mcgill-queens university press philosophy and philosophers an introduction to western philosophy dec 1993

[...]... environment, and an alphabet, were opportune conditions for the rise of scientific and philosophical speculation The concerns of Greek philosophy centred on perplexing problems derived from common observation and nascent science: the one (unity) and the many (plurality), permanence and change, reality and appearance, existence (being) and non-existence (non-being) We observe a world of many things over... later Newton, which emerged from the 1,500 years of dominance by Aristotle, who tended to close the ga p between appearance and reality In a view like that of the atomist s' , which holds both time and space to be infinite, there is time and space enough for our world to have come into being by chance What forms and events occur are, in fact, determined and depend on the behaviour of the ato ms, the... of information is the summaries and comments of those ancient philosophers and historians who did have direct access to Presocratic texts We must beware of the corruption of Presocratic views by error, misunderstanding, or deliberate pointmaking To understand how these philosophers could have had such an influence on such a wide range of subjects, we have to understand that the early Greeks did not... can have knowledge only of a world behind and other than appearances, we can have opinion about the world of ap pearances, and that world is not a mere nothing; at the sa me time major concern would shift, with Socr ate s and Plato, from the investigation of n ature to that of ethics, meaning, an d epi stemology Post-Parmenidean philosophers Taking up the challenge of Parmenides to give some place to. .. place in human thought that seemed to have no precedent; and it is on these changes in the way human beings began to think about the world and themselves that the mo st fundamental aspects of today's Western civili zation-its science, ethics, politics, and philosophy- are founded There were events of significance before thi s time; but 600 BC onwards marks alterations in human thought sufficient to de scribe... Mycenaeans Around 700 BC the Ionians flourished with trade increasing around the Mediterranean Various peoples influenced the cultural and intellectual growth of Ionia From the Scythians in the north they received shamanistic beliefs that probably influenced Pythagoras Other peoples to exert influence on Greek culture were the Lydians and Phrygians in Asia Minor, the Canaanites and Phoenicians-the... importance of the Pre socratic atomists is immense The atomist s set out to reconcile an explanation of the empirical world with the arguments of the Eleatics banning the positing of the real de struction or creation of being, or the reality of change and motion So every atom has Parmenidean being and moves in the void (nothingness) The atomist s' conception is the exact opposite of Anaxagora s' and. .. important matter of an alphabet Egypt was also a country that fascinated the Greeks, and the effect can be seen in what the Greeks took from Egyptian mathematics and medicine Perhaps the most significant influence was derived from the Babylonian Empire (which fell to the Persians in 538 BC) where major advances had been made in mathematics and the data collected on astronomical events The Iranian peoples... developed, and within fish adult humans were originally formed who appeared when the fish form was shed Anaximenes, the last of the Milesian philosophers, presents a less bold doctrine of arche than Anaximander, for while the arche is infinite, Anaximenes returns to a physical substance: air Air is in constant motion as can be felt, but not seen, from the wind By a process of rarefaction and condensation... gains d ominance there ha s to be recompense for this by an increase in the opposite quality The Pre-Parmenidean philosophers 7 obvious problem surrounding an explanation from imbalance in apeiron, is why any kind of imbalance should begin, given its once homogeneous state Anaximander held the view that the earth does not move and is cylindrical in shape The doctrine of an immobile earth was to remain . alt="" Philosophy and philosophers