From the standpoint of the knowledge already achieved, it will not be difficult for us to evaluate the achievements and shortcomings of ancient philosophy (VI century BC - 529, the year the Emperor Justinian closed Plato’s Academy). If we began the book with ancient philosophy, we would have to wander in the darkness of an era that had barely begun to harness the potential of science and philosophy. But something else is also obvious: Western philosophy began precisely in Antiquity, and it was at this time that many problematizations were developed that stimulate the creative search of modern philosophers. In the interests of what follows, we will highlight the main stages of ancient philosophy.
Table 4.2.
A. Pre-Socratics (VI-V centuries BC)
Philosophy (literally: the love of wisdom) arose within the framework of ancient Greek culture, which was dominated by mythological and religious (theological) theories. They resolved the existence of the root causes as mythical heroes and gods. This very existence was taken for granted and therefore was not questioned. Philosophers were guided by the principle that the existence of root causes must be justified. Their position was initially critical. If someone asserts something, then he must prove the truth of his judgment. But on one thing they agreed with the adherents of myths and religious legends: it is necessary to find the reason or basis for many things. In this regard, the problem of finding the one as the basis of the many comes to the fore.
Trying to understand the innovations of the ancient Greeks, let us pay attention to the modern understanding of the whole. In science, the unified appears in the form of principles, concepts and laws. It is clear that in the views of the Pre-Socratics all this cannot be found in a developed form. But their theories are of a certain interest, because scientific thought was awakened in them.
Table 4.3.
Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander (all three from Miletus) and Heraclitus from Ephesus as monists (from the Greek monos - one) consider one natural substance to be the fundamental basis of everything that exists. Substance is something that is the basis of existing things, but does not itself need it. Within the framework of monist concepts, it is extremely difficult to comprehend the variability of things and development processes. In this regard, it was precisely in this regard that the views of naturalists - pluralists Empedocles and Anaxagoras - appeared. They introduce gradations of the unity, which in Anaxagoras act as seeds, homeomeries, elements of qualities, of which there are as many as there are qualities. Empedocles and Anaxagoras are able to explain the emergence of new things by the union and separation of elements or seeds. This way of reasoning is very close to modern physicists and chemists.
Pythagoras, as the founder of an entire school, considered numbers to be the substance of the world, establishing various kinds of relationships. Thus, it was found that if the lengths of the strings of a monochord relate to each other as 1: 2; 2:3; 3:4, then the resulting musical intervals will correspond to the octave, fifth and fourth. Pythagoras understood the numbers themselves not as abstractions, but as the essences of things. We can therefore say that he is more of a physicist than a mathematician. Pythagoras' innovation lies in the search for laws.
The Eleatics Parmenides and his student Zeno became famous for their formulation of the question of being. The One is being. It exists, and non-existence, therefore, does not exist. “There is nothing outside of being,” including thoughts. All thinkers before Parmenides argued that the One is the basis of the world, but the world is not exhausted by the One. Parmenides argued that the whole world is reduced to being. Movement and multiplicity are equated with non-existence, therefore they do not exist. Zeno shows that their recognition leads to unacceptable logical contradictions.
Achilles cannot catch up with the tortoise, because by the time he reaches the place where it was a moment ago, the tortoise will move forward. It is, in principle, impossible to move from one place, because before you can travel a certain distance, you need to overcome half of it, but that is also preceded by half of it. And so on to the starting point of the supposedly moving object. One has only to admit that one body consists of others, and a contradiction immediately arises. Between two bodies you can always place an infinite number of others, because the space between them can be divided ad infinitum. It turns out that the body supposedly consists of a finite and infinite number of things. There is an obvious contradiction.
The aporia of the Eleatics led to a crisis. Philosophers understood that reference to experimental data was not a way out of the paradoxical situation, since in this case they would have to abandon the idea of a single thing - the main concept of early ancient Greek philosophy.
The atomists Leucippus and Democritus introduced the concept of atoms of matter, space and time. The meaning of this action was the rejection of the Eleatic idea of the endless division of matter, space and time. In this case, the arguments of the Eleatics really lose their force. It is unacceptable to assume, for example, that an infinite number of other things can be placed between two bodies.
As for modern science, it describes the multiplicity of phenomena and their variability consistently, but it uses a complex mathematical apparatus, which, of course, was not known to the Eleatics and atomists. The discovery of the aporitic nature of theories is desirable insofar as overcoming them contributes to the improvement of these theories.
The Sophists (Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus) were the first to realize that naturalists mainly dealt with nature, with physis. The subject of their analysis is a person, his moral, political and legal problems. The famous statement of Protagoras says: “man is the measure of all things in that they exist and in that they do not exist.” He denies the absoluteness of truth, because the useful always appears as relative. Protagoras is considered the founder of relativism - the doctrine of the relativity of truth. Socrates criticized the sophists because they failed to reveal the essence of man. In other words, they failed to discover a single thing in relation to man.
Pre-Socratics- philosophers of the ancient period before Socrates (800 - 500 BC).
Presocratics (German Vorsokratiker; French Presocratiques, English Presocratics) is a new European term to refer to the early Greek philosophers of the 6th-5th centuries. BC e. The works of the Pre-Socratics are known only from fragments that were preserved in the form of quotations from later ancient authors (see doxographies). The main philosophical centers of early Greek philosophy were Miletus (in Ionia, the western coast of Asia Minor), Sicily, Elea. The largest pre-Socratic philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes (Miletus school), Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides and his followers (Eleates), Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus. The focus of the entire philosophy of the Pre-Socratics is the cosmos, its elementary principles, the causes of various natural phenomena, therefore this philosophy is also called cosmological and natural philosophy. In general, the eastern, Ionian tradition (Miletus school) is characterized by empiricism, interest in the diversity of the material, while the western (Italian) tradition (Pythagoreanism, the Eleatic school, partly Heraclitus) is characterized by a predominant interest in the formal, numerical and structural aspect of things, the first formulation of epistemological and ontological problems in their pure form, often religious and eschatological interests. The sum and result of the development of all early philosophy was the atomistic system of Democritus. In the early period, Greek philosophy formulated two universal theses that allow us to speak of it as an independent school of thought: “from nothing nothing comes” and “like is known by like,” which were one way or another present in all the constructions of the Pre-Socratics.
The anthropological problems of the early tradition are included in the cosmological one: at first it does not go beyond the framework of narrow physiology and considers man as a material, albeit an animate element of the cosmos, then, in atomistic philosophy, it acquires the features of rationalistic ethics, substantiates the rules of behavior in society in connection with the idea of the universal good (happiness).
1. History
First time term "pre-Socratics" was introduced in the year when the German philologist Hermann Diels ( - ) collected in his book "Fragments of the Presocratics ("Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker") texts" of philosophers who lived before Socrates. The book included more than 400 names along with fragments of Orphic and other pre-philosophical theocosmogonies.
Ancient philosophy (first Greek and then Roman) covers more than a thousand years from the 6th century. BC There is. until the 6th century n. is., originated in the ancient Greek poleis (city-states) of democratic orientation and in content, methods and purpose differed from the Eastern methods of philosophizing, the mythological explanation of the world inherent in early ancient culture. The formation of a philosophical view of the world was prepared by ancient Greek literature and culture (the works of Homer, Hesiod, gnomic poets), where questions were raised about the place and role of man in the universe, the skills of establishing motives (reasons) for actions were formed, and artistic images were structured according to a sense of harmony, proportions and measures. Early Greek philosophy uses fantastic imagery and the metaphorical language of mythology. But if for myth the image of the world and the real world are separable, no different and, accordingly, comparison, then philosophy formulates as its main goal: the desire for truth, a pure and disinterested desire to get closer to it. Knowledge of the complete and definite truth, according to ancient tradition, was considered possible only for the gods. Man could not merge with “Sophia”, since the mortal, finite, is limited in knowledge. Therefore, only a continuous striving for truth is available to a person, never fully completed, an active, active, passionate desire for truth, a love for wisdom, which follows from the very concept of philosophy. The main stages of development for the ancient Greeks who lived during the period of ancient philosophy of the formation of civilization, the world is a huge collection of various natural and social forces and processes. How to live in such a world? Who rules the world? How to reconcile your own capabilities with the secret and powerful forces of nature? What is being and what is its foundation, its beginning? Being was associated with many constantly changing elements, and consciousness was associated with a limited number of concepts that restrained the chaotic manifestation of the elements. The search for a stable beginning in the changing cycle of phenomena of the vast Cosmos is the main cognitive goal of ancient Greek philosophy. Therefore, ancient philosophy can be understood as the doctrine of “first principles and causes?. By its method, this historical type of philosophy seeks to rationally explain being, reality as an integrity. For ancient philosophy, reasonable arguments, logical argumentation, rhetorical-deductive rationality, logos are significant. Transition " from myth to logos" created a well-known vector for the development of both spiritual culture and civilization of Europe.
There are four main stages in the development of ancient philosophy.
First stage- covers the 7th-5th centuries. BC There is. and is called pre-Socratic. The philosophers who lived before Socrates are called pre-Socratics. These include the sages from Miletus (the so-called Miletus school - Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes), Heraclitus from Ephesus, the Eleates (Parmenides, Zeno), Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, ato-containers (Leucippus and Democritus). At the center of early pre-Socratic Greek natural philosophy were problems of physics and space.
Second stage- approximately from the middle of the 5th century. BC There is. - Until the end of the 4th century. BC There is. - Classic. The Sophists and Socrates, for the first time, tried to determine the essence of man and carried out an anthropological turn in philosophy. The philosophical heritage of Plato and Aristotle, characterized by the discovery of the supersensible and the organic formulation of the basic - classical - problems, fully generalizes and reflects the achievements of the classical era of Greek antiquity.
Third stage in the development of ancient philosophy - the end of the IV-II centuries. BC There is. - Usually called Hellenistic. In contrast to the previous one, associated with the emergence of significant, deep in content and universal in theme, philosophical systems, various eclectic competing philosophical schools are being formed: peripatetics, academic philosophy (Platonic Academy), Stoic and Epicurean schools, skepticism. All schools are united by one feature: the transition from commenting on the teachings of Plato and Aristotle to the formation of problems of ethics, moralizing frankness in the era of decline and decline of Hellenistic culture. Then the popular works of Theophrastus, Carneades, Epicurus, Pyrrho and others.
Fourth stage in the development of ancient philosophy (I century BC. -V-VI centuries N. Yes.) - The period when Rome began to play a decisive role in antiquity, under whose influence Greece fell. Roman philosophy was formed under the influence of Greek, especially Hellenistic. There are three schools of thought in Roman philosophy: Stoicism (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), skepticism (Sextus Empiricus), Epicureanism (Titus Lucretius Carus). In the III-V centuries. n. There is. In Roman philosophy, Neoplatonism arises and develops, the outstanding representative of which is the philosopher Plody Tin. Neoplatonism significantly influenced not only early Christian philosophy, but also all medieval religious philosophy.
2. Training
The main subject of philosophizing among the Pre-Socratics was space. It seemed to them to be composed of ordinary sensory elements: earth, water, air, fire and ether, mutually transforming into each other as a result of condensation and rarefaction. Man and the social sphere, as a rule, were not distinguished by the Pre-Socratics from general cosmic life. The individual, society, and cosmos in the pre-Socratics were subject to the same laws.
