Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 21, “Weird Science: The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy.” I’m Scott Emmons. 

In the last episode, we looked at some political developments of the early 6th century BCE that would have a profound impact on the future of Athens. Meanwhile, across the Aegean, an intellectual revolution was taking place in the coastal city of Miletus. It was there that Greek philosophy was born.

That’s a big statement, and it needs some unpacking. First of all, what do we mean by philosophy? The Greek word “philosophia” is often rendered literally as “love of wisdom,” which is an okay translation, although the word “wisdom” may be a little too lofty. “Sophia” really just means smarts. Mental acuity, whether it’s shrewdness in politics, skill in a particular craft, what have you. But by the time the Greeks started using the word “philosophy,” they were thinking of it as something on a higher plane. The key thing to keep in mind, though, is that philosophy included subjects that we would call the natural sciences. It was only fairly recently, with the scientific revolution and the rise of rigorous experimental methods, that science started to be thought of as something different. Even Isaac Newton described his work as natural philosophy. And that’s essentially what the first philosophers were doing in Miletus. They were trying to figure out the basic principles of nature, what made the cosmos tick.

 Now, when I say Greek philosophy was born at this time, I don’t mean to suggest it came in a sudden burst of inspiration. Like everything, it had its antecedents. For one thing, the Greeks had for some time been absorbing knowledge from Near Eastern cultures. The Babylonians had already made great strides in mathematics and astronomy. Miletus was in the Lydian sphere of influence, and its educated elites may well have had access to some of that knowledge. Also, the earliest Greek poets, Homer and Hesiod, had an interest in the origin of the world and how it was structured. Hesiod’s Theogony explains the development of the universe as a process of gods reproducing and creating other gods. And natural forces are gods. A good example is that “ouranos” is the word for sky, and the sky is a god who mates with Gaia, the Earth goddess. 

Still, in the 6th century BCE, the Milesian philosophers made a breakthrough. For whatever reasons, instead of explaining the workings of the cosmos in terms of gods and goddesses with human-like personalities, they started searching for universal laws that governed natural processes. That’s not to say that they rejected the gods altogether, but there was some evolution in the way they thought about gods. A god could be an animating principle that guided the motions of the heavenly spheres as opposed to one of the anthropomorphic deities from Homer or Hesiod. Why would this kind of inquiry spring up in this one Ionian town at just this time? We can’t do much more than speculate about that. It’s been suggested that it had something to do with the shifts in power structures and the development of law codes like those we saw in Athens with Draco and later Solon. The idea of permanent, unchanging laws is in the air. And when people argue in a court of law, there’s a need for rational inquiry to arrive at a correct verdict. In any event, Miletus was a vibrant, culturally rich city, and it was a likely place for a major intellectual movement to take root.

 I feel like I need to say something about terminology…. The philosophers of the 6th and much of the 5thcenturies are commonly lumped together under the name “Presocratics,” in other words “before Socrates.” It’s a misleading term, for one thing because some of the later ones were actually contemporary with Socrates. And different philosophers came up with wildly different theories, so there’s really nothing holding them all together as a group except the time period. So I’m not a fan of the term “Presocratics,” but that’s the label they’ve been given, and there’s no changing it now.

 Well, whatever we call them, it’s notoriously hard to nail down exactly what the earliest philosophers believed and taught. The main problem is the same one we have with early lyric poetry. Whatever books they wrote haven’t survived, and all we have are fragments in the form of quotations or paraphrases from later authors. The most important one is Aristotle, who summarizes a good deal of early natural philosophy in his treatises Physics, Metaphysics, and others. Then there are various later authors, who all have their strengths and weaknesses. Simplicius of Cilicia lived in the late 5th to the 6th century of the common era, so over a millennium after the philosophers we’re talking about, but he wrote an important commentary on Aristotle’s Physics that fills in some of the gaps. Some time before Simplicius, in the 3d century CE, an author named Diogenes Laertius wrote biographies of the ancient philosophers, which are some of the most extensive sources we have. The trouble is, Diogenes was a no-talent hack. He included all kinds of dubious material along with some reliable information, so modern scholars have the challenge of sifting out what’s valuable. But even when we’re dealing with a really sharp mind like Aristotle, we often don’t know whether they’re quoting or paraphrasing. And if they are quoting, do they have the original work in front of them, or are they quoting from memory? So when we look at the earliest Greek philosophy, we get a very fuzzy picture, and a lot of details are uncertain.

 With that caveat, let’s dive in. I’m not going to go through all the so-called Presocratics and their teachings. That could be a whole podcast series in itself. For this episode I’m going to focus on three Milesian thinkers who pioneered this kind of natural inquiry. They all seem to have had the same main objective, which was to determine a “first principle” of the cosmos. The Greek word is “arché,” which can mean “beginning” or “origin,” but also a primary place in power, so something like “dominion.” These thinkers were looking for one element or substrate that was the origin and somehow the essence of everything in the observable world. And it started with a man named Thales, who argued that this first principle was water.

