality of time often incorporate the concept of causality or the second law of thermodynamics or both.

In an intuitive and naive sense, it seems obvious that later events cannot cause prior events. This is an instinctive argument for the directionality of time.

The second law of thermodynamics is subject to many different phrasings, but a simplistic version says that entropy never decreases and that systems always tend toward maximum entropy. The directionality of time, then, is marked out as entropy increases, or at least fails to decrease.

Ludwig Boltzmann was a physicist and philosopher in Vienna. He did his work in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Much of his work dealt with the physical chemistry of gasses. In particular, he refined the mathematical formulation of Brownian motion and how gasses move toward entropy, equilibrium, and homogeneity.

Along the way, Boltzmann obtained some results which are perhaps counterintuitive and which challenge the common understanding of the directionality of time.

Boltzmann discovered that a gas, if contained in a finite space which changes neither in shape nor in total volume, and if in a state of equilibrium, will spontaneously develop local regions of disequilibrium. This seems like a violation of the intuitive understanding of the second law of thermodynamics.

Further, Boltzmann came to reject a simplistic version of Newtonian time, in which it would be said that systems move toward entropy over time. He came instead to view the movement toward entropy as time. On Boltzmann’s view, then, it would be said that the movement of systems toward entropy is time: time is the increase of entropy.

Combining these two ideas, Boltzmann concluded that there are instances in which time runs backward: times when pockets of disequilibrium develop in a system which has already obtained maximum entropy. As author Martin Gardner writes:

The most popular way to give an operational meaning to “backward time” was by imagining a world in which shuffling processes went backward, from disorder to order. Ludwig Boltzmann, the 19th-century Austrian physicist who was one of the founders of statistical thermodynamics, realized that after the molecules of a gas in a closed, isolated container have reached a state of thermal equilibrium — that is, are moving in complete disorder with maximum entropy — there will always be little pockets forming here and there where entropy is momentarily decreasing. These would be balanced by other regions where entropy is increasing; the overall entropy remains relatively stable, with only minor up-and-down fluctuations.

As counterintuitive as these results are, Boltzmann went even further. If that these principles hold for a gas in an unchanging container — imagine a corked test tube in a chemistry laboratory — then these principles will also hold true for the universe as a whole.

On the grand cosmic scale, Boltzmann hypothesizes, there might be regions within the universe in which time is running backward.

If one is to speak of time running backward, then it must be decided whether this will be explained in Newtonian terms, Leibnizian terms, or Boltzmann’s terms. In intuitive Newtonian terms, some sense can be made of time as an existing framework in which it might happen that entropy would decrease instead of increase: but if time is independent of the events which happen in it, then this decrease in entropy would not qualify as a reversal of time’s direction, even if it is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

In Leibnizian terms, one event succeeding another, or one state succeeding another, shapes the direction of time, and so likewise this decrease in entropy would not be a reversal of time.

On Boltzmann’s own terms, in which time is the movement toward entropy, this can be seen as a reversal of time. Yet it should be asked: does Boltzmann need to assume a larger Newtonian framework of independent time, in order to determine that time in the smaller region is running backward?

To complicate matters further, Boltzmann implies that it would be possible to have in the universe regions, some of which are moving toward equilibrium, and some of which are moving away from it. Here one wants to add the phrase: “at the same time.” But if those competing regions within the universe define their time as Boltzmann suggests, i.e., by the movement toward equilibrium, how then could it be said that these regions have time moving in opposite directions, unless there were a larger framework, a meta-time, of Newtonian nature, against which the direction of time in the smaller regions could be measured?

The question is: Does Boltzmann need a Newtonian meta-time to make his view of time succeed?

Martin Gardner continues:

Boltzmann imagined a cosmos of vast size, perhaps infinite in space and time, the overall entropy of which is at a maximum but which contains pockets where for the moment entropy is decreasing. (A “pocket” could include billions of galaxies and the “moment” could be billions of years.) Perhaps our flyspeck portion of the infinite sea of space-time is one in which such a fluctuation has occurred. At some time in the past, perhaps at the time of the “big bang,” entropy happened to decrease; now it is increasing. In the eternal and infinite flux a bit of order happened to put in its appearance; now that order is disappearing again, and so our arrow of time runs in the familiar direction of increasing entropy. Are there other regions of space-time, Boltzmann asked, in which the arrow of entropy points the other way? If so, would it be correct to say that time in such a region was moving backward, or should one simply say that entropy was decreasing as the region continued to move forward in time?

Boltzmann further concludes that in regions, or in the universe at large, in which equilibrium as been achieved, i.e., in which entropy is at its maximum, there is no time, or in Boltzmann’s own words, it is “dead.”

Can it make sense to speak of time running backwards, or in the case of an achieved equilibrium, of time stopping, unless there is some meta-time, some perspective from a higher level, from which it could be observed that time was so behaving? Martin Gardner asks:

If things come to a standstill in time and “then” reverse, what does the word “then” mean? It has meaning only if we assume a more fundamental kind of time that continues to move forward, altogether independent of how things in the universe move. Relative to this meta-time — the time of the hypothetical observer who has slipped unnoticed into the picture — the cosmos is indeed running backward. But if there is no meta-time — no observer who can stand outside the entire cosmos and watch it reverse — it is hard to understand what sense can be given to the statement that the cosmos “stops” and “then” starts moving backward.

