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.

What Existentialism Might Be: From Kierkegaard to Sartre

The word ‘existentialism’ appears often in writings of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The frequency of its use is one of several reasons for its ambiguity. The word began to be used regularly in the 1920s and 1930s, and its appearances multiplied even more in the postwar decades.

While each author who uses the word seems to be confident about what it means, the kaleidoscope of usages does not allow for a clear meaning. A near-infinite collection of quotations about which authors are, or are not, existentialists would yield a mass of contradictions.

Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

Existentialism is not easily definable. Its protagonists have traced it back to Pascal, to St. Augustine, even to Socrates. It has been alleged in our time to be the doctrine of writers as various as Miguel de Unamuno and Norman Mailer. At first sight, characteristics of the doctrine are almost as various. That two writers both claim to be existentialists does not seem to entail their agreement on any one cardinal point. Consequently, to define existentialism by means of a set of philosophical formulas could be very misleading. Any formula sufficiently broad to embrace all the major existentialist tendencies would necessarily be so general and so vague as to be vacuous, for if we refer to a common emphasis upon, for example, the concreteness of individual human existence, we shall discover that in the case of different philosophers this emphasis is placed in contexts so dissimilar that it is put to quite different and incompatible uses. How then is existentialism to be defined?

Yet MacIntyre bravely ventures forth to attempt some semblance of a definition. Voluntarism is a common theme among those who are frequently labeled as existentialists.

If any single thesis could be said to constitute the doctrine of existentialism, it would be that the possibility of choice is the central fact of human nature. Even the thesis that existence precedes essence often means no more than that people do not have fixed natures that limit or determine their choices, but rather it is their choices that bring whatever nature they have into being. As existentialists develop this thesis, they are involved in at least three separate contentions.

The theme of voluntarism runs through, and loosely connects, the writings of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, and Dickens. In each, individuals are seen as making choices, or exhorted to make choices, with the awareness that the choices of individuals are significant.

This aspect of existentialism can perhaps be highlighted by contrasting it with those thinkers who oppose it. In the writings of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and sometimes Nietzsche, there is a certain mechanism or determinism which either denies choice to the individual, or minimizes its significance.

Maybe one could attempt to define existentialism by what it opposes. Marx argues that the individual human is the passive object which the grand forces of history and economics toss about like a cork on the ocean’s waves. Freud hypothesized that an individual’s thoughts and emotions were determined by experiences. Darwin constructed a system which saw choices as issuing from being who is the product of the impersonal forces of chemistry and physics.

Existentialism could be seen as a response to, or reaction against, Marx, Freund, Darwin, and similar thinkers. On the other hand, Kierkegaard, often cited as the father of existentialism, largely predated them.

By contrast, the existentialists would argue that human beings make numerous choices. Even when these choices seem to be dictated by a relatively rigid value system, that value system itself was chosen by the individual. These choices are not determined in any calculable way; therefore, any analogy to chemistry or physics is rejected.

This emphasis on choice is accompanied by a fondness, among at least some existentialist writers, for the words “free” and “freedom.”

Alasdair MacIntyre explains:

The first is that choice is ubiquitous. All my actions imply choices. Even when I do not choose explicitly, as I may not do in the majority of cases, my action bears witness to an implicit choice. The second contention is that although in many of my actions my choices are governed by criteria, the criteria which I employ are themselves chosen, and there are no rational grounds for such choices. The third is that no causal explanation of my actions can be given.

These partial hints about what existentialism might be, or about how the word ‘existentialism’ might be defined, notwithstanding, it remains difficult to answer questions like “Is Martin Heidegger an existentialist?” or “What does existentialism say about the afterlife?”

Existentialism is a construct, not a primary source. As such, it is of secondard concern relative to the actual texts of individual thinkers. Jean-Paul Sartre once famously remarked, “Existentialism? I don't know what that is. My philosophy is a philosophy of existence.”

The best and wisest route for scholarship is to treat each thinker as an individual, and to examine each thinker by means of the close reading of that philosopher’s texts.

Logical Positivism: The Influential if Unloved Innovations of the Vienna Circle

During the first half of the twentieth century, several major philosophical trends shaped the era’s significant thought. One of those movements is known by at least three names: Logical Positivism, Logical Empiricism, the Vienna Circle. These three names are almost synonymous, with only slight differences between them.

The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers and other thinkers who met on a regular basis, discussing and publishing, in the city of Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. While Vienna was the location of the earliest and most influential developments within this movement, Berlin and other cities were also important locations for the development of Logical Empiricism.

