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.
