Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Greek Mythology

This is meant as a general introduction to Pre-Socratic philosophy; specifically, how it emerged as an explanation of the world that differed dramatically from what came before: mythological explanations, and a bit about how it developed into physics and ethics.

Mythology provides supernatural explanations for the universe and creation.

"The basic theme of mythology is that the visible world is supported and sustained by an invisible world." - Joseph Campbell

Some thought unseen gods manipulated the world from their perches on Mt. Olympus or elsewhere. One deity was responsible for grain, another for water, another for the olive, etc. Another idea from ancient mythology was that a giant humanoid relative of such divine providers, named Atlas, holds the heavens above his shoulders.

If you can't see it, how do you know? Mythology makes guesses. Early philosophers also made guesses about the unseen universe.

The early Greek, Pre-Socratic philosophers attempted to explain the world around them in more natural terms than those who relied on mythological explanations involving a division of labor among the gods. For example, instead of anthropomorphic creator gods, Anaxagoras thought the guiding principle of the universe was nous 'mind'.

Such an explanation doesn't sound much like what we think of as philosophy, but the Pre-Socratics were early philosophers, sometimes indistinguishable from natural scientists. This is an important point: philosophy and science/physics weren't separate academic disciplines.

Later philosophers turned to other topics, like ethics and how to live, but even at the end of the Roman Republic, it would be fair to characterize ancient philosophy as both "ethics and physics" ["Roman Women," by Gillian Clark; Greece & Rome, (Oct., 1981)].

The Greeks dominated philosophy for about a millennium running roughly from the middle of the first millennium B.C. to the middle of the first millennium A.D. Jonathan Barnes, in Early Greek Philosophy, divides the millennium into three parts:

1. The Pre-Socratics.
2. The period known for its schools, the Academy, Lyceum, Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics.
3. The period of syncretism begins approximately 100 B.C. and ends in A.D. 529 when the Byzantine Roman Emperor Justinian forbade the teaching of pagan philosophy.

The first period begins with Thales' alleged prediction of a solar eclipse in 585 B.C. and ends in 400 B.C. Philosophers of this period are called Pre-Socratic, somewhat misleadingly, since Socrates was a contemporary. Others argue that the term "philosophy" inaccurately limits the sphere of interest of the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers.

Students of nature, the Pre-Socratics are credited with inventing philosophy, but they didn't work in a vacuum. For instance, knowledge of the eclipse -- if not apocryphal -- may have come from contact with Babylonian astronomers.

The early philosophers shared with their predecessors, the mythographers, an interest in the cosmos. Parmenides was a philosopher from Elea (in Magna Graecia) who probably was an older contemporary of the young Socrates. He says that nothing comes into being because then it would have come form nothing. Everything that is must always have been.

Here are some major differences in the outlook of the mythographers:

• Myths are stories about persons.
  Pre-Socratics looked for principles or other natural explanations.
• Myths allow a multiplicity of explanations.
  Pre-Socratics were looking for the single principle behind the cosmos.
• Myths are conservative, slow to change.
  To read what they wrote, you might think the aim of the Pre-Socratics was to knock down earlier theory.
• Myths are self-justifying.
• Myths are morally ambivalent.
  -From "The Attributes of Mythic/Mythopoeic Thought"

Philosophers sought a rational order observable in the natural phenomena, where mythographers relied on the supernatural.

When Thales said "all things are full of gods," he wasn't so much singing the swansong of mythographers or rationalizing myth as breaking new ground by, in Michael Grant's words, "... implicitly denying that any distinction between natural and supernatural could be legitimately envisaged." The most significant contributions of the Pre-Socratics were their rational, scientific approach and belief in a naturally ordered world.

With the philosopher Aristotle, who valued evidence and observation, the distinction between philosophy and empirical science began to appear. Following the death of Alexander the Great, kings who controlled parts of his empire began to subsidize scholars who worked in areas, like medicine, that would do them some good, while the philosophical schools of the Stoics, Cynics, and Epicureans were not interested in empirical science. Michael Grant attributes the separation of science and philosophy to Strato of Lampsacus (successor of Aristotle's successor, Theophrastus), who shifted the focus of the Lyceum from logic to experiment.

As Barnes points out, just because the Pre-Socratics were rational, and presented supportive arguments, doesn't mean they were right. They couldn't possibly all be right, anyway, since much of their writing consists in pointing out inconsistencies of their predecessors' paradigms.

Sources:
Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy
Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks
Michael Grant, The Classical Greeks
G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers
J.V. Luce, Introduction to Greek Philosophy
The Attributes of Mythopoeic Thought

Related Resources

Presocratic Philosophy

Pythagoras of Samos

Epicureans

Stoics