Carlos asked:

What is philosophy?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

Philosophy seems to be as far removed from the affairs of ordinary life as can be. But in fact all of us have some philosophical views, whether we are aware of them or not. You really can’t live as a free and independent person without embracing a philosophy.

This should remind you that philosophy was invented by the Greeks. The word is Greek, and it means ‘love of wisdom’. Something we forget is this: the Greks were free and independent people with their thoughts, just like we are. Actually we learnt it from them. So the important issue about philosophy, is that you have to be a free agent. People who live in dictatorships, or tyrannies, or theocracies, usually don’t philosophise because they are told how to live and think.

How we use it everyday is in our attitude to life. This does not mean: how you run your business, or the sport you pursue. It means, what do you wish to get from your life?

Now most people would say they want life to be interesting and fulfilling. That’s already latently a philosophical attitude. A philosophy might come out of it.

Then you might think that you wish to be treated with respect as a person. That’s also philosophical, because the moment you think like this, you will find that you must respect others the same way. As you move on, you might wish also to become insightful about the many things that go on in society. Or you might wish to learn about biology, or physics, or animal husbandry. In all these endeavours you are pursuing some goal that you should be able to formulate.

Once you start thinking this way, you’re on the way to philosophising. This is because such thinking is about you gaining an understanding and making rational decisions.

This is where philosophers can help.

I give you an example. Back in ancient Greece, Socrates used to walk the streets and ask people, what is life all about? He could ask us today the same questions. In the end he always said: the unexamined life is not worth living. This means that life must be lived with a conscious awareness of what is ethical in your dealings with others.

Later Aristotle, who was a systematic thinker, gave us the really golden rule to follow. He said: do everything in moderation, because every exaggeration is bound to make someone unhappy, including yourself. You can do too much good, as well as bad.

What you must not think now: oh, these were big men with big ideas, but they’re still only opinions. If you keep on this road yourself, you will come up against the same issues. And then, if you can’t work them out, these ‘opinions’ suddenly become important, because philosophers argue in depth. They don’t just give opinions.

Aristotle also said that we should watch over the goals we pursue in life. He said that most of us are mistaken about why we love doing certain things (common error even today): namely, we want to get rich, or famous, or powerful, or get married, have a home and children etc. and we think that when we have achieved it, we will be happy. Big mistake! What all of us really want, at bottom, is to be happy. And now he observed that people are really happy when they strive. If you strive for fame, that makes you happy. If you’re in love and are loved in return, you are happy. Once you’ve achieved all the good things you want, you might get bored or depressed, or get a sense of deja vu. Then you will have to start all over again. So, Aristotle says, don’t mistake the end for the means. The means are happiness, the goal is only a temporary station in life.

The only goals that can be permanent, he says, are love and friendship. And he adds, that although it is nice to have plenty of money, love and friendship are more important.

So philosophy makes people think about the basic issues of life – which is really life in society – and about the value of knowledge and beliefs, of love and friendship, of success and failure, and how important each of these may be. It makes us inquire into reasons for what we accept or reject, into the importance of ideas and ideals, as well as our hopes and aspirations. Philosophy is the best way of ensuring that your opinions and convictions will be rational, not just whimsies.

This is just a smattering, of course. People who like to think, will generally go on and study deeper and further. Consider, for example, that science could not work at all, if there was no philosophy underlying it, about what science should investigate. But at the beginning this is aiming to high. The best thing about philosophy in a practical sense is this: that it teaches us how to think and how to be aware.

You only have to look at the three greatest philosophers among the Greeks to see that their first concerns were: the individual, society, politics, ethics. Of course, modern philosophers show the same concerns.

Philosophy is also about knowledge, of course. But this comes later. First, as humans, we must learn to live. And because humans don’t live alone, it means we must learn how to live with each other. All the problems we have in society come about because people don’t think about them. So not having a philosophy is really bad news. There is no philosophy of racism, for example, but people are racists because of ignorance about ‘what it is to be a human being’.

So ultimately, this is what philosophy is. A way of learning to think, to understand and to respect life. We all needs this. Maybe we are in such a bad state today, because we think, we’re so clever and scientific we don’t need to think anymore. Science will solve our problems! But everyone who learns to think philosophically can tell you that this is nothing but a grand delusion. So not having philosophy is like not having any friends, or father and mother, who can tell you when you go off the rails!