 Aristotle tells us that Thales was the founder of natural philosophy and speculates that he identified water as the first principle because, as translated by W.D. Ross, “the nutriment of all things is moist.” Apologies if you’re one of those people who cringe at the word “moist,” but I can’t think of a better one. Aristotle elaborates, saying the nature of seeds is moist, and water is the origin of moist things. But he expresses this as a guess, saying these are probably the reasons Thales drew this conclusion — which is a good indication that he didn’t have Thales’ work in front of him. In fact, there’s a good chance that Thales didn’t leave any writing behind. So Aristotle is just making a reasonable assumption. A little later, he points out the importance of water in ancient mythological accounts of creation, for example that Ocean was one of the progenitors of everything. So the idea of water as the source of all things has some history behind it. But while those mythological treatments represented bodies of water as gods with human-like qualities, Thales identified it in philosophical terms as the first principle.

 As part of this water-centric view, Thales asserted that the earth rested on water the same way wood and other substances floated. Aristotle smacked that theory down by asking the obvious question — What does the water rest on? For that matter, I would add, “Sure, wood floats, but sand and rocks don’t.” Most of the stuff the Earth is made of doesn’t float on water. This is a striking feature of these early Greek efforts at explaining the natural world. The first philosophers were good at constructing ingenious and internally consistent systems, but they don’t seem to have practiced much self-criticism. They hadn’t developed any kind of rigorous process for testing their own conclusions. 

 Another part of Thales’ philosophy that’s come down to us is the assertion that stone — or at least a certain type of stone — has a soul The basis for this is that magnets attract iron and cause motion. And motion is an attribute of living things. The word for soul is “psyche,” which in its most basic sense means “breath.” Later on, it took on a meaning more like our word “soul.” But from an early time, breath was closely associated with life, so we might think of it as the life force. So when Thales says objects have souls, he means they’re alive in some way. It’s not quite clear whether he means all objects have souls or just the ones like magnets that produce observable motion. But there may be a hint in another passage from Aristotle, where he cites Thales as saying “all things are full of gods.”

 From these bits and pieces of his theories, Thales may come across as pretty naïve. But again, he was working long before the tools for rigorous scientific investigation were invented. By all accounts, he was a very smart guy. He appears in all lists of the Seven Sages of Greece. One of his biggest claims to fame is that he predicted an eclipse that occurred in 585 BCE. In fact, that’s one piece of evidence that gives us a clear time frame for his life and career. It’s also an indication that he may have been able to draw on Babylonian astronomy, even if only indirectly. Herodotus tells the story that when the Lydian king Croesus was having trouble getting his army across the river Halys, Thales solved the problem with an engineering project, digging a canal to divert part of the river behind the army so that the main channel could be forded. There’s also an anecdote that he observed signs indicating a bumper crop of olives in one year, so he bought up all the presses he could get his hands on and made a killing in olive oil. He was Greece’s legendary genius, so if you wanted to say someone was super smart, you’d call them Thales, just the same way we use the name Einstein. 

 Okay, so much for Thales. The second of the three Milesian pioneers is Anaximander. He had a very different take on the first principle. He said that it was not water or any other substance that we experience in the world, but a mysterious something called the apeiron. That word in this context is an absolute beast to try to wrestle into an English translation. It’s usually rendered as “infinite,” “boundless,” or “limitless.” But some scholars, I think rightly, have pointed out that it can also have the connotation of “undefined.” After all, when you define something like water, you’re establishing its boundaries. It’s liquid and not solid, for example. So in talking about the apeiron, Anaximander may mean not just infinite, but impossible to define in ordinary terms.

 In any case, the apeiron is the source of everything that comes into being, and it’s what everything ultimately returns to. The things that emerge from the apeiron are pairs of opposites. Hot and cold, wet and dry, light and dark, and so on. So the world we live in is made up of all these opposing forces. And Anaximander tells us how they interact in what’s probably the earliest actual quotation we have from a Greek philosopher. It comes from Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, and it says that the opposites, quote: “pay the penalty and recompense for injustice to one another according to the ordering of time.” Unquote. The main reason it’s considered a genuine quote is that Simplicius remarks on Anaximander’s poetic language. But I’m not sure he was really just being poetic. To me, that fragment is a key to understanding the ancient Greek perception of the cosmos. Justice is not just something people make up to keep their communities in order; it’s a fundamental principle of the universe. When one force becomes dominant, it commits injustice against its opposite, and in the course of time it will pay the penalty.

 Anaximander developed a fully fleshed-out cosmology, and it demonstrates how imaginative these systems could be. He posited that there were innumerable worlds. That would be in keeping with the apeiron being without limit. It’s not clear whether he thought of these worlds as existing simultaneously or if there was an endless succession of them. Our world began when the opposites were generated by the constant motion of the apeiron. Judging from Aristotle’s remarks, Anaximander seems to have thought of it as a whirling motion with a centrifugal effect, so that heavier stuff — like the Earth — stayed near the center and the lighter stuff was thrown outward. Somehow, early in the process, a giant ball of fire surrounded the Earth, and according to one source, it then burst, and the pieces got enclosed in circles to become the sun, the moon and the stars. In another account, the ball of fire is still out there but hidden by a thick layer of air, and the heavenly bodies are circular vents where the fire shows through.

