Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Pre-Socratics Part 3 (Part 6)

Well, Parmenides has brought us to a real fine mess. He has accepted the assumption of the Milesians that there's an underlying oneness or substance, one substance that characterizes all of reality, and that has led him to the conclusion that there is no motion. But if the conclusion follows from that premise, but the conclusion is absurd, then of course people have the option of rejecting the premise, don't they? So if he starts with the premise there's one underlying substance, and that leads to an absurd conclusion that there is no motion, then the premise itself must be rejected. We must reject the premise that there is one underlying substance. You all know that from your logic class, right? If P, then Q. But we know Q is false, so we must then reject P as well. And that's what the pluralists did. They rejected the premise upon which Parmenides was working, that there is one underlying substance. The pluralist, as the name would tell you, are going to argue that there's a plurality of underlying substances rather than just one. The first pluralist that we study is Empedocles. Empedocles. I've written him on the board as A, underneath Roman numeral 7, the pluralist. Actually, we're studying the pluralist so that we might understand atomism eventually, which is the most refined and sophisticated version of pluralism. But first of all, A. Empedocles. Empedocles lived in the early 5th century BC, and so we'll give him a date of 475. Now, if we give him the date of 475, how then does he relate to Parmenides the monist? We've just studied Parmenides and gave him a date of 475. Yeah. So they are basically contemporaries, Parmenides being the monist, Empedocles being the pluralist. Empedocles says motion is possible in a plenum. A plenum is something that is full. The feeling of Parmenides was there could be no empty space, so reality is filled. It's a plenum. But Empedocles said motion is possible in a plenum. He thought he could prove that by putting a straw into water. You know, if you have an open tube, a straw, and you put your finger over the end of the straw and push it into the water. Water does not fill the tube, doesn't come up into the straw, as we would say today, we know there's air in there, and your finger is not letting the air escape. And so you're really pushing a rod, a rod of air into the Water, nothing comes in. But what happens when you take your finger off the end of the tube so the air escapes and it's pushed out. Then water fills into the straws of the level of the water. And so here we have a plenum, as it were. But motion is possible because there's a plurality, according to Empedocles, there's a plurality of things. Water is one, air is another. And so one thing can replace another, or even within a plenum, water can replace air. And you have not granted that there's empty spaces in reality or in the world. And so he can get around Parmenides and show that motion is possible. And it's not rationally to be ruled out as long as you don't accept the idea that all is one. Rather, he says reality is made up of a plurality of things. Specifically, he said it was made up of four different roots. Four different roots. Remember the word roots. That's we set over against Anaxagoras, who spoke of seeds, which again is to be said over against Democritus, who spoke of atoms. But for Empedocles, they were roots. There are really four different realities which are eternal and unchanging, not one, as the Milesians had thought, as Heraclitus had thought, although he didn't look at a material substance, or as Parmenides had thought, being only one. Rather, there are four eternal, unchanging substances. They are earth, air, fire and water. We have to say that slowly, or else the end comes out. Fire, water, and that's a different concept altogether. Earth, air, fire and water. So you have four different kinds of things now to make mixtures out of. Well, how do they get mixed up, how do they get together, and how do they get separated? For Empedocles, there are two types of motion in this world. There is the uniting and joining motion, which he called love, and there is the separating, discriminating motion, which he called strife. Tonight we have a formula for an interesting metaphysic, don't we? My view of reality, Empedocles says, amounts to four plus two. Four types of things joined together with two types of motion, four roots, earth, air, fire and water, which are joined or separated by love and strife. Now, there are chance combinations that come about through a continuous cycle of love and strife in the world. These chance combinations of earth, air, fire and water make up the objects of this world. But not all of the chance combinations survive. Obviously, if you don't put together an animal in the right way, hearts and lungs connected, for instance, then that particular chance combination of earth, air, fire and water is not going to be fit for survival. It's not going to. So Empedocles said that not everything that comes about through love and strife, joining and separating these elements works out well. But the ones that work out well, they hang around the giraffes that have the long necks that can eat the leaves of the trees. That's fine. That works out. Of course, I'm kind of smirking about this because people, people who think Charles Darwin was creative and came up with this wondrous idea of survival of the fittest. He may have stated it more clearly in a more sophisticated way, but the basic seed idea comes from the Greek philosophers like