The Pioneers: Early Ionian Philosophers

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Chapter 2

This webpage reproduces a chapter of
A History of Philosophy
by
Frederick Copleston, S. J.
as reprinted by
Image Books — Doubleday
New York • London • Toronto • Sydney • Auckland
1993

The text, and illustrations except as noted,
are in the public domain.

Chapter 4

Part I: Pre‑Socratic Philosophy

p22 Chapter III
The Pioneers: Early Ionian Philosophers

I. Thales

The mixture of philosophy and practical scientist is seen very clearly in the case of Thales of Miletus. Thales is said to have predicted the eclipse of the sun mentioned by Herodotus1 as occurring at the close of the war between the Lydians and the Medes. Now, according to the calculations of astronomers, an eclipse, which was probably visible in Asia Minor, took place on May 28th, 585 B.C. So if the story about Thales is true, and if the eclipse which he foretold is the eclipse of 585, then he must have flourished in the early part of the sixth century B.C. He is said to have died shortly before the fall of Sardis in 546/5 B.C. Among other scientific activities ascribed to Thales are the construction of an almanac and the introduction of the Phoenician practice of steering a ship's course by the Little Bear. Anecdotes narrated about him, which may be read in the life of Thales by Diogenes Laërtius, e.g. that he fell into a well or ditch while star-gazing, or that, foreseeing a scarcity of olives, he made a corner in oil, are probably just tales of the type easily fathered on a Sage or Wise Man.2

In the Metaphysics Aristotle asserts that according to Thales the earth is superimposed upon water (apparently regarding it as a flat floating disc). But the most important point is that Thales declared the primary stuff of all things to be water . . . indeed, that he raised the question of the One at all. Aristotle conjectures that observation may have led Thales to this conclusion, "getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the movement of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). He got his notion from this fact, and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and water is the origin of the nature of moist things."3 Aristotle also suggests, though with diffidence, to be sure, that Thales was influenced by the older theologies, wherein water — as the Styx of the poets — was the object of adjuration among the gods. However p23 this may be, it is clear that the phenomenon of evaporation suggests that water may become mist or air, while the phenomenon of freezing might suggest that, if the process were carried further, water could become earth. In any case the importance of this early thinker lies in the fact that he raised the question, what is the ultimate nature of the world; and not in the answer that he actually gave to that question or in his reasons, be they what they may, for giving that answer.

Another statement attributed to Thales by Aristotle, that all things are full of gods, that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron,4 cannot be interpreted with certainty. To declare that this statement asserts the existence of a world-soul, and then to identify this world-soul with God5 or with the Platonic Demiurge6 — as though the latter formed all things out of water — is to go too far in freedom of interpretation. The only certain and the only really important point about Thales' doctrine is that he conceived "things" as varying forms of one primary and ultimate element. That he assigns water as this element is his distinguishing historical characteristic, so to speak, but he earns his place as the First Greek philosopher from the fact that he first conceives the notion of Unity in Difference (even if he does not isolate the notion on to the logical plane), and, while holding fast to the idea of unity, endeavours to account for the evident diversity of the many. Philosophy naturally tries to understand the plurality that we experience, its existence and nature, and to understand in this connection means, for the philosopher, to discover an underlying unity or first principle. The complexity of the problem cannot be grasped until the radical distinction between matter and spirit has been clearly apprehended: before this has been apprehended (and indeed even after its apprehension, if, once "apprehended," it is then denied), simpliste solutions of the problem are bound to suggest themselves: reality will be conceived as a material unity (as in the thought of Thales) or as Idea (as in certain modern philosophers). Justice can be done to the complexity of the problem of the One and the Many only if the essential degrees of reality and the doctrine of the analogy of being are clearly understood and unambiguously maintained: otherwise the richness of the manifold will be sacrificed to a false and more or less arbitrarily conceived unity.

p24 It is indeed possible that the remark concerning the magnet being alive, attributed by Aristotle to Thales, represents the lingering‑on of a primitive animism, in which the concept of the anima-phantasma (the shadowy double of a man that is perceived in dreams) came to be extended to sub‑human organic life, and even to the forces of the inorganic world; but, even if this is so, it is but a relic, since in Thales we see clearly the transition from myth to science and philosophy, and he retains his traditional character as initiator of Greek philosophy, ἀλλὰ Θαλῆς μὲν ὁ τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς φιλοσοφίας.7

II. Anaximander

Another philosopher of Miletus was Anaximander. He was apparently a younger man than Thales, for he is described by Theophrastus as an "associate" of Thales.8 Like him, Anaximander busied himself with practical scientific pursuits, and is credited with having constructed a map — probably for the Milesian sailors on the Black Sea. Participating in political life, as so many other Greek philosophers, he led a colony to Apollonia.

