Parmenides

Parmenides is pivotal in the history of philosophy - in order to understand Anaxagoras, Empedocles, or Zeno of Elea, one must first understand Parmenides, because those later thinkers were writing in reference to him. Yale’s Professor Robert Brumbaugh writes:

Parmenides was greatly influenced by the Pythagoreans. He invented formal logic by applying their mathematical methods of proof to the philosophical problem of the natures of being and not-being. Presenting his argument in the form of an epic poem, he used logic to show that being is unchanging and uncreated. This conclusion denied the possibility of any appearance of variety or change. A corollary to this positive, if mystical, conclusion was that human reason has the power to understand reality.

He is, then, not only foundational for understanding later generations of Greek philosophers, but also many modern philosophers, starting with Descartes: the philosophical admiration for the strength of mathematical reasoning has led a diverse set of people - from Spinoza to Hegel, from Wittgenstein to Quine - to model various branches of philosophy on the patterns of proof and theorem found in mathematics. Parmenides touches on another central point in philosophy: he poses a question about the strength and abilities of human reason. To be sure, he also answers that question - and thereby finds for himself both a number of allies and opponents. It is the question that is the beginning-point for Kant’s philosophy: which questions can human reason answer, and which ones can it not answer? Such a question is properly prior to any philosophizing, because before we can try to answer any further philosophical questions, we should first know whether or not those questions can be answered at all, and whether it is human reason, or some other faculty, which might be able to answer them.

Interestingly enough, Parmenides also wrote about astronomy, biology, and other sciences. Yet if his main insight was sound, the many changing things these sciences study could not be real. Vividly aware of change and the individuality in the world they observed about them

later Greek philosophers would try

to find ways to keep Parmenides’ logical method but to avoid his mystical conclusion.

It doesn’t bother Parmenides that the natural sciences must be, on his terms, dealing with what are illusions. He is content to deal with the parade of images presented by, as, or through sense-data, while realizing that they are merely images, that there is no underlying change behind the image of change, no underlying coming-to-be behind the image of coming-to-be, and no underlying passing-away behind the image of passing-away. Again, one sees here the seeds of Kant and phenomenology: the seeds of the former, inasmuch as the logic of causal relations in the phenomenal world does not apply to, or even entail the existence of, the noumenal world; the seeds of the latter, inasmuch as Parmenides brackets, even if he has already answered, the questions about the existence and natural of the noumenal world. Parmenides (as synopsized by the Brumbaugh) sets up his argument:

Suppose someone assumes that being is divided into many separate beings. Then what is it that separates them and holds them apart? It cannot be being, for then all of the parts would still all be together in one totality, and it not be distinct. On the other hand, if one says things are separated by not-being this leads to absurdity. For not-being, if it is the opposite of being,can only be a void, a kind of pure nothing: if one says that non-being is a separator, he is treating it as being, which by definition it is not. If one says that though it is nothing, it still separates the parts of being, this is the same as saying that “nothing separates being into parts,” which in fact is a statement denying that the parts are separated. How can nothing do something positive? The idea is self-contradictory.

Parmenides is both making a specific metaphysical statement here, and also laying down a principle for argumentation in general:

In explicitly recognizing that noncontradiction is a fundamental property of existence, as well as of thought, Parmenides hit a upon a most important principle. Once it is recognized that only consistent entities can exist, the truth of generalizations can be tested by examining their consistency.

It is worthwhile to sharpen the notion “that noncontradiction is a fundamental property ... of thought.” One might more specifically say “ ... of rational thought” or “ ... of logical thought” or even “ ... of significant thought,” for a self-contradictory sentence, and the proposition which is represents, cannot signify, i.e., cannot have a referent. The net impact on philosophy

was to reinforce philosophical formalism by showing that there is a close connection between reality and abstract logical form, and to make philosophers more conscious of the methods by which they arrived at their conclusions.

Future philosophers would appreciate “the value of precise logical form,” an impact which places Parmenides into the category of very important philosophers!

Empedocles

Empedocles wrote his philosophy partly in reaction against, and partly in support of, the ideas of Parmenides. Empedocles agreed that the basic nature of the universe was changeless, but he allowed for a changing arrangement of the changeless building blocks of the universe. Thus he is often seen as the first thinker to state the concept of elements, from which we get our modern idea of chemistry. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

To account for change, without assuming that “something comes from nothing,” he introduced the idea of a plurality of “elements,” which mix in different ratios but themselves remain unchanged. However, both the form and content of his poetry suggest that Empedocles was more interested in interpreting the vivid world of our sense than in finding some other reality behind appearance. He had an imagination able to combine the most divergent notions - so much so that many later readers have been unable to appreciate the originality of his work. Those of his ideas that were most philosophically influential were his notion of a plurality of “elements” ...

Brumbaugh goes on to describe one possible way to interpret the murky texts of Empedocles:

One can deny that there is any deep-hidden reality underlying appearance and argue that truth is to be found in close observation of what we can see or touch or imagine vividly. Someone who takes this standpoint will be less trustful of appeals to to mysterious “realities,” to highly abstract arguments, than he will be to more vivid items of experience.

If this is, in fact, what Empedocles thought, then he not only anticipated the modern chemical system of elements, but he may also have anticipated several other philosophical schools: phenomenology, epiphenomenology, and the radical empiricism of Hume and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.