Answer by Tony Fahey

Philosophy, as any student of Philosophy will tell you, means ‘love of wisdom’. In its truest sense it is a desire to challenge, to expand and to extend the frontiers of one’s own understanding. It is the study of the documented wisdom – the ‘big ideas’ – of thinkers throughout the history of humankind. However, even in our most respected institutions, Philosophy is often presented as theology, psychology, spirituality or religion. Indeed, many exponents of these respective disciplines seem to have no difficulty in identifying themselves as ‘philosophers’ when in fact they are ‘dogmatists’ (sic). What can be said, however, is that Philosophy is all of the above and none. ‘All’, in the sense that it will certainly engage with the views advanced by the exponents of these disciplines. ‘None’, in the sense that Philosophy can never be constrained by views that do not allow themselves to be examined, challenged, deconstructed and demystified in the realisation that ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ is not something that can be caught and grasped as one particular ism.

For those really interested in Philosophy, it is important to draw a distinction between ‘a philosophy’ and ‘Philosophy’ itself. There are abroad today many colleges, institutions, societies, ‘schools of philosophy’ (and, for some reason ‘schools of philosophy and economics’), groups, cults and sects promoting the view that they ‘teach’ Philosophy, where in fact what they are doing is promoting a particular worldview that they claim is superior to other worldviews or ‘philosophies’. What has to be said is that when a body claims that its philosophy has the monopoly on other worldviews it cannot be placed under the rubric of Philosophy – it is dogma. It is for this reason that those institutions that promote a particular religious ethos cannot, by their very nature, be said to teach Philosophy in any real sense: they are constrained by their own ‘philosophical’ prejudices to treat other worldviews impartially – particularly where these other approaches run contrary to their own. Moreover, by indoctrinating their students into a mindset that holds that it is their way or no way, these institutions show that their interest is not primarily in that which is best for the student, but that which is best in ensuring their own perpetuity. This approach (of using others as a means to one’s own ends), as Kant reminds us, is repugnant to Philosophy – the search for wisdom.

What this means is that Philosophy cannot condone any body of knowledge that advocates a closed view on wisdom or truth – one cannot take an a la carte approach to Philosophy. As the Dalai Lama, in the prologue to his book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality advises, where scientific discoveries are made that expose weaknesses in long held traditional beliefs, these beliefs should be abandoned, and the new discoveries embraced (would that all spiritual leaders or ‘philosophers’ were so openminded!). Philosophy, then, must operate on the premise that its conclusions should ever be open to what Karl Popper calls, ‘the law of falsification’. That is where its conclusions are found to be questionable, it is imperative that these views are revisited, re-evaluated and, where necessary, either re-formulated or abandoned. Unfortunately, as history shows, many systems of belief either will not entertain such an approach, or, if or when they do, it is often so far in time removed from the initial discovery that much harm has occurred in the interim.

What should be realised is that the wisdom to which Philosophy aspires is not attained by the practice of uttering self-hypnotising mantras or prayers, nor by being initiated into some select group, sect or cult that promises that its ‘road less travelled’ is the one true road. Philosophy is not love of ‘a truth’ or ‘some particular approach to wisdom’, but a love of truth and wisdom. However, this wisdom or truth does not come pre-wrapped and packaged as one ism or another, rather it involves the courage and preparedness to engage with, to challenge and to expand the boundaries of one’s own knowledge and experience. – one’s own wisdom.

Isabel asked:

Did Berkeley accept or reject solipsism?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Isabel, whilst George Berkeley did attempt to avoid or reject accusations of solipsism by arguing that all things exist in the form of ‘ideas’ in the mind of God, in this response I will show that his theocentric world-view still falls under the rubric of solipsism – albeit it solipsism of a rather unique kind.

According to Berkeley there is no such entity as a physical world, or matter, in the sense of an independently existing object. Rather it is that all that we ordinarily call physical objects are actually collections of ideas in the mind. The appearances we experience are the very objects and the appearances are sensations or perceptions of a thinking being. His most famous saying is ‘esse est percipi’ – ‘to be is to be perceived’. According to the ‘esse is percipi’ thesis, all the things surrounding us are nothing but our ideas. Sensible things have no other existence distinct from their being perceived by us. This also applies to human bodies. When we see our bodies or move our limbs, we perceive only certain sensations in our consciousness. Using a series of arguments, often called by philosophers as the ‘veil of perception’, Berkeley argued that since we never perceive anything called ‘matter’, but only ideas, the view that there is a material substance lying behind and supporting these perceptions is untenable. For Berkeley everything was mind-dependent: if one cannot have an image of a something in the mind, then it fails to exist – hence his thesis ‘to be is to be perceived’. Berkeley’s response to those who argued that if there were no material substrate behind our ideas, how is it that things persist when no one perceives them, was to argue that all our perceptions are ideas produced for us by God. As he himself says,

‘Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them’ (Berkeley Principles #29).