Anaximander composed a prose-work on his philosophical theories. This was extant in the time of Theophrastus, and we are indebted to the latter for valuable information as to the thought of Anaximander. He sought, like Thales, for the primary and ultimate element of all things; but decided that it could not be any one particular kind of matter, such as water, since water or the moist was itself one of the "opposites," the conflicts and encroachments of which had to be explained. If change, birth and death, growth and decay, are due to conflict, to the encroachment of one element at the expense of another, then — on the supposition that everything is in reality water — it is hard to see why the other elements have not long ago been absorbed in water. Anaximander therefore arrived at the idea, the primary element, the Urstoff, is indeterminate. It is more primitive than the opposites, being that out of which they come and that into which they pass away.9

This primary element (ἀρχή) was called by Anaximander — and, according to Theophrastus, he was the first so to call it — the material cause. "It is neither water nor any other of the so‑called p25 elements, but a nature different from them and infinite, from which arise all the heavens and worlds within them." It is τὸ ἄπειρον, the substance without limits. "Eternal and ageless" it "encompasses all the worlds."10

The encroachments of one element on another are poetically represented as instances of injustice, the warm element committing an injustice in summer and the cold in winter. The determinate elements make reparation for their injustice by being absorbed again into the Indeterminate Boundless.11 This is an instance of the extension of the conception of law from human life to the universe at large.

There is a plurality of co‑existent worlds which are innumerable.12 Each is perishable, but there seems to be an unlimited number of them in existence at the same time, the worlds coming into being through eternal motion. "And in addition there was an eternal motion in which the heavens came to be."13 This eternal motion seems to have been an ἀπόκρισις or "separating off," a sort of sifting in a sieve, as we find in the Pythagorean doctrine represented in the Timaeus of Plato. Once things had been separated off, the world as we know it was formed by a vortex movement or δίνη — the heavier elements, earth and water, remaining in the centre of the vortex, fire going back to the circumference and air remaining in between. The earth is not a disk, but a short cylinder "like the drum of a pillar."14

Life comes from the sea, and by means of adaptation to environment the present forms of animals were evolved. Anaximander makes a clever guess as to the origin of man. ". . . he further says that in the beginning man was born from animals of another specie, for while other animals quickly find nourishment for themselves, man alone needs a lengthy period of suckling, so that had he been originally as he is now, he could never have survived."15 He does not explain — a perennial difficulty for evolutionists — how man survived in the transition stage.

The Doctrine of Anaximander shows an advance, then, on that of Thales. He proceeds beyond the assignation of any one determinate element as primary to the conception of an Indeterminate Infinite, out of which all things come. Moreover, he makes p26 some attempt at least to answer the question how the world developed out of this primary element.

III. Anaximenes

The third philosopher of the Milesian School was Anaximenes. He must have been younger than Anaximander — at least Theophrastus says that he was an "associate" of Anaximander. He wrote a book, of which a small fragment has survived. According to Diogenes Laërtius, "he wrote in the pure unmixed Ionic dialect."

