Lecture Notes on the Origins of Philosophy

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"Philosophy"--first given its sense by Pythagoras: philos = sophia

philos (Gr) = love, brotherly love
agape (Gr) = love, love of God
eros (Gr) = love, erotic, sexual love

sophia (Gr) = wisdom

		philos + sophia
		love of wisdom
		theory of the cosmos
		looking at order
		contemplation of the world as patterned whole

This assumes that:
		cosmos is opposite of chaos
		order is opposite of disorder
		rational is opposite of irrational

Freud is different.

Philosophy began when man freed himself of myth and dared to fashion a rational view of the world.

The intellectual revolution of all time was the move from mythos to logos.

	MYTHOS				LOGOS
	inspired word			natural language
	revealed			reasoned
	myth 				logic (-ology = study of)
	religion			science

Myth

Myth is an explanation in story; the point of a myth is its moral, a justification of the way of the world: (Why must we labor? Why do women bear pain in childbirth? Why is there a rainbow?).

Myth has its foundations in the oral tradition: (the dirty joke).

Myth is anthropomorphic: (tree limbs; God as old man with white hair and beard).

Mythmaker was the first geologist: creation out of a watery chaos: Babylonian myth Enumu Elish ("When Above"), c. 1500 BCE.

		        FROM

	Aspu				Tiamat
    (fresh water)	AND	     (salt water)
	male				female

			CAME

		   Lahmu and Lahamu 
		 (silt at river mouth)
		       children

The young rise up against the old, and from the blood of a captive god, man is created.

George Frazier, The Golden Bough: sympathetic magic: (rain-making, voodoo doll).

The shaman comes to realize that he is not responsible for rain, so he explains it with a greater man who is.

F. M. Cornford: ritual reenactment of creation, fertilization. The ritual becomes obscure after generations, verbal explanation is needed for the younger generation--myth is born.

Hebrew cosmogony: Genesis, much more subtle, sublime, almost perfect magic: God created the world by speaking; creation from word.

In Homer (c. 9th cent. BCE), there is no conception of a law governing the world, nor of nature as a system of regular events. Above gods there is fate, but his conception is inconsistent. Sometimes Zeus can cause something to happen, but other times he is powerless: (Achilles and Hector at Troy).

In Hesiod (8th cent. BCE), Zeus has a moral law: he rewarded good and punished evil uniformly, regularly throughout nature. But the origin of the world is still anthropomorphic.

Logos

All philosophy and science can trace themselves to one foundation: Thales of Miletus (640-546 BCE); contemporary with Solon, known as a wise man, or sage. He predicted an eclipse of the sun and measured the height of a pyramid. We have a few fragments of what he said:

• "Water is the cause of all things."
• "All things are filled with gods."

Water takes on solid, liquid, and gas.
Water into air--evaporation; air into water--rainfall
Water into earth--silting; earth into water--springs
Presence of blood in animals, sap in plants

Two themes:

1. notion of a single, unifying principle;
2. sought this principle in natural events and processes

Thales gave us theories--public assertions open to criticism, revision, or rejection on the basis of contradiction and empirical evidence. Thales makes advance and improvement possible--his theory can be tested.

Thales is the Father of Philosophy because his assumptions about being determined the course of philosophy for a long time.

Thales's assumptions:

1. monism: one thing causes everything; sought unity in diversity;
2. substance: one thing; "physis" = the real; materialism;
3. ultimate substance is active: "All things are filled with gods"; contains principle of change, water is one thing, undergoes change and is transformed into various objects--primitive conception of process.

Philosophy grows out of science when it becomes necessary to question the inquiry itself, its method:

• What does it mean to say something endures through change?
• What is the relation between one real stuff (physis) and its many appearances?

Anaximander: the "Boundless"

Anaximenes: Air--quantitative changes result in qualitative changes

Heraclitus: Fire--primitive metaphor for abstract concept: process. Distinction between appearance and reality

Parmenides: Being--reality is fundamentally one: "What is, is; what is not, is not." Whatever is must be uncreated, indestructible, eternal, and unchangeable.

Empedocles: pluralist--reality must be a plenum with four roots (elements): earth, air, fire, and water

Pythagoras: founded religious fraternity of scientists. The unity of the cosmos is mathematical; therefore, the universe is thoroughly intelligible.

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   August 30, 1999