MILESIAN PHILOSOPHY
- Interpreting fragmented philosophies
- making your sources speak sense
- reconstructing plausible arguments for their conclusions
- avoiding anachronisms: terms, issues, interests, arguments
- A received view:
- three (and only three?) Generations
- three Questions
- What is the primary stuff?? ---- The ONE
- How does this stuff change? ---- The MANY
- How does (some of) this stuff come to be alive?----Life & Soul
- some problems with the received view
What I call here the "received view" has its advantages. It organizes otherwise fragmentary thought in a context, it demonstrates the nature of philosophical "progress" via reasoned criticism, and it stresses the continuity between the earliest themes in Western philosophy and the questions that captured later thinkers. The view also has some problems. If Milesian Philosphy focused on these three questions, it is difficult to explain either Anaximander's detailed cosmology, with its (pardon the pun) limited reference to the Unlimited (APERION) or Anaximines' rejection of Anaximander's compelling arguments. As far as Anaximander is concerned, the APERION does not seem to provide adequate basis for his concern with cylces, opposites, and imbalances. As for Anaximander, although his philosophy appears to have been markedly less abstract than that of his predecessor, he does seem to have concentrated on observable transformations. It may not be too great an exaggeration to say that Anaximines took up the scientific clues in Anaxminader's work, and that these interested him more than the more metaphysical and speculative concepts.
One thing that what I have called the "received view" underestimates is the degree to which early Greek thought was framed by the intimation and threat of CHAOS or disorder. In their lives as in their society, and by extension, in the COSMOS itself, disorder was perceived as an ever-present threat. Although this concept has maintained a strong hold on the Western philosphical imagination, I think it is fair to say that the possibililty of the collapse of the prevailing order was a more present and conscious concern in their daily lives than it is in most of ours. We may know in some theoretical sense that entropy is increasing, but most of us have developed a thicker metaphsical skin about such risks. Political, social and economic disorder concern us more than the threat of collapse of the world order. Apart from a few apocalyptic environmental types, we are less likely to think of nature and her warring factions of oppositions as vulnerable to complete collapse.
In my view it is hard to overstate the awareness of real and present natural disaster as a formative element in early Greek thought.
- Thales
- life & background
- his thought
- is this different from just another myth?
- Anaximander
- life & background
- Anaxminder as scientist
APEIRON- possible meanings
The etymology of APEIRON is disputed. The A is generally accepted to be a privitive, like English "un" or "non." The rest of the word could derive from PEIRAS, "limit" or "boundary," or from PER, a preposition meaning "through," "via," or "beyond."
A NOTE ON EXPLANATIONS: In general, we expect things not to be self-explanatory. The request for an explanation, the question "Why?" is ordinarily taken as a request to link the topic in question with some other phenomenon or state of affairs. My friend Dan Breazeale of the University of Kentucky recalls his visit in graduate school days to Acadia National Park in Maine. The Ranger led a nature walk in which he pointed to a number of unsual natural fatrues of the park's ecology. A pattern emerged. The Ranger would say, "It is very interesting that this kind of moss grows on this kind of tree only in this Park, and no where else," to which someone would respond, "That's fascinating. How do you explain that?" "It's the nature of the tree," the Ranger would explain. Moliere satirized learned late medieval doctors for their explanations of the soporiphic effects of opium by reference to opium's supposed "dormintive virtues." It explains nothing, of course, simply to say that the reason x is y-like is that x has y-like properties. Explanations ordinarily move from the subject in question to some underlying or logically prior characteristic or quality. What I am calling the "received view" credits Anaximander with the great achievement of generalizing this observation. No polar element of any of the fundamental oppositions could ever serve to explain its own difference from its paired opposite. Even supposing that we could explain fire by reference to (hot) air, we could never explain (moist) earth or water by reference to (dry) air.
- eternal
- timeless ("ageless")
- hence divine
Agelessness, immortality, eternity were assumed to be marks of divinity. From early on Greek Philosophers moved toward the concept of THEOS, which did not imply personality, nor even necessarily intelligence. Anything eternal was, other things being equal, divine. Cp. Aristotle on the sun, moon and fixed stars.
- surrounds all worlds???
ARCHE-principle, origin
- a note on the logic of explanation
- the fragment (R. McKirahan translation, Simplicius, Comm. on Aris. Phys., 24.18-21=DK 12B1 + A9) :
The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and make restitution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time, as he says in rather poetical language.
(For a more detailed discussion of this and other aspects of Anaximander's thought, click here.)
- cosmology:
- cylindrical earth?
- "separating off"---a vortex?
- evolution & successive worlds
- absence of mythology
- was Anaximander a materialist?
- Anaximines
- life & background
- an instinct for explanation
- explaining the seen by the unseen
- answering the questions:
- air
- condensation/rarefaction
- Why only three generations?
- What makes this Philosophy?
revised September 14, 1996
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