Thus, by arguing that things exist through God’s perception of them, and not merely through one’s individual perception, it seems that Berkeley succeeds in his attempt to avoid accusations of solipsism. However, because his thought falls into the category of what could be called divine solipsism: there is nothing much else than God himself in Berkeley’s universe, it seems that the esteemed Irish Bishop’s attempt to reject the said label may not have been as successful as he had wished. Ultimately, by presenting a concept of God in this way, Berkeley is in point of fact, creating within his own mind an idea of a God within whose mind all things exist as ideas: God as a solipsist. Moreover, because his concept of God is an idea formed within his own mind (effectively making him the God of God), and because, by his own admission, he agrees that all things are merely ideas which arise within the mind of the individual, we are forced to draw the conclusion that Berkeley was indeed a solipsist.

Themba asked:

Does Leibniz’s conception of the relationship between physical and mental events get rid of the Zombie and Mutant possibilities? Why or why not?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I may be out of touch, but certainly I am not aware of real zombies existing anywhere. In fact, the last time I looked, it seemed plain and perfectly obvious to me that zombies can’t possibly exist. However, I don’t think Leibniz was responsible for this. It’s just a plain fact. So this part of your question has really got to be addressed to the sci-fi entertainment industry, where people with over-ripe fantasies dream up such creatures. But don’t get confused with what you see on TV. Zombies are fictions, and on screen they’re nothing but computer-generated images! Unless a law is passed to stop these dreamers from dreaming, zombies will continue their non-existent ‘existence’ and there’s nothing even Leibniz can do about it (and yet he was a doctor at law!).

There is another possibility, in case I’ve misunderstood. Sometimes we call a dull, apathetic person a ‘zombie’. Here Leibniz was distinctly charitable. He did not promote the idea of getting rid of them, although he wrote that no good can come of being dull and apathetic. He called such people ‘lazy sophists’, because they always have good reasons for being lazy and he warned them that God will not provide fruit unless you first plant a seed. In another of his papers, however, he wrote that no person can be so utterly stupid that someone else could not learn something from them. That’s what I mean by charitable. But what this has to do with the physical and mental events in your question is not clear to me.

Mutants are different of course. You and I and just about every living thing on this earth is a mutant. But once again you have to beware of sci-fi jargon, because when they say ‘mutant’ they have just another kind of zombie in mind. But Leibniz knew nothing of mutational theory, although he did say, categorically, that some mutations are just not possible – ‘natura non facet saltus’, or in plain English, ‘nature takes no leaps.’ But again, the only connection I can make to your question is this: That in the minds of (some) people, nature leaps all over the place – until they come back down to earth.

Apart from all this, Leibniz in the ‘New System’ (which is presumably the text you are referring to) makes the point that there is a pre-established harmony between body and soul. It works this way: Body and soul are one. Body is ensouled and the soul is embodied. So the difference between them is important only in the macroscopic environment in which you and I live. In the microscopic environment, the soul and the cells that come together are pre-programmed (by God) to work in harmony. So when you will to lift your arm, your arm goes up, because the arm was always destined to go up at that instant and providing it co-existed with your soul. This is quite a difficult idea to follow, especially if you don’t agree to God being instrumental in this action. But you could say that the arm has a disposition to go up, and your soul has a disposition to will this to happen, and so it happens at the moment when both will and action coincide. For more on this subject, however, you should read the paper – it’s not overly long and quite well written.

Of course (last word) none of this has anything to do with zombies and zombie/ mutants. They can’t will anything or lift their arm, because only their inventor can. But if this is the gist of your question then obviously Leibniz did not ‘get rid of’ but actually supports the idea you’re asking about. In fiction, mind you!

Kim asked:

Most features of Plato’s justification for his ideal republic are unappealing or even repulsive to citizens of modern democracies. Why? Do you find anything correct in his account?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

Plato asked an absolutely basic question: Why do we need governments? Why can’t we just run our own lives as we see fit? The answer is obvious, of course: If we were all completely free, we would soon run into conflicts and society would disintegrate. Second: all societies need services to be available to the public; and these are usually too extensive and expensive for private citizens to meet. Finally, any society might be attacked at some stage and needs to defend itself.

So his plan was: (1) Install some people as rulers, but those people must not be self-interested; they must only be interested in the welfare of the State. (2) Install a defence force. These people must be trained for war. It is not a good idea to have the citizens leaving their jobs and families, because society would break down while a war goes on. (3) Install institutions for society, like schools, so that everyone has an equal opportunity for self-development.

Now if you look around the world today, you’ll find all three of these plans realised in many states. We have governments, we have armed forces and we have civil service institutions. Of course the details differ from what Plato had in mind. But the question is, if the citizens in modern societies are truly better off than in Plato’s state. For example, the Greeks believed in democracy, Plato thought this was foolish. We believe in democracy today, but in actual fact our democracies suffer from too many vested interests all exerting social and political power, and a lot of this is very unhealthy. Plato knew this, because it was happening in his own society too. So the problem you are asking about, concerns his method of dealing with the unwelcome side effects of democracy.

According to Plato the basic argument is that ruling (governing) is a skill. Plato proves this by appealing to common sense; if one possesses knowledge he will not make a mistake. Some men have a greater skill to rule than others. Plato points out, that only those who are fit and trained properly should be the rulers. And they must be incorruptible. That’s the ideal.

In our democratic society, just as in ancient Greece, anyone can be elected to Parliament. How many of those do you think are fit to govern? What training did they have? Probably very little, if any.

Is that a good way to run a society? Especially when modern societies are so big and complex? Doesn’t it make sense for Plato to say, rulers should be educated in ruling, in governing? After all, you can’t become an officer in the army without an officer’s training. Yet the government of a country is so much more important.

Effectively, therefore, we today are saying, Plato is wrong. In a democracy, the ideal is self-government by all. But consider that we must elect representatives. We assume, sight unseen, that these people we elect have the skills needed for government. Actually, most of them are doctors or lawyers, farmers or union officials. And we never ask them to show their credentials as Parliamentarians before they stand for election.

Now the point of this is not that rulers, the people who govern the country, should be aristocrats. In ancient Athens, the only people trained in politics were in fact aristocrats. But this does not mean that Plato actually supported them against the democratic spirit. In fact, if you read Plato carefully (which many people don’t do) you will find that he has school inspectors with responsibility for finding boys and girls with talent of that kind. They are then put into a special school to be trained in the art of government. No mention of aristocrats here!

Accordingly anyone who wishes to criticise Plato for arguing that philosopher-kings are the answer to the problem of government, should bear in mind that these philosopher-kings start their career as ordinary schoolboys and schoolgirls.

Plato argues further that there are good ethical values and high standards of goodness, and philosopher-kings learn what these are. Because ruling according to him is not imposing personal standards on the other members of society, but to make laws that are fair and just for everyone.

The same school inspectors also find boys and girls with the appropriate talent for organising a defence force for the state.

Both the governors of the state and the military are separated from the people in Plato’s state. They are totally dedicated to their tasks and do not interfere with the people’s lives. That’s one of the criticisms that are levelled against Plato. He wants to assume that the governors, because they are philosopher-kings, will never be tempted or corrupted. He also assumes that the military is so dedicated they will never turn against their own people. We might agree that this is a naive point of view, and certainly idealises the power of philosophy over their minds.

It follows from this separation of the rulers from the people that making laws involves restraints on the personal liberty of the people. On one hand, none of us today is completely free to do what we like. On the other hand, the way Plato frames the legislative process, it restricts all forms of personal expression. We all know that he wanted to banish most of the free arts because he thought they corrupt the population. This is definitely one of the issues where we totally disagree with Plato.

A different issue is that Plato does not want people to chase after unrealisable goals. He will not let you choose a profession that you are not cut out for. Let’s say you want to be a opera singer, but you have difficulty learning the notes. This shows it’s not your metier, but no-one will stop you, and you might still find some people who will want to listen to you. Plato would not allow this. He would say, you’re wasting resources. And again, we disagree with him on this score. We all waste a lot of energy, and mostly it does no harm, but it can actually be very useful. For example, Aristotle thought (against Plato) that sports events and theatre are good because the people can left off steam. In fact, Aristotle says something like, it’s good therapy to let people enjoy the tragic misfortunes on stage. We purify our emotions that way (which he calls catharsis).

