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.
