Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1)

by Peter S. Adamson

We’re going to see that political, social, and religious forces had a lot to do with the way philosophy progressed, and even the fact that philosophy could happen at all. It’s an obvious, but easily overlooked, fact: philosophy occurs only in a society that can produce philosophers.

“My God, he’s right, everything does come from water!” But if Thales got to his water principle in this kind of way, then at least it would show him giving a novel explanation of the cosmos, and using a process of argument to get to that explanation. Whether,

Anaximander is best known for saying that the principle of all things is what he called “the infinite.” The word in Greek is apeiron, which means, literally, “that which has no limit.”

Anaximander’s principle. He did apparently think that the apeiron was infinitely big, in other words, that it stretched out in space indefinitely far, and surrounds the cosmos in which we live. And we also know that he thought it was eternal—so, infinite in time as well as space.

His infinite is a conceptual leap, and seems to be derived from pure argument rather than empirical observation.

Anaximenes, who seems to go in the other direction. He agreed with Anaximander that the principle of everything is infinite, but he was happy to go ahead and identify it with a particular substance: not water this time, but air.

Anaximenes also had something to say about the soul. Unsurprisingly, he said that the soul is made of his favorite stuff: air, which in this case is breath (§160). This idea of the soul as breath, or in Greek pneuma—that’s where we get the word “pneumatic”—is going to have a long career in later ancient philosophy.

feature of Pre-Socratic philosophy: these are thinkers who want to hold onto a sense of religious awe in the face of the dynamically changing cosmos they describe.

Xenophanes represents a new development in Pre-Socratic philosophy, because he’s the first explicitly to attack the authority of the poets.

Xenophanes seems to have come up with this conception by reversing the approach of Homer and Hesiod. His God won’t be like humans; instead, he’ll be as much unlike humans as possible, and better in every way. Unlike us, God needs nothing, despite what the poets would have you believe.

So you can stop sacrificing those animals. God doesn’t move at all—there’s nowhere he needs to go—and maybe he doesn’t even have a body. On the other hand, like the Homeric and Hesiodic gods, He is very powerful.

Xenophanes insists that God is nothing like us: he is incomparable to us both in body and in thought. You’ll notice, for instance, that we can’t shake all things just by thinking about it.