Back to Plato. His point of view is, that everyone should strive for the good of the whole society. For him, the health of society is more important than the interests of individuals. This is a precarious balance, of course. It is probably an exaggerated point of view; but the other side of it is, that we can become too dependent on the state, and that leaves the door open for all sorts of corruption.

Modern democratic theories hold that no man is infallible; and if no one is infallible, it is pointless to have someone else making mistakes for you. That’s a pretty good rebuttal of Plato, who seemed strongly to believe that philosopher-kings cannot make mistakes.
We all make mistakes. It’s unavoidable. But we hope that we learn from our mistakes. This is not something you will read in Plato. He was a bit idealistic and ambivalent about this. So e.g. in the matter of the arts, he never considered (like Aristotle) the possibility that people can learn from watching tragedies and become better persons as a result.

But having said all this, and acknowledged that Plato tended towards a very hard and Spartan politics, nevertheless there are many points on which he was undoubtedly correct, like some that I mentioned earlier. Some of those we just don’t like, because we feel uncomfortable about having our freedom curtailed. But perhaps we already have so much freedom, that we don’t know what to do with it. How come we in this democratic world give so much evidence of unhappiness?

In the end, Plato wanted to ensure that the people in his state lived happily. To you and I it can give the impression that he is saying, ‘If necessary, I am going to force you to be happy!’ Well, he ends up by admitting that his ‘Beautiful City’ (Kallipolis) is only a dream; but says also, if anyone were to take just one of his ideas on board, that society would improve.

In a word: I think it is wrong to assume that Plato really wanted such a state to exist. He gave a model or paradigm, as he called it. And he was hoping that we, his readers, would learn some important lessons about politics and ethics and not take these things lightly or for granted. The historical fact is that many societies adopted a few or many of his principles. For example the Catholic Church was a Platonic state for many centuries and still is to some extent. Even modern democracies took many of his ideas and realised them in their laws and politics. So it’s not that repulsive after all. It’s only when we take his paradigm as a whole, that we find it unpalatable.

Tim asked:

I have been stumped as to a Confucius saying that I really need some truth and guidance on. Ok, The saying ‘Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.’ I wanted to get a Chinese written version of the first part ‘Virtue is not left to stand alone’ and I got the translation from a website, but they told me that ‘Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors’ is the ‘American Version of his quote. That the real translation is simply ‘Virtue Not Alone’. Is this true? Everything I have found over countless hours on the internet shows the longer version. I cannot find anywhere just ‘Virtue not alone’. So which is the TRUE REAL words of his quote? if their a Confucius quote, and the longer version is the Americanized version? please help, because for a year this has been bugging me to find a true answer to this.

Answer by Shaun Williamson

I don’t speak or write any Chinese but the one thing we can be sure of is ‘Virtue not alone’ is not an English sentence and therefore cannot be a translation of anything that Confucius wrote.

Confucius was a literate individual so it is not right to translate his sayings into pidgin English. He didn’t speak or write pidgin Chinese. A minimum translation would have to be ‘Virtue does not exist alone’ or ‘Virtue is never alone’.

Translation is a difficult business but translating Confucius is not as difficult as translating Chinese poetry so I see no reason to doubt the common English translations. If you are really bothered by this then the answer is to study the appropriate dialect of written Chinese so you can translate it for yourself. Alternatively do some research on English translations of Confucius and decide which one is likely to be the most accurate.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Chinese is a language full of implicit semantics. In this it is unlike European languages, where the alphabetical system of written communication tends to spell everything out word by word.

You get the same problem also when translating European languages into each other, though not as bad. But, as an example, you can’t translate ‘understatement’ into German, there is simply no word for it. So what does a translator do? Use several words to encircle the meaning. Something like happens with your quote.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs and the earlier Sumerian cuneiform pose problem like this too. Being pictorial, you could in principle read them in any language whatever, by which I mean that the actual words you pronounce when you read them are not tied to the Egyptian or Sumerian language. So in alphabetical languages, the grammatical structure may require you to speak more words than appear in the writing.

From this you can see that any language which relies on writing other than alphabetical, often contains more words than are written. The readers would generally know what meanings are implied by the way the actually written words are arranged.

So to get back to Confucius: Although there are only three words, every Chinese would understand the implications that have to be spelled out in English.

Which means, that the same Chinese expressions may vary from one translator to another, because they all have to add words not found in the original.