Anaxagoras

To understand the work of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, it helps to see him against the backdrop of two other philosophers: Zeno of Elea and Parmenides. Parmenides emphasized what he believed to be the unchanging nature of the universe and its basic components: if something exists, it has always existed and always will exist, because nothing can come into being out of nothing - which is to say, something does not emerge from nothing. Because things don’t come into being out of nothing, it follows (at least for Parmenides) that things don’t cease to exist, either: something cannot disappear into nothing. Parmenides further extrapolated that, because things neither enter nor leave existence, things also do not change in any meaningful way. Finally, he concluded that because things neither change, nor begin to exist, nor cease to exist, then there is essentially only one thing in the universe: what seems to us to be many things is actually a type of cosmic unity.

Zeno of Elea (not to be confused with Zeno of Citium) was a follower of Parmenides, and wanted to support his theories via a set of paradoxes. Zeno wanted to show that if one holds views which contradict the views of Parmenides, then one will wind up believing absurdities. Zeno wanted to show that motion, because it is a type of change, doesn’t really exist, despite the testimony of our sense-data: motion entails paradoxical results when one uses rigorous logic in physics. Likewise, the overarching cosmic unity of all being is consistent, but Zeno says that if we assume the existence of many things, we encounter self-contradictory results.

We arrive then at Anaxagoras. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Anaxagoras contributed three new ideas to Greek philosophy. First, he developed the view that matter is a continuum. This is one way to escape Zeno’s paradoxes, since it gives both space and time the property of infinite divisibility. Second, he presented a new concept of the mind and its place in the cosmic scheme, maintaining that although all other things mix together, mind remains pure. This was not yet a mind-matter dualism, but it was an important philosophic contribution. Third, Anaxagoras formulated a new way of relating these two dimensions, using mind as the motive power that sets matter in motion.

While Anaxagoras wanted to find solutions to some of Zeno’s paradoxes, he did not flatly reject Parmenides.

Impressed by Parmenides’ statement that “nothing can come from nothing,” Anaxagoras held that matter changes only through a different mixing of qualities which all things share. There is never a sudden bursting into being of something that was nothing just before. Instead there are changes in intensity of the mingled qualities that flow from one place to another. The qualities themselves, once they have separated out of the primordial state when “all things were together,” are conserved, not created or destroyed.

In this way, Anaxagoras tries to preserve Parmenides basic doctrine, while explaining the appearance of change and motion. There is something akin to modern molecular chemistry in the ideas of Anaxagoras, although he would not have thought of it that way: the individual atoms do not essentially change, but they can be recombined into different compounds.

Constructive Skepticism

Descartes seems to simultaneously seek an absolutely certain knowledge and direct a withering doubt at anything which presents itself as certain knowledge: not a contradiction, but a tension to be sure.

Yet Descartes saw his skepticism as constructive rather than destructive: those bits of knowledge which survived it would be certain, and would be the unshakable foundation stones for a new philosophical system. Russell Shorto writes:

It was necessary for him to prove both the existence of God and the innate goodness of God, for, given the corrosiveness of Cartesian doubt, these were the only assurances we have that the material world really exists. So his work has a theological grounding: not only do the world and science depend on God, but so does Cartesian philosophy.

If chemistry and physics are to bring us any knowledge, Descartes writes, it will be upon this basis: for him, the “divine spark” may be characterized as certainty. One of his followers, Nicolas Malebranche, would refine this theme:

To talk of Cartesian dualism is somewhat misleading; Descartes actually wrote that the universe consisted of not two but three substances: mind, body (that is, the material world), and God. God is the guarantor that the mind and the world can interact meaningfully - that we can reach truth using the power of reason.

Malebranche doesn’t seem to realize that his insight into Cartesian thought has an odd resemblance to Plato’s tripartite soul, and Shorto, in summarizing Malebranche’s view, doesn’t point out the same similarity to Freud’s tripartite mind. The central role of God in Cartesian thought translates into the central role of God in modern philosophy:

It would be wrong to imagine that the Enlightenment was antireligion. Its mainstream thinkers, as well as many if not most of the radicals, were antichurch, not antifaith. Their problem with religion was that it kept individual humans from exercising their own minds and applying their innate reason to understanding the world and their place in it. This criticism applied not only to Catholicism but also to Protestant theology.

Here Shorto relies on the somewhat sloppy shorthand of “Enlightenment” for “modern philosophy” or for “thinkers writing in era immediately after the death of Descartes.” The notion of the “Enlightenment” as a distinct historical era, even if we allow for some variations within the monolith, is so ambiguous as to be undefinable. But the point stands: there was an eager engagement in the concept of God, even as there was a violent rejection of institutionalized religion. Spinoza exemplifies this:

Spinoza insisted that there is such a thing as religious truth, but he also insisted that religious institutions were largely concerned with protecting their own position.

Descartes, who agreed with Aristotle very rarely, might have formulated the matter in terms of an Aristotelian golden mean: a healthy skepticism, even a bitter cynicism, about religious institutions does not entail a rejection of the concept of God. On the contrary, our assumption that the universe behaves in an orderly fashion (the laws of chemistry and physics) implies a theistic view.

Lost in Words

Trained philosophers are constantly confronted with the glaringly illogical writings which characterize both the popular press and contemporary politicians. Example follows example of inconsistency, faulty argumentation, ambiguity, and every other error which logicians teach their students to avoid. A recent example, from the autumn of 2010, is provided by Rand Paul in a newspaper column he wrote. Attempting to establish for his readers his location on the political landscape, he explains for several paragraphs that he is not a “Libertarian,” but rather a “Constitutional Conservative” — but never defines either term!