When it comes to the big ideas of the Ancient Greeks, it is important to note that the earliest key figures among the Greek peoples were the poets, those mythmakers and interpreters of traditional religion. Their works contained many philosophical issues in which we might find profound interrogations and wisdom. There was also mention of prophet figures in those early stories. Besides poets, prophets, and other important religious and cultural figures, philosophers came to the forefront, especially on the topic of nature. The earliest proper philosophers were Ionians, such as Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Democritus, and Anaxagorus. This group made up the extremely primitive hylozoist philosophy; a philosophy mostly defined by its crude explication of life (ζωή) and matter (ύλη). These were physicists in the simplest conception of the term, philosophers of nature by sense perception, as noted by Aristotle.
This outline is helpful for thinking about key theological and metaphysical questions of physics and the nature of life and reality, and is a good foundation for all other philosophies of nature.
Here are the key points of their philosophical framework.
· Life and Matter
· Change (becoming, motion): Heraclitus reduced all to change, or pure flux, i.e. only change is real (later, Parmenides reduced all to being)
· Material monism: some of these philosophers reduced all matter to one substance, such as water, air, earth, or fire.
· Atomism: Democritus’ attempt to take Heraclitus’ pure flux and find in it base geometrical quantity without quality; aggregate of this geometrical quantity, split into parts, in everlasting motion by the void (non-entity)
· Chance: change, motion, becoming happens at random; materials aggregate into something by this chance becoming; there is not yet an account of the effect of change like the efficient cause, along with necessity, potentiality, and actuality in Aristotle’s work
· Primitive Mechanism: like the later scientific mechanism of modernity, i.e. naturalism
In the case of the various types of monism with some of these figures, the problem is saying that “all things are really one”, that is, identical, and also nothing[1]. In the mechanistic conception atoms in motion are organized by chance, a crude materialistic metaphysics. Lastly, Anaxagorus continued with reductive monism or pantheism in saying that in a thing is the matter, or elements for everything. However, he did conclude that there must necessarily be an intelligence (νους) that orders everything in the universe, to which Aristotle commended[2] him for not being “drunk” on sensible matter like the others of this era.
Many of these problems are dealt with later by Aristotle with his ideas of form and matter, necessary causation, chance, potentiality and actuality which are articulated in his four causes: formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause. Specifically, his efficient cause – what is causing the change or motion in the matter – and his final cause– why or to what end/purpose is this change for – are keys to dealing with the problems highlighted with these early philosophers.
I’ll be exploring Aristotle’s theory of physics more, next as a short summary, as well as other philosophers’ theories of nature. I hope to get into contemporary physics and quantum theory later on.
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[1] Physics, i, 2, 185 b 19
[2] Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 28.