There is no doubt that Boltzmann was an exceptionally brilliant thinker. Yet there are some difficult questions for him to answer.

Did he over-rely on the analogy to gasses? What might be provable or observable about a corked test tube filled with air might not apply to the universe as a whole. What justifies the transference? If principles have been understood from gasses in a finite container of unchanging shape and size, why would these principles apply to the universe as a whole?

Is Boltzmann justified in asserting that the universe as a whole is in a state of equilibrium? He makes the assertion that “the universe” is “everywhere in thermal equilibrium and therefore dead,” with the exception of small regions which “depart from thermal equilibrium” for a “relatively short time.”

Yet the universe as it is known demonstrates sharp distinctions between vacuums and dense astronomical bodies. It displays, not chaotic Brownian motion, but predictable Newtonian and Keplerian orbits. Observations, whether by optical telescope or by radar telescope or by space travel, do not reveal a homogenized universe.

The reader will want to consult Boltzmann’s Vorlesungen über Gastheorie, Band II, Kapitel 90.

Boltzmann made remarkable discoveries and had brilliant insights. Yet many questions about the direction of time remain to be answered.

Reductionism Then and Now: Pre-Socratic Physics

When the Milesian philosophers of Ionia began their reductionist project, they seem to have equated a universal systematic underlying principle for all reality with a principle for all matter. Perhaps they either didn’t distinguish matter from energy, or didn’t care about energy, or weren’t aware of energy.

As with all investigations of pre-Socratic thinkers, conjectures will remain tentative, due to sketchy textual sources.

Perhaps they saw energy in terms of powers which objects have, making the objects — i.e., matter — primary, and energy secondary.

When the Milesians sought a unifying principle, they looked to matter instead of to energy — what is the common principle behind all matter? — although they were aware of forces, as Leonard Susskind writes:

Of all the forces of nature, only three were known to the ancients — electric, magnetic, and gravitational. Thales of Miletos (600 BC) was said to have moved feathers with amber that had been rubbed with cat fur. At about the same time he mentioned loadstone, a naturally occurring magnetic material. Aristotle, who was probably late on the scene, had a theory of gravity, even if it was completely wrong. These three were the only forces that were known until the 1930s.

The history of physics changed direction at some point placing more emphasis on energy as an independent topic, rather than energy as merely a property of, or an ancillary to, matter.

So it is that post-Socratic and post-Newtonian physics seeks a Grand Unified Theory (GUT), not uniting all matter, but uniting all known forces. Physics as a discipline decided that it had worked about the basic principle of matter — all atoms are composed of electrons, neutrons, and protons, etc. — and turned to energy.

The ancients knew of the three main forces because they were clearly observable, as Leonard Susskind notes:

What makes these easily observed forces special is that they are long-range. Long-range forces fade slowly with distance and can be seen between objects when they are well separated.

While physicists search for a GUT, they focus primarily on electro-magnetic and nuclear forces. A further step would make a truly universal system by including gravity. This is called a ‘Theory of Everything’ (TOE).

While GUT and TOE remain speculative and controversial, they are also a continuation of the Milesian reductionist project, with a shift toward energy and away from matter.

While gravity is the most easily observable force, and therefore the first object of philosophical speculation, it is also the weakest force. This is counterintuitive to the extent that it is everywhere visible and to the extent that someone who’s had a brick dropped on his toes will not consider the force to be empirically weak.

Yet gravity is considered to be a weak force because for any one unit of matter, the measured force is small relative, e.g., to magnetic forces. Gravity’s force seems strong, exerting hundreds of pounds of force on each human being, because the earth’s mass is so large. By contrast, a magnet of much smaller mass than the earth would be able to exert an equal or greater force.

Gravitational force is by the far the most obvious of the three, but surprisingly it is much weaker than electromagnetic force. The reason is interesting and worth a short digression. It goes back to Newton’s universal law of gravitational attractions. Everything attracts everything else.

In the search for universal principles — whether GUT or TOE or the Milesian reductionist project — language is strained to capture the concepts. Is this the systemic principle that’s “behind” or “underneath” all reality? The prepositions betray language’s difficulties in capturing the idea: most prepositions are spatial, and yet the quest here is not for a primarily spatial relationship.

In sum, while the Milesians made significant progress toward a unifying principle which underlies all reality, their search seems to have been skewed toward matter at the expense of energy.

Reductionism and the Milesian Philosophers

Sorting through the ideas of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the modern reader can be forgiven for finding some of what they thought to be odd. But with sympathetic reading, their proposals can be understood in ways which do, after all, make some sense.

The common thread connecting these three philosophers from Miletus is a project now called ‘reductionism.’

Looking at the variety in the world around them, these men asked whether there was some unifying reality which produced all of it, constituted all of it, and made it all intelligible. For these three thinkers, this was primarily on the level of physical objects.

What do a flower, a rock, a cloud, and the planet Jupiter all have in common? They are all composed of matter. But matter manifests itself in these divergent — very divergent — ways. What makes all these different things fall into the same category?

Phrasing the questions in a twenty-first century way, one might ask, what properties does all matter share? Certainly, a flower growing in a garden and the planet Jupiter seem to have very little in common. If they are both made of matter, then it is necessary to more closely understand what matter is.

