LECTURE 2

Historical Types of Philosophy: Formation and natural development of the Ancient Eastern
and Western philosophy
Metaphysics and Epistemology: Existence and Knowledge Early Philosophy.
Metaphysics and epistemology are dancing partners – you usually don’t find one very far from the
other. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned primarily with the nature, sources, limits,
and criteria of knowledge.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) produced a series of works on a wide variety of subjects, from biology to
poetry. The physika means “the things of nature”.
The fundamental question treated in Aristotle’s Metaphysics can be put this way: What is the
nature of being?” A number of different subjects might qualify as “related” to this question, and in
contemporary philosophical usage metaphysics is a rather broad and inclusive field. However, for
most philosophers it does not include such subjects as astral projection, psychic surgery, or UFOs.
What is the nature of being? One of the authors used to ask his introductory classes to answer that
questions in a brief essay. People are troubled by what the questions means and are uncertain what
sort of things is expected for an answer.
The first philosophers, or first Western philosophers at any rate, lived in Ionia, on the coast of
Asia Minor, during the sixth century B.C. They are known collectively as the pre-Socratic
philosophers, a loose chronological term applied to the Greek philosophers who lived before
Socrates [SOK-ruh-teez] (c. 470-399 B.C.)
It was not inevitable that this change would occur, and there are societies that exist today whose
members, for lack of this perspective, do not so much as understand why their seasons change. We
are not arguing for the virtues of advanced civilization is in some ways a mixed blessing. But
advanced civilization is a fact, and that it is a fact is a direct consequence of two developments in
thought.
THE MILESIANS
Tradition accords to Thales (c. 640-546 B.C.), a citizen of the wealthy Ionian Greek seaport town of
Miletus, the honor of being the first philosopher. And philosophy began when it occurred to Thales
to consider whether there might be some fundamental kind of stuff out which everything else is
made. Today we are so accustomed to thinking of the complex world we experience as made up of a
few basic substances (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and the other elements) that we are surprised there
ever was a time when people did not think this. But before Thales, people did not think this. So
Thales deserves credit for introducing a new and rather important idea into Western thought.
What is the basic substance, according to Thales? His answer was that all is water, and this turns
out to be wrong. But it was not an especially silly answer for him to have come up with. For
example, when a peace of wood burns, it goes up in a smoke, which looks like a form of steam.
Perhaps, Thales might have speculated, the original piece of wood was actually water in one of its
more exotic forms.
We are guessing about Thales’ reasoning, of course. And in any case Thales did come to the
wrong conclusion with the water idea. But it was not Thales’ conclusion that was important – it was
what Thales was up to. Thales attempted to explain the complex world that we see in terms of a
simpler underlying reality.
Two other Milesians at about this time advanced alternatives to Thales’ theory that the basic stuff
water. One Anaximenes [sn-NAK-suh-MEN-eez] (640-546 B.C.) pronounced the basic substance to
be air and said that air becomes different things the processes of condensation and rarefaction. The
other, Anaximander [an-NAK-suh-MAN-der] (610-c. 547 B.C.), a pupil of Thales, argued that the
basic substance out of which everything comes must be even more elementary that water and air and
indeed every other substance of which we have knowledge. The basic substance, he thought, must be
ageless, boundless, and intermediate. Anaximander also proposed a theory of the origination of the
universe. He held that from the basic stuff a nucleus of fire and dark mist formed; the mist solidified
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in its center, producing the world. The world is surrounded by fire, which we see (the stars and other
heavenly bodies) through holes in the mist. Thus, he produced a model of the universe.

PYTHAGORAS
Quite a different alternative was proposed by Pythagoras [puh-THAG-uh-rus] (c. 580-c. 500 B.C.)
and his followers, who lived in the Greek city of Croton in southern Italy. Pythagoras is said to have
maintained that things are numbers, and we can try to understand what this might mean. Two points
make a line, three points define a surface, solids are made of surfaces, and bodies are made out of
solids. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), a primary source of information about the early philosophers,
reported in his Metaphysics that the Pythagoreans “construct natural bodies out of numbers, things
that have weight or lightness, out of things that don’t have weight or lightness”.
In other words, things are things – one thing ends and another thing begins – because they can be
enumerated. If one thing can be distinguished from another thing, it is because things are countable.
So, according to Theano, Pythagoras meant there is an intimacy between things and numbers.
Whatever the things, whether it is physical or not, it participates in the universe of order and
harmony: it can be sequenced, it can be counted, it can be ordered. And in the Pythagorean
philosophy, the idea of orderliness and harmony applies to all things.
The Pythagorean combination of mathematics and philosophy gave birth to an important concept
in metaphysics, one we will encounter frequently. This is the idea that fundamental reality is eternal,
unchanging, and accessible only to reason. Sometimes this notion about fundamental reality is said
to come from Plato, but it is fair to say it originated with the Pythagoreans.

