Sources

• Philip Wheelwright, The Presocratics pp 1-40
• W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers
• David Roochnik, Retreiving the Ancients

Early Historical Periods

• 700 BCE Homer and the epics, Odyssey and Iliad. Hesiod's Theogony.
• 600-400 BCE Presocratics
• 400-350 BCE Socrates, Plato & Aristotle
• 350- Alexandrian Greece
• 323 BCE Alexander Dies
• 300 BCE Euclid
• 200 BCE Rome begins to rise

The Setting in 600 BCE

• Map of the Eastern Mediterranean - "intellectual centers of gravity".
• Egyptian Civilization
• Mesopotamiam (between two rivers) cultures and civilizations; Tigrus & Euphrates (Iraq, Iran). Several civilizations and then city-states such as Babylona.

• Subjective knowledge vs objective knowledge. Eg, dream knowledge as true knowledge.
• "Man as part of society, society as embedded in nature and dependent on cosmic forces ... natural phenomena conceived in terms of human experience and human experience conceived in terms of cosmic events."
• Time and space are not quantitative and abstract from experience.

• Preoccupation with practical needs (material).
• Explanations in terms of the supernatural; God or gods.
• Knowledge by revelation.

• Evolution of social systems; justice, law, politics, economics.
• Various long-standing religious scrolls and their stories.
• Mythos - stories, poems, retellings. The Greek poets.
• Homer on courage, friendship, honor, fate, mortality, marriage, personal identity, etc. Hesiod's story about the beginning and development of the world.

The Presocratics and the Early Greek Questions

• Discovery of Nature - humankind can know by reason and observation.
• Separation of idea from object - abstraction
• Opportunities for reflection in a priviledged class
• Knowledge by experience vs knowledge by revelation
• Natural vs supernatural
• Nature in terms of nature, cause and effect elaborated with natural and observable relations.
• Nature of divinity - underlying truth, divine reason, divine knowledge - Logos (word, proposition, truth within, reality - all mixed)
• The preoccupation with first principles - Arche (source, principle)
• True knowledge
• Reason - as true knowledge
• Senses and perception
• Being and Non-Being
• Change, motion, coming-to-be
• Form, as in underlying pre-sense truth that frames the reality we experience. Another answer to the question of what is most real; what is it.
• Matter vs Form. (A table is wood or is something to put books on).
• Underlying truth vs experiential truth.
• Causation
• Divisibility and continuity
• Finite and Infinite
• Bounded and unbounded.

• Roochnik, p12.
  • Thales is the first philosopher because he was a practitioner of logos, or rational thought or speech

• Wheelwright page 13
  • Ontology - What is most real and why? Can we trust our senses?
  • Cosmology - How the world works as a natural system. Origins and change. Destiny or purpose.
  • Epistemology - How do we know we know, ie, validate our knowledge. Epistemology is the maturing of philosophy; reflecting on what it means to know. Asking about "the effectiveness of the instruments with which they have been provided by nature for getting in touch with the world" - Guthrie.

• Wheelwright p43
  • Presocratics began asking what instead of who (the gods), how instead of why, as in intent or purpose of the gods.

• Roochnik on the early philosophical questions, p8
  • Is the world orderly or chaotic?
  • Is it a projection of our minds, or dies it exist independently on its own?
  • Can something come from nothing?
  • Is anything stable, or is all in flux?
  • In the face of death does human life have meaning, and how should we go about living it well?

Context and Intrepretation

• Wheelwright p15 - Problems of translation

• Wheelwright pp1-12 - The early Greek context

• Wheelwright pp17-39 - Greek religious setting

• Guthrie - Greek ways of thinking
  • The influence of language and words on interpretation

• Our interests and frame of mind
  • The mathematical order of nature
  • A story that will have the cohesion to help us make sense of history and remember something. Stories give us meaning.

  • Roochnik p8-9 - The risks of a "dialectical narrative".