The three Milesian philosophers were looking for a universal and ubiquitous principle — the basis of all matter — which would be the source and substance for everything. In this way, they are not so different from modern physicists.

The modern answer to the Milesian question might be: “Everything is made of protons, electrons, and neutrons.”

Seen in this way, the suggestion that everything is foundationally composed of water, or air, or some indeterminate stuff which has the capability of becoming water or air or fire or dirt, is not so odd. Interpreted with charity, these suggestions make sense, even if they’re not quite correct.

Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen is the most common element in the earth’s crust, and hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. These two substances are everywhere in the environments which human beings inhabit. The rocks, plants, animals, and other objects encountered in daily life on earth are full of these two substances.

The choice of air as a potential primordial source for everything likewise has some reasonable aspects. The air on Earth is approximately 21% oxygen, and as noted above, oxygen is ubiquitous. Earth’s air is often laden with water, whether as clouds or as invisible vapor, which therefore includes hydrogen. Additionally, air is often filled with dust, which could be fine particulates of silicon, iron, or anything else.

The hypothesis of some primary substance called the ‘indeterminate’ — the ‘boundless’ or the ‘unlimited’ in various attempts to translate Anaximander’s Greek into English — resembles the concept of an undifferentiated stem cell, which can become any of many different types of cell, and resembles the concept of basic particles in physics, which can form atoms of any type.

The reductionist project of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes is, then, not as odd as it seems, and has a significant similarity to aspects of modern physics.

Anaximander: Order Out of Chaos

The career of Anaximander was both destructive and constructive. He formulated objects to the views of Thales, and then assembled lines of reasoning to support his own views.

Against Thales, he argued that finding the systemic principle of the universe in any one element was too limited, too specific. For one particular element to be the source and foundational principle for the universe seemed impossible to Anaximander, because that one element would be locked into the narrowness of not being any of the other elements.

So Anaximander proposes a view that there is some indeterminate stuff that is not any one element, but contains the potential to give rise to each and all of them, as Donald Palmer writes:

For Anaximander, the ultimate stuff behind the four elements could not itself be one of the elements. It would have to be an unobservable, unspecific, indeterminate something-or-other, which he called the Boundless, or the Unlimited (apeiron in Greek). It would have to be boundless, unlimited, and unspecific because anything specific is opposed to all the other specific things in existence. (Water is not fire, which in turn is not air, and air is not earth [not dirt and rock]). Yet the Boundless is opposed to nothing, because everything is in it.

Anaximander’s language is vague, but the modern reader can consider concrete examples from the twenty-first century. In complex organisms, a stem cell is indeterminate, or undetermined — it can eventually become one of a long list of different and mutually exclusive types of cells.

Likewise, in the plasmatic chaos in the center of the star, subatomic particles are freely existing which will later constitute definite, but distinct, types of atoms: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, etc.

So Anaximander’s proposal for a limitless boundless something as a foundational principle for the universe isn’t too bad, as Donald Palmer explains:

Anaximander seems to have imagined the Boundless as originally moving effortlessly in a great cosmic vortex that was interrupted by some disaster (a Big Bang?), and that disaster caused opposites — dry and wet, cold and hot — to separate off from the vortex and to appear to us not only as qualities but as the four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire.

In his analysis of Thales, Anaximander presented an early version of the concept of entropy: the idea that, without some force to the contrary, the universe tended toward some homogeneous equilibrium.

It is also possible to read into Anaximander an early version of the hypothesis that life is the principle which opposes entropy: action which moves the universe away from entropy is life. The biological process might be the one force in the universe which moves things toward more order, and which makes more complex structures.

Rebellion among Philosophers: Anaximander Questions Thales

Given that Thales is widely considered to be the world’s first philosopher, it was left to the world’s second philosopher to be the world’s first intellectual rebel. It was a historical inevitability that, Thales having expressed some views, someone else would later express different views.

The task of the reader is to compare both sets of ideas. This task will require thought about evenhanded and fair readings of the two competitors. A stalemate or a tie is a perfectly acceptable outcome — as is the production of a third alternative arising from the comparison. The task is more about the thinking process and less about the outcome of a final judgment.

Every disagreement also involves a certain amount of agreement. While no two philosophers agree on everything, it is also true that no two philosophers disagree on everything. In the case of Thales and his successors, Donald Palmer points out that:

Several generations of Thales’s followers agreed with his primary insight — that the plurality of kinds of things in the world must be reducible to one category — but none of them seems to have accepted his formula that everything is water.

The second philosopher has two tasks: First, he must first produce reasons or evidence which support his disagreement with the first philosopher. Second, he must produce reasons or evidence which support his innovation, his new idea which is proposed as a replacement for the first philosopher’s idea.

So who was the world’s second philosopher?

Thales taught his philosophy, whether in a formal academic setting, or merely by example, we do not know. “His student Anaximander” lived from around 610 B.C. to around 546 B.C., and was “also from the city of Miletus, said that if all things were water, then long ago everything would have returned to water.”

Anaximander was in some sense a “student” of Thales, whether through formal education or through merely being exposed, firsthand or secondhand, to the ideas of Thales. It is not certain whether or not the two men ever met in person, although it is very likely, given that they lived in the same city at roughly the same time.

