A framework for interpretation

• Roochnik p 7- Historical dialectic and an organizing narrative. Flaws and all.
  • Each thinker will be conceived as responding to, and is in some sense shaped by, a previous one.
  • A progression of more comprehensive and complex ideas leading to Aristotle. (Plato for us).

• Matter vs Form - major distinct themes (Guthrie)
  • Ionians - Natural Philosophy based on materialistic ontology of matter.
  • Pythagoreans (Italian peninsula)- Mystical/Spiritual cults with reality in an abstract ontology of form.

• Being vs becoming - ontological dualism (Roochnik & others)

• Problems of Motion (Guthrie & others)
  • All is in flux. All is becomming and there is no being.
  • All is one and there is only being. Motion is an illusion, becomming is an illusion. Only reason and not senses can inform us of the the truth. We cannot trust our senses.

• Empiricism vs Rationalism as the basis for knowing

• The Mathematical Order of Nature
  • This is for us to fill in. What is the dialectical narrative we call The Mathematical Order of Nature

Wheelwright p13-14 - Phases of Materialist Natural Philosophy

• Thales and Milsians on Ionian peninsula - Discovery of Nature
• Heraclitus - All is change
• Parmenides and the Eleatics - All is one.
• Qualitative Pluralists - One underlying reality, changing appearances.

• The Sophists - a skeptical outcome of the materialists
• The Pythagorians - a mystical brotherhood that discovered soul and saw form instead of matter as the answer to the ontological question. The Pythagoreans believed in transmigration of the soul (reincarnation).