aetheric-spheres

[aetheric-spheres]

Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Everyone knows about Socrates, but who were all the guys before him? And what did they believe? Here's a list of some of the prominent philosophers who led up to the legendary Socrates and his successors, Plato and Aristotle.

Thales: founder of the Milesian school of philosophy, because, well, he came from Miletus. He initiated the shift away from myth and towards reason. He began the search for rationality behind the Universe, the search to pinpoint that one Thing that orders everything else. He wanted stability

Parmenides: developed Thales's idea of a one Being behind the Universe (as opposed to multiple gods as in Greek mythology), and proposed the concept of absolute monism, the idea of immutable reality. He believed that there are only reality and un-reality; something is real because it exists, and things that don't exist aren't real. Real things can't change into unreal things, and vice versa. Hence, the concept that there is only reality, and that reality is stable, unchanging -- it can't change into something unreal

Empedocles: following in Parmenides' footsteps, he maintained absolute monism, but with his own little twist. Instead of saying there is only one, immutable being that is reality, he said reality is made of four immutable elements -- earth, water, fire, and air. The interactions among these elements produce the changes we see and experience in the Universe, and these elements are influenced by Love and Strife.

Anaxagoras: believed that the Universe is made of infinite seeds; and that behind these seeds exists the ultimate immutable Being, Nous, or Mind. This Being is the force behind it all, the one thing that never changes. Therefore, he still maintained absolute monism.

Democritus: this one changed things around a bit. Instead of saying that there was just one (1) being behind the order in the Universe, Democritus said there are infinite immutable beings that make up the Universe - atoms, he called them. So here is a change from, there's a being behind the universe ordering everything, to, there are infinite beings actually composing the order in the Universe. He not only switched up absolute monism, he went so far as to point out that Parmenides was wrong in one way. He developed the idea of the Void, the existence of unreality. Nothing exists in the Void, the Void itself is not a being; yet it causes the movements and interactions of the atoms, of the Universe itself.

Pythagoras: alright, so this guy had a really big thing for math. Math was everything to him. It was the key to life, to salvation. He basically worshipped it. Pythagoras was involved in mystery religions, which makes it difficult for us to know a lot about what he taught. But he is the one who proposed the Forms, the order behind matter. He applied it mostly to...math, of course. He said that knowing the Forms (*cough* Pythagorean theorem) was the path to salvation, because knowledge aligns the self with the order of the Universe, the World Soul, as he called it. While other Ionian philosophers were becoming more and more rationalistic, rejecting the spiritual traditions of Greek myth, Pythagoras was just having a good ol' time fusing them both together.

Xenophanes: rejected most of Greek mythology as irrational and just too human. He instead proposed the idea of one God, in combination with a very rationalistic, almost pantheistic view of the world. There was one God, and that one God was the whole World.

Protagoras: leader of the Sophists, who promoted humanism, relativism, and pragmatism. He denied the supernatural and made reason the highest order. He also said that man can't really, actually know Truth, because truth is subjective. There's no absolute standard. He was a skeptic, a questioner of everything.

Heraclitus: the complete opposite of Parmenides. To him, there was no immutable reality, just constant, ever-changing flux. The whole Universe is just constantly in a state of change. However, he did believe in Logos, a sort of fiery order behind the flux.

These are just some Pre-Socratic philsosphers and their beliefs, in no particular order, really. There are many more, but I don't have the time or energy to explain them all!

(Based off of what I've learned from The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas)