Praise asked:

What are the main contributions of the Ionians to philosophy?

To ask as the Miletians did, what are things really like and how can we express the process of change, is a substantial departure from the mythology and poetry of Homer and Hesiod and a movement towards what we may call the temperament of science. Critically discuss.

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

Their main contribution was that they invented it.

But it was natural philosophy, which we call science today. Even so, there is much more behind it. You would surely not believe that Thales said to himself one day: I’m going to create science! Before such a thought can occur to you, it is necessary to have liberty to think, and flexibility in your thinking. In a sense this is real difficulty and greatest contribution the Ionians made. Effectively the Ionian philosophers discovered what it means to think, and then they taught us all what thinking is good for.

The background to this is that the Greeks were just as deeply religious as we Christians were 500 years ago. They believed that gods and spirits were everywhere and that you had to worship them and fear them, because they were so powerful.

How and why the Ionian philosophers began to think about existence and the universe is of course very difficult to explain. There are three possible causes:

1. When they examined the beliefs in gods and spirits, they discovered that most of them had names which reflected what kind of natural force they represent. So there was thunder and the god of thunder, but both had the same name. What happens if we delete the name from the list? Obviously nothing, because thunder will still occur. So the name of a god is maybe superfluous?

2. But to think like this, there needs to be a special condition in society, which is that the thinker must have the freedom under the law to think any way they like. In ancient Greece, many of the tribes had democratic constitutions, which means that freedom of thought was possible.

3. The earliest of these thinkers came from Miletus, which was at the cross-roads of many cultures. So they knew all the superstitions of the Persians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Lydians etc. When they compared them with their own beliefs, they saw remarkable similarities and started wondering if there were better, more logical reasons to explain the world.

In other words, they asked rational questions how the world works and they have observed the laws of nature and came to the conclusion that the world was a ‘Cosmos’ (in English: A space that seems orderly and organised).

These Ionian pre-Socratics are often referred to as the thinkers of the Ionian Enlightenment. I use the term enlightenment because they discarded superstitions and insisted on reasoning about such matters.

The first and the most important of these Ionian thinkers was Thales of Miletus (640-545 BC). He was already very accomplished in independent thinking. He knew geometry better than the Egyptians, he worked as an engineer for Croesus of Lydia, and he predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BC. While the Greeks were watching to see if he was right, the Lydians and Medes were fighting a battle on the same day, but stopped when the eclipse began and ran away in fright.

He also speculated that the fundamental substance of the world is water. Which means that everything alive has water in it, which is entirely true. His pupil Anaximander (610-547) accepted the idea of a substance, but disputed that it could be water. He said, water has form; but a basic substance must be formless. This he called an ‘apeiron’. So you can see that Thales was setting an agenda for natural philosophy, which got everyone interested and working on it; and in fact we still pursue his agenda today.

Obviously there are other contributions. I’ll mention just two more.

The first is the basic conflict between matter and energy that flared up between Parmenides of Elia and Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500). Parmenides said the whole world is just one block of rigid matter. Heraclitus opposed him and said the universe is in constant motion or flux (e.g. ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’). This is another issue our physicists are still working on, and they are still trying to reconcile these disparate points of view.

Finally, Democritus of Abdera, who was a contemporary of Plato, devised the atomic theory. This was also an effort at reconciling matter and energy, because the atoms are so small that the difference makes no difference.

I also want to mention that another outcome of rational thinking was a new approach to medicine. The separation of medicine from magic depends on the concept of aetiology, which was first articulated by the Ionians. Here again they contributed to a completely new understanding of health and disease, using reason as their natural ally.

When we read their fragments today, they seem pretty unimportant. But we need to look at this achievement from the point of view that this was the very first step taken by man, to liberate the mind from oppression by superstition, and to look at the world with the eyes of reason.

Answer by Tony Fahey

In the above two questions, Praise brings us right back to the origin of Western Philosophy. Because the two questions are directly related, I have decided to attempt to give something approaching an acceptable answer to both questions in the following response. I say ‘attempt’ because the space afforded in this forum does not allow for the type of critical discussion that such a broad issue deserves.

The Ionian philosophers were a group of Greek philosophers who were active in Miletus, an Ionian colony in Asia Minor, during the sixth century B.C., and some of their successors who lived about one hundred years later. They are considered to be the earliest of the Greek philosophers, and therefore of the Western tradition of philosophy. Whilst the philosophers of the Ionian school included such influential thinkers as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Diogenes, and many more, given the limitations referred to above, in the attempt to cover both questions, in this response I will deal, primarily, with the three natural philosophers who are credited with starting the whole Western philosophical ball rolling, so to speak. That is, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

Philosophy, A. R. Lacey’s A Dictionary of Philosophy informs us means ‘Love of wisdom’ 1976, p.176). Chambers Dictionary broadens this definition to include: ‘investigation of the nature of being; [and] knowledge of the causes of things’ (1992, p. 803). These definitions reflect the desire of mankind to make sense of the world in which they live. Before the Presocractics (and many would argue that it is still the case), people found answers to philosophical questions in religious myths which were handed down from generation to generation. Gods were given human forms and attributes, and in order to appease these gods, and to ensure a sense of permanence – that the sun would rise each day, and Spring and Summer would return each year, and so on – sacrifices and homage were paid to these gods. So we can see that even before, what Aristotle would later call, the ‘natural philosophers’, people were concerned with the notion of stability in an ever-changing world.

Sometimes it is possible to look at the natural world and become aware of an unseen energy, a dynamic that animates physical phenomena. Some people see this dynamic as evidence of a divine force; that each phenomenon is created by God for a particular end or purpose, and that this purpose belongs to a greater harmonious system. This view is described as a teleological approach. Others, while they may agree that in the natural world events may appear to occur in regular sequence, are reluctant to ascribe to these events the intervention of divine providence, whilst others again argue that there is no evidence that there is a teleological dimension to natural events.

The early Greeks looked at how this energy or force manifested itself in various natural phenomena and attributed to these manifestations anthropomorphic characterisations. Thus, Zeus, or Jupiter, was seen as the supreme god, whose anger, at what was perceived as wrongful behaviour by the early Greeks, was expressed by the roar of thunder, whilst Poseidon was seen as the god of earthquakes and the sea, and Bacchus as the god of wine and vegetation. In other words, these gods were seen as whimsical or capricious entities that possessed all the virtues and frailties of mortal beings. The myths that evolved from the belief in the power of these gods formed the basis of the early Greeks worldview. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, turned away from this form of belief system and looked to the natural world for evidence of the source or first principal of things.

The Milesian philosophers (the natural philosophers).

Thales:

Around the beginning of the sixth century BC, the city of Miletus, on the western coast of Asia Minor, became a thriving centre of trade between Greece and the Middle East. Thales (pronounced Thay-leez), a native of that city, travelled extensively and came into contact with many different cultures, especially those of Egypt and Babylon. Being an Ionian Greek by birth, Thales would have been indoctrinated with values of his native place – values, that is, drawn from the myths and legends of the narrow Greek society in which he was reared. However, because of its trade with the world beyond Miletus as well as colonisation, Thales began to question the legitimacy of the worldview that had been handed down to him. Thus, while others were prepared to accept the ‘truth’ as handed down by tradition, Thales began to ask new questions about the causes of things. That is, he began to ask questions about the first principle of things. And by asking about the
nature of the first principle itself, he departed from the tradition and introduced a new form of inquiry – one could say his approach gave birth to philosophical inquiry.

As with the other Milesians (Anaximander and Anaximenes) all we know of Thales is what we learn from a few fragments given by later thinkers who interpreted his ideas in their own way. And it is from these fragments that we are forced to construct some notion of this early thinker’s contribution to philosophy. According to Aristotle, Thales made water the principle of all things, and he believed that just as a log floats on a pond, so too does the earth float on a greater expanse of water (mind you, he also held that since magnets move iron they must have souls – he also said that all things are full of gods; that the mind of the world is god, and that god is intermingled with all things). He also held that earthquakes were caused by subterranean waves rocking the earth – in the same way that a ship may be rocked by the sea. While to our minds these observations seem trite, Thales’ willingness to move away from tradition represents a dramatic and
significant shift in humans would hereafter, look at their world.

As well as being the first thinker to try to account for the nature of the world without appealing to the whims and wills of anthropomorphic, Homerian gods, Thales is also credited with correctly predicting that there would be a solar eclipse in 585 BC during a battle between the Medes and the Lydians. As such, Thales qualifies as the first natural scientist and analytical philosopher in Western intellectual history.

Anaximander :

Anaximander was also from Miletus and lived around the same time as Thales (6th c BC). Anaximander also believed that there was a single primal substance, however, unlike Thales’ water, he believed in something called the ‘Indefinite’ or ‘apeiron’: boundless. That is, for Anaximander, the source of all things was not some determinate element, but something that was without limits.

By proposing the Indefinite as the primal substance, Anaximander could account for the emergence of things and the elements which are quite different in character to water, and from each other. He believed that the first principle could not be water, as Thales had proposed, because if it were, it would conquer all others. Aristotle reports him as saying that these known elements are in opposition to one another. Air is cold, water is moist, and fire is hot. ‘And therefore, if any one of these were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time’ (The Presocratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright, 1966. T3, p.55, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York and London). Thus, since the world is constantly changing, the primal substance must be indefinite.

According to Aristotle, Anaximander proposed the Indefinite as the first principle of the universe, and argued that it ‘has neither come into being nor can it pass away’. He says that the Indefinite ‘encompasses all things and governs all things’, and that it is immortal and indestructible. Instead of the anthropomorphic (god with human attributes) figure of Zeus whom Hesiod had said was the ruler of the universe, Anaximander proposed an abstract entity which is given the traditional attributes of the divine. By creating a neuter noun – a noun which is neither masculine nor feminine – from an adjective – a word that would normally describe a quality or modify a noun – Anaximander introduces the notion of a single divine entity that is identified with the Indefinite as first principle. This simple move, at one fell swoop, made possible the subsequent philosophical speculation about the divine.

Anaximenes:

The third Milesian philosopher was Anaximenes (c 580-500 BC). Anaximenes believed that both Thales and Anaximander were mistaken. The source of all things, he believed, was air – or ‘vapour’. The soul is air; fire is rarefied air; when condensed, air changes into water, and if further condensed it becomes earth, and ultimately stone. Anaximenes held that air was the origin of earth, water, and fire. Like Thales, he also thought that there must be some underlying primal substance that is the source of all change. Like the Indefinite of Anaximander, he thought this primal substance was the divine and all encompassing source of generation for all visible objects in both heaven and earth – even though he had identified it as air, which is an element. In the same way that Thales held that the world floats on water, Anaximenes held that the world rides on a cushion of air. He also held that heavenly bodies were fiery because they evaporated, and that they ride upon air because they are flat. Although Anaximenes was a younger contemporary of Anaximander he appears to be a more primitive thinker.

The first attempts at philosophy, then, were occupied with the only world which men can present clearly to themselves – the world of nature. In general, these attempts take the shape of a search for some unitary principle or primal substance for explaining the world, some one kind of real existence out of which the diversity of the universe has arisen, some underlying permanence in this never ending process of change. The first decisive steps in this search were taken by the Milesian philosophers.

John asked:

In Meditation I, Descartes describes a kind of powerful doubt that prevents him from being persuaded of the truth of almost anything. Is Descartes’ doubt powerful enough to stop Anselm’s ontological proof from being convincing?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Hi John, let us begin by considering, briefly, both Anselm’s and Descartes’ approach to this issue: Anselm’s argument for the existence of God can be found in chapters two and three of his Proslogion. Very roughly, his argument goes like this: God is the most perfect being; it is more perfect to exist than not to exist; therefore god exists. It should be said that Anselm was a monk and bishop of Canterbury who held that faith is prior to and provides the context for understanding. Thus, for Anselm, it is not the case that we understand first in order to believe, rather it is that we believe in order to understand. According to Anselm, if God is defined as a being than which nothing greater can be conceived or thought, then God must exist, since it is greater to exist in reality than just in the mind as notional or conceptual.

Like Anselm, Descartes believed that each of us possesses the idea of a perfect entity. Inherent in that idea is the fact that a perfect entity must exist – because, as Anselm had said, a perfect entity can only be perfect if it has existence. Neither could we conceive of a perfect entity if there was no such thing. We are imperfect, said Descartes, so the idea of perfection cannot come from us. Descartes reasons that the idea of a perfect being must have been placed in him by a really existing perfect being – God. That God exists was therefore as self-evident to Descartes as that a thinking being must exist.

One of the earliest critics of Anselm’s ontological proof was his contemporary Gaunilo (also a monk), who, in his Liber pro Insipiente, opposed it on the grounds that humans cannot pass from intellect to reality. According to Gaunilo, Anselm’s argument would imply that anything, no matter how fictitious or chimerical, which was thought in the mind, would have to exist in reality. To prove his point Gaunilo uses the example of an ‘island more blessed than any other, a perfect island… greater than which nothing greater can be conceived’. Given Anselm’s ‘proof’, he argues, if one can conceive of such an island in this way, then it follows that such an island must exist in reality as well as in the mind – this, of course is absurd. In fairness to Anselm, where he attempted to defend himself from Gaunilo’s criticism by saying that his concept of a priori perfection applied specifically and only to God, Descartes decided that since he could conceive God as a ‘clear and distinct’ a priori idea that any such ‘clear and distinct’ idea should be granted the same unquestionable status.

Thus, we can see that since Descartes sets out on his epistemological journey by doubting everything, it may seem, initially, that his doubting would have been powerful enough, if not to actually ‘stop’ Anselm’s proof from bring convincing, to at least put it on hold (as Husserl might say, ‘to eschew it’) until it could be shown to be either valid or invalid. However, because it can be shown that both Anselm’s and Descartes’ theses make the same case in regard to the proof of the existence of God, it must be argued that Gaunilo’s critique of Anselm equally applies to Descartes.

Indeed, it can further be said that when Giambattista Vico, in his critique of Descartes’ proof of the existence of God, says that those who seek God in this way do so out of stupidity. Adding that in order to know that God exists, one would have to know the genus and mode of God – that is, one would have to be the maker of God; and that those who attempt to prove the existence of God a priori, are guilty of impious curiosity, one might be forgiven for thinking that amongst the ‘those’ Vico speaks of, one could be forgiven for thinking that he may well have been counting Anselm.

Stephanie asked:

What would Descartes and Hume say if they looked out a window and saw a red bird?

Answer by Craig Skinner

We can only speculate, but here is my suggestion.

Descartes (I translate into English):

"Mon Dieu! I have a clear and distinct idea of a red bird. God being no deceiver, I can trust my senses, and so take it that there is a substantial (res extensa that is) bird out there. Mind you, senses can deceive, it’s difficult at this distance, maybe it’s a soft toy, and red birds are rare here in Stockholm. There again (Ho Ho!) it might be a dream or hallucination, after all I am in bed with pneumonia and high fever – these freezing-cold early morning sessions teaching Queen Christina are killing me.

"Of course, by the way, when I say it’s red, the redness is entirely in my mind, not in the bird.

"Now it’s rooting around for worms or insects to take back to its young. Of course, it’s not that it cares for the young, or feels anything for that matter. After all, unlike we humans, it has no soul, it’s just a complex machine (like our bodies are too of course), and we needn’t worry what we do to birds or animals, they feel nothing. Actually, I do wonder about that sometimes, but it allows natural philosophers to get on with the science of animals and of the human body without getting in the Church’s hair.

"Ah well, back to re-reading those tiresome objections to my Meditations by those bores Arnauld, Gassendi and company. Dont these people ever see anything clearly and distinctly!"

Hume (beyond the first sentence I wont reproduce his Scottish accent, which Londoners ridiculed):

"Hoots mon, there’s a burrd loose aboot this hoose!

"To be exact, I have an impression of a red bird. Let others speculate as to the ultimate cause of this impression – myself, an external world, God ? – me, I’ll stick with Newton’s ‘I feign no hypothesis’.

"Oh, sorry," [turning to his backgammon opponent] "I thought for a minute I was still in my study instead of back in ordinary life. Yes, it could be a particularly florid redwing. It’s been here at the same time every day recently for the bread my housekeeper scatters. Just shows you. Like us, birds think by association of ideas, and the constant conjunction of the housekeeper’s appearance and the bread on the grass has induced him to expect the latter on observing the former. Eh! How’s that for a theory of causation.

"Look, he takes some bread back for his young. They seem to have a deal of sympathy for kin, and kind, and maybe more widely. Looks like a naturalistic view of ethics might fly as it were (chortling).

"It’s difficult to imagine that that bright redness is all in the mind as Galileo and Descartes have it. Nah, Locke’s on the money with it being a secondary quality in the mind produced by the primary qualities in the object, so, as powers to produce them, colours are in the object.

"And another thing. What good would red plumage be at attracting mates if they didn’t have minds to house an impression of it. Take that one on board Des.

"Anyway, last game, then its upstairs for me, unlock the desk drawer and work on that tome about religion. If my ideas there don’t get too widely known, I could still be in with a shot at the Glasgow Chair despite getting the bird (parting chortle) in Edinburgh."

Adriana asked:

According to kant what would it mean that a person could not move in empty space?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

As far as I’m aware Kant never mentions empty space. He says that space is a necessary intuition for us, so that we can understand our own motions in relation to all other motions. You could legitimately infer from this that space does not exist in itself. Which is very different from ’empty space.’

I don’t think the idea of empty space is intelligible. What sort of a space could be empty? Do you know or understand what empty space is?

Be that as it may, once you have a person, there is no empty space.

Once you have a person, there must be more than one person, and they must be co-ordinated in space.

So your question is self-contradictory. A bit like ‘can a mouth eat itself’?

Dava asked:

Let’s assume I am running the London Marathon… if my feet were bigger would it be over sooner?