In any case, Anaximander argues against Thales — in the philosophical sense of ‘argumentation’ which means a calm presentation of a line of reasoning, not an emotional quarrel — by a technique which amounts to saying, “If what you say is true … ”

This technique is called reductio ad absurdum or simply reductio for short. The writer grants his opponent’s view, and then shows that this view entails something clearly illogical or false.

Anaximander’s first argument amounts to this: If it were true that everything is essentially water, then by now, everything would have returned to the simple state of water, and there would be nothing in the universe besides water.

In a slightly different argument, Anaximander points out that fire is the opposite of water, and asks how it would be possible for water to produce fire. He asks it as a rhetorical question, i.e., he expects no answer, because he thinks that the answer is obvious to everyone — water can’t possibly produce fire.

The reader will recall that the “principle of charity” is necessary here. One could quickly retort that, from the viewpoint of modern chemistry, water is hydrogen and oxygen, and can easily give rise to fire. But such a retort would miss the point.

Donald Palmer gives a more detailed account of Anaximander’s line of reasoning:

Anaximander asked how water could become its deadly enemy, fire — how a quality could give rise to its opposite. That is, if observable objects were really just water in various states of agitation — as are ice and steam — then eventually all things would have settled back into their primordial liquid state. Aristotle paraphrases him this way: If ultimate reality “were something specific like water, the other elements would be annihilated by it. For the different elements have contrariety with one another … If one of them were unlimited the others would have ceased to exist by now.” (Notice that if this view can be accurately attributed to Anaximander, then he subscribed to an early view of the principle of entropy, according to which all things have a tendency to seek a state of equilibrium.)

The modern reader might be tempted to agree with half of what Anaximander asserts here, and disagree with the other half.

One the one hand, the tendency of physical systems to move toward a state of equilibrium, which can be variously characterized as chaos or homogeneity, is a valuable insight. Anaximander might be credited with anticipating the famous second law of thermodynamics, and is a forerunner of thinkers like Rudolf Clausius, Max Planck, and Ludwig Boltzmann.

On the other hand, he blithely assumes that something can’t become its opposite, or that a quality can’t give rise to its opposite. After Anaximander, some later philosophers — among them, G.W.F. Hegel — will assert the view that a thing or a quality will always give rise to its opposite.

In any case, the world’s first philosophical revolution — Anaximander’s opposition to Thales — is groundbreaking and worth studying.

The Principle of Charity and Thales: Making Sense of Apparent Nonsense

When reading philosophical texts, the student will inevitably come across passages which seem odd, confused, or even simply wrong. Yet the student learns that these passages were written by some of the greatest minds of the ages. How does one understand this?

Wise readers will apply an approach called ‘the principle of charitable interpretation.’ This approach looks at a text, seeks and explores competing possible interpretations, and attributes the most rational intentions to the author, and attributes truest meaning to the text, or the meaning most likely to be true, or the meaning nearest the truth — sidestepping, for the moment, exactly what it means to be “true,” and working simply with a prima facie and intuitive sense of ‘true.’

Another related approach requires the reader not to reject an entire text or its author simply because a small part of that text seems to be in error. A number of major authors have repeated the notion that garlic juice neutralizes a magnetic field. These authors — including Johannes Eck, Georg Agricola, Paracelsus, Portaleone, Andreas Libavius, and Johann Baptist van Helmont, among others — wrote texts which were otherwise relatively rational and reliable.

So it is with Thales, the world’s first philosopher. Donald Palmer applies the “principle of charity” to Thales:

I regret to say that I must add three other ideas that Aristotle also attributes to Thales. My regret is due to the capacity of these ideas to undercut what has seemed so far to be a pretty neat foundation for future science. Aristotle says that, according to Thales,

(A) The earth floats on water the way a log floats on a pond.
(B) All things are full of gods.
(C) A magnet (loadstone) must have a soul, because it is able to produce motion.

The first of these ideas, (A), is puzzling because it seems gratuitous. If everything is water, then it is odd to say that some water floats on water. (B) shows us that the cut between Mythos and Logos is not as neat in Thales’ case as I have appeared to indicate. (C) seems somehow related to (B), but in conflicting ways. If according to (B) all things are full of gods, then why are the magnets mentioned in (C) any different from everything else in nature? No surprise that over the years scholars have spilled a lot of ink — and, because the debate still goes on, punched a lot of computer keys — trying to make sense of these ideas that Aristotle attributes to Thales.

Now, it is clear that the earth does not float on water. But the reader can charitably note the similarities between “floating” on water and “floating” in space. While the former depends on relative densities and the latter depends on gravitation and orbital physics, the affect of floating is similar in both cases.

More than 2,000 years after the fact, it is difficult to guess at what Thales had in mind when he wrote — or perhaps said — that “all things are full of gods.” Perhaps he thought that there were forces which kept objects in existence: otherwise, they might simply cease to exist. Or perhaps he noted that objects had the power to create certain sensations in the human mind: colors, textures, scents, sounds, and tastes. Modern readers will probably never know with certainty what Thales meant, but even these two quick examples show charity in speculating about what he might have meant.

Likewise, the notion that a magnet has a soul is clearly an acknowledgement of the mysterious power it has. Thales lacked the vocabulary and electromagnetic concepts which enabled Michael Faraday to describe, explain, and name magnetic fields. If Faraday didn’t have the advantages of using the concepts of modern physics, then perhaps he, too, would have attributed “souls” and “gods” to magnets and other physical objects.