3. Philosophy of the Pre-Socratics
Man was considered as a Microcosm in relation to the Macrocosm, as a part and a kind of repetition, a reflection of the Macrocosm. But the concept of cosmocentrism has another meaning. Space is the opposite of Chaos; accordingly, order and harmony are opposed to disorder, etc. That is why the cosmocentrism of early antiquity is explained as an orientation toward identifying harmony in human existence. After all, if the world is harmoniously ordered, if the world is the Cosmos, the Macrocosm, and man is its reflection and the laws of human life are similar to the laws of the Macrocosm, then, consequently, there is a hidden similar harmony in man. The generally accepted meaning of cosmocentrism is the following: recognition of the status of the external world (Macrocosm), which determines all other laws and processes, including spiritual ones. This ideological orientation forms ontologism, expressed in the fact that the first sages - physicists were looking for the causes of the beginning of existence. Pherecydes of Syros (600 ~ bl.530 pp. BC), who is considered the teacher of Pythagoras, argued that there was an arche - earth (Greek Ktonia) Thales of Miletus (625 "-547 pp. BC n. is.) by arche-earth he understood water, Anaximenes (585-525 pp. is.) - air, Heraclitus (544-483 BC) - fire. He wrote: “This cosmos is the same for everyone. , none of the gods, none of the people created, but there has always been, is and will be an eternally living fire, it lights up moderately, it fades moderately." In the 5th century BC there is. Empedocles (490-424 pp. BC. There is. ) He united all four elements, giving them the status of elements, i.e. self-identified, quantitatively and qualitatively unchangeable substances that are not reduced to one another (in Heraclitus they are mutually reinvented), combining in a certain proportion, they form the entire diversity of the world, including living organisms. In the philosophy of Ancient Greece, the concept of arche as the substance and basis of all things was expanded by Thales’s student Anaximander (610-546 pp. BC). Anaximander found the First Principle not among the real elements to be observed, but in apeiron. The adjective apeiros in Greek means immense, boundless, boundless, boundless. Anaximander's apeiron is immortal, indestructible and eternally moving. The immensity of the aleurone is the basis for the ability not to dry up, to be the eternal genetic beginning of the Cosmos, to underlie the mutual transformation of the four elements: after all, if the elements turn into each other, it means that they have something in common, which in itself is neither earth, nor water, nor air or fire. Anaximander argued that apeiron is the basis and the only cause of all essence; the aleuron produces everything from itself: moving rotationally, the apeiron distinguishes opposites: wet and dry, cold and warm, their paired combinations form earth (dry and cold), water (wet and cold), air (wet and hot), fire (dry and hot). Anaximander's apeiron is somewhat vague. Anaximander was the first to realize that the infinity of any particular element (for example, earth, water, air or fire) would lead to its isolation, superiority over all other elements as finite. Anaximander's apeiron is indefinite, and therefore indifferent to all the elements that emanate from it and are generated by it.
Naturally, Anaximander was the first in philosophy to realize the incompatibility of a certain uniqueness of the qualitative certainty of the beginning and the attribute of infinity. The concept of beginning as apeiron, i.e. not defined quantitatively and qualitatively, correct in modern conditions. The famous Czech cosmologist Leo Rieger in his book “Introduction to Modern Cosmology” points out that attempts to summarize modern ideas about matter and its properties necessarily come to the idea of Anaximander’s apeiron. Indeed, any unambiguous and comprehensive ontological definition of matter is impossible in principle. And the concepts of infinity and the indefinite coincide, because they often say: functions (or number) become indefinite, meaning their infinite growth. Heraclitus says that “fire will engulf everything and judge everyone,” fire is not only arche as an element, but also as a living, intelligent force. That fire, which is fire for the senses, is logos for the mind - the principle of order and measure in the Cosmos and microcosm. Being fiery, the human soul has a self-expanding logos. This is the objective law of the Universe. But logos means a word, and a rational one, it is, firstly, the objectively given content of which the mind must account for, secondly, it is the very activity of the mind that is reporting, thirdly, for Heraclitus it is the end-to-end semantic ordering of being and thinking. This is the opposite of everything unconscious and wordless in the World and in man. Fire endowed with logos, according to Heraclitus, is intelligent and divine.
3.1. Philosophy of Heraclitus
The philosophy of Heraclitus is dialectical: a world ruled by logos, unique and changing, nothing in it is repeated, everything is transitory and disposable, and the main law of the Universe is struggle: the father of everything and the king over everything, the struggle is common, and everything is born thanks to struggle and out of necessity . Thus, Heraclitus was one of the first to explain the essence of things and processes through the struggle of opposites. It is oppositely directed forces acting simultaneously that form a tense situation, which determines the internal, secret harmony of things. Heraclitus illustrates this deep thought with a well-known example: both arched ends of the bow strive to straighten, but the bowstring holds them back, and their mutual action creates the highest unity. But despite the fact that logos reigns everywhere, controls, rules over everything, people often lose touch with logos. Deviation from logos occurs when people limit themselves to superficial everyday knowledge and become committed to sensory-bodily pleasures. Heraclitus very negatively assessed the inability to understand the inner essence of the world and the pursuit of pleasure, which are interrelated and almost identical. But every person has the opportunity to restore and strengthen the direct connection with logos. Heraclitus advised: firstly, “lawlessness must be extinguished more often than a fire,” and secondly, “it is necessary to observe the universal,” which is a subject not of sensory knowledge, but of philosophical reasoning. “Thinking is of great value, and wisdom lies in speaking what is true and, listening to nature, acting with it.” Knowing the hidden, secret harmony, which is better than the obvious, is a way to avoid arrogance. Such knowledge allows us to overcome the diversity of views and focus on comprehending a single truth, which ensures mutual understanding and unification of people.
3.2. Parmenides' Doctrine of Being
Another very significant step towards the liberation of philosophy from elements of mythological consciousness was made by representatives of the Eleatic school. Actually, it was in the Eleatics that the category of being was first formed, and the question of the relationship between being and thinking was first raised. Parmenides (540-480 pp. BC), who became famous thanks to the statement: “Being is, but non-being is not,” actually laid the foundations of ontology as a conscious, distinct example of philosophical thinking. What is existence? For Parmenides, the most important definition of being is its comprehension by the mind: that which can be known only by the mind is being. Being is inaccessible by feeling. Therefore, “thought and that about which thought exists are one and the same thing.” This statement of Parmenides emphasizes the identity of being and thinking. Being is that which always exists, that which is united and indivisible, that which is unshakable and consistent, “like an opinion about it.” Thinking is the ability to comprehend unity in consistent forms, the result of thinking is knowledge (episteme). Sensory perception deals with many different things and individual objects surrounding a person. A person can have a head, a look (doxa) - an ordinary, everyday idea, opposed to knowledge as a consequence of the comprehension of the one. Trying to find the deep basis of everything that exists, Parmenides notes: nothing directly given in sensory experience can satisfy him because of its clearly transitory and finite nature. All the things in which mortals see the truth, believing in it, all this is just an empty name: to be, but also not to be, to be born, but also to die, to change place to place, to change color and coloring - so with vivid expressions Parmenides sensually refutes perceived things and phenomena as something completely unworthy of the philosopher’s attention through the “untruth” of their existence, that is, through their transitory nature, subject to change and transformation. He is interested in what remains enduring in the eternal flow of general changes. From the immediate reality of being as plural, Parmenides goes to the recognition of existence, rightly believing that without the existence of the world as one, there would not be its sensory plurality. But then he concentrates his attention on the edge of the unity in existence that has opened up to him. The absolute, imperishable and enduring nature of a single being overshadows the plural and sensual. Now the philosopher calls only the singular and immovable being being, and the plural and sensory being non-being, contrary to the judgments of people. Hence all the paradoxes of the teachings of Parmenides. What does Parmenides mean by the unique in being? Through the separation of the unified from the plural, the singular appears not as one side of being, but as being itself. The plural is declared to simply not exist. The gap between the numerous and the single and the hypertrophy of the singular has arisen to the detriment and expense of the multiple, which can cause undesirable consequences. The existence of Parmenida is represented in the form of a completely perfect ball with a regular center in the middle. A little more or less than a few. “There is absolutely no non-being that its integrity would be violated. There is also no being that would be in one place more than in another. Being, as a whole, is invulnerable. Exactly from all sides, being has certain boundaries.” The use of a sensory image - a bullet - to illustrate the world as a single whole, and even in the mouth of such a supporter of logical knowledge as Parmenides, is at first surprising. Meanwhile, the all-uniform Xenophanes is also spherical.
The similarity of the existence of a ball is explained by the idea of ancient philosophers about the ball as itself, the most beautiful and most perfect of all bodies, simultaneously finite and infinite, movable and motionless. The ancients defined a ball as a body, closed in itself, self-sufficient, which has its own certainty in itself, and is not determined by external conditions. Therefore, the ball seemed to them the most suitable example to illustrate the reality with which it arises as the basis of itself, alien to movement and change, eternal, independent of anything and imperishable. The perfection of the ball was seen as an example of the perfection of being. Parmenides obtains the definition of the unified by refuting the plural, differences, and differentiation. The understanding of the unity, at the same time, has a substantial character, which indicates inconsistency, but not other people's thoughts about the general pattern in nature, follows from the properties of the world as one. Comparison of the pictures of the world, according to Heraclitus and according to Parmenides, leads to the temptation to contrast them with each other, and also to call Parmenides an anti-dialecticist: after all, Parmenides’s being is unchangeable, immutable and unchangeable. There is even an opinion that the system of Parmenides can easily be presented as a reaction to the views of Geraishit about general changes and contradictions in the essence. But, firstly, Heraclitus talked about the movement of the same system of ontology (the existence of the Cosmos exists and does not depend on the person who is trying to cognize it), secondly, Heraclitus intuitively, and Parmenides consciously focus on rational cognition by man world (Heraclitus’s logos permeates the entire Universe, the objective logos in the macrocosm and the subjective logos in the human soul, in the microcosm - this is one and the same thing, for following the Logos, a person can know the world - precisely in “reasonable concepts, and not because of feelings ), about Parmenides, it probably won’t be an exaggeration to say this - the most obvious predecessor of European rationalism (being is comprehended by reason), thirdly, let’s listen to Aristotle and after him - to Sextus Empiricus: “Probably Parmenides was not uneducated in dialectics, if Aristotle considered his student Zeno to be the founder of dialectics." In modern conditions, Parmenides appears as Plato saw him: "Parmenides has always seemed to me both worthy of respect and dangerous, in the words of Homer: "An amazing depth is noticeable in his speeches. I I am afraid that we do not understand his words and even less understand his thoughts."
3.3. Philosophy of Zeno of the Aegean
Zeno of Elepsky (490-430 pp. BC), defending and substantiating the views of his teacher and mentor Parmenides, rejected the misconception of sensory existence, the multiplicity of things and their movement. Having first used proof as a method, as a cognitive technique, Zeno sought to show that multiplicity and movement cannot be thought of without contradiction (and he completely succeeded in this!). The same dispute, where with the help of objections they put the opponent in a difficult position and refutes his point of view, is a prototype of dialogue, a prototype of subjective dialectics. The same method was widely used by the Sophists. The origins of the continuum problem in modern science, exceptional in its drama and richness of content, lie in the legendary Zeno of Elea. The adopted son and favorite of Parmenides, the recognized head of the Aegean school in ancient philosophy, was the first to demonstrate that after 25 centuries the unsolvability of the problem would be called a continuum. Zeno, the creator of more than forty aporias, certain fundamental difficulties, according to his plan, should confirm the correctness of Parmenides’ teaching about the existence of the world as one and which he was able to find literally at every step, criticizing the usual purely multiple ideas about the world. A fairly accurate aporia, reminiscent of Parmenides' paradox. In aporia, purely plural ideas about being are criticized. “If a being is plural, then it must simultaneously be large and small, and large to infinity and small to extinction.” We find a modern interpretation of the aporia in studies on the history of mathematics: “let a segment be an infinite set of “indivisible” parts. If the value of individual “indivisibles” is equal to zero (i.e., the indivisibles are points), then the value of the entire segment is zero. If each the indivisible has a certain value, it is not explicitly assumed that this value is the same for all indivisibles, then the value of the segment will be infinite. From the point of view of modern mathematics, the aporia shows that it is impossible to define the measure of a segment as the sum of measures of indivisibles, that the concept of a measure of a set is not something at all. - something that is obvious in the very concept of a set and the measure of length is not equal to the sum of the measures of its elements. Therefore, the aporia is obviously directed against a one-sided multiple interpretation of the world, sometimes also called the aporia of measure. Thus, the aporia also provides for logical difficulty, up to. still forces us to introduce the measure of a set purely axiomatically. Indeed, in modern conditions, the measure of a set is determined by a system of intervals, and it is perceived that the intervals already have a certain length (measure). In fact, we are talking about the structure of the space-time continuum. Obviously, Zeno wanted to show the illusory nature of the exclusively multiple interpretation of the structure of space and time, confirming the truth of the doctrine of GIarmenides about the existence of the world as the only one.
