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.