In the case of Thales and other Presocratic thinkers, an additional factor obliges the reader to extend charity when reading them: the texts themselves are fragmentary and have been through a long and perilous process of transmission. If an author, centuries after his work, were known only by a few sentences, plucked from his various texts, which were perhaps garbled as they’d been copied and re-copied, and which lacked not only the larger context of the book from which they came, but also lacked a situational context which might show which concerns the author was addressing, then such an author might be easily misunderstood, and might easily appear as mistaken, confused, or ignorant — when in fact he might be none of those things.

The value of the “principle of charity” is that it causes the reader to explore the text further and more carefully instead of dismissing it: and the reader will find that further exploration rewarding.

Thales and Monism: Is There a Single Underlying Principle?

As one who sought to add philosophical conceptual explanations to the mythological explanations of the universe, Thales looked for a unifying thought or substance which would explain all objects.

This is a big question which has kept philosophers busy over the centuries. Can all of reality be reduced to one single principle? Some folks say so; they are called ‘monists.’ The question for them is, then, what is that one single principle.

Other philosophers argue that reality is too complex to be reduced to a single principle, and that there are actually two principles at work. These thinkers are called ‘dualists.’

The discussion of dualism and monism is a big one, and way too large for this blog post. It suffices to note, for present purposes, that Thales seems to have been a monist. One must quickly add that he probably would not have conceptualized it that way, and that there are lots of things that remain unknown about his metaphysical system, and which levels and types of reality he might have postulated, as Donald Palmer writes:

Thales was familiar with the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth. He assumed that all things must ultimately be reducible to one of these — but which one?

It is easy to laugh at the traditional framework of four elements, but it is a logical system. With Thales, the system remains in place, but is elevated by adding a conceptual level to the mythological framework.

In all the empirical experience that one could have in the year 600 B.C., water was ubiquitous. Water is necessary for life, and water surrounds all land masses. So water seems like a good choice if one is looking for a universal principle:

Of all the elements, water is the most obvious in its transformations: Rivers turn into deltas, water turns into ice and then back into water, which in turn can be changed into steam, which becomes air, and air, in the form of wind, fans fire.

Why would a twenty-first century philosopher spend time thinking about Thales, or taking his ideas seriously? Because Thales was trying to do what physicists are still doing: searching for a “grand unified theory” (GUT).

There is an innate drive in humans to seek foundational principles. Does this innate drive imply that such principles exist? The monists, in any case, continue to seek one central axiom to explain reality. Thales was perhaps the first one to do this, and led all the others in that direction.

It’s clear that Thales was looking for such a foundational concept, as Donald Palmer reports:

Thale’s actual words were: “The first principle and basic nature of all things is water.”

This obviously false conclusion is valued today not for its content but for its form (it is not a great leap between “All things are composed of water” and the claim “All things are composed of atoms”) and for the presupposition behind it (that there is an ultimate stuff behind appearances that explains change while remaining itself unchanged). Viewed this way, Thales can be seen as the first philosopher to introduce the project of reductionism. Reductionism is a method of explanation that takes an object that confronts us on the surface as being one kind of thing and shows that the object can be reduced to a more basic kind of thing at a deeper but less obvious level of analysis. This project is usually seen as a major function of modern science.

Thales is, then, the father of reductionism. Simply put, an observer might note the commonalities between trees, grass, marigolds, tomatoes, etc., and create a category called “green plants.” In this category, one finds photosynthesis, a need for water, a need for light, roots, leaves, etc.

Reductionism is, in its simplest form, the creation of categories.

The question is: How far can one take reductionism? Is it possible to take it too far? Is it possible to take it not far enough? This question will reappear over and over again, in various forms, in the history of philosophy. Not to take reductionism far enough is to create a “distinction without a difference.” To take reductionism too far is to overlook differences.

In any case, Thales seems to be, not only the father of philosophy, but also rather the father of monism and reductionism. Not bad work for a guy living around 600 B.C.!

Seeking a Systematic and Unified Ontology: Thales Looks for the Foundational Principle of Physical Reality

The first philosophers in the history of the world are grouped together as Presocratics. Among the Presocratics are several subgroups, the earliest of which is the Milesians. Among the Milesians, the initial individual was a man named Thales. He did his work around 600 B.C., give or take a decade. So he was the first of the first of the first.

As Donald Palmer writes:

Philosophy makes its first self-presentation in three consecutive generations of thinkers from the little colony of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor — today’s Turkey — in the sixth century.

The first recorded philosopher is Thales of Miletus.

Apparently, he did not write a book, or if he did, it is long lost.

So, this most fascinating fellow — potentially the world’s first philosophy — did not leave directly anything for modern readers. How does one know about him? What did he think?

Although there is no major text written by Thales left for us, there are a few dubious and sketchy quotes. Most of those are recorded in books written by Aristotle, who wrote about three hundred years after Thales. Donald Palmer reports:

If we can trust Aristotle and his commentators, Thales’s argument was was something like this:

If there is change, there must be some thing that changes, yet does not change. There must be a unity behind the apparent plurality of things, a Oneness disguised by the superficial plurality of the world. Otherwise the world would not be a world; rather, it would be a disjointed grouping of unrelated fragments.