Based on the idea of the continuity of the infinite division of any spatial or temporal segment, Zeno resorts to the aporia of division into two. The hypothesis of the continuity of space generates an actually infinite set of half segments of each new half, arising in the infinite division (dichotomy) of the original segment, so that a moving body, occupied with an infinite partition of the segments arising here, cannot overcome the slightest distance. Hence the famous conclusion: there is no movement. The aporia “Achilles and the Tortoise” has a similar meaning. The winner of the Olympic Games, fleet-footed Achilles, fights with a leisurely tortoise, which at the moment of start is some distance ahead. While Achilles covers half the exit distance separating him and the tortoise at the moment of start, the tortoise, of course, crawls some distance forward. While Achilles covers half of the new distance separating them, the turtle crawls away again to some new distance, etc. Through the accepted hypothesis of infinite divisibility (continuity) of space and time, the situation is exactly reproduced an infinite number of times, each time Achilles covers half of the new distance separating him and the turtle, still the turtle, although not by much, crawls forward. An amazing conclusion: the fleet-footed Achilles is not able to not only overtake, but even catch up with the slow tortoise! What follows from this? Obviously, it is necessary to abandon the idea of infinite divisibility (continuity) of space and time. This means that there are the most atomic elements of spatial extension and temporal Tria - indivisible ones, beyond which divisibility is no longer alive and intelligible? The difficulties encountered by Zeno are easily removed. Zeno probably really tried to impose on his interlocutor with the help of the aporias “Dichotomy”, “Achilles and the Tortoise” the conclusion about the rejection of the continuity hypothesis and thereby justify the transition to the concept of indivisibles - the concept of a discrete structure of space and time. But achieving the goal was only half of the strategic the idea of Zeno, who was already called bilingual by his contemporaries. Based on the concept of indivisibles, the philosopher proposed to consider two problems formulated in the aporia “Stadium” and “Arrow flying”. structure of space and time, where they were convinced with the help of the first two aporias), invited the ancient Greeks, big fans of sports and physical culture. Let all three columns be at rest at the moment of start, and each athlete is supposedly in the corresponding cell of spatial extent. Next, Zeno proposes to consider such a situation. Let the middle column stand, and the two outer ones begin to simultaneously move in opposite directions. From the standpoint of indivisibles, this means: the upper and lower columns of the flow of one hourly indivisible will shift compared to the middle stationary column by one spatial indivisible. Now, the sage suggests, let's look at the mutual movement of the upper and lower columns in relation to each other. It turns out that in one time indivisible they shifted from each other into two spatial indivisibles. So, the indivisible is divided! (In this case, the temporal indivisible is divided into two spatial indivisibles). But this contradicts the conclusion of the first two aporias about the existence of indivisibles! Further, in the aporia “Arrow in flight,” Zeno shows how the spatial indivisible can be divided. An arrow fired from a bow flies in the space of everyday experience, but flies along an elementary segment of the spatial indivisible? If so, then the very fact of movement within an indivisible arrow flying will divide it (you can always put marks on it and when the arrow moves, different positions of the mark within an indivisible spatial segment will divide it). But this again contradicts the concept of indivisibles. It remains to be recognized that the arrow that flies does not follow each of the indivisibles. But is movement even possible then? After all, the sum of moments of rest (in each of the indivisibles) gives nothing but rest (for all space), just as the sum of zeros gives nothing but zero. And again the already known conclusion arises: there is no movement.
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Georg Hegel cited the following anecdote: Zeno began to walk silently in front of his students, thereby clearly refuting the conclusion about the impossibility of movement, which followed from the four aporias he had previously outlined. When the students were finally satisfied with this method of refuting aporia, Zeno took a large stick that stood in the corner of the room and began to beat them, saying: “He who is content with sensory evidence must receive the same sensory objections.” Whether Zeno actually used such extreme measures to convince of the differences between the sensory and the logical is unknown. It is precisely the Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno who, at the dawn of the development of European culture, clearly defined the sensual and logical.
Indeed, the development of European science is based on the idea of logical justification and proof, the very possibility and necessity of which was first fully realized and glorified by Parmenides in the famous poem “On Nature”. Here for the first time - and this is a qualitatively new and significant step forward compared to ancient Eastern philosophy - sensory knowledge is separated from logical knowledge. Sensory knowledge is regarded as a thought (thought), superficial and false, while only logical knowledge was recognized as true. Without Parmenides and Zeno the formation of Euclid and Archimedes is impossible. That is why Parmenides is considered the true creator of the doctrine of logos, who almost never used such a concept. Parmenides also includes the most important principles of logical knowledge: firstly, nothing arises from nothing, secondly, the method of proof by contradiction, thirdly, proof by reduction to the absurd, fourthly, the discovery of the law of exclusion of the third, and also the discovery of the law of identity, the law of contradiction.
The dialectic of Parmenides and Zeno is relevant in many ways. The depth and fundamental nature of the problem of the relationship between the continuous and the discrete in the properties of space and motion, unconventionally posed by Zeno, is also evidenced by the unflagging interest in aporia. Thus, the logical structure of the difficulties revealed in Zeno's four aporias is exactly reproduced in relativistic electrodynamics in the matter of electron energies and mass. The energy and mass of the electron is determined by its interaction (via virtual photons) with the field. In the case of assigning an electron a point size, the energy and mass become infinite, since virtual photons appear in the corresponding integrals, which are released at any small distances and are absorbed by the electron in the process of interaction with the field, and have at least some frequency (and therefore energy). Hence, the need to introduce a finite electron radius removes the difficulty. However, from a relativistic point of view, it is difficult to assign an electron a certain finite and smallest value of its radius. In addition to the teachings of the Milesian sages, Heraclitus and the Eleatics, Pythagoreanism is becoming quite popular.
3.4. Pythagoras
Information about Pythagoras himself, the founder of the Pythagorean Union, has reached modern times from later sources of ancient Greece. Plato names Pythagoras only once, Aristotel - twice. Most Greek philosophers consider the birthplace of Pythagoras (580-500 pp. BC) to be the island of Samo, which he abandoned through the tyranny of Polyclitus. There is information that Pythagoras, allegedly on the advice of Thales, went to Egypt, where he studied with the priests, then as a prisoner (in 525 BC, Egypt was captured by the Persians) he ended up in Babylon, where he studied with Indian sages. After many years of study, Pythagoras returns to Great Hellas, to the city of Croton, where he organizes the Pythagorean Union - a science-fiction and ethical-political community of like-minded people.
The Pythagorean League is a closed society, and the teachings of the Pythagoreans are secret. The lifestyle of the Pythagoreans was fully consistent with the hierarchy of values.
- First place was given to the beautiful and decent (including science).
- The second place was taken by the profitable and useful.
- The third is pleasant.
The Pythagoreans rose before sunrise, performed mnemonic (related to the development and strengthening of memory) exercises, and then went to the seashore to greet the sun, thought about upcoming matters, and worked. At the end of the day, after bathing, everyone ate dinner together and praised the gods. Then - joint reading. Before going to bed, each Pythagorean reported on the past day. The basis of Pythagorean ethics was the doctrine of what should be: victory over passions, subordination of the younger to the elder, the cult of friendship and camaraderie, veneration of Pythagoras. Such a way of life must have ideological foundations, based on ideas about the Cosmos as an ordered and symmetrical integrity, the beauty of which is revealed not to everyone, but to those who lead a righteous lifestyle.
There are many legends about Pythagoras, an undoubtedly outstanding personality. There is evidence that Pythagoras was seen simultaneously in two different cities, had a golden thigh, that the Kas River once greeted him with a human voice, something similar. Pythagoras himself argued that “number owns things,” including moral ones, and justice is a number multiplied by itself. Secondly, the soul is harmony, and harmony is a numerical ratio, the soul is immortal and can migrate (Pythagoras may have borrowed the idea of metapsychosis from the teachings of the Orphisms), i.e. Pythagoras adhered to the dualism of soul and body. Thirdly, the philosopher put number at the basis of the cosmos, endowing the old word with new meaning: number correlates with the one, and the one serves as the beginning of certainty that the only one is subject to knowledge. A number is a universe ordered by number. Pythagoras made a significant contribution to the development of science, primarily mathematics. In astronomy, he is credited with the discovery of the oblique position of the Zodiac, determining the duration of the “great year” - the interval between the moments when the planets occupy the same position relative to each other. Pythagoras is a geocentrist, declaring that the planets, moving around the Earth through the ether, create monotonous sounds of different pitches, and together create a harmonious melody. By the middle of the 5th century. BC There is. The Pythagorean League collapsed. The secret becomes clear.
In the works of Philolaus (V century BC). The unit about which the famous geometer Euclid will say: that through which each of the existing ones is considered one, in Philolaus is a spatial-corporeal quantity, part of material space. Philolaus connected the arithmetic with the geometric, and through it with the physical. If one is a spatial-physical point, then 2 is a line, 3 is a plane, 4 is the most geometric figure (tetrahedron), 5 is quality and color, 6 is endowment with a soul, 7 is mind, health and light, 8 is love and friendship, wisdom and ingenuity. Philolaus constructs the Universe from the Limit, the Boundless (apeiron) and Harmony, which is “the combination of the heterogeneous and the harmonization of the uncoordinated.” The boundary that strengthened the apeiron as some kind of indefinite matter is numbers. Above is the cosmic number - 10, the decade, which is "large and perfect, fulfills everything and is the beginning of the divine, heavenly and human life." According to Philolaus, truth is inherent in things themselves to the extent that matter is organized by number: “Nature does not accept anything false under the condition of harmony and number. Lies and envy are inherent in the boundless, insane and unreasonable nature.” From the point of view of Philolaus, the soul is immortal, it is endowed with the body with the help of number and immortal, incorporeal harmony. The experience of the Pythagoreans developing a worldview is clear evidence that what is conceived and set as a goal is not always achieved in the process of implementation in exactly the desired quality.
