I finished my second read through of pages 1-24 in W.T. Jones’ “A History of Western Philosophy: The Classical Mind“. The next step in this process will be to read the sources. I’m using this book for now. Fortunately for me the writings we possess for this period are very few indeed. I stopped on page 24 because this is the place in the text where the shift from monism to pluralism occurs. I don’t intend to review the book much less rewrite it, but I do want to highlight some of the material and some of my observations.

It is intriguing to see the shift from beliefs in capricious almost child like gods as the sustaining force of the physical world to an almost entirely godless process-based explanation of the causation and presumed unity of this same world. I can imagine the reponse that these philosopher-scientists received from their contempories and culture at large. People don’t seem to change that much it seems, neither then or now. Most would want their understanding of things to remain fixed, to be of the type that can’t undergo change because it is so certain. Unfortunately for the Greeks during this time the monists were subverting everything that they considered, albeit in error, to be in this fixed category. Even we in this modern age (or is it post-post-modern?) would like the world neatly packaged, but this is of course only wishful thinking. (Yes, I believe we can know things, but that’s a different post.) These “innovators” were not content with the fantasic, super-natural and what we now call mythic accounts that attempted to answer questions about the world and its processes. When they looked at changes in water and air, the effects of fire and dynamic nature of the world they saw public, physical explanations that satisfied their ancient criteria for reasonable, possible and probable. They had real answers.

What many of these proto-philosophers did was explain the world and its unity through ostensive definitions. Thales would say, “See this water? This is the primary stuff of the world.” Anaximander and Anaximenes followed suit with their own unique perspectives. It seems that these chaps wanted to run far away from private musings to public facts that could be debated and challenged and openly discussed. What is a bit funny is the way in which they waffled back and forth between “public” data about the world’s unity and processes on one hand and a form of rationalism that clearly ignored the physical evidence on the other. Xenophanes may have thought reason to be more reliable than perceptions, but doesn’t that get it backwards? This dichotomy is, I think, best explained by the slow progression of these modes of discovery. Who could blame them for wanting to escape the power of the gods by offering rationalistic explanations of the physical world?!

A word about new ideas. We may today be a lot like the Greeks when new ideas are proposed. We may run for the hills, shoot the messenger or simply live in denial. However, newness does not mandate correctness or even adoption. It is not the case that only “new” (or fashionable in my view) ideas are the only ones of value and utility. It is the case, and this is what we forget sometimes, that when these new ideas do come along and they successfully refute the old ideas that we should at a minimum critically evaluate both of them. Not all new ideas are going to pass the reasonable, possible and probable tests enough to persuade us to change our view, but unless our understanding is certain we should be willing to put things to the test. Of course this presumes we want to come closer to the truth whether propositional or the kind that is certain. In the case of Thales, Anaximander, Xenophanes and others, they attempted to refute the old perceptions of the world and offer a new and, in their view, more accurate view of the world. Because of this, even though their conclusions are laughable to us now, I give them props.