So what is the nature of this unifying, ultimately unchanging substance that is disguised from us by the appearance of constant change?

Thales was looking for a unifying and systematic principle behind physical reality — behind the phenomena which people detect with their five senses. What is the basic and foundational stuff of the world? Of the universe?

The questions which Thales posed are not that much different than the questions of modern physics more than 2,000 years later. The search for a unifying principle behind all forms of matter is the essence of subatomic physics. Likewise, the search for a unity behind all forms of energy, and eventually, behind both matter and energy, is a common theme among the great physicists of the past, present, and foreseeable future.

The physicists of the modern age look to various and increasingly smaller subatomic particles, look to a continuum of electromagnetic energy, and look to equations like Einstein’s to encompass both matter and energy.

Thales looked to something rather common yet remarkably subtle. He wondered if the underlying principle of all physical reality might be water.

It’s easy to dismiss Thales as simple-minded, primitive, or naive. But the reader might consider his choice more patiently. Water is one of the few things which is readily experienced in all three states: solid, liquid, and gas. Water constitutes the majority of the earth’s surface: 75% by some accounts. Water is also essential to all known forms of life, and constitutes a majority of the bodies of all known plants and animals.

So Thales could have done worse.

In addition to seeking a unifying and systematic principle for the sensible world, Thales was also trying to develop a conceptual explanation of that world, an explanation that would add a layer of depth beyond the already-available mythological explanations.

Contrary to the current casual usage of the word, ‘myth’ does not refer exclusively to falsehood. There are true myths. A myth is an explanation by means of a narrative. True myths give an accurate explanation of some aspect of reality, but they often give an incomplete explanation. They are true but incomplete.

Thales, his fellow Milesians, and the Presocratics generally, sought to give conceptual explanations of the physical world around them. This is why their early philosophy is often so closely bound to physics. There was no sharp distinction between physics and philosophy in those days.

Thales thought that everything was water. Modern physicists think that everything is atoms or subatomic particles. The difference may not be so large.

The Unreliable Sources for Reliably Influential Inventiveness: The Obscure But Powerful Effect of Presocratic Thought

The good news about the Presocratic philosophers is that they are among the most thought-provoking, creative, and inventive thinkers in the history of philosophy. The bad news is that they are among the worst-documented authors ever.

That means that modern readers have very little information about them, and very little reliable information about exactly what they wrote or hypothesized. As Donald Palmer writes, “the problem is that in fact very little is known about the pre-Socratic philosophers. Most of the books that they wrote had already disappeared by the time that the philosopher Aristotle” summarized and explained their views.

Aristotle, who lived from 384 B.C. to 322 B.C., “tried to catalog and criticize their views.” Aristotle wrote about these Presocratic philosophers, and what they wrote and asserted. The problem is, modern readers can’t be sure of how accurate Aristotle was. Did Aristotle understand the Presocratics correctly? Did he report about them accurately?

Donald Palmer explains:

Today’s understanding of the pre-Socratics is based mostly on summaries of their ideas by Aristotle and by later Greek writers who had heard of their views only by word of mouth. Many of these accounts are surely inaccurate because of distortions caused by repetition over several generations by numerous individuals. (Have you ever played the game called Telephone, in which a complicated message is whispered to a player, who then whispers it to the next player, and so on, until the message — or what’s left of it — is announced to the whole group by the last player in the circle?) Also, these summaries often contained anachronistic ideas, that is, ideas from the later time projected back into the earlier views. Only fragments of the original works remain in most cases today, and even those few existing passages do not always agree with one another. Remember, these “books” were all written by hand on papyrus (a fragile early paper made from the crushed and dried pulp of an Egyptian water plant), and all editions of these books were copied manually by professional scribes. Furthermore, the meaning of many of the fragments is debatable, both because of the “fragmentary” nature of the scraps — key words are missing or illegible — and because of the obscure style and vocabulary in which many of these works were written. Nevertheless, a tradition concerning the meaning of the pre-Socratics had already developed by Aristotle’s time, and it is that version of their story that influenced later philosophers and scientists. Aristotle is not the only source of our information about the pre-Socratics, but unfortunately most of the additional information comes from post-Aristotelian commentators giving interpretations of Aristotle’s remarks. We do not know to what extent the material provided by these other sources is informed by extraneous sources. So Aristotle appears to be our real source, and we have no clear idea of his accuracy because he paraphrases the various pre-Socratics.

Donald Palmer summarizes the situation bluntly: “Therefore, the tradition” which he describes “is flawed and distorted in many ways.”

So, if this data is so garbled, if this information is so distorted, why should modern readers invest their time reading it?

It’s worth wading through these disjointed and obscure texts because the Presocratics started exploring so many questions which lie at the three-way intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and physics. They explored exponential calculations — algebra class before algebra had been discovered — as they investigated rapidly accumulating accelerations and asymptotic curves. They hinted at calculus 2,000 years before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton discovered calculus.

Scholars continue to explore this tantalizing yet frustrating batch of quotes and snippets from the world’s first philosophers because they directly connect with the most modern, and post-modern, questions about the universe.

Revealing the Foundations of the Universe: The Presocratics Establish Modern Physics

Who were the Presocratics? They were a group of philosophers who did most of their work between 600 B.C. and 400 B.C., give or take a few decades. They did not all live in the same place; they were separated by hundreds of miles, at a time when travel and communication were much slower than they are now.