Atom (literally: indivisible) is a logical continuation of the spatial-corporeal monad (literally: one, unit, united, indivisible as synonyms). But unlike identical monads, the indivisible Ecphanta differ from each other in size, shape and strength, the world, which consists of atoms and emptiness, is unique and spherical, moves by the mind and is controlled by providence. Traditionally, the emergence of ancient atomism (the doctrine of atoms) is associated with the names of Leucippus (V cm. BC) and Democritus (460-371 pp. BC), whose views on the nature and structure of the Macrocosm are the same. Democritus also explored the nature of the Microcosm, likening it to the Macrocosm. And although Democritus is not much older than Socrates, and his range of interests is somewhat broader than traditional pre-Socratic problems (attempts to explain dreams, the theory of color and vision, which had no analogues in early Greek philosophy), he is still considered a pre-Socratic. The concept of ancient Greek atomism is often qualified as “a reconciliation of the views of Heraclitus and Parmenides: there are atoms (the prototype is Parmenides’ being) and emptiness (the prototype is Parmenides’ non-being), where atoms move and, connecting with each other, form things. There is a fluid and variable world, being There are many things, but the atoms themselves are unchangeable. “Not a single thing happens in vain, but through causality and necessity,” the atomists taught and thereby demonstrated philosophical fatalism. But fatalism leaves no room for chance. Man is defined as an animal by nature. capable of various learning and has an assistant in everything: the human soul is a collection of atoms; a necessary condition for life is breathing, which atomism understood as the exchange of atoms of the soul with the environment. Therefore, the soul is immortal. air, and there is and cannot be any “afterlife” existence of the soul.
Democritus distinguishes two types of existence: that which exists in reality, and that which exists in general thought. Democritus refers only to atoms and emptiness, which do not have sensory qualities. Sensual qualities are what exist in the general opinion - visual, taste, etc. However, sensory inertia arises not just in the mind, but in the general opinion. Democritus considers such quality not to be individually subjective, but universal, and the objectivity of sensory qualities has its basis in forms, sizes, orders and the arrangement of atoms. This asserts that the sensory picture is not arbitrary: atoms, influencing normal human sense organs, always give rise to the same feelings. Together, Democritus realized the complexity and difficulty of the process of achieving truth: “Reality is in the abyss.” Therefore, only a sage can be the subject of knowledge. "The sage is the measure of all existing things. With the help of sensations, the measure of perceived things, and with the help of reason, the measure of comprehending things." The philosophical work of Democritus actually ends the era of the Pre-Socratics. The genesis of philosophical thought stimulated the development of the entire culture of ancient Greece, and through it the economic and political spheres of public life.
4. Representatives
The most pre-Socratics:
5. Schools
Pre-Socratics are traditionally divided into representatives Ionian philosophy(Miletus School, Heraclitus, Diogenes of Apollonia), Italian philosophy (Pythagoreans, Eleatics) and atomists. Sometimes the Sophists are mistakenly classified as Pre-Socratics, but this is not entirely correct, since most of the Sophists were contemporaries of Socrates and he actively argued with them. Moreover, the training of the Sophists is very different from that of the Pre-Socratics.
| Philosophers / Ancient philosophers / Pre-Socratics | |
| Pre-philosophical tradition | |
|---|---|
| Milesian school | |
| Pythagoreans | |
| Eleatics | |
| Atomists | |
| Sophists | |
| Outside of schools | |
| |||||
PRE-SOCRATICS(German Vorsokratiker; French Présocratiques; English Presocratics) is a new European term to refer to early Greek philosophers of the 6th–5th centuries. BC, as well as their immediate successors in the 4th century. BC, not affected by the influence of the Attic “Socratic” tradition. The term has become stronger in the international historical and philosophical practice of Chap. O. thanks to the classic work of the German classical philologist G. Diels (1848–1922) “Fragments of the Pre-Socratics” (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1903), in which for the first time fragments from the lost ones, preserved in the form of quotations from later ancient authors, were collected with scientific completeness and critically published works of the Pre-Socratics, as well as doxographic ones (see. Doxographers ) and biographical evidence about them. The Diels collection brings together over 400 names (most of them remain only names), including sophists, who, however, are not usually called “pre-Socratics” (therefore, some authors prefer to talk about “pre-sophistic” rather than “pre-Socratic” philosophy ), as well as fragments of pre-philosophical theocosmogonies (see. Orphism , Pherecydes ).
Diels proceeded from the ancient, broad meaning of the term “philosophy,” so “Fragments of the Presocratics” includes a lot of material that relates to the history of mathematics, medicine, etc. (up to culinary art). The philosophy of the Pre-Socratics developed in the East - in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor and in the West - in the Greek colonies of Southern Italy and Sicily; hence the division into “Ionian” dating back to antiquity ( Milesian school and her followers) and “Italian” ( Pythagoreanism And Eleatic school ) branches. In general, the Eastern, Ionian, tradition is characterized by empiricism, sensationalism, interest in the specific diversity of the sensory world, a predominant orientation towards the material aspect of the world, and the relegation of anthropological and ethical issues (with the exception of Heraclitus with his pathos of a religious and moral reformer); for the Western, Italian, tradition - the primacy of the rational-logical principle over the sensual, primary interest in the formal, numerical and generally structural aspect of things, the first formulation of epistemological and ontological problems in their pure form, often religious-eschatological interests. The focus of the entire philosophy of the Presocratics is the cosmos, understood - using the dominant method of analogy among the Presocratics - either biomorphically (see. Hylozoism ), or technomorphic (see. Demiurge ), either sociomorphically (Dicke), or – among the Pythagoreans – based on numerical models; The binary oppositions inherited from the pre-scientific picture of the world continue to play a significant role among the pre-Socratics. In this sense, they occupy a unique place among the Pre-Socratics Parmenides and his school, who for the first time abandoned the folklore and mythological heritage - binary classifications and metaphorical analogies - and gave a programmatic example for the entire Western European “metaphysics” of a purely logical construction of being. Man and the social sphere in general, as a rule, are not distinguished from general cosmic life (the opposition of “nature and law” - nomos and physis - was first developed by the sophists): the cosmos, society and the individual are subject to the action of the same laws and are often considered as isomorphic structures , mirroring each other (see. Macrocosmos and microcosm ). Characteristic of pre-Platonic philosophy is the lack of a clear distinction between “material” and “ideal”.
The internal course of development of the philosophy of the Pre-Socratics can be presented in the following formula: the construction of cosmological systems among the early Ionian thinkers was put an end to by Parmenides and his school, who demanded a logical and theoretical justification for the possibility of the sensory world, and above all, movement and multiplicity; the old hylozoistic cosmos decomposed, highlighting the “motive cause” (as defined by Aristotle) into a special category; in response to the postulates of the Eleatic School, more mechanistic pluralistic systems arose in the 5th century. – Empedocles , Anaxagora and atomists (sometimes called “New Ionian”), in whom all the signs of Eleatic unchanging and self-identical existence were transferred to de-animated “matter” (however, the law of conservation of matter was, apparently, formulated even earlier by Anaximander). Among the Pre-Socratics there were almost no “professionals” (the first exception is Anaxagoras): most of them were involved in the life of the polis and acted as statesmen, founders of colonies, legislators, naval commanders, etc. - the direct opposite of the Hellenistic ideal of the philosopher with his principle of “live unnoticed.”
Fragments:
1. DK, vol. I–III;
2. Collie G. La sapienza greca, v. 1–3. Mil., 1978–80;
3. Kirk G.S., Raven J.E., Schofield M. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambr., 1983;
4. Makovelsky A.O. Pre-Socratics, parts 1–3. Kazan, 1914–19;
5. Fragments of early Greek philosophers, edition prepared by A.V. Lebedev, part I: From epic theocosmogonies to the emergence of atomism. M., 1989.
Bibliography:
1. The Presocratic Philosophers: An Annotated Bibliography, by Luis E. Navia, 1993.
Literature:
1. Losev A.F. History of ancient aesthetics. Early classic. M., 1963;
2. Cassidy F.X. From myth to logos. M., 1972;
3. Rozhansky I.D. Development of natural science in antiquity. M., 1979;
4. Dobrokhotov A.L. The Pre-Socratic doctrine of being. M., 1980;
5. Bogomolov A.S. Dialectical logos. M., 1982;
6. Zaitsev A.I. Cultural revolution in Ancient Greece VIII–V centuries. BC L., 1985;
7. Lloyd G.E.R. Polarity and analogy. Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought. Cambr., 1966;
8. Frankel H. Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens. Münch., 1968;
9. Um die Begriffswelt der Vorsokratiker, hrsg. v. H.-G. Gadamer. Darmstadt, 1968;
10. Studies in presocratic philosophy, ed. by D. J. Furley and R. E. Allen, v. 1–2. L., 1970;
11. Guthrie W.K.S. A history of Greek philosophy, v. 1–2. Cambr., 1971;
12. West M.L. Early Greek philosophy and the Orient. Oxf., 1971;
13. Fritz K. v. Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken Wissenschaft. V.–N. Y., 1971;
14. Cherniss H. Aristotle's criticism of presocratic philosophy. N. Y., 1971;
15. The Presocratics. A collection of critical essays, ed. A.P.D.Mourelatos. N.Y., 1974;
16. The Presocratics, ed. E. Hussey. L., 1972;
17. Barnes J. The presocratic philosophers. L., 1982;
18. Idem. The Presocratic Philosophers. L.–Boston, 1982;
19. Mansfeld J. Die Vorsokratiker. Stuttg., 1987;
20. Long A.A.(ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. Cambr. (Mass.), 1999.
Chapter 2. “PRE-SOCRATICS”
“Pre-Socratics” is a term of historical and philosophical science of the New Age, denoting a heterogeneous collection of philosophers of archaic Greece in the 6th - 5th centuries. BC e., as well as the closest successors of these philosophers who belonged to the 4th century. BC e. and not affected by the action of the new, classical (“Socratic”) philosophical tradition.
The philosophy of the “Pre-Socratics” developed both in the east of Hellas - in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, and in its western part - in the Greek colonies of Southern Italy and Sicily (the so-called “Great Greece”). The eastern, “Ionian” tradition is characterized by empiricism, a kind of naturalism, exceptional interest in the diversity and specificity of the material world, and the secondary nature of anthropological and ethical issues. To this branch of the “pre-Socratic” philosophical tradition belong,
for example, the Milesian school, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. The Western, “Italian” branch of “pre-Socratic” philosophy is characterized, first of all, by a specific interest in the formal and numerical components of the world of things, logicism, reliance on the arguments of reason and understanding, and the affirmation of ontological and epistemological issues as fundamental for philosophical science. The Pythagoreans, the Eleatic school and Empedocles primarily belong to this branch of “pre-Socratic” philosophy.
things. The cosmos is not eternal and occurs in time, literally “has a beginning,” being born from the disorder (chaos) that precedes it. In the teachings of the “pre-Socratics,” the cosmos is simultaneously taken as a being that has become, occurred, in two considerations: cosmological (reflecting the structure and integrity of the universe in statics) and cosmogonic (representing the world structure in its dynamics). At the junction of these two disciplines, the central theme of “pre-Socratic” philosophical thought arises - the first Greek philosophy was the problem of finding the fundamental principle of existence, i.e. something unchangeable, stable, permanent, which serves as the source or substrate of all things, but is, as it were, hidden under the external shell of the changing world of phenomena. This is why Aristotle subsequently called all of Socrates’ predecessors “physiodogs,” i.e., lit. "interpreters of nature." Another characteristic feature of “pre-Socratic” (pre-Platonic) philosophy is the lack of a clear distinction between “material” and “ideal”. Man and the social sphere in the teachings of the “pre-Socratics” are not singled out as independent topics for reflection: the cosmos, society and the individual are subject to the action of the same same laws. The most important of these laws, the “law of justice,” was formulated by Anaximander of Miletus (6th century BC): “And from what existent things come, there their death goes through a fatal debt, for they bear punishment and pay punish each other for wickedness, according to the order of time” (Anaximander, fr. 1). It is no coincidence that the natural philosophical content of Anaximander’s text is presented in the language of civil law relations. For the most part, the “pre-Socratics” were always directly connected with the life of their native polis (city-state) and acted as statesmen (Thales, Pythagoras, Empedocles), founders of colonies (Anaximander), legislators (Parmenides), naval commanders (Melisse), etc. .d.