Answer by David Robjant

There are some marshalling issues connected with the definition of ‘running’. Overlooking width fitting problems, any athlete with a foot length over 26 miles and 385 yards would not be permitted to compete.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

My first reaction to this question was that it is surely a joke. However, on second thoughts there does seem to be a point here about the way we assess the truth of counterfactual conditionals, of the form, ‘If A had been the case then B would have been the case.’

  If all the world was apple pie
  And all the sea was ink
  And all the trees were bread and cheese
  What should we have to drink?

‘If all the world was apple pie…’ is the antecedent of a counterfactual. However, in this case, we have absolutely no idea how to assess its truth or falsity. To cite the analysis of David Lewis (in his book Counterfactuals, 1973) you look at the possible worlds most closely resembling the actual world, except for the fact that ‘all the world is apple pie and all the sea is ink’. Where do you start?!

Counterfactuals are unruly. It’s an idiom that allows you to ask questions, or make statements, where the question of truth or falsity isn’t something merely hidden or difficult to get at, but where the very idea that there ‘is’ an answer, in reality, is absurd. We don’t have to go as extreme as the nursery rhyme case. Do counterfactuals have truth conditions at all? Or are they merely more or less appropriate things to say, given the circumstances?

Keep everything the same and just make my feet one inch longer. I still take the same number of strides, at the same rate. If each stride is, say, one metre, then regardless of the size of my feet, with each stride I advance one metre. However, I do have one advantage, if we assume that one of my feet crosses the finishing line before the rest of me. I could beat my alter ego with one inch shorter feet, by one inch. (This rarely happens in real life, because the athlete’s nose or hand crosses the finish line first.)

So far so good, the problem is that lots of other things would be the case if my feet were longer by one inch. My body would be just that little bit heavier, my running shoes would also be just that little bit heavier, there would be slightly more wind resistance as I moved my feet forward. OK, you say, that’s just a matter of calculation. In principle, there would be answer, say, if we could devise a suitable computer simulation.

But that’s surely not the point of the question. We don’t want to change anything, at all, except foot size. We are not interested in the most likely or ‘similar’ scenario where my feet are larger, only in the effect that foot size has on the outcome of the race, and that effect alone. In short, what we are interested in is a specific causal relationship.

That is a condensed argument for a different analysis of counterfactuals from the one Lewis gives, where the key concept is causality rather than Lewis’s notion of ‘similarity of worlds’. The bad news is that, if we reject Lewis, then we also give up any hope of a reductive analysis of causal statements in terms of counterfactuals.

Olive asked:

How is it possible to cast two shadows at the same time?

Answer by Craig Skinner

This looks like a science (optics) question rather than a philosophy one. But here’s the answer.

First, I presume you mean one object casting two shadows (two objects will obviously cast two shadows, one for each).

The usual way is to have two light sources, each casting a shadow. Thus, earlier tonight, I walked round the block. As I passed a street lamp, it cast my shadow in front of me, and the shadow lengthened as I walked on. As I neared the next lamp, it cast my shadow behind me, so now there were two, one behind and one in front of me. On a moonlit night, I can see three, one cast by each of the two lights, one by moonlight.

Less often, two shadows are cast even though there is only one light source. The usual explanation is that one shadow is cast directly by sunlight, the other by sunlight reflecting off a window. Very rarely, a thin band of dark cloud obscures a strip across the middle of the sun’s disc so that each unobscured bit of the disc acts as a separate light source and two shadows are cast, very slightly apart.

They say vampires casts no shadow. I’m sure this is true (because there are no vampires).

Finally there is a novel called ‘Casting Two Shadows’ which is well reviewed. I haven’t read it. I understand it is about love, honour and sacrifice, but tells us nothing about optics.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

In order to answer your question the first thing we need to decide is how you define a ‘shadow’.

A shadow can be a volume of space within which any partly or wholly contained object is described as being ‘in shadow’, or ‘in the shade’. The Earth’s shadow, in this sense, has the shape of a tapering cone, as the light source, the Sun, is larger than the Earth.

More often, we speak of a ‘shadow’ as a two dimensional shape on a surface. It is actually possible, to cast two shadows in this sense with one object and a compact light source, no mirrors, etc.

Let’s say I am walking across a bridge with an iron railing. I see my moving shadow cast by the sun on the iron railing, but I also see, in the distance, the shadow of the bridge on the meadow below, with the iron railing and my shadow. There are two shadows – two ‘two-dimensional shapes on a surface’ – one of which (from my viewpoint) is contained within the other.

However, in the first sense of ‘shadow’ there is only one shadow, i.e. one volume of space where the light from the sun cannot directly reach because I am in the way.