Philosophizing Miletus

Connections to Turkey keep coming up. A few weeks ago, Zeynep gave a Turkish cooking lesson, and now the white bean salad I (Dave) loved so much is one of my weekly dishes. I found a 10 Lira note that I forgot to exchange, so I keep it in my wallet to remind me of Turkey. And now, Miletus and Ephesus is coming up in my latest reading material: Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaardner.

Sophie's world is a tour through the history of philosophy, starting with the Greeks. And the very first 4 philosophers are from Miletus and Ephesus: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes from Miletus, and Heraclitus from Ephesus. One of the central questions these philosophers were asking was: what is this world that we live made of, and how did it come about?

To get in the mindset of these guys, forget for the moment all that you have taught about atoms and elements and physics and chemistry. Look out in from the space from where you are now, and see the objects in front of you. What are these things? How were they created? Look at your plant or hand, what is this thing made of?

[Note: many of the quotes below come from The Presocratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright.]

Thales (624 BC - 546 BC) thought that the most basic element was water, that the earth rests upon water, and that all things are full of gods. Aristotle says "He [Thales] drew his notion from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature; and of course the first principle of moist things is water." (Metaphysica).

Thales was a pretty smart guy, he is reported to have measured the height of an Egyptian pyramid by waiting his shadow was as long as he was tall, and then marked top of the pyramid's shadow. The idea here is that you can use the ideas of similar triangles and isosceles triangles to find the height of anything that creates a shadow.

Anaximander (610 BC - 546 BC) was a disciple of Thales. Instead of water, Anaximander thought the first principle was the Boundless or Unlimited (apeíron). "The Unlimited is the first principle of things that are. It is that from which the coming to be takes place, and it is that into which they return when they perish, by moral necessity, giving satisfaction to one another and making reparation for their injustice, according to the order of time."

One way of looking at this is that all things come from primordial stuff (apeiron), and all things return to it. In terms of modern physics, this could be interpreted as the Higg's field.

Anaximander made a number of remarkable observations: that the earth was round, that the sun was as large as the earth and consisted of fire, and humans came from earlier animals like fish. If think of what you can observe in the world, ignoring the knowledge you've been taught, these are ideas are remarkably prescient.

Anaximenes (585 BC - 525 BC) was perhaps a disciple of Anaximander. He thought the unlimited stuff was air, and that condensed air becomes water, and condensed water becomes earth; rarefied air becomes fire.

Heraclitus (535 BC - 475 BC) was not a part of the Thales-Anaximander-Anaximenes clique, he came from nearby Ephesus. He thought instead that the first principle was fire, which compresses into water, then earth. He also thought that all things come to be by conflict between opposites, and that changes always happens: everything flows. I think that Heraclitus came up with the expression that you can't step in the same river twice.


Ok, so you may ask, what's the big deal? These old guys were crazy, fire can't become water or earth! Well, my thinking is this: what we "know" now comes in large part from what we were taught, and those ideas in turn were built on previous ideas in the general culture. Each idea, like the idea of atoms or elements, is built upon an ediface of historical ideas, and we are largely unconscious of that ediface. However, that ediface shapes our thinking, and somewhat limits our understanding.

Here's another way of looking at it: you may think that the ideas of Fire, Earth, Air and Water are old and hopelessly outdated. Would you say the same thing about the ideas that universe is composed of Energy and Matter, and that Matter can take form of Solid, Gas, or Liquid?

-- Dave