 As for the Earth itself, it’s cylindrical in shape, like a section of a column. It sits in the center of the universe and doesn’t move. Why not? Because, being in the exact center, there’s no reason for it to move in any direction. I have to admit, I don’t follow the logic of that, because no one had any real understanding of gravity. But it’s interesting that he advanced this a priori argument that since the Earth is in the center, there’s no sufficient 

reason for it to move in one direction or another. And it fits with his overall sense that the universe is symmetrical, both in structure and in the alternation of the opposites.

Other than that, we only have some random scraps of Anaximander’s world view. We hear that he had a theory of the origin of humanity from fish. Somehow humans developed inside fish and came out fully formed and able to fend for themselves. He’s also credited with being the first Greek to create a map of the inhabited world. His map was later taken up and improved by another Milesian named Hecataeus, who was a kind of travel writer and in some ways a forerunner of the historian Herodotus. Put a pin in that, because a version of that map is going to appear in a later episode.

 Well, the last of the three Milesians we’ll look at is Anaximenes. In some ways he looks like a throwback to Thales, because his first principle is something from the observable world. But instead of water, he identified it as air. For Anaximenes, everything is made of air in some form. In its base state, it’s invisible. When condensed, it becomes cloud. Further condensed, it becomes water. Then earth. And in its densest state, it becomes rock. At the other end of the scale, when it’s rarefied, it becomes fire. In Anaximenes’ scheme you can see the seeds of what would eventually become the standard view of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. But we’re not there yet. For Anaximenes, they’re all modifications of the same stuff.

 The forces responsible for air taking on its different forms are the opposites, especially hot and cold. Heat causes rarefaction, cold causes condensation. And this is one rare case of an early natural philosopher describing an experiment, or at least something you could test. He observes that if you purse your lips tightly together and blow, the air feels cool. But if you exhale with your mouth wide open, it comes out warm. Because when you blow with your lips compressed, the air is condensed; otherwise, it’s rarefied. His conclusion was wrong, of course. If I blow on the back of my hand, it feels cool, and as I understand it, that’s because rapidly moving air accelerates the evaporation of themoisture on my skin, and heat is passed from my skin to that evaporating water. But it’s not like I have a deep insight into the physics of it. I’ve just read explanations from scientists who hopefully do understand what’s going on. Without that background, Anaximenes’ explanation might sound pretty solid.

 Like Anaximander, Anaximenes advanced his own cosmology. In his system, the Earth is flat and rides on air. He’s probably drawing on observations of things like leaves and feathers floating on currents of air. And the same is true of the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, and stars are made of fire, and they’re also flat and ride on the air above the Earth.  

 When we look at the first Milesian philosophers, we’re obviously in a very early stage of scientific inquiry. They tended to draw broad conclusions based on limited observations or analogies with observed phenomena. Motion is a characteristic of living things. Therefore, magnets are alive. The achievement of these early philosophers is not in their conclusions or their specific observations, but in their search for rational explanations. The philosopher-historian Jonathan Barnes puts it well in his introduction to the Penguin translation of the early Greek philosophers. Quote: “I do not claim that Thales in particular or the Presocratics in general offered good arguments for their theories; rather, I claim that they offered arguments for their theories.” Unquote.

 That spirit of inquiry kicked off a trend that produced some fascinating figures over the next couple of centuries. Xenophanes of Colophon, still in Ionia, made observations that questioned the traditional conceptions of the gods. Pythagoras started on the Ionian island of Samos but moved to southern Italy, where his followers formed a secret society that emphasized mathematics and taught the transmigration of souls. Heraclitus is most famous for his sayings that things are constantly in flux, and you can’t step into the same river twice. Parmenides and Zeno, on the other hand, argued that reality was unchanging and that all change was illusion. You may have heard Zeno’s proof that an arrow can never move to its target, because first it would have to travel halfway there, and before that it would have to get halfway to the halfway mark, and so on to infinity. Other big names are Empedocles of Sicily, Anaxagoras of Athens, and Democritus of Abdera, who famously developed a theory of atoms. In the late fifth century, philosophy came under the influence of the sophistic movement, which honed techniques of persuasive argument, especially for use in political and forensic oratory. That was the world Socrates operated in, and his student Plato became one of the giants of Greek philosophy. It’s a long journey, and it all traces back to those three pioneers from Miletus.

 And that will conclude Episode 21. I hope you’ve found it interesting, and I’d love to hear any comments, questions, additions or corrections you have. I can be reached at scott@epicgreekhistory.com, or you can always leave a comment on my Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song and interstitials was composed by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, Ευτυχεĩτε — be well!