So, take consolation that translators from the Chinese do not usually wilfully distort their text, but do what they can to render it into English, which often cannot be done intelligibly without adding and/or embroidering.

Salma asked:

In what way can the study of philosophy in the pre-Socratic thinkers illuminate the nature of philosophy?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Here are three ways in which philosophy was, and still is, greatly influenced by the Presocratics.

1. They were the original naturalistic philosophers.

2. They exemplified the two sides in the debate as to whether the world is fundamentally made up of things (substance metaphysics) or processes (process metaphysics).

3. Discussion of time, space and infinity still takes account of Presocratic views, notably Zeno’s paradoxes of motion.

To deal briefly with each.

1. Naturalistic philosophers

Instead of seeing events as due to gods and demons, they tried to give a rational account of the origin and workings of the world, believing that this could be comprehended by humans. Explanation by mechanism (natural) replaced explanation by agency (supernatural). The former is standard nowadays (Big Bang, laws of nature). They were protoscientists, the first natural philosophers. Different thinkers came up with different suggestions as to what the basic elements (or single basic element) of the cosmos might be – fire, water, air, the infinite (‘apeiron’), the 4 elements (earth, air, fire, water), atoms in the void. Some of these seem quaint now, but are they stranger than modern views that the world is made of strings, quantum fields or information? Whilst they got the ‘conjecture’ bit of the scientific method right, they fell short on the ‘testing’ bit, hardly ever testing their views against the empirical world. Mind you, no progress was made in this direction by Socrates and the ancient Greeks, and we had to wait till medieval times for the idea of experiment and observation, and till early modern times for it to take hold.

2. Things or processes?

(a) things: on this view, things are primary and process (change) secondary. Change is due to interaction of things which remain unchanged by these processes. For example, atoms constantly interacting and reconfiguring in space (Democritus); or eternal basic units (‘no thing comes to be

nor does it perish’) producing change by ‘mixing together and dissociating’ (Anaxagoras). In short, substance metaphysics.

(b) processes: on this view, process is primary, things secondary. Change is fundamental and unceasing, whilst things are merely temporary stabilities or patterns in the eternal flux. This was Heraclitus’ view (‘all things flow’). Famously he said that nobody can step into the same river twice. A river isn’t so much a thing, as a temporary pattern in the constant process of flow, which in turn is part of the water cycle (evaporation, cloud formation, raining, flowing). Other processes include growth, decay, heating/cooling, thinking. In short process metaphysics.

Aristotle sided with substance metaphysics, and this became the Western paradigm. Aristotle was posthumously ‘adopted’ and ‘baptized’ by the Church, and his views became official, with lively debates about how the divine and earthly substances were united in the body of Jesus etc. Later, Descartes suggested there were two basic substances, res extensa and res cogitans (matter and mind). The notion of mind as a substance was controversial and has now rather faded, but matter held its ground as substance. Atomic theory supported the notion for two hundred years.

But by the 20th century the game was up. Atoms were found to be mostly empty space, and subatomic ‘particles’ seem to have no size at all, being merely loci of high energy in quantum fields, and without even definite positions, but rather existing in states of quantum superposition. Bertrand Russell truly said that the ‘matter’ of modern physics was no more substantial than anything we might be invited to witness at a seance. Modern physics supports the process view.

Russell’s colleague, Whitehead, championed process philosophy, which had continued, in a minor key after the Presocratics, in the views of Leibniz, Bergson and William James. To date, process philosophy hasn’t had the attention that substance metaphysics has enjoyed over the centuries, and so is less well-developed than materialism or idealism, but I fancy it will survive and thrive, becoming a serious rival to substance metaphysics as it was with the Presocratics.

3. Zeno’s paradoxes of motion

Zeno’s general philosophical views are hardly known but his 4 paradoxes of motion are justly famous, standard fare for Philosophy of Mathematics students, and worthy of discussion in 21st century thinking on time, space and infinity. Thus, the main change in the second edition (2010) of Dainton’s ‘Time and Space’, the standard work on philosophy of time and space, is the addition of 2 substantial chapters on Zeno and the Continuum. And the paradoxes have stimulated modern thought experiments on supertasks.

There is much more to be said on why study of the Presocratics helps illuminate the nature of philosophy, but I have tried to give a flavour.

It is a pity that we largely study others’ views on the Presocratics, since hardly anything of what they wrote survives, so that it is difficult to get a feel for what they were like as people, something we can do when we read say, Plato, Descartes or Hume.