The doctrine of Anaximenes appears, at first sight at any rate, to be a decided retrogression from the stage reached by Anaximander, for Anaximenes, abandoning the theory of τὸ ἄπειρον, follows Thales in assigning a determinate element at the Urstoff. This determinate element is not water, but Air. This may have been suggested to him by the fact of breathing, for man lives as long as he breathes, and it might easily appear that air is the principle of life. In fact, Anaximenes draws a parallel between man and nature in general. "Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the whole world."16 Air then is the Urstoff of the world, from which the things that are and have been and shall be, the gods and things divine, arose, while other things come from its offspring."17

But there is obviously a difficulty in explaining how all things came from air, and it is in his proffered solution to this difficulty that Anaximenes shows a trace of genius. In order to explain how concrete objects are formed from the primitive element, he introduces the notion of condensation and rarefaction. Air in itself is invisible, but it becomes visible in the process of condensation and rarefaction, becoming fire as it is dilated or rarefied; wind, cloud, water, earth and finally stones, as it is condensed. And indeed this notion of condensation and rarefaction suggests another reason why Anaximenes fixed on air as the primary element. He thought that, when air becomes rarefied, it becomes warmer and so tends to fire; while when it becomes condensed, it grows colder and tends towards the solid. Air then stands halfway between the circumambient ring of flame and the cold, moist mass within it, and Anaximenes fixes on air as a sort of half‑way house. The important point in his doctrine, however, may be said to be his attempt to found all quality on quantity — for that p27 is what his theory of condensation and rarefaction amounts to in modern terminology. (We are told that Anaximenes pointed out that when we breathe with the mouth open, the air is warm; while when we breath with the mouth shut, the air is cold — an experimental proof of his position.)18

As with Thales, the earth is conceived as flat. It floats on the air like a leaf. In the words of Professor Burnet, "Ionia was never able to accept the scientific view of the earth, and even Democritus continued to believe it was flat."19 Anaximenes gave a curious explanation of the rainbow. It is due to the sun's rays falling on a thick cloud, which they cannot penetrate. Zeller remarks that it is a far cry from Iris, Homer's living messenger of the gods, to this "scientific" explanation.20

With the fall of Miletus in 494, the Milesian School must have come to an end. The Milesian doctrines as a whole came to be known as the philosophy of Anaximenes, as though in the eyes of the ancients he was the most important representative of the School. Doubtless his historical position as the last of the School would be sufficient to explain this, though his theory of condensation and rarefaction — the attempt to explain the properties of the concrete objects of the world by a reduction of quality to quantity — was probably also largely responsible.

In general we may once more repeat that the main importance of the Ionians lies in the fact that they raised the question as to the ultimate nature of things, rather than in any particular answer which they gave to the question raised. We may also point out that they all assume the eternity of matter: the idea of an absolute beginning of this material world does not enter into their heads. Indeed for them this world is the only world. It would scarcely be correct, however, to regard the Ionian cosmologists as dogmatic materialists. The distinction between matter and spirit had as yet not been conceived, and, until this happened, there could hardly be materialists in our sense. They were materialists in the sense that they tried to explain the origin of all things out of some material element: but they were not materialists in the sense of deliberately denying a distinction between matter and spirit, for the very good reason that the distinction had not been so clearly conceived that its formal denial was possible.

p28 It scarcely needs to be indicated that Ionians were "dogmatists," in the sense that they did not raise the "critical problem." They assumed that we could know things as they are: they were filled with the naïveté of wonder and the joy of discovery.

The Author's Notes:

1 Hist., I.74.

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2 Diog. Laërt., Lives of the Philosophers, I.22‑44.

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3 Metaphysics (trans. by J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross).

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4 De Anima, Α 5.411a7; 2.405a19.

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5 So Aëtius, I.7.xi (D. 11 A 23).

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6 Cicero: De Nat. D., I.10.25 (D ibid.).

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7 Metaph., 983b18.

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8 Phys. Opin., fr. 2 (D 12 A 9) Cf. Ps. Plut. Strom., 2 (D. 12 A 10).

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9 Frag. 1.

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10 Frags. 1‑3.

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11 Frag. 1.

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12 D. 12 A 17. Simpl. Phys., 1121, 5; Aët. II.1.3; Cic. De Nat. D., I.10.25; Aug. C. D., viii.2.

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13 Cf. Hippol., Ref., 16, 2 (D. 12 A 11).

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14 Frag. 5. Ps. Plut. Strom., 2 (D. 12 A 10)

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15 Ps. Plut. Strom., fr. 2 (D. 12 A 10).

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16 Frag. 2,

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17 Hippol., Ref., i.7 (D. 13 A 7).

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18 (Plut., De prim. frigid., 947 f.), Frag. 1

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19 G. P., I, p9.

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20 Outlines, p31.

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