Movements are by nature ambiguous at their boundaries, and Logical Positivism is no exception. It is impossible to identify precise starting and ending points in time for this movement. It is not always clear which philosophers were part of the movement, and which ones were merely similar to, or associated with, the movement. Despite this vagueness, and despite the fact that movements are always constructs and not specific data points, it is nonetheless meaningful and useful to speak of Logical Positivism.

What is Logical Positivism? A definition or description of the movement would include these points: It is heavily empirical; it is anti-metaphysical; it takes physics and mathematics as paradigmatic for knowledge; it seeks to clarify philosophical questions by analysis of the words and propositions used to formulate those questions; its understanding of language is encapsulated in the slogan “The meaning of a word or sentence is the method of its verification.”

Each point in that definition requires considerable expansion.

Writing in 1969, Herbert Feigl explains:

Logical positivism began to form a fairly definite outlook in philosophy about forty years ago. As is well known, it was primarily the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap that initiated the early phase of this — then new and radical — departure from the traditional ways of philosophizing. To be sure, some aspects of logical positivism are derived historically from Hume and Comte; but, in contrast, especially to Mill’s positivism, a new conception of logic (having its origins in Leibniz, Frege, and Russell) was united with the empiricism of Hume, Mach, and the early Einstein.

When Logical Positivism is described as heavily empirical, it means that the movement took observation to be the foundation of most knowledge.

As an anti-metaphysical movement, it considered words and sentences which refer to nonobservable things to be not wrong, but nonsensical. Thus the movement would consider a discussion of the mind, as separate from the brain, to be nonsense.

Because it takes physics and mathematics as paradigmatic for knowledge, it tends to favor what is quantifiable and measurable in observation. It looks to mathematics, and mathematical logic, to provide a framework in which observations can be organized.

The group sought to resolve philosophical paradoxes — longstanding questions, riddles, mysteries — by analyzing the words and sentences which formulated them. The Logical Positivists thought that many problems which had puzzled philosophers for years were the result of poorly-phrased propositions.

The method by which the Logical Positivists hoped to clear up philosophical misunderstandings — or what they took to be misunderstandings — was called “verificationism.” This method looked at a sentence — a proposition — and asked: by which procedure would it be determined whether this sentence is true or false? If such a method were found, then the Logical Positivists asserted that the method is the meaning: The meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification.

Herbert Feigl was a member of the Vienna Circle, and recalls:

The Vienna Circle consisted mainly of scientifically trained philosophers and philosophically interested mathematicians and scientists. Most of the members were tough-minded thinkers, Weltzugewandt (as Hans Hahn put it), ‘this-worldly’ rather than ‘other-worldly.’ They were radically opposed to metaphysical speculation, especially of the a priori and transcendent types. Since the development of the Vienna Circle is by now a familiar chapter in the history of recent philosophy, I propose, after dealing with some of the antimetaphysical doctrines of logical positivism, to concentrate on some of the aspects that are not as well known. I shall refer particularly to the work of Moritz Schlick, the founder and leader of the Vienna Circle. Schlick’s early work anticipated a good deal of what in more precise formulations was later developed by Carnap, Reichenbach, and others. In his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (first edition, 1918; second edition, 1925) there were also anticipations of some of the central tenets of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I think it was Schlick’s extremely unassuming character, his great modesty and kindliness, and his deep personal devotion to Wittgenstein that made him forget or suppress the great extent to which his views, independently developed and quite differently stated, already contained very important arguments and conclusions regarding the nature of logical and analytic validity; the semantic explication of the concept of truth; the difference between pure experience (Erleben), acquaintance (Kennen), and genuine knowledge (Erkennen), etc. Indeed, so deeply impressed was Schlick with Wittgenstein’s genius that he attributed to him profound philosophical insights which he had formulated much more lucidly long before he succumbed to Wittgenstein’s almost hypnotic spell.

The methods and assertions of Logical Positivism arose, in part, as reactions against some overly metaphysical trends among other groups of philosophers, like the British Idealists and other neo-Hegelian and post-Hegelian schools of thought. Logical Positivism may have served as a corrective and as a challenge to such idealism.

While there was value in not letting idealism go uninspected, it is also the case that, after the movement’s heyday in the late 1930s, there are few self-proclaimed Logical Positivists among the philosophers of the early twenty-first century.