They did not all know each other, and they certainly did not all agree on many topics. They are divided into a number of different subgroups.

Yet they are all categorized together, and for good reasons. Yes, it’s true that they all — or most of them — did their work prior to the famous career of Socrates. But there is a better reason for lumping them all together. It’s the way they thought — the way they reasoned. Even when they came to different conclusions, they were using similar methods.

Donald Palmer explains that “the thinkers who were active in Greece between” 600 B.C. and 350 B.C. “are known today as the pre-Socratic philosophers, even though the last group so designated were actually contemporaries of Socrates.” Those dates are, of course, approximate, because these kinds of trends fade into, and out of, existence in a gradual way.

While the beginning and ending of a construct like the Presocratic era is fuzzy, the life of Socrates had definite beginning and ending points. Socrates was born in 469 B.C. and died in 399 B.C.

Donald Palmer explains some common threads among the diverse group: “What all the pre-Socratic philosophers have in common is their attempt to create general theories of the cosmos (kosmos is the Greek term for “world”) not simply by repeating the tales of” what happened, but rather explaining why and how it happened.

The Presocratics thought that myths — even when they are true — are not sufficient explanations. A myth is an explanation by means of narrative. A myth can be true or false. In slang and casual speech, ‘myth’ is sometimes used to refer to a falsehood, but that is not its meaning in philosophical discourse. The Presocratics pointed out that, if a conceptual explanation was given in addition to a myth, then the net amount of knowledge and understanding would be greater.

For example: a person might ask about how the first men arrived on the moon and walked around on it. A mythological answer would talk about Wernher von Braun and Neil Armstrong and the Apollo spacecraft, etc.. That myth would be true as far as it went, but it lacks some information.

A conceptual answer would talk about the forces of gravity, how much acceleration a spacecraft needs to reach a certain speed, what the escape velocity is for earth orbit, etc.

The Presocratics wanted to explain physical phenomena, not by giving a narrative, “but by using observation and reason to construct general theories that would explain to the” rational “and curious mind the secrets behind the appearances in the world.” A conceptual answer articulates principles which can be applied beyond the case in question. A mythological answer, even when it’s true, is usually limited to a concrete and specific instance.

Another commonality was that all the pre-Socratic philosophers stemmed from the outlying borders of the Greek world: islands in the Ionian Sea or Greek colonies in Italy or along the coast of Persia (in today’s Turkey).

Some scholars speculate that social life on the edges of the Greek Empire was more interesting than life back home on the Greek mainland, and that this circumstance occasioned the birth of philosophy. This is an interesting hypothesis, with plausible arguments both for and against it.

In any case, “knowledge of these thinkers is tremendously important not only for understanding the Greek world of their time, but” for gaining insights into modern physics, modern mathematics, and modern philosophy. Of course, one must also define when the modern era begins.

One of the reasons that the study of the Presocratics is good “for grasping the origins of” most subsequent “philosophy and science” is that they developed a concept of matter. One might look at different objects: a tree, an iceberg, a distant planet.

Those objects seem dissimilar to one another, but the Presocratics saw that they were all physical objects, and that there is some underlying commonality shared by all physical objects. They are all composed of matter. This is an abstraction. Abstraction is important in philosophy, in physics, and in all rational thought.

The Latin words from which the word ‘abstract’ arises mean to “pull away” or to “take off.” In abstraction, the thinker “pulls away” a concept or a principle from the specific instance in which she or he finds it. Having separated the concept from the context, she or he can then apply that concept elsewhere — or everywhere.

The Presocratics developed a way of understanding the universe which was systematic and unified. Their understanding revealed an underlying structure to reality which made modern physics possible. This understanding included that reality is intelligible, i.e., that it can be understood; that some laws of nature are universal, i.e., they apply everywhere and everywhen; and that certain elements of logic and mathematics are the foundations of the universe.

Topics in Early Greek Philosophy: The Presocratics Explore New Disciplines

Before Siddhartha formulated his thoughts in India, and before Confucius in China, the first philosophers lived and worked in Greek territories and colonies. Thales, who is reasonably cited as the world’s first philosopher, did his work around 600 B.C.

What constitutes philosophy? What was it that the Greeks did to qualify as the inventors of philosophy? Donald Palmer writes that “early Greek philosophers reframed the perennial puzzles about reality in such a way as to emphasize the workings of nature rather than the” dramatic explanatory power of a narrative. In other words, the Greek found a new way to explain things. In addition to myth, the Greeks began to formulate conceptual explanations.

Mythical explanations are narratives; in this sense of ‘myth,’ it’s important to remember that there are “true myths.” This is in contrast to the colloquial or informal use of ‘myth’ as a synonym for ‘falsehood.’

So the birth of philosophy among Greeks is, in part, about the “how” of explanations — aside from whether those explanations are true or accurate.

Not only did the Greeks arguably invent philosophy, they also created many of the various subtopics within philosophy. Donald Palmer identifies some of these specific subdisciplines:

This new direction represents the beginnings of a way of thinking that the Greeks would soon call “philosophy” — the love of wisdom. We can discern in these early efforts what we now take to be the main fields of the discipline that we too call philosophy: ontology (theory of being); epistemology (theory of knowledge); axiology (theory of value), which includes ethics, or moral philosophy (theory of right behavior), and aesthetics (theory of beauty, or theory of art); and logic (theory of correct inference).