HERACLITUS AND PARMENIDES

Another important pre-Socratic philosopher was Herraclitus [hayr-uh-KLITE-us] (c. 535-475 B.C.),
a Greek nobleman from Ephesus, who proposed yet another candidate as the basic element.
According to Herraclitus, all is fire. In fixing fire as the basic element, Herraclitus was not just
listing an alternative to Thales’ water and Anaximenes’ air. Herraclitus wished to call attention to
what he thought was the essential feature of reality; namely that it is ceaselessly changing. There is
no reality, he maintained, save the reality of change: permanence is an illusion. Thus, fire, whose
nature it is to ceaselessly change, is the root substance of the universe.
Herraclitus did not believe that the process of change is random or haphazard. Instead, he saw all
change as determined by a cosmic order that he called the logos, which is Greek for “word”. He
taught that each thing contains its opposite, just as, for example, we are simultaneously young and
old, and coming into and going out of existence. Through the logos there is a harmonious union of
opposites, he thought.
Change does seem to be an important feature of reality – or does it? A younger contemporary of
Herraclitus, Parmenides, [par-MEN-uh-deez] thought otherwise. Parmenides’ exact dates are
unknown, but he lived during the first quarter of the fifth century B.C.
Parmenides was not interested in discovering the fundamental substance or things that underline
or constitute everything or in determining what the most important feature of reality is. In all
probability the Milesians, Herraclitus, and the Pythagoreans reached their conclusions by looking
around the world and considering possible candidates for its primary substance or fundamental
constituents. For Parmenides it would have been a complete waste of time to look to the world for
information about how things really are.
Principles like those Parmenides assumed are said in contemporary jargon to be principles of
reason or a priori of principles, which just means that they are known prior to experience. It is not
that we learn these principles first chronologically, but rather that our knowledge of them does not
depend on our senses.
For example, consider the principle “You can’t make something out of nothing”.
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Parmenides based his philosophy on principles like that One of these principles was that if
something changes it becomes something different. Thus, he reasoned, if being itself were to change,
then it would become something different. But what is different from being is non-being, and non-
being just plain isn’t. Thus, he concluded, being does not change.
What is more, being is unitary – it is a single thing. If there were anything else, it would not be
being’ hence; it would not be. (The principle assumed in this argument is similar to “a second thing
is different from a first thing”)
Further, being is eternal: it cannot come into existence because, first, something cannot come
from nothing (remember?) and, second, even if it could, there would be no explanation why it came
from nothing at one time and not at another. And because change is impossible, as already
demonstrated, being cannot go out of existence.
Herraclitus envisioned being as ceaselessly changing, whereas Parmenides argued that being is
absolutely unchanging. Being is One, Parmenides maintained: it is permanent, unchanging,
indivisible, and undifferentiated. Appearances to the contrary are just gross illusion.
EMPEDOCLES AND ANAXAGORAS
The philosophy of Parmenides (being is unchanging) and Herraclitus (being is ceaselessly changing)
seem to be irreconcilably opposed. The next major Greek philosopher, Empedocles [em-PED-uh-
kleez] (c. 490-430 B.C.) thought that true reality is permanent and unchangeable, yet he also thought
it absurd to dismiss the change we experience as mere illusion. He was in fact the first philosopher to
attempt to reconcile and combine the apparently conflicting metaphysics of those who came earlier.
Additionally, Empedocles’ attempt at reconciliation resulted in an understanding of reality that in
many ways is very much like our own.
According to Empedocles, the objects of experience do change, but these objects are composed of
basic particles of matter that do not change. These basic material particles themselves, Empedocles
held, are of our kinds: earth, air, fire, and water. These basic elements mingle together in different
combinations to form the objects of experience as well as the apparent changes among these objects.
The idea that the objects of experience, and the apparent changes in their qualities, quantities, and