The oldest Greek scientific and philosophical school is the school formed in Miletus, the largest trade, craft and cultural center of Ionia, on the western coast of the Asia Minor peninsula in the 6th century. BC e. The Milesian school (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) was predominantly natural science and aimed to describe and explain the universe in its evolutionary dynamics: from the origin of the Earth and heavenly bodies to the appearance of living beings. The very birth of the cosmos was thought to occur spontaneously (voluntarily) from a single sovereign substance - eternal and infinite in space. The gods of the popular religion were identified by the Milesians with “countless worlds” (Anaximander), the elements and luminaries (Anaximenes); the universal nature of physical laws was affirmed; The traditional division of the heavenly (“divine”) and the earthly (“human”) was called into question for the first time. The history of European mathematics (geometry), physics, geography, meteorology, astronomy and biology begins with the Milesian school.
According to philosophical doctrine Thales of Miletus(c. 640 - c. 546 BC), “everything came from water” (i.e. water is the origin of everything that exists), “the earth floats on water, like a piece of wood” (this is how Thales explained nature earthquakes), and “everything in the world is animated” (or “full of gods”) - in particular, according to the ancients, Thales attributed the soul to a magnet that attracts iron. “To be,” according to Thales, means “to live”; everything that exists lives; life involves breathing and eating; the first function is performed by the soul, while the second is performed by water (the original substance of all existing things, amorphous and fluid). Tradition portrays Thales as a merchant and entrepreneur, inventor and engineer, wise politician and diplomat, mathematician and astronomer. According to one legend, Thales was the first to predict a total solar eclipse (May 28, 585 BC).
According to another, he was the first of the Greeks to begin to prove geometric theorems. As ancient authors report, they proved the following propositions: 1) the circle is divided in half by diameter; 2) in an isosceles triangle, the angles at the base are equal; 3) when two straight lines intersect, the vertical angles they form are equal and, finally, 4) two triangles are equal if two angles and one side of one of them are equal to two angles and the corresponding side of the other. Thales was also the first to inscribe a right triangle in a circle.
Anaximander(c. 610 - c. 540 BC) was the second representative of the Milesian philosophical school. The ancients called him "student", "comrade" and "relative" of Thales. Anaximander outlined his teachings in the essay “On Nature,” which can be considered as the first scientific work in the history of Greek philosophy written in prose (Thales did not write anything). Unlike his predecessor, Anaximander believed that the source of existence of all existing things was not water, but some eternal and boundless (Greek - “infinite”, “limitless”) principle, average between air and fire, which he called “divine”, and which , according to him, “controls everything.” Anaximander imagined the emergence of the cosmos as follows. In the depths of the original boundless first principle, a kind of “embryo” of the future world order first appears, in which the wet and cold “core” turns out to be surrounded by a fiery “shell”. Under the influence of the heat of this “shell,” the wet “core” gradually dries out, and the vapors released from it inflate the “shell,” which, bursting, breaks up into a series of “rings” (or “rims”). As a result of these processes, a dense Earth is formed, shaped like a cylinder (“truncated column”), the height of which is equal to a third of the diameter of the base. It is important that this cylinder has no support and rests motionless in the center of the cosmic sphere. The stars, Moon and Sun (in exactly this sequence) are located from the center of the “core” at distances equal to 9, 18 and 27 radii of the Earth; these luminaries are holes in dark air tubes surrounding rotating rings of fire. Living beings, according to Anaximander, were born in the wet silt that once covered the Earth. When the Earth began to dry out, moisture accumulated in depressions that formed seas, and some animals came out of the water onto land. Among them were fish-like creatures, from which the “first people” subsequently descended.
Anaximander considered the emergence and development of the world to be a periodically repeating process: at certain intervals, due to the complete drying of the wet and cold world “core,” the cosmos is again absorbed by the boundless principle surrounding it (“eternal and ageless nature”). At the same time, Anaximander recognized the simultaneous coexistence of countless worlds (cosmos) - structurally organized parts of a single protocosmic government. According to ancient authors, Anaximander was the first of the Greeks to construct a sundial (the so-called “gnomon”) and draw a geographical map of the Earth on a copper tablet, on
The last representative of the Milesian philosophical school was Anaximenes(it reduces its rarefaction due to heating, or by thickening, leading to cooling. Air vapors (fog, etc.), rising upward and becoming rarefied, turn into fiery celestial bodies. On the contrary, solid substances (earth, stones, etc. .) are nothing more than condensed and frozen air. Air is in constant movement and change. All things, according to Anaximenes, are one or another modification of air and are located in the center of the cosmic hemisphere. form" (i.e., the shape of a trapezoid) and rests on the air masses supporting from below. The Sun, in the words of Anaximenes, is “flat, like a leaf,” and the stars are “driven” into the “icy” sky like nails. The planets are ignited “leaves.” , floating in the air. When too much air collects in one place, rain is “squeezed out” of it. Winds arising from the mixing of water and air “rush like birds” moving around the Earth like “a cap turning around a head.” The Sun and Moon never set beyond the horizon, but fly over the Earth, hiding alternately behind its northern, “elevated” part.
The “nature of things” was interpreted differently by the Pythagoreans, students and followers Pythagoras of Samos(c. 570 - c. 497 BC). Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, a skilled stone cutter, was born on about. Samos ok. 570 BC e. In his youth, Pythagoras listened to Anaximander of Miletus and studied with Pherecydes of Syros, who, according to Cicero, “first said that the souls of people are immortal” (Cicero. Tusculan Conversations, I, 16, 38). According to legend, he also visited Egypt and Babylon, where he became acquainted with mathematics and astronomy. OK. 532, having fled from the tyranny of Polycrates of Samos, Pythagoras arrives in the city of Croton (Southern Italy), where he creates a religious and philosophical brotherhood with a strict charter and community of property. The authority of Pythagoras as a sage and teacher was so great that after several years, power in Croton and in many other cities of Southern Italy and Sicily passed into the hands of Pythagoras' disciples - the Pythagoreans. Subsequently, as a result of an uprising that swept the entire country, the Pythagorean Union was destroyed, its members were killed, and Pythagoras himself fled to Metapontus, where he died c. 497 BC e.
Miracles were told about Pythagoras. A white eagle flew to him from the sky and allowed himself to be stroked. Crossing the river Siris, he said: “Hello, Si-ris!” And everyone heard the river rustle in response: “Hello, Pythagoras!” At the same hour he was seen in Crotona and Metapontum, although there was a week's journey between these cities. They said that he was the son of Apollo or Hermes, that he had a golden thigh, that he remembered his past incarnations. According to legend, training in the Pythagorean Union lasted fifteen years. For the first five years, the students could only remain silent. For the second five years, students could only hear the teacher's speeches, but not see him. And only in the last five years have students been able to talk with Pythagoras face to face. The Pythagoreans tried not to call Pythagoras by name, preferring to talk about him - “That same husband” or “Himself.” Pythagoras, don’t drink anything), for example: “What has fallen, don’t pick it up” - before death, don’t cling to life; “Don’t step through the scales” - observe moderation in everything; “Do not break bread in two” - do not destroy friendship; “Don’t walk down the beaten track” - don’t indulge the desires of the crowd. It was Pythagoras, according to legend, who was the author of the words “cosmos” and “philosophy”.
From the point of view of the Pythagoreans, the cosmos and things are not just matter and substance, but substance with a certain structure, subject to proportionality and numerical relationships. Pythagoras argued that “everything is a number,” that is, a reasonable combination of quantities that make up pairs of opposites: the limit and the infinite; odd and even; unity and plurality; right and left; male and female; light and darkness; good and evil, etc. “Limit” denoted regularity, perfection, form, order and space. “Boundless” means disorder, formlessness, incompleteness, imperfection and emptiness. The geometric expression of the idea of limit was the ball, the arithmetic expression was unity, therefore the cosmos, according to the teachings of the Pythagoreans, is one and spherical and at the same time located in limitless empty space. They thought of the emergence of the universe as the filling of a point (“divine unit”) with space (matter, two and emptiness), as a result of which the point received volume and extension. The numerical structure of the cosmos determined the nature of the interconnection of things and the nature of each individual thing. Everything that happens in the world is controlled by certain mathematical relationships; The philosopher's task is to reveal these relationships. The impetus for this way of thinking was certain patterns in the field of musical acoustics, the discovery of which was attributed to Pythagoras himself. In particular, it was found that when two strings vibrate simultaneously, a harmonic sound is obtained only when the lengths of both strings are related to each other as prime numbers - 1: 2 (octave), 2: 3 (fifth) and 3: 4 ( quart). This discovery served as an impetus for the search for similar relationships in other areas, for example, in geometry and astronomy.
Some of the individual mathematical developments of the Pythagoreans include: 1) the theory of proportions: according to the testimony of the ancients, the early Pythagoreans were familiar with arithmetic, geometric and harmonic proportions; 2) the theory of even and odd numbers, namely the following provisions: the sum of even numbers will be even, the sum of an even number of odd numbers will be even, the sum of an odd number of odd numbers will be odd, an even number minus an even number is even, an even number minus an odd number is odd etc.; 3) the theory of “friendly” and “perfect” numbers: the first are those for which the sum of the divisors of one is equal to the other (for example, the number 284 is equal to the sum of the divisors of the number 220, namely: 1 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 10 + 11 + 20 + 22 + 44 + 55 + 110 = 284, and vice versa), the second are numbers equal to the sum of their divisors (6 = 1 + 2 + 3 and 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14); 4) proof of a number of geometric theorems, including the famous “Pythagorean theorem”: a square built on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares built on its legs; 5) construction of five regular polyhedra: pyramid, cube, dodecahedron, octahedron and icosahedron; 6) the discovery of irrationality (or, in geometric terms, the discovery of the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with its side), i.e., such relations that are not expressed by integers: subsequently (in modern times) this discovery led to the creation of geometric algebra.