One particular subtopic, cosmology, fascinated many of the earliest philosophers, including Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Cosmology asks about the foundational principles of the universe: What constitutes the universe? What keeps the universe in existence? What are the underlying essential components of the universe?

Donald Palmer remarks about these earliest philosophers:

They tended to demote cosmogony (theories about the origins of the world) and promote cosmology (theories about the nature of the world).

In addition to getting credit for inventing philosophy, the Greeks can plausibly get credit for inventing the natural sciences. To be sure, early Babylonians, Egyptians, and Persians made some interesting astronomical observations. In order to give the Greeks the honor of inventing the natural sciences, a clear boundary between the mere collection of observational data and scientific reasoning would be necessary.

“In fact, the theories put forth in ancient Greece could be called the origins of” modern science and mathematics “with as much justification as they can be called the origins of” philosophy “even though at that early period no such distinctions could be made.” Among ancient thinkers, there was no sharp separation between philosophy and the natural sciences.

Even today, there are ambiguous areas of overlap between mathematics, philosophy, and physics.

Among the Presocratics, thinkers like Zeno of Elea are still cited today in university departments of physics and mathematics. Zeno wrestled with concepts of time, space, and infinity — and wrestled with them in a way which kept his musings relevant for 2,000 years.

Other presocratics, primarily the Milesians, worked out a relationship between density, heat, and motion — anticipating the physicist Robert Brown by two millennia. The Milesians were the philosophers who lived in or near the city of Miletus: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

Roughly, I would say that science deals with problems that can be addressed experimentally by subsuming the observable events that puzzle us under the dominion of natural laws and by showing how these laws are related causally to those events. Philosophy, on the other hand, deals with problems that require a speculative rather than an experimental approach. Such problems often require conceptual analysis (the logical scrutiny of general ideas) rather than observation or data gathering.

Before the birth of Socrates, around 470 B.C., these earliest philosophers had invented philosophy, invented most of its subdisciplines, and laid the foundations of modern physics and modern mathematics.

Greek Beginnings: The Origin of the Word ‘Philosophy’

While debatable, it is convenient to take the Ionian philosophers on the west coast of Turkey, formerly known as Asia Minor or Anatolia, as the first philosophers. Certainly, the Greeks dominated philosophy for its first few centuries: There was little philosophical activity outside of the Greek lands, so philosophy was not only predominantly Greek during these years, but exclusively so.

So it was that the word ‘philosophy’ arose out of the Greek language. ‘Sophia’ is a Greek word for wisdom, and ‘Philo’ is a Greek word for love. Philosophy is etymologically the love of wisdom, as Donald Palmer writes:

The Greek word “Logos” is the source of the English word “logic” as well as all the “logies” in terms like “biology,” “sociology,” and “psychology,” where “logos” means the theory, or study, or rationalization of something. “Logos” also means “word” in Greek.

Reasoning is impossible without words. “Logos” can mean “word,” but it can also mean reasoning or any ongoing interactive linguistic activity, “so it involves the act of” writing, “or setting forth an idea in a clear manner.” Philosophy is impossible without language, and without writing, only simplistic reasoning is possible. Complex trains of thought require writing.

But there are complications to this simple story about how the word ‘philosophy’ came to be. The Greek language has at least four words that can be translated into English as ‘love.’ Why was ‘philo’ chosen, instead of another similar word? The Greek language reflected the awareness that there are different types of love. A person might love ice cream, and parents love their children. The same word ‘love’ is used to refer to two different relationships.

Likewise, the word ‘gnosis,’ from which the English word ‘cognition’ arises, could have been used instead of ‘sophia.’

So the simple story about the origins of the word ‘philosophy’ is not so simple after all.

“Logos,” therefore, designates a certain kind of thinking about the world, a kind of logical analysis that places things in the context of reason and explains them with the pure force of thought. Such an intellectual exercise was supposed to lead to wisdom (Sophia) and those who dedicated themselves to Logos were thought of as lovers of wisdom (love = philo), hence as philosophers.

Greek philosophy began around 600 B.C., plus or minus a decade, and Greek philosophers were active until sometime after 100 A.D. There were quiet periods during those centuries when philosophy was inactive, and other periods when it was prolific.

It was in this context that the word “Logos” was applied to Jesus, and to the Hebrew concept of God which Jesus made accessible to larger audiences.

“What was there before philosophy, before Logos? There was Mythos — a certain way of” explaining things by means of narrative, i.e., by telling a story. Used in this way, the word ‘myth’ doesn’t necessarily mean falsehood. Contrary to everyday usage of the word, in philosophy, one can speak of a true myth. Myths tell of “events that caused the world to be as it is now.”

It’s understandable that philosophers would like to get rid of false myths. People like to think that they’re correct, and that what they believe is true.

But if some myths are true, why would philosophers still want to investigate the matter and find another, Logos-based, explanation?

Philosophy was, in part, a drive to develop concept-based explanations, which not only explained why things are the way they are, but explained it in a way which used reason instead of narrative, which used abstractions instead of concrete details.

In some situations, it is possible for myth-based and logos-based explanations to coexist. A true myth can give a specific and historical narrative to explain a certain state of affairs, while philosophy can explain the same state of affairs conceptually.