relationships, are in reality changes in the positions of basic particles is very familiar to us and is a
central idea of modern physics. Empedocles was the first to have this idea.
Empedocles also recognized that an account of reality must explain not merely how changes in the
objects of experience occur but why they occur. A contemporary of
Empedocles was Anaxagoras [an-ak-SAG-uh-rus] (c. 500-428 B.C.). For another, he introduced
into metaphysics an important distinction, that between matter and mind.
Anaxagoras accepted the principle that all changes in the objects of experience are in reality
changes in the arrangements of underlying particles. But unlike Empedocles, he believed that
everything is infinitely divisible.
Whereas Empedocles believed that motion is caused by the action of two forces, Anaxagoras
postulated that the source of all motion is something called nous. The Greek word nous is sometimes
translated as “reason”, sometimes as “mind”, and what Anaxagoras meant by nous is apparently
pretty much an equation between mind and reason. Mind, according to Anaxagoras, is separate and
distinct from matter in that it alone is unmixed.
Before mind acted on matter, Anaxagoras believed, the universe was an infinite, undifferentiated
mass. The formation of the world as we know it was the result of a rotary motion produced in this
mass by mind. In this process gradually the sun and stars and moon and air were separated off, and
then gradually too the configurations of particles that we recognize in the other objects of
experience.
According to Anaxagoras, mind did not create matter but only acted on it. Notice also that
Anaxagoras’s mind did not act on matter for some purpose or objective.
Finally, Anaxagoras’s particles are not physical particles like modern-day atoms.
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THE ATOMISTS
The atomists were Leucippus and Democritus. Not too much is known of Leucippus, although he is
said to have lived in Miletus during the mid-fifth century B.C., and the basic idea of Atomism is
attributed to him. Democritus (46-370 B.C.) is better known today, and the detailed working out of
Atomism is considered to be the result of his efforts. Democritus is yet another philosopher who was
also a brilliant mathematician.
The Atomists held that all things are composed of physical atoms- tiny, imperceptible,
indestructible, indivisible, eternal, and uncreated particles composed of exactly the same matter but
different in size, shape, and (though there is controversy about this) weight. Atoms, they believed,
are infinitely numerous and eternally in motion. By combining with one another in various ways,
atoms compose the objects of experience. They are continuously in motion, and thus the various
combinations come and go. We, of course, experience their combining and disassembling and
recombining as the generation, decay, erosion, or burning of everyday objects.
The Greek philosopher generally believed that for motion of any sort to occur, there must be a
void, or empty space, in which a moving thing may change position. But Parmenides had argued
pretty convincingly that a void is not possible. Empty space would be nothingness – that is, non-
being – and therefore does not exist.
The Atomists’ way of circumventing this problem was essentially to ignore it (although this point,
too, is controversial). That things move is apparent to sense perception and is just indisputable, they
maintained, and because things move, empty space must be real – otherwise motion would be
impossible.
One final point about the Atomist philosophy must be mentioned. The Atomists are sometimes
accused of maintaining that chance collisions of atoms cause them to come together to form this or
that set of objects and not some other. In this sense, then, the Atomists left nothing to chance;
according to them, purely random events, in the sense of just “happening”, do not occur.
The view that future states and events are completely determined by preceding states and events is
called determinism.
All believed that the world we experience is merely a manifestation of a more fundamental, underlying reality.
It led the Milesians to consider possible basic substances and the Pythagoreans to try to determine
the fundamental principle on which all else depends. It led Herraclitus to try to determine the
essential feature of reality, Parmenides to consider the true nature of being, and Empedocles to try to
understand the basic principles of causation. Finally, it led Anaxagoras to consider the original
source of motion and the Atomists to consider the construction of the natural world.