The Pythagoreans also did a lot in the field of astronomy. They were the first to express the idea of the spherical shape of the Earth (Pythagoras) and established the so-called. the correct order of the planets, placing them in the following sequence: Earth, Moon, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. According to the teachings of the Pythagoreans Hicetus and Ecphantus (late 5th - early 4th centuries BC), the Earth is not at rest, but moves slowly or, more precisely, rotates (“spins”) around its own axis. From the point of view Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 - after 399 BC), in the center of the Universe there is a certain “middle fire”, around which ten celestial bodies move: Anti-Earth, Earth, Moon, Sun, planets and the “sphere of fixed stars”, t e. vault of heaven. The existence of the Anti-Earth, invisible to humans, was, according to Philolaus, to explain the nature of celestial eclipses. He argued: “Everything that is knowable has a number, for without it nothing can be thought or known” (Philolaus, fr. 4). Philolaus symbolically denoted the three-dimensional value with the number “4” (point - line - plane - body), the quality of a thing and color - with the number “5”, the animation of the body, according to Philolaus, - “6”, mind and health - “7”, love and friendship - "8". A special place in his philosophical system was occupied by the number “10” (“decade”), which expressed the utmost completeness and perfection of the number series and thereby was the universal formula of all existence. The rational basis of the cosmos was designated by the Pythagoreans by the number “4” (“tetractys”), represented as the sum of the first four numbers: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, - and containing the basic musical intervals: octave (2: 1), fifth (2:3) and quart (3:4). Guided by the formula “there is no movement without sound,” the Pythagoreans correlated the movement of the Sun, Moon and stars with one or another interval, and the pitch of the sound of the bodies was considered proportional to the speed of their movement: the lowest tone was for the Moon, the highest for the stellar sphere. Subsequently, this theory was called “harmony of the spheres”, or “music of the world”. “Harmony of the Spheres” served as evidence of the hidden numerical nature of the cosmos and had a deep ethical and aesthetic meaning. The soul, from the point of view of the Pythagoreans, is immortal and is a “demon,” that is, an immortal living being residing in the bodies of animals and plants. The soul is in the body “as in a grave” (in accordance with the Pythagorean acousma: Greek -, “body is a grave”) and ends up in it as punishment “for sins”; Only if the soul stays in three different bodies without committing a single crime does it forever find peace and eternal bliss. According to this theory, the Pythagoreans taught the homogeneity of all living beings and the “purification” of the “demon,” or soul, through vegetarianism. Later, in the teachings of Philolaus, the soul began to be considered a “harmony” of various mental states, however, in contrast to the heavenly “harmony,” it was less perfect and prone to “disorders”; In this case, music was intended as therapy for the soul, and a moderate diet was intended as therapy for the body. Scientist and doctor close to the Pythagoreans Alcmaeon from Croton (1st half of the 5th century BC) argued that the state of the human body is determined by pairs of opposing forces or qualities, such as sweet and bitter, dry and wet, hot and cold, etc. The main condition Alcmaeon considered human health to be the “equality” of these qualities, while the “dominance” of one member of a couple over the other leads to disease. An imbalance can be caused by the nature of the food, the characteristics of the water and the properties of the terrain, as well as other reasons. The doctor's task is to restore the disturbed balance. According to the testimony of the ancients, Alcmaeon of Croton was the first in the history of European science who began to practice dissection of corpses in order to study in detail the structure and functions of individual organs. One of the results of this practice was Alcmaeon's discovery of the nervous system and the functions of the brain, which, according to his teaching, is the center of all human mental activity.
A younger contemporary of Pythagoras was Heraclitus of Ephesus(c. 540 - c. 480 BC). Heraclitus belonged to an old royal family and even had the hereditary title of priest-basileus, which, however, he later renounced in favor of his younger brother. In his youth, Heraclitus claimed that he knew nothing, and in adulthood he said that he knew everything. According to the testimony of Diogenes Laertius (III century AD), he never learned anything from anyone, but claimed that he examined himself and learned everything from himself (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 5). He ignored the request of his fellow citizens to give them laws, citing the fact that the city was already in the grip of bad government. Having retired to the sanctuary of Artemis, he spent day after day amusing himself with the boys playing dice, and to the surprised Ephesians who approached him he said: “Why are you surprised, scoundrels? Isn’t it better for me to stay here and do this than to participate in government with you?” Heraclitus wrote only one essay and, according to legend, dedicated it to the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. The book was written in complex metaphorical language, with deliberate ambiguity, parables and riddles, for which Heraclitus later received the nickname “Dark” from readers. According to legend, Socrates, when he read the work of Heraclitus, said the following about him: “What I understood is wonderful; which I probably didn’t understand either; you just need to truly be a deep-sea diver to fully understand everything in it” (Diogenes Laertius, I, 22). The work of Heraclitus consisted of three sections: “On the Universe”, “On the State”, “On Theology”, and was called by ancient authors differently: “Muses”, “A single order in the structure of everything”, “On nature”. More than 100 fragments of quotes have survived to this day. After his death, Heraclitus received the nickname “Weeping”, “for every time Heraclitus left the house and saw around him so many people living badly and dying badly, he cried, pitying everyone” (Seneca. On Anger, I, 10, 5 ).
of people, but he always was, is and will be an eternally living fire, flaring up in measures and extinguishing in measures” (Heraclitus, fr. 51. Hereinafter - translated by A.V. Lebedev, with modifications by S.A. Melnikov and D. V. Bugay, the order of fragments of Heraclitus is also indicated according to the edition of A. V. Lebedev). Fire in the philosophy of Heraclitus is not so much one of the world's elements as an image of eternal movement and change. The periods of “ignition” and “extinction” of fire alternate one after another, and this alternation continues forever. When “extinct” (“the way down”, according to Heraclitus), fire turns into water, which turns into earth and air; during “ignition” (“the way up”), vapors emanate from the earth and water, among which Heraclitus included the souls of living beings. Souls are involved in the cycle of cosmic elements, they “ascend” and “set” with them. “For souls, death is the birth of water; for water, death is the birth of earth; from earth, water is born; from water, the soul” (fr. 66). The vapors have a different character: light and pure ones turn into fire and, rising upward and accumulating in round containers (“bowls”), are perceived by people as the Sun, Moon and stars; dark and humid vapors cause rain and fog. “The dry soul,” says Heraclitus, “is wisest and best” (fr. 68). The alternating predominance of certain evaporations explains the change of day and night, summer and winter. The sun is “no wider than a human foot,” and eclipses occur because the celestial “bowls” turn their convex, dark side toward the Earth. “Everything is exchanged for fire, and fire for everything, just as all things are exchanged for gold and gold for all things” (fr. 54). Heraclitus taught about the non-stop variability of things, their “flow and new waters,” Heraclitus wrote (fr. 40).
The most important tenet of his philosophical doctrine was that “the way up and the way down are the same” (fr. 33), and that wisdom lies in “knowing everything as one” (fr. 26). Heraclitus, like the Pythagoreans, believed that everything in the world consists of opposites, however, not “combining” with each other, but opposing ones8). “War is the father of all and the king of all: she declared some gods, others people, some she created slaves, others free” (fr. 29). The interaction and struggle of opposites determines the existence of every thing and every process in the universe. Acting simultaneously, these oppositely directed forces form a tense state, which determines the internal harmony of things. Heraclitus calls this “harmony” “secret” and says that it is “better than the obvious,” Pythagorean (fr. 9). Addition", "definition", "account", "report", "ratio", "proportionality", "reason", "reasonable basis", "reason", "opinion", "reasoning", "assumption", "law" ", "concept", "meaning"). “It is this Logos,” says Heraclitus, “that truly exists forever that people do not understand”; “everything happens in accordance with this Logos, but people are like those who do not know” (fr. 1); “and with that logos with which they are in the most constant communication, with it they are in constant discord” (fr. 4).
“Logos” means for Heraclitus, on the one hand, the rational law that governs the universe and sets, determines for the cosmos the measure of its “ignition” and “extinction”; on the other hand, such knowledge about things, according to which things are part of the general cosmic process, that is, they are given not in the static state of their state, but in the dynamics of transition. “Immortals are mortal, mortals are immortal, some live at the expense of the death of others, and die at the expense of the lives of others” (fr. 47). Separate (private) knowledge about individual things - “many knowledge”, according to Heraclitus - is obviously false and insufficient, since it (“much knowledge”) “does not teach the mind” (fr. 16). “The teacher of the majority is Hesiod: they think about him that he knows a lot - about him who did not even know day and night! After all, they are one” (fr. 43). People live as if each of them had their own special consciousness (fr. 23). They are like sleepers, for each sleeper lives in his own world, while those who are awake have one common world. It is possible that the famous fragment 94 (“of the skeletal principle, which can retain its self-identity, even moving into other bodies. “Man,” Heraclitus wrote, “is a light in the night: it flares up in the morning, fading in the evening. He flares up to life, having died, like the way it flares up to wakefulness, having fallen asleep” (fr. 48).
The doctrine had a significant resonance Xenophanes of Colophon(c. 570 - after 478 BC), philosopher and rhapsodist (performer of songs at poetry competitions), who anticipated, in particular, Heraclitus’ criticism of the Pythagorean theory of “transmigration of souls.” Xenophanes dedicated one of his satirical epigrams to Pythagoras: Once he passes and sees: a dog squeals from being beaten.
He felt sorry, and he said the following:
“Enough! Don't hit! In this squeal of a dear dead man there is a voice:
This is my dear puppy, I recognize him as a friend.”
(Xenophanes, fr. 7. Per. S. Ya. Lurie).
In general, Xenophanes’ teaching consisted of two closely related parts: “negative” (criticism of traditional Greek religious ideas) and “positive” (the doctrine of a single self-identical god residing in the Universe). The main objects of Xenophanes' criticism were the poems of Homer and Hesiod, recognized as exponents of the “general opinion” about the nature of the “heavenly” and “earthly”:
Homer and Hesiod wrote everything about the gods together.
What people consider only a disgrace and a disgrace, -
It’s as if they steal, commit fornication and deceit.
(Xenophanes, fr. 11. Per. S. I . Lurie).
It is common for people, according to Xenophanes, to imagine what is beyond their understanding, according to their own image: for example, people believe that gods are born, have a human appearance and wear clothes (fr. 14); Ethiopians in the south depict the gods as black and with flattened noses, Thracians in the north - red-haired and blue-eyed (fr. 16).
No, if bulls, or lions, or horses had hands,
Or they painted with their hands and created everything that people
Then they would begin to draw the gods in a similar appearance -
Horses are like horses, and bulls are like bulls, and figures
They would create exactly the same ones that they themselves have.
(Xenophanes, fr. 15. Per. S. Ya. Lurie).
Xenophanes contrasted the traditional anthropomorphic and polytheistic religion with a monotheistic concept based on the idea of a single god, eternal and unchanging, in no way similar to mortal beings. “One god, the greatest among gods and men, unlike mortals neither in body nor in mind” (fr. 23). He “sees everything completely, thinks everything completely and hears everything completely” (fr. 24). He remains motionless, because “it does not become for him to move here and there” (fr. 26), and with only “the power of his mind” he “shocks everything” (fr. 25). The god of Xenophanes is, in all likelihood, identified with the air that fills the cosmos and resides in all things. The upper limit of the earth “is under our feet and touches the air,” while the lower end “goes to infinity” (fr. 28). According to Xenophanes, “everything from the earth and into the earth everything dies” (fr. 27). “Everything is earth and water that is born and grows” (fr. 29). The land periodically sinks into the sea, and at the same time all creatures die, and when the waters recede, they are born again. Only God, according to Xenophanes, has the highest and absolute knowledge, while human (ordinary) knowledge never goes beyond the limits of individual “opinion” and is entirely based on guesswork (fr. 34).
The teachings of Xenophanes influenced the formation of the Eleatic school of philosophy (Parmenides, Zeno of Eleia, Melissus), which received its name from the city of Elea, a Greek colony on the west coast of Southern Italy. The founder of the school was Parmenides(born c. 540/515 BC). According to the testimony of ancient authors, Parmenides first studied with Xenophanes, and then was trained by the Pythagorean Aminius. He outlined his views in a poem consisting of two parts and a mystical introduction, written on behalf of an unnamed “young man.” The introduction describes his chariot flight into the supersensible world through the “gates of day and night” from the “darkness” of ignorance to the “light” of absolute knowledge. Here he meets the goddess, who reveals to him “both the fearless heart of the completely round Truth, and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliability” (fr. 1, 28 - 30). Accordingly, the first part of the poem sets out the doctrine of true intelligible “being” (Greek - “being”, “that which is”, simply “is”), which is alien to the opinion of mortals (“the path of truth”); in the second part, Parmenides paints the most plausible picture of the deceptive world of phenomena (“the path of opinion”).
