The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

INTRODUCTION TO
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
THE HUMAN PERSON
WILFREDO DJ P. MARTIN IV| SHS SET A

THE PRE-SOCRATIC
PHILOSOPHERS
The Pre-socratics were 6th and 5th century BCE
Greek thinkers who introduced a new way of
inquiring into the world and the place of human
beings in it. The Pre-socratics were the
founding fathers of the Western philosophical
tradition, and the first masters of rational
thought.

THE FIRST STAGE IN A RATIONAL
SYNTHESIS: SOCRATES
• BORN IN ALOPEKE, belonging to the tribe Antiochis
• Son of SOPHRONISCUS (a sculptor) and Phaearete
(a midwife)
• Trained as a stonemason and participated in the
Peloponnesian War (battles of Amphipolis, Delium,
and Potidaea)
• One of first persons who was a GADFLY
• Accused of corrupting the minds of the youth
because of his philosophy and was given the
penalty of death by poison.

SOCRATES
philosophy should achieve practical results for
the greater well-being of society
attempted to establish an ethical system based
on human reason rather than theological
doctrine.
pointed out that human choice was motivated
by the desire for happiness. Ultimate wisdom
comes from knowing oneself
”The more a person knows, the greater his or her ability to
reason and make choices that will bring true happiness.”

cosmological and
physical speculation
vs.

1. THALES OF MILETUS
He is remembered
primarily for
his cosmology based
on water as the essence
of all matter, with
the Earth, a flat disk
floating on a vast sea.
HYLOZOISM- animation/vivification
of matter

In his thinking about Earth, he
regarded the inhabited portion as
flat, consisting of the top face of
a cylinder whose thickness is one-
third its diameter.
In his cosmogony, he held that
everything originated from
the apeiron (the “infinite,”
“unlimited,” or “indefinite”)
2. ANAXIMANDER

3. ANAXIMENES
Anaximenes’ assumption
that air is everlastingly in
motion suggests that he
thought it also possessed
life. Because it was
eternally alive, air took on
qualities of the divine and
became the cause of other
gods as well as of all
matter.

THE PYTHAGOREANS
4.) PYTHAGORAS
• Came from the island of Samos, and settled in
Croton, Magna Graceia
• Founder of the Pythagoreans
• Famous for this theorem
• School of thought was divided into two: the
akousmatikoi and the mathematikoi
• Persecuted because of their submission to
taboos and other strange rules like: not eating
of meat and beans, not wearing of clothes
made of wool, not picking up anything that has
fallen, stir a fire with iron and others

THE ELEATIC
SCHOOL
5.) XENOPHANES
• From Colophon, Asia Minor
• Lived in the second half of 6th
Century
• He looked at the gods of Homer and
Hesiod as something absurd and
irrelevant
• He is linked to the doctrine of
PANTHEISM or doctrine of oneness

6. PARMENIDES
•From Elia who lived in the 6th Century
•Discovered metaphysics/ontology or the
ENTITY
•“nothing cannot be thought, there is
nothing, there is only being”
•Such being is uncreated, indestructible,
eternal, and indivisible

7. ZENO
•Zeno was famous for the paradoxes whereby,
in order to recommend the Parmenidean
doctrine of the existence of “the one” (i.e.,
indivisible reality), he sought to controvert the
commonsense belief in the existence of “the
many”
•Zeno made use of three premises: first, that
any unit has magnitude; second, that it is
infinitely divisible; and third, that it is
indivisible.
•First to discover Dialectics

8. HERACLITUS
•Born in Ephesus, Asia Minor (6th-5th BC)
•Developed the Theory of Flux and Unity
of Opposites
•For him, the source of everything is fire
•The world is an eternal fire which
transforms itself
“One cannot step on the
same river twice”

9. EMPEDOCLES
oFrom Agrigentum, Sicily
oAuthor of the Poems On
Nature and Purification
oDeveloped theory of 2
suns: one authentic (fire)
and one reflected (actual)
oFor him, the root of all
things are from the 4
elements (air, fire, water,
and earth)

10. ANAXAGORAS
•From Clazomenae, Asia Minor (5th
Century)
•Discovered the theory of
HOMOIOMEREIAI
•For him, there are not 4 elements
but an infinite number of elements
•“There is everything in everything”
•Accdg to him, there are “SEEDS” in
all other things

11. DEMOCRITUS
Founder of the
ATOMISTS
For him, even the
soul, is composed
of atoms which are
indestructible and
indivisible

◦We are called to thinking, as some
people are called to church or to a
particular profession (such as a doctor
or nurse)
◦Reason itself calls us to THOUGHT.

BATTLING THEOS
The presocratics were conscious of how important it is to go
beyond the old religion of gods which has served the Greeks for so
long; not that they disparaged these gods; rather, they all agreed
that the gods were a set of metaphors that had outlived their use.
They wanted to find a way to penetrate into the heart of being
through abstract reasoning, rather than through often paradoxical
activities of Zeus and Athena.
Thinking demanded its own set of imperatives that allowed the
mind to remove the fetters of customary thinking, indeed the idea
of Belief as a theological activity.

UNDERSTANDING BEING
“One should say and think that Being is.” (Parmenides)
Being in this sense is the whole of things, the mightiness of the
cosmos, the very substance of atom, the indubitable notion of
oneness that lies beneath out understanding of the Universe.
Being, however, is determined in the world by the
emergence of a duality: that things come into being and
then pass away. (life and death, night and day, hot and
cold)

UNDERSTANDING BEING
A paradox, perhaps. Being, or the One as Xenophanes
called it, in its eternal stability longs to show itself in the
world if an agitation, of instability. Hence, its recourse to
duality as a prelude to manifestation. (give and take, ebb
and flow, attack and retreat)
Movement is thus an aspect of time, no more. Things
show themselves in time in the act of movement, of
passing from one state to another, so that life is death and
death, life.

The true delight of thinking is not to
‘discover’ something new in nature, or
anything at all for that matter, but to explore
where thought might lead as an intellectual
adventure.

The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

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The Pre-Socratic Philosophers