SOCRATES, PLATO, AND ARISTOTLE

These three were the most important philosophers of ancient Greece, and in some respects the most
important, period. Plato (C. 427-347 B.C.) was the pupil of Socrates (470-399 B.C.), and Aristotle
(384-322 B.C.) was the pupil of Plato.

SOCRATES
In the fifth century, B.C. the center of Western civilization was Athens, a city-state and a democracy.
This period of time was some three centuries after the first Olympic Games and the start of
alphabetic writing, and approximately one century before Alexander the Great demonstrated that it is
possible to conquer the world.
These rhetoricians, the Western world’s first professors, were the Sophists. They were interested
in practical things, and few had patience with metaphysical speculation. They demonstrated their
rhetorical abilities by “proving” the seemingly unprovable; that is, by attacking commonly held
views.
At the same time the fifth century B.C., there also lived a stonemason with a muscular build and a
keen mind, Socrates (470-399 B.C.). He wrote nothing, but we know quite a bit about him from
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Plato’s famous “dialogues,” in which Socrates almost always stars. (Plato’s later dialogues reflect
Plato’s own views, even though “Socrates” is doing the speaking in them. But we are able to extract
a reasonably detailed picture of Socrates from the earlier dialogues.)
Given the spirit of the times, it is not surprising that Socrates shared some of the philosophical
interests and practices of the Sophists. We must imagine him wandering about the city, engaging
citizens in discussion and argument. He was a brilliant debater, and he was idolized by many young
Athenians.
But Socrates did not merely engage in sophistry – he was not interested in arguing simply for the
sake of arguing – he wanted to discover something important, namely, the essential nature if
knowledge, justice, beauty, goodness, and, especially, traits of good character such as courage. The
method of discovery he followed bears his name, the “Socratic method.” To this day, more than
twenty centuries after his death, many philosophers equate proficiency within their own field with
skill in the Socratic (or dialectic) method.
The method goes like this: Suppose you and Socrates wish to find out what knowledge is. “For
instance, suppose I, Socrates, ask you to guess what kind of car I own, and you guess a Volvo. Even
if your guess turns out to be right, would you call that knowledge.”
By saying this, Socrates has made you see that knowledge cannot be equated with true belief
either. You must therefore attempt a better analysis. Eventually you may find a definition of
knowledge that Socrates cannot refute.
So the Socratic/dialectic method is a search for the proper definition of a thing, a definition that
will not permit refutation under Socratic questioning.
Socrates was not a pest who went around trapping people in argument and making them look
idiotic. He was famous not only for his dialectical skills bur also for his courage and stamina battle.
He staunchly opposed injustice, even at considerable risk to himself.

PLATO
When we pause to consider the great minds of Western history, those rare individuals whose insight
elevates the human intellect by a prodigious leap, we think immediately of Socrates’ most famous
student, Plato (C. 427-347 B.C.), and Plato’s student, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Both Plato and
Aristotle were interested in practically every subject, and each spoke intelligently on philosophical
topics and problems. Platonic metaphysics formed the model for Christian theology for fifteen
centuries. After this rediscovery, Aristotle’s metaphysics came to predominate in Christian thinking,
although Christianity is still Platonic in many, many ways.

Plato’s Metaphysics: The Theory of Forms

Plato’s metaphysics is known as the Theory of Forms, and it is discussed in several of the two
dozen compositions we have referred to as Plato’s “dialogues”. The most famous dialogues is the
Republic, from the so-called middle period of Plato’s writings, during which Plato reached the peak
of genius. The Republic also gives Plato’s beat-known account of the Theory of Forms.
According to Plato’s Theory of Forms, what is truly real is not the object we encounter in sensory
experience but rather Forms, and these can only be grasped intellectually. Therefore, once you know
what Plato’s Forms are, you will understand the Theory of Forms and the essentials of Platonic
metaphysics. Unfortunately, it is nit safe to assume Plato had exactly the same thing in mind
throughout his life when he spoke of the forms. Nevertheless, Plato’s concept is pretty clear and can
be illustrated with an example or two.
Consider two beautiful objects: a beautiful statue and a beautiful house. These are two very
different objects, but they have something in common – they both qualify as beautiful. Beauty is
another example of a Form. What you encounter in the physical world is always some object or
other, a house or a statue or whatever, which may or may not be beautiful. But beauty itself is not
something you meet up with; rather, you meet up with objects that to varying degrees possess
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beauty, or, as Plato said, “participate” in the Form beauty. Beauty, like circularity, is an ideal thing,
not a concrete thing.
You may be tempted to suppose that the Forms are just ideas or concepts in someone’s mind. But
this might be a mistake. Before any people were around, there were circular things, logs and round
stones and so on – that is, things that came close in varying degrees to being perfectly circular. If
there were circular things when there were no people around, or people-heads to have people-ideas
in, it would seem that circularity is not just an idea in people’s heads. It may be more difficult to
suppose that there were beautiful things before there were people to think of things as beautiful, but
this difficulty might only be due to assuming that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.”
Sometimes Plato’s Forms are referred to as Ideas, and the Theory of Forms is also said to be the
Theory of Ideas. But Idea is misleading because, as you can see, Plato’s Forms are not the sort of
ideas that exist in people. We will stick with the word Forms.
Forms have certain important and unusual features. We will begin by asking: How old is
circularity? Immediately on hearing the questions, you will realize that circularity is not any age.
Circular things, sand dollars and bridge abutments and so on, are some age or other. But circularity
itself has no age. The same thing is true of beauty, the Form. So we can see that the Forms are
ageless, that is, eternal.
They are also unchanging. A beautiful house may change due to alterations or aging, but that
couldn’t happen to beauty itself.
Finally, the Forms are unmoving and indivisible. Indeed, what sense would it make even to
suppose that they might move or be physically divided?
But why did Plato say that only the Forms are truly real? A thing is beautiful only to the extend it
participates in the Form beauty, just as it is circular only if it participates in the Form circularity.
Likewise a thing is large only if it participates in the Form largeness, and the same principle would
hold for all of a thing’s properties. Thus, a large, beautiful, large, or round if the Forms beauty,
largeness, and circularity did not exist. Indeed, if the Forms oak and table did not exist, “it”
wouldn’t even be an oak table. Sensible objects – that is, the things we encounter in sensory
experience – are what they are only if they sufficiently participate in their corresponding Forms.
Sensible objects owe their reality to the Forms, so the ultimate reality belongs to the Forms.
Thus, Plato introduced into Western thought a two-realm concept. On one hand, there is the realm
of particular, changing, sense-perceptible or “sensible” things. On the other hand, there is the realm
of Forms- eternal, fixed, and perfect – the source of all reality and of all true knowledge. This
Platonic dualism was incorporated into Christianity and transmitted through the ages to our thought
today, where it lingers still and affects our views on virtually every subject.

Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

A skeptic is a doubter, a person who doubts that knowledge is possible. Xenophiles [zeh-NOOF-uh-
neez] (C. 570-480 B.C.) declared that even if truth were stated it would not be known. Herraclitus
(C. 535-475 B.C.), whom we talked about earlier, was a contemporary of Xenophanes. He had the
idea that, just as you cannot step into the same river twice, everything is in flux; this theory suggests
it is impossible to discover any fixed truth beyond what is expressed in the theory itself. (Herraclitus,
however, apparently did not himself deduce skeptical conclusions from his metaphysical theory.)
Cratylus [KRAT-uh-lus], a younger contemporary of Socrates (470-399 B.C.), carried this flux
theory even further, arguing that you cannot step even once into the same river because both you and
the river are continually changing.
Gorgias [GOR-jee-us] (C. 485-380 B.C.), one particularly famous Sophist, said: “There is no
reality, and of there were, we could not know of it, and even if we could, we could not communicate
our knowledge.” This statement parallels that of Xenophanes, just mentioned.
The best-known Spohist philosopher of all, Protagoras [pro-TAG-uh-rus] (C. 490-421 B.C), said
that “man is the measure of all things.” This can be interpreted – and was interpreted by Plato – as
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meaning that there is no absolute knowledge: our person’s views about the world are as valid as the
next person’s.
What is essential to remember is that, according to Plato, the highest form of knowledge is that
obtained through the use of reason because perfect beauty or absolute goodness or the ideal triangle
cannot be perceived.

ARISTOTLE
Plato’s most distinguished pupil was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), on whom Plato had a tremendous
influence. Aristotle was eventually hired to be a teacher of Alexander the Great.
Nevertheless, Aristotle was a careful observer and a brilliant theorizer. What we call metaphysics
Aristotle called “first philosophy.”
In Aristotle’s opinion, each thing, he maintained, is a combination of matter and form.
According to Aristotle, you need both form and matter to have a thing, and, with the exception of
god (discusses later), neither form nor matter is ever found in isolation form the other.
Things do change, of course: they become something new. Thus, another basic question is: What
produces a change? In Aristotle’s opinion each change must be directed towards some end, so just
four basic questions can be asked of anything.

1. What is the thing? In other words, what is its form? Aristotle called this the formal cause of
the thing. We do not use the word cause that way, but Aristotle did, and we just have to
accept that.
2. What is it made of? Aristotle called this the material cause.
3. What made it? This Aristotle called the efficient cause, and this is what today we often mean
by “cause.”
4. What purpose does it serve? That is, for what end was it made? This Aristotle called the final
cause.
But Aristotle explained that his predecessors were all concerned with causation.
One of the Aristotle’s most compelling arguments against the Theory of Forms is known as the
Third Man argument.
Aristotle’s own view is that the Forms are universals – something that more than one individual
can be. Universals, Aristotle insisted, do not exist separately or apart from particulars. Circularity
and greenness, for example, have no independent existence apart from particular round things and
particular green things.
Aristotle made a great contribution to the history of logic. To be specific, it was Aristotle who first
made a study of the principles of sound reasoning, especially those involved in one of the most
important forms of inference – the syllogism.
What is inference? To infer one proposition from other propositions is to see that the first one
follows from the others.
Aristotle examined other important areas of logic as well, and he attempted to define the forms of
thought or ways in which we think about reality.
The Macedonian domination of the Greek-speaking world, known as the Hellenistic age (Hellene
means “Greek”), was a period of major achievements in mathematics and science.