Categorizing the Pre-Socratics

For a century or two, beginning with the work of Thales, Greek philosophy flourished, and flourished mainly outside of Greece, for philosophy was born primarily in the colonies belonging to Greece, and not in Greece itself. Thales began his work around 600 B.C.; it is impossible to specify a more precise date.

Thales was the first of a large group of pre-Socratic philosophers, scattered across the Mediterranean world and across many decades. This group contained a broad range of methods and views, and influenced nearly all subsequent philosophizing.

It is understandable and predictable that scholars would hope to organize these foundational thinkers into groupings. In the conflict between psychology and philosophy, the human mind naturally tends to look for patterns and categories, even when there might be none.

In the face of any proposed taxonomy of pre-Socratic philosophers, one must ask whether such a classification is valid, and what the evidence for it might be.

Examining what was, at one time, the standard classification of these thinkers, Eduard Zeller explores it and finds it wanting. This accepted classification divided the pre-Socratic philosophers into four groups, the Ionian, the Pythagorean, the Eleatic, and the Sophic. The Ionian and Eleatic groups were named geographically after Ionia and Elea; the Pythagorean group was named after the philosopher Pythagoras; the Sophic group’s name is derived from the Greek word for wisdom.

Man pflegte früher in der vorsokratischen Zeit vier Schulen zu unterscheiden: die ionische, die pythagoreische, die eleatische und die sophistische. Den Charakter und das innere Verhältnis dieser Schulen bestimmte man teils nach dem Umfang, teils nach dem Geist ihrer Untersuchungen.

This commonly-accepted taxonomy of the pre-Socratics grouped them partially with reference to the scope and range of their philosophical topics, and partially with reference to their spirit and way of thinking.

Eduard Zeller argues that identifying certain groups with particular themes — the Ionians with physics, the Pythagoreans with ethics, the Eleatics with dialectics, and the Sophists with the decline of these narrow specialties and rise of a more comprehensive systematic approach — is problematic. It represents a retrojection of the three branches of classical Greek philosophy — ethics, physics, and dialectic — onto an earlier, pre-classical era. An additional anachronism is this interpretation’s reading into the Sophists a desire for a unified systematic philosophy.

Was den Umfang betrifft, so wurde als die unterscheidende Eigentümlichkeit der vorsokratischen Periode die Vereinzelung der drei Zweige bezeichnet, die später in der griechischen Philosophie verknüpft sind: von den Ioniern‚ sagte man, sei die Physik einseitig ausgebildet worden, von den Pythagoreern die Ethik, von den Eleaten die Dialektik, in der Sophistik sehen wir die Entartung und den Untergang dieser einseitigen Richtungen, die mittelbare Vorbereitung einer umfassenderen Wissenschaft.

Although Zeller doesn’t state this explicitly, it is likely that he also discounted the received interpretation of the pre-Socratics into four schools because it relied in part on the accident of geography. To assume that merely being colocated in Ionia meant that the Ionian philosophers together formed a school, or that the same was true of those who happened to be in or near Elea, is a priori questionable. The entire project of organizing groups of philosophers into “schools” smacks rather of the Hellenistic Era, and would therefore constitute a retrojection when applied to the Archaic or Pre-Classical Era.

Zeller further identifies a weakness in the standard taxonomy of the pre-Socratics by noting that not only is the accident of geography taken as the foundation for common approach to philosophy among those who happen to be spatially near each other, but rather also a sort of ethnic identity is given to these schools, inasmuch as the conventional taxonomy termed the Ionian philosophy to be “realistic” and the Dorian philosophy to “idealistic.”

Dieser Unterschied der Richtungen wurde dann weiter mit dem Stammesunterschiede des Ionischen und des Dorischen in Verbindung gebracht; andere legten den letztern ihrer ganzen Betrachtung der älteren Philosophie zugrunde, indem sie aus den Eigentümlichkeiten des ionischen und des dorischen Charakters den philosophischen Gegensatz einer realistischen und einer idealistischen Weltanschauung ableiteten.

In this context, Dorian is taken to refer both to parts of mainland Greece as well as the colonies located in Italy and on the islands near Italy, whereas Ionia refers to the western coast of Turkey (i.e., Asia Minor or Anatolia).

As used here, the words ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’ refer to varying emphases. In this sense, ‘idealistic’ philosophy emphasizes thoughts, patterns, and principles, which ‘realistic’ philosophy would emphasize concrete objects and events.

In any case, Zeller is rightly skeptical of a too-tidy pigeonholing of pre-Socratic philosophers into various schools. Such categorizing hides the individual creativity and inventiveness of each of these clever and perceptive thinkers.