Initially, for Parmenides, two assumptions are theoretically conceivable: 1) something “is and cannot but be” - this is “being” and “being”; 2) something “is not and may not be” - this is “non-existent” and “non-existence”. The first assumption leads to the “path of conviction and truth”; the second should be immediately rejected as “completely unknowable,” for “what is not there can neither be known nor expressed” (fr. 2). Denying the existence of something presupposes knowledge about it and thereby its reality. From here the principle of the identity of being and thinking is derived: “Thinking and being are one and the same thing” (fr. 3); “Thinking and what the thought is about are one and the same, for without the being in which it is expressed, you cannot find thinking” (fr. 8, 34 - 36). “Nothingness” is unthinkable, and “that which does not exist” is impossible. The assumption, along with “being”, the existence of “non-existence” results in the “path of opinion”, that is, it leads to unreliable knowledge about things - “this or that”, existing “one way or another”. From the point of view of Parmenides, it is necessary, without trusting either “opinions” or sensations, to recognize the truly correct path “is”. From this “is” necessarily flow all the main characteristics of truly existing being: it “did not arise, is indestructible, integral, unique, motionless and endless in time” (fr. 8, 4 - 5). The fact that “being” has not arisen and cannot perish immediately follows from the impossibility of non-existence, from which “being” could be “born,” or into which, having been destroyed, “being” could “transition.” It is impossible to say “was” or “will be” about being, since “it is all together, one, continuous” (fr. 5, 6). It is “indivisible” and homogeneous (fr. 8, 22), since the recognition of heterogeneity and divisibility would require the assumption of emptiness (i.e., “that which does not exist”). It eternally remains in the same place (fr. 8, 29) and “needs nothing” (fr. 8, 33).
The second part of Parmenides' poem is devoted to the "opinions" of mortals. Here Parmenides sets out his cosmology. The world of “opinion” is not completely unreal and false: it is “mixed” of being and non-being, truth and lies. Mortals, says Parmenides, distinguish between two “forms” of things. On the one hand, it is “light”, or “ethereal fire”, bright, rarefied, everywhere identical to itself (“being”). On the other hand, it is a dark “night”, dense and heavy (“non-being”). "Light" is "hot" or fire; “night” - “cold”, or earth (fr. 8, 56 - 59). All things are involved in “light” and “darkness”, or are a mixture of both. At the same time, “night” is just the absence of “light,” and the affirmation of this “form” of things as independently existing is the main and truly fatal mistake of mortals. There is one space and is surrounded on all sides by a spherical shell. It consists of a series of concentric rings, or "crowns", revolving around the world center. The gods are interpreted by Parmenides as allegories of heavenly bodies, elements, passions, etc. Traditional mythology and religion, from the point of view of Parmenides, are also a consequence of the false assumption of the existence of non-existence, or “multiple”: only one “being” truly exists, and the many-sided Olympians deities are only “imaginary”.
Was a student of Parmenides Zeno of Elea(Parmenides’ ideas about “being.” Zeno analyzed the theses of Parmenides’ opponents, who argued that, for example, existence is plural and not one; that movement, emergence and change in the world of things exist really, etc., and showed that all these assumptions necessarily lead to logical contradictions. Ancient authors report that Zeno’s book included 45 such “aporias”, the most famous were four “aporias” against the movement: “Dichotomy”, “Achilles and the Tortoise”, “Arrow”. and "Stages". From the point of view of the Eleatics, since there is only one "being", it is identical with itself and, therefore, indivisible. The belief in the real multiplicity of things and the reality of movement is the result of the erroneous assumption that along with "that which is." ” (“being”), there is also “that which is not” (“non-being”), i.e., the difference in “being”, making it not one, but many, i.e., divisible.
It is on the paradox of the divisibility of “being” (and movement) that all four of Zeno’s problems are built: 1) “Dichotomy” (lit. “division in two”): before going half, you need to go half of this distance, but before going half, you need to go half half, etc. ad infinitum. However, “it is impossible to pass or touch an infinite number of points in a finite (definite) time” (Aristotle. Physics, VI, 2, 233a). Consequently, the movement will never begin and will never end - hence the contradiction; 2) “Achilles and the tortoise”: “the fastest runner (Achilles) will never catch up with the slowest one (the tortoise), since the one who is catching up must first reach the place from which the runner has moved, so the slower one will always be slightly ahead” (VI, 9, 239b); 3) “Arrow”: “if every object is at rest when it occupies an equal place, and a moving one is always at the point “now,” then a flying arrow is motionless” (VI, 9, 239b); 4) “Stages”: here it speaks of “equal bodies moving around the stadium in opposite directions past equal stationary bodies”, and at the same time it turns out that “half the time is equal to double”, since a moving body passes another body moving towards it , twice as quickly as past the one at rest. The last “aporia” is based on ignoring the addition of speeds in oncoming traffic; the first three are logically flawless and could not be resolved by means of ancient mathematics.
Melissa from the island of Samos (born c. 480 BC) was the third of the representatives of the Eleatic school of philosophy. In an essay called “On Nature, or On Being,” Melissus attempted to bring together Parmenides’ argument about a single, unchanging and immovable “being.” To the previous characteristics of truly existing “being” he added two new ones: 1) “being” has no boundaries, since if “being” were limited, then it would border on “non-existence”, but there is no “non-being”, therefore, “ being" cannot be limited; 2) “being” is incorporeal: “If it exists,” writes Melissa, “then it must be one, and since it is one, then it cannot be a body. If “being” had volume (thickness), it would also have parts, and would no longer be one” (Melisse, fr. 9).
The philosophical teaching of the Eleatics became a kind of milestone in the history of early, “pre-Socratic” Greek thought. The arguments of the Eleatic school about the properties of true “being” seemed to the subsequent generation of philosophers for the most part irrefutable. On the other hand, the teaching of Parmenides dealt a serious blow to the “Ionian” philosophical tradition, which was engaged in the search for a certain cosmic fundamental principle of things, the source and beginning of everything that exists. Within the framework of the theory of “being” proposed by the Eleatics, no desired relationship of all things could be justified; even the very principle of such justification was automatically called into question and lost its obviousness. A way out of this situation was found in abandoning the search for any one generating principle and in the assumption of many structural elements of things. These principles ceased to be considered unified and immobile, but were still called eternal, qualitatively unchangeable, incapable of arising, being destroyed and transforming into each other. These eternal entities could enter into various spatial relationships with each other; the infinite variety of these relationships determined the diversity of the sensory world. The most outstanding representatives of this new trend in Greek philosophy were successively Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the ancient “atomists” - Leucippus and Democritus.
Teaching Empedocles from Akragant (Sicily) (c. 490 - c. 430 BC) is an original combination of Pythagorean, Eleatic, and also, partly, Milesian theoretical constructions. He was a legendary personality - a politician, a doctor, a philosopher, and a miracle worker. According to the testimony of the ancients, he constantly - both in life and in death - strived in everything to resemble a perfect deity: “With a golden crown on his head, bronze sandals on his feet and a Delphic garland in his hands, he walked through the cities, wanting to gain fame for himself like the immortals gods" ("Judas", under the word "Empedocles"). According to one popular legend, he fought the winds that dried up the earth and raised him from the dead; according to another, sensing the imminent approach of death, he climbed onto the red-hot Etna and threw himself down into the very mouth of the volcano; the lava threw his bronze sandal onto the slope. Several hundred fragments have survived from two philosophical poems by Empedocles, called “On Nature” and “Purification”.
Empedocles' teaching is based on the theory of four elements, which he calls "the roots of all things." These are fire, air (or “ether”), water and earth. “The roots of things,” according to Empedocles, are eternal, unchanging and incapable of transforming into each other. All other things are obtained by combining these elements in certain quantitative proportions. Empedocles agreed with Parmenides’ thesis about the impossibility of the transition of “non-being” into “being” and “being” into “non-being”: for him, the “birth” and “death” of things are just incorrectly used names, behind which stands a purely mechanical “connection” and “ separation" of elements....In this perishable world
There is no birth, just as there is no destructive death: There is only one mixing and exchange of what is mixed, - Which is what people foolishly call birth.
(Empedocles, fr. 53. Per. G. Yakubanis, revised by M. L. Gasparov).
et") are heterogeneous elements, while the second one separates them. The alternating predominance of these forces determines the cyclical course of the world process.
My speech will be double: for something sprouts with Unity
Manyness, then the growth of Unity is again divided into Manyness.
Mortal things have twofold birth, twofold and death:
For one thing is born and perishes from the merging of the All, -
And in the division of the whole, something else grows and dies.
This continuous exchange cannot stop:
That which is drawn by Love all comes together,
Then the enmity of Discord is again driven apart from each other.
Thus, since Unity is eternally born from Manyness,
And by dividing Unity, Multiplicity is again accomplished, -
There is that arising in them, but there is no harmonious age in them.
But since this exchange cannot stop,
Eternally, insofar as they, unchangeable, move in a circle.
(Empedocles, fr. 31, 1 - 13. Per. G. Yakubanis, revised by M. L. Gasparov).
Each individual cosmogonic cycle has four phases: 1) the era of “Love”: all four elements are mixed in the most perfect way, forming a motionless and homogeneous “ball” in one half, and air (ether) in the other, an imbalance occurs, leading to rotation world - slow at first, but gradually accelerating; this rotation explains, in particular, the change of day and night; 3) “Love” returns, gradually connecting heterogeneous elements and separating homogeneous ones; the movement of space slows down; 4) the fourth phase, “zoogonic,” for its part, is divided into four stages: 1) in moist, warm mud, individual members and organs of all kinds of creatures appear, which rush randomly in space; 2) unsuccessful combinations of members are formed, various, mostly ugly creatures; 3) “whole-natural” creatures arise that are not capable of sexual reproduction; and, finally, 4) full-fledged animals with sexual differentiation are born.
The cosmos, according to Empedocles, is egg-shaped, its shell consisting of solidified ether. The stars are of a fiery nature: the fixed stars are attached to the firmament, while the planets float freely in space. Empedocles likens the sun to a huge mirror that reflects the light emitted by the fiery hemisphere of space. The Moon was formed from a condensation of clouds and has a flat shape, receiving its light from the Sun. Empedocles did not distinguish between the process of thinking and sensory perception. According to his theory of sensations, material “outflows” are continuously separated from each thing, which penetrate the “pores” of the sense organs. Cognition (perception) is carried out in accordance with the principle: “Like is known by like.” For example, he believed that the inside of the eye consists of all four elements; when a given element meets its corresponding “outflows,” visual perception arises.
Views Anaxagora from Clazomenes (c. 500 - 428 BC), a close friend of Pericles, who lived for a long time in Athens, were formed under the strong influence of the cosmology of Anaximenes of Miletus and the doctrine of Parmenides about “being”. When asked why he was born, Anaxagoras answered: “In order to contemplate the Sun, Moon and sky.” In Athens, Anaxagoras was accused of a state crime (atheism), since he dared to assert that the god Helios (Sun) is a red-hot block; for this he faced the death penalty. But Pericles stood up for the teacher, turning to the judges with the question whether they should condemn Pericles as well. And hearing that it was not, he said: “But I am this man’s student; don’t execute him, but release him”; the death penalty was replaced by exile. The philosopher died in Lampsacus (Asia Minor), surrounded by students. Some of them lamented that the teacher was dying in exile; Anaxagoras, according to legend, said: “The path to the kingdom of the dead (Hades) is the same everywhere” (Diogenes Laertius, II, 10-16).
The first phrase from the only work of Anaxagoras is known: “Together all things were, infinite both in quantity and in smallness” (Anaxagoras, fr. 1). The initial state of the world, according to Anaxagoras, was a motionless “mixture”, devoid of any outlines. The “mixture” consisted of an infinitely large number of tiny, invisible structural elements of existence in which each part is similar to the other and at the same time to the whole (bone, meat, gold, etc.). At some point in time and in some part of space, this “mixture” acquired a rapid rotational movement, imparted to it by a source external to it - “Mind” (Greek noys - “mind”, “mind”, “thought” ). Anaxagoras calls “Mind” “the lightest of all things”, which is not mixed with anything, and claims that it “contains complete knowledge of everything and has the greatest power” (fr. 12).
