Academic studies agree that the period pre-Socratic it was the first period of Western Philosophy. The first philosophers appeared in Greece about 2600 years ago. A number of factors led the Greeks to create a autonomous and rational way of thinking. Among such factors are:
the need to counter mythological ideas about the origin of the Universe;
the plurality of peoples that made up the region of Ancient Greece;
the flourishing of trade and shipping;
contact with Egyptian and Babylonian peoples.
the first period of Philosophy Greek is termed as pre-Socratic (because its representatives made a Philosophy different from that made by Socrates, almost 200 years after Thales of Miletus) or cosmological (because they did a kind of cosmology, which is a rational way to understand the origin of the universe — cosmos, in Greek — as opposed to vision mythological).
Read too: Socrates: life, works and main ideas
Objectives of the pre-Socratics
The first traces of pre-Socratic Greek Philosophy arise with
Miletus Tales, a merchant and scholar living in the region of Ionia, a group of Greek islands located in the current Turkish territory. History says that Thales was an expert mathematical, astronomer and strategist. He predicted, in the year 585 BC. C., the occurrence of a total eclipse of the Sun, through mathematical calculations and astronomical predictions.The year 585 is considered a. Ç. like the period of your intellectual maturity, when he probably first proposed a theory cosmological. Thales, in opposition to what the Greek cosmogonies said, which narrated the emergence of the Universe based on fanciful stories that involved gods, observed nature and proposed a possible rational origin for everything, based on his observation, this origin being the Water. From there, he founded a new way of thinking based on reason.
The act of observing nature in order to propose a possible originrationalforeverything, made Thales the first philosopher and pushed forward the goal that would become common among all pre-Socratics: to formulate a possible rational origin for the world through the empirical observation of nature and the use of the rational faculty human.
If, until then, the human being created fanciful stories to explain what he could not explain (the most varied natural phenomena), from the pre-Socratic ones, the human being starts to use the rationality to understand the Universe, and the main objective of all pre-Socratics was to establish the precise origin of everything that exists.
Read too: What is Philosophy?
Main ideas
As the goals of the pre-Socratics were the same, their main ideas were similar. All of them were seeking to formulate a reasoning for the emergence of the universe through cosmology. There is a difficulty in establishing a precise and in-depth understanding of the ideas of the pre-Socratics, as many of them they left few writings, and many writings disappeared, were destroyed or are found today in confused fragments.
It is only true that all the pre-Socratics left their contributions to cosmology and that each one of them described one or several elements as the cause of everything that exists. THE nature, object of study of those thinkers, was called by the Greeks of physis, and the beginning of everything was called arche. The pre-Socratics who agreed that there was not a single element that generated everything, but several, were called pluralists. To facilitate studies, historians of Philosophy have grouped the pre-Socratics in schools, according to the ideas of each thinker.
These are the main schools:
SchoolIonic: the thought founded by Thales, who affirmed that water would be the beginning of everything, was continued by Anaximander, who stated that the origin was given by an infinite and indefinable element, which he called apeiron. Another exponent of Ionian thought was with the disciple of Anaximander, Anaximens, who postulated that the beginning of everything occurred through an infinite but well-defined element, air. heraclitus from Ephesus, another Ionian, claimed that fire was the origin of everything, which would give nature a transforming character.
SchoolPythagorean:Pythagoras of Samos, a great ancient mathematician, observed the presence of mathematical relationships in all of nature. Based on sizes, weights, proportions, distances and varied values, nature would be constituted by Mathematics itself. According to the philosopher, the origin of everything would be, precisely, the beginning of any geometrical figure - the point and the idea of unity.
SchoolEleata: the main Eleatics are Parmenides and Zeno, who formulated the principle not based on a precise element, but on the immobility of all things that evidences the essence of everything. According to Parmenides, there was neither creation nor change, but an eternal and unchanging essence of everything. The change we perceive in the world would be the result of the deception of our senses.
Pluralist School: the main pluralists are Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and Leucippus. All of them claimed that there was not a single element that caused everything, but a plural composition that gave rise to the Universe. For Empedocles, this origin was based on the four elements of nature - earth, fire, water and air. For Anaxagoras, the origin was in what he called seeds, which would be compounds that would coalesce or would be separated by affinity, through the natural forces he called love and hate. Leucippus and Democritus, considered the "fathers" of Chemistry, formulated the atoms as the origin of everything. The word atom comes from ancient Greek and means indivisible. Atoms would be, according to thinkers, the smallest particles that agglutinate, with particles similar to themselves, to form the objects of the world.
To learn more about pre-Socratic schools, read: Presocratic Philosophical Schools.
Why study the Presocratics?
Presocratic ideas seem absurd today, due to the high technological and scientific development that humanity has reached. In any case, the beginning of all Western rational knowledge took place in the pre-Socratic period. The ideas of the pre-Socratics boosted, for example, the nature sciences, by showing that the answer to natural questions is not found outside this world, but in nature itself.
In addition to its scientific importance, there is also a historical importance which values the Pre-Socratic period due to its relevance for the constitution of all subsequent Philosophy.
Bibliography
There are few writings left by the pre-Socratic philosophers. Many texts were lost, were destroyed by people (as in the fire at the Library of Alexandria) or by natural disasters. It is also notorious that the pre-Socratics did not write with a view to publication, as we understand it today, which is why most writings do not even have a title.
Some scholars, however, ancient or recent, have devoted themselves to collecting and commenting on the pre-Socratic philosophical works. The greatest references to the works of the pre-Socratics are in the books of Aristotle. Modern and early contemporary philosophers such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger also commented on, quoted and criticized the pre-Socratics.
by Francisco Porfirio
Philosophy teacher
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/filosofia/pre-socraticos.htm
