Early Greek Philosophy

Author: Михaїл-А-Булгáкoв☦️
Reviewer: Nancy

  Early Greek philosophy belonged to Greek culture as a whole and to all Greeks, not only to city-states such as Athens and Sparta. Its thinkers shared the use of ancient Greek for thought, expression, and exchange. They shifted humanity's perspective on the world away from the divine focus of early civilization and toward a human-centered outlook intended to educate and cultivate—regardless of whether the earlier authority came from the gods of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, or Greece's own Olympus.
  Early Greek philosophy reached the Stoics through the selective interpretations of Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle. In the hands of the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, it later met Neoplatonism and entered Christian teaching. Heraclitus's *logos*, for example, appears at the beginning of the Gospel of John. Its ability to encompass reason, truth, speech, and the way also made it a foundational theological concept. Yet early Greek philosophy as a whole, like most of Aristotle's writings, remained largely unknown in medieval Europe. Only in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance did it reenter the Western scholarly world, as Greek texts returned and Arabic works were translated into Latin.
  Early Greek philosophy entered modern scholarship in earnest only at the end of the nineteenth century. The German historian of philosophy Eduard Zeller published *A History of Greek Philosophy*, while the British historian of ancient philosophy and classicist John Burnet published *Early Greek Philosophy*. Over several decades, the German historian and classical scholar Hermann Diels compiled *Doxographi Graeci* and *The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics*, finally giving scholars collections of early Greek philosophical texts that met modern academic standards.
  Among the world's early civilizations, the Greeks of the Archaic period were relatively early to abandon theological explanations that used the supernatural powers of myth and religion to account for real events and natural processes. They used rational inference independent of supernatural forces to think critically about natural phenomena, disasters, society, and human relationships, explaining such questions through nature itself. This turn produced not only the philosophical thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but also a system of dependable knowledge: science.
  Early Greek thinkers investigated nature and natural phenomena independently, critically, and seriously. They asked about the basic constituents and overall composition of everything in the world, the ways and laws governing the cosmos and individual action, and the properties and causes behind them. In doing so, they posed philosophical questions that still matter today: Did the universe have a beginning? How did that beginning begin? Do the basic components of things and their transformations follow discoverable laws? Is the world a unity? How do we know, and how can we possess knowledge?
  On the relationship between philosophy and science, early Greek thinkers offered cosmogonies rooted in empirical observation. The world arose neither from nothing nor through divine creation. Everything came from a single entity or unified state, combining into the things of the world under natural laws and following those laws through generation and destruction. Each thinker had a distinct set of terms and explanations, yet those ideas could be discussed, exchanged, corrected, and developed. They could explain and judge particular natural events and facts while also grasping and interpreting the world systematically as a whole. In this way, they formed the earliest rational worldview.
  As for the subject matter of philosophical thought, early Greek thinkers first focused on the reality of all things: their origin and governing principle. Thales, for example, proposed that “water is the origin of all things.” These thinkers also set cosmological change beside the eternal logic of epistemology, seeking at the level of language and thought to reconcile the differences and opposition between natural reality and human reflection. Heraclitus held that “everything flows” while proposing the “order and harmony” of the law of *logos*. Parmenides, beginning from “eternal, unchanging truth,” was the first to bring being, thought, and language into unity.
  From these two realms—the realities of nature and thought—early Greek thinkers went on to explore the human soul and the possibility of its search for knowledge. Starting respectively from change and changelessness, Heraclitus and Parmenides both moved toward knowledge's “eternal truth.” The atomists investigated the fundamental material composition of nature while also considering human sensation and experience, explaining the lawful operation of the world through a unity of nature and mind. Early Greek thought thus opened philosophical questions about first principles, cosmic order, being and what a thing is, and the ethical relationship between gods and humans.
  On philosophical discourse and terminology, the British scholar Barnes identifies several concepts as the most important categories of early Greek thought. Cosmos (universe) means both the world as a whole and order itself. As a verb, it means arranging the generation, operation, and coordination of things according to an order. As a noun, it denotes the ordered world as a whole—the totality of things. Physis (nature) stands in contrast to what is made or artificial. A natural thing, true to its nature, can grow by itself; this was humanity's first conceptual distinction between nature and artifice. Alongside the *cosmos*, *physis* refers specifically to the distinctive nature that each thing in the world possesses, rather than its accidental or random features. It marks the particular natures that distinguish diversity within the unity of the whole *cosmos*. In this sense, if the world as a whole is treated as one individual, its *physis* is its *cosmos*. This meaning of *physis* survives in many fields of study today. Early Greek inquiry into *physis*, however, also concerned the beginning and operative principle of all things and the world. This leads to the next fundamental term. Arche (beginning) is both the origin or starting point of all things and the world, and the initial principle by which the world operates—in other words, the first principle.   The Greeks held that things and worlds capable of growing according to their own nature must have an origin and root, together with rules governing their growth or operation. *Arche* therefore reflects on the mode and course by which naturally constituted things—and the world itself—operate within a *cosmos*. Beyond *cosmos* and *physis*, it searches for their external foundation. The concept has several levels: How did the world and its contents begin? What is the first principle of their growth and operation? What basic elements constitute the world? How do those elements compose individual things, their structures, and the world as a whole? These first three terms concern objective knowledge of the external world. Early Greek thinkers also reflected on human knowledge and its expression: *logos*. *Logos* is rational thought and speech, distinguished from empirical observation of the world. It represents one of the earliest distinctions in human thought between sensation and reason. Guided by *logos*, early Greek thinkers emphasized reasoning from causes, the use of rationality, argument, and inference rather than dogmatic judgment and unsupported conclusion.
  Early Greek thought laid the first foundations for scientific method and its working principles. It used humanly constructed terms to name the basic elements of nature, employed observation to infer or posit mechanisms by which things arise and operate, and reduced the world's complex diversity to simpler forms of order and principle. Compared with modern scientific knowledge, many of its particular conclusions and inferences now appear amusing or naïve. Yet their mode of producing knowledge already displayed the essential features of science. Early Greek thought created the basic concepts of Western science and philosophy and began a scientific—or rational—way of seeing the world. It continues to shape how people establish confidence in knowledge and conduct scholarly research today.