Under the influence of the rotation speed, the dark, cold, moist air, which collects in the center of the cosmic vortex, is separated from the light, hot and dry fire (ether), rushing to its periphery. Subsequently, denser and darker components are released from the air - clouds, water, earth, stones. In accordance with the principle of “like tends to like,” similar “seeds” combine to form masses perceived by the senses as homogeneous substances. However, complete isolation of these masses cannot occur, since “in everything there is a part of everything” (fr. 6), and each thing only seems to be what prevails in it (fr. 12). The total amount of matter always remains unchanged, since “no thing arises or is destroyed, but is combined from existing things (i.e., “seeds”) and divided” (fr. 17). The cosmic vortex, gradually slowing down, is subsequently perceived like the rotation of the firmament. The Earth, formed from the densest and heaviest substances, slowed down faster and currently remains motionless in the center of space. It has a flat shape and does not fall down, being supported by the air underneath it. The celestial bodies were torn from the earth's disk by the force of the rotating ether and then heated up under its influence. The sun is a huge flaming block. Stars are hot stones. The Moon is colder in nature, has depressions and hills, and is possibly inhabited. Anaxagoras is credited with the first correct explanation of solar and lunar eclipses. Sensations arise as a result of the action of “like” on “unlike”; the contrast of this action determines the intensity of the sensation, therefore sensations are always relative and cannot be a source of true knowledge. But even without them, knowledge is impossible, “since phenomena are the visible manifestation of the invisible” (fr. 21a).
Founders of atomism Leucippus(nothing is known about his life) and Democritus(c. 460 - c. 370 BC) in contrast to the Eleatics, they argued that “non-being” exists no less than “being”, and this “non-being” is emptiness. Democritus of Abdera, son of Hegesicrates, was born c. 460 BC e. According to Diogenes Laertius, Democritus was first “a student of some magicians and Chaldeans, whom King Xerxes provided to his father as teachers when he was visiting him”; “It was from them that he learned the science of gods and stars as a child. Then he moved on to Leucippus” (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 34). There were legends about Democritus' curiosity. He said: “Finding an explanation for at least one phenomenon is more gratifying than being a Persian king!” After the death of his father, who left him a large inheritance, Democritus went to travel and visited Egypt, Persia, India and Ethiopia. When he returned home, he was brought to court for squandering his father's fortune. Instead of any excuses, he read his main work “The Great World Building” before the judges and received 100 talents as a reward for it (1 talent = 26.2 kg of silver), copper statues were erected in his honor, and after his death he was buried for the state account (IX, 39). Democritus lived more than 90 years and died ca. 370 BC e. He was a very versatile scientist and prolific writer, the author of about 70 works, of which approx. 300 quotes. He was nicknamed “The Laughing Philosopher,” because “everything that was done seriously seemed so frivolous to him.”
deposition; they rush around randomly in the void and, connecting with each other, give birth to all kinds of things. These fundamental principles of things are unchangeable, invisible, indivisible and perfect; there are countless of them. The reason for the movement of “atoms”, their cohesion and disintegration is “necessity” - the natural law that rules the universe. Large combinations of “atoms” generate huge vortices from which countless worlds arise. When a cosmic vortex arises, first of all, an outer shell is formed, like a film or shell, which fences off the world from the external empty space. This film prevents the “atoms” inside the vortex from flying out and thus ensures the stability of the resulting space. Whirling in such a whirlwind, the “atoms” are separated according to the principle “like tends to like”: the larger ones gather in the middle and form a flat Earth, the smaller ones rush to the periphery. The earth is shaped like a drum with concave bases; At first it was small and rotated around its axis, but then, becoming denser and heavier, it became stationary. Some clutches of "atoms" ignite due to the speed of movement, resulting in the appearance of celestial bodies. From the point of view of Democritus, all worlds differ in size and structure: in some worlds there is neither the Sun nor the Moon, in others the Sun and Moon are larger than ours or are present in greater numbers; Worlds may also arise that do not have animals or plants and are generally devoid of moisture. Worlds are formed at different distances from each other and at different times; some have just begun, others (like ours) are in their prime, and others are dying, colliding with each other. Different types of living things (birds, land animals, fish) differ in the nature of the “atoms” from which they are built. All living things are distinguished from non-living things by the presence of a soul, which, according to Democritus, consists of small round mobile “atoms”, similar to the “atoms” of fire. Not only humans and animals have a soul, but also plants. The soul is preserved in the body and increases due to breathing, but it dies along with the death of the body, dissipating in space. The gods also consist of “atoms” and therefore are not immortal, but they are very stable compounds of “atoms” that are inaccessible to the senses.
Based on the teaching of Empedocles on sensory perceptions, Democritus believed that from each body, peculiar “outflows” emanate in all directions, representing the finest combinations of “atoms”, deviating from the surface of the body and rushing through the void with the greatest speed. Democritus called these “outflows” “images” of things. They enter the eyes and other sensory organs and, according to the principle of “like acts on like,” they affect “atoms” that are “similar” to them in the human body. All sensations and perceptions are the result of the interaction of the “atoms” from which “images” are composed and the “atoms” of the corresponding sense organs. Thus, the sensation of white color is caused in the eye by “smooth atoms”, black - by “rough” ones; “smooth atoms” that get on the tongue cause a sensation of sweetness, and those that get into the nose - a feeling of incense, etc. From the point of view of Democritus, sensations are not useless, but serve as the initial stage on the path to knowledge: Democritus called this initial stage “dark "knowledge, contrasting it with true knowledge, to which only reason can lead. Drawing an analogy between the structure of the human body and the entire universe, Democritus was the first to use the expressions of “macrocosmic philosophy.
German Vorsokratiker; French Presocratiques; English Presocratics) is a new European term to refer to the early Greek philosophers of the 6th-5th centuries. BC e., as well as their immediate successors in the 4th century. BC BC, not affected by the influence of the Attic “Socratic” tradition. The term has become stronger in the international historical and philosophical practice of Chap. O. thanks to the classic work of the German classical philologist G. Diels (1848-1922) “Fragments of the Pre-Socratics” (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1903), in which for the first time fragments from the lost ones, preserved in the form of quotations from later ancient authors, were collected with scientific completeness and critically published works of the Pre-Socratics, as well as doxographic (see Doxographers) and biographical evidence about them. The Diels collection brings together over 400 names (most of them remain only names), including sophists, who, however, are not usually called “pre-Socratics” (therefore, some authors prefer to talk about “pre-sophistic” rather than “pre-Socratic” philosophy ), as well as fragments of pre-philosophical theocosmogonies (see Orphism, Fergana). Diels proceeded from the ancient, broad meaning of the term “philosophy,” so “Fragments of the Presocratics” includes a lot of material that relates to the history of mathematics, medicine, etc. (even the culinary arts). The philosophy of the Pre-Socratics developed in the East - in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor and in the West - in the Greek colonies of Southern Italy and Sicily; hence the division, dating back to antiquity, into the “Ionian” (Miletus school and its followers) and “Italic” (Pythagoreanism and the Eleatic school) branches. In general, the Eastern, Ionian tradition is characterized by empiricism, sensationalism, interest in the specific diversity of the sensory world, a predominant orientation towards the material and material aspect of the world, the marginalization of anthropological and ethical issues (the exception is Heraclitus with his pathos of a religious and moral reformer); for the Western, Italian tradition - the primacy of the rational-logical principle over the sensual, a predominant interest in the formal, numerical and generally structural aspect of things, the first formulation of epistemological and ontological problems in their pure form, often religious-eschatological interests. The focus of the entire philosophy of the Presocratics is the cosmos, understood using the dominant method of analogy among the Presocratics, either biomorphically (see Hylozoism), or technomorphically (see Demiurge), or sociomorphically (Dike), or among the Pythagoreans, based on numerical models ; The binary oppositions inherited from the pre-scientific picture of the world continue to play a significant role among the pre-Socratics. In this sense, a unique place among the Pre-Socratics is occupied by Parmenides and his school, who for the first time abandoned the folklore and mythological heritage - binary classifications and metaphorical analogy - and gave a programmatic example for the entire Western European “metaphysics” of a purely logical construction of being. Man and the social sphere in general, as a rule, are not distinguished from general cosmic life (the opposition of “nature and law” - nomos and physis - was first developed by the sophists): the cosmos, society and the individual are subject to the action of the same laws and are often considered as isomorphic structures , mirrored in each other (see Macrocosmos and microcosm). Characteristic of pre-Platonic philosophy is the lack of a clear distinction between “material” and “ideal”. The internal course of development of the philosophy of the Pre-Socratics can be presented in the following formula: the construction of cosmological systems among the early Ionian thinkers was put an end to by Parmenides and his school, who demanded a logical and theoretical justification for the possibility of the sensory world, and above all, movement and multiplicity; the old hylozoistic cosmos decomposed, highlighting the “motive cause” (as defined by Aristotle) into a special category; in response to the postulates of the Eleatic school, more mechanistic pluralistic systems arose 5 v, - Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the atomists (sometimes called “New Ionian”), in which all the signs of the Eleatic unchanging and self-identical being were transferred to the de-animated “matter” (however, the law of conservation of matter was , apparently formulated even earlier by Anaximander). Among the Pre-Socratics there were almost no “professionals” (the first exception was Anaxagoras): most of them were involved in the life of the polis and acted as statesmen, founders of colonies, legislators, naval commanders, etc. - the direct opposite of the Hellenistic ideal of the philosopher with his principle “ live unnoticed." Fragment: DK, vol. I-HI; Colli G. La sapienza greca, v. 1-3. Mil, 1978-80; Kirk G. S., Raven J. E., Schobeid M. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambr., 1983; Makovelsksh A. O. Presocrats, parts 1-3. Kazan, 1914-19; Fragments of early Greek philosophers, edition prepared by A. V. Lebedev, part 1: From epic theocosmogonies to the emergence of atomism. M., 1989.
Bibliography: The Presocratic Philosophers: An Annotated Bibliography, by Luis E. Navia, 1993.
Lit.: Losev A.F. History of ancient aesthetics. Early classic. M., 1963: Cassidy F. X. From myth to logos. M., 1972; Rozhansky I. D. Development of natural science in the era of antiquity. M., 1979; Dobrokhotov A.L. The Doctrine of the Pre-Socratics about Being. M., 1980; Bogomolov A. S. Dialectical logos. M., 1982; Zaitsev A. Ya. Cultural revolution in Ancient Greece VIII-V centuries. BC e. L., 1985; Lloyd G. E. R. Polarity and analogy. Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought. Cambr., 1966; FrankelH. Wege und Formen fruhgriechischen Denkens. Munch., 1968: Um die Begriffswelt der Vorsokratiker, hrsg. v. H.-G. Gadamer. Darmstadt, 1968; Studies in presocratic philosophy, ed. by D. J. Furley and R. E. Allen, v. 1-2. L., 1970; Guthrie W. K. S. A. history of Greek philosophy, v. 1-2. Cambr., 1971; Uistif. L. Early Greek philosophy and the Orient. Oxf., 1971; Fritz K. v. Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken Wissenschaft. B.-N.Y., 1971; Chemiss H. Aristotles criticism of presocratic philosophy. N.Y., 1971; The Presocratics. A collection of critical essays, ed. A. P. D. Mourelatos. N.Y., 1974; The Presocratics, ed. E. Hussey. L., 1972; Bornes J. The presocratic philosophers. L., 1982; Idem. The Presocratic Philosophers. L.-Boston, 1982; Mansfeld J. Die Vorsokratiker. Stuttg., 1987; Long A. A. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. Cambr. (Mass.), 1999.
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