Early Philosophy

PHILOSOPHY: A NEW WAY TO EXPLAIN THE OLD WORLD
IS THE VISIBLE WORLD SUPPORTED BY AN INVISIBLE WORLD?

INTRODUCTION

In the 6th century BC there was a change in the outlook of the world in Ancient Greece. Up to then, men had looked for explanations to natural phenomena, their lives, and fate, in the supernatural. Stories about gods were orally communicated and latter compiled by Homer inpoetic form. These stories told .... Then three Greek men from Miletus, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, started to analyse physical matter and looked for rational, mathematical, more intellectual explanations to the reality around them and beyond. These men were considered philosophers because they assumed that the world had originated from a unique natural element and could be explainedscientifically. They differed on some of their conclusions but were united on their approach.

Presocratic philosophy refers to the period between Thales and Plato (625 BCE -347 BCE). During this period the arguments among Presocratic philosophers swayed between the claim of oneness to defence of plurality and opposites; from permanence to continuous change and evolution; from existence to becoming.Before the birth of philosophy, Ancient Greece was under the spell of fantasy and mythical anthropomorphic gods that, although powerful and immortal, had similar flaws as humans. On those days it was comforting for men to pass the responsibility of their actions to figures above them, and any calamity or natural phenomenon were accepted as acts performed by the gods. It is, therefore, easy tounderstand the reluctance of Greek citizens to abandoning these consoling, tailored explanations for the chaos on earth, in favour of rational explanations.
According to Guthrie (1962, p. 26) the origin of Greek philosophy occurred “when the conviction began to take shape in men’s minds that the apparent chaos of events must conceal an underlying order, and that this order is the product ofimpersonal forces”. This search for knowledge and intellectual satisfaction started with three Milesians, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes; three citizens of the Ionian prosperous Greek city of Miletus, on the west coast of Asia Minor, who lived between 600 BCE and 400 BCE. Other philosophers, who made great contributions to the emergence of philosophy, followed them but the scope of this essay will onlyallow for an introduction to the Milesians.
Human beings had been at the centre of concern in Greece for centuries. However, Presocratic philosophers moved away from an interest on mankind to a devotion to external nature of the world (physis) and its primary source. Their evolutionary approach did not represent a deviation from past conceptions since an evolutionary perspective had always beenprevailing among Greeks. The difference was in the explanations given for changes occurring. As Gurthrie (1962, p. 142) explains, ”the myths described this evolution in terms of marriages and begetting of the personified elements themselves, the philosophers ascribed it to natural causes”.
According to Wheelwright (1966, p. 1), “philosophical thought is stirred to activity in the main by eitheror both of two great human motives: the religious and the scientific”, and, although the first philosophers did not deny the existence of god, they based their explanations of the universe (cosmology) and the divine (theology) on empirical and scientific study.
What is significant about this change is not only the fact that god’s dominance was displaced by reason or Logos , but also the movefrom a diverse world of mythical beings, by the single, the One principle, matter or idea. Greek early philosophers introduced the concept that All is One and interconnected, even though there was no general consensus among the philosophers on the primary material or first principle (arche). Aristotle noted that
most of the earliest philosophers thought that the principles which were the nature...