Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Greek Mythology

Here you'll find an introduction to Pre-Socratic philosophy, which emerged as an explanation of the world formed by ancient Greek thinkers who found supernatural explanations found in mythology inadequate or wrong.

Mythology vs Philosophy:

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

The early Greek, Pre-Socratic philosophers attempted to explain the world around them in more natural terms. 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. Later philosophers turned to other topics, like ethics and how to live.

Periods of Greek Philosophy:

The Greeks dominated philosophy for about a millennium. 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.

Pre-Socratic Philosophy:

The first period begins with Thales' 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 lived in the sixth century. 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.

Pre-Socratics Denied a Distinction Between Natural & 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.

Pre-Socratics May Have Been Rational Without Being Right:

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