Empedocles. Now, for Empedocles, the world process of love and strife, all these elements being combined and separated in various combinations, was considered God, was considered God. And he attributed to God the world process, the personal attribute of mind. So the process is mind, which can be worshipped as God. Mind is going through love and strife, motions combining earth, air, fire and water. Now, this is somewhat contradictory. It's very confusing. On the one hand, the universe is in process, which is a chance combination of things. It's a mechanical, if you will, impersonal chance world. But then on the other hand, Empedocles wanted to say that flashing mind. Mind flashes through all of reality, the thoughts that are so fast that you can't even see them. That comes close to a more personal and purposive view, teleological view of reality. There's mind, a personal attribute that characterizes the natural world. So we don't find in Empedocles a consistent and well worked out philosophy. And he has still the problem that was not resolved. Other Milesians how can things change and yet remain the same? When you have various things like earth and air and water come together, do they stay earth, air and water, or do they become cabbages? Which is it? Is cabbage different than earth, air and water? Or is cabbage a new substance? So is there real change or is there nothing more but identity? How can the qualitatively unchanging roots become the changing many of experience? Obviously we experience much more than four types of things in this world, don't we? Wouldn't be very much fun to go to a restaurant and only have four things on the menu. Earth, air, fire and water. Now we go to the menu and we look for London broil and for braised chicken and for burritos and for tacos and pizzas. And it's not lunchtime yet. So I'm not trying to tempt you, but the point is there's a lot of diversity out there in the world. How does Empedocles account for that diversity? How can the qualitatively unchanging earth, air, fire and water turn into or become the many things, the changing many things that we experience? So let's move ahead then, to be on our outline. The next pluralist makes an improvement over this. His name is Anaxagoras. Just to help you, you've already had two guys that have the Anax beginning in their names. Okay? Two Milesians, Anaximander and Anaxemenes. Now we have another one. Don't confuse them. Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras lived in the mid 5th century BC and since it was the mid 5th century, I think it'd be good to give him the date of 450. I know you're all beginning to wonder, when is this scheme of Dr. Bonsen's going to run out? It's going to break down sometime. Yeah, it will. But for now, we'll keep using it. Empedocles. Anaxagoras. According to Anaxagoras, the many that constitute reality over against the one that the Milesians and Parmenides assumed. The many is an infinite diversity of qualitatively different seeds. Empedocles had four roots. Anaxagoras has an infinite number of seeds, an infinite number of seeds. And these seeds are qualitatively different. Please don't confuse them with atomism, which is the next step in the development of plan pluralism. They are not all the same. They are different. They are qualitatively different. There are cabbage seeds and frog seeds and human seeds. Reality is made up of an infinite number, an infinite diversity of these seeds. And what brings the seeds together? Well, instead of the two motions of love and strife which you have in Empedocles, for Anaxagoras, there's a single kind of motion called mind, A single kind of motion that he calls nous, the Greek word for mind. So if you had a formula to remember Empedocles, it would be four plus two, right? Four roots, two types of motion. What would the formula be For ANAXAGORAS? Infinity +1. An infinite number of seeds and one kind of motion, which is mental motion. Is this a materialistic view of reality or a immaterialistic view of reality? Is this a mechanical view of reality or a purposive teleological view of reality? It's hard to answer those questions with Anaxagoras. It's not real clear how he works those things out. According to him, originally everything was in a homogeneous mixture. All these seeds were so well distributed throughout the mixture, it was so homogenous that nothing particular was noticeable. You have this infinite number of qualitatively diverse seeds, but there was such a smooth blend of all the seeds that when you look at the mixture, that reality was nothing stood out. It's all the same. And what is that like? Who is that parallel to who said something similar previously? Speak out now. Anaximander. Exactly right. Said there was a reservoir of the boundless, the aperon, so that nothing, you know, stood out. It was just completely blah. Right. Well, there's a similarity in Anaxagoras. He said the seeds are so distributed in a homogenous way that nothing stands out. There's no particular quality that's noticeable. Well, then, what happened? Mind entered in the picture. Just like for Empedocles, love and strife. Start working with the four elements where Anaxagoras mind enters the picture. And when mind enters in as a factor, it sets up a motion within the seeds, a circular vortex. Again, you see, the fascination of the Greeks was circular motion. So mind comes in, and now the seeds are in a circular vortex. And what happens? Well, just as with an Aximander, some of these seeds start clumping together and they separate out in various sequences. And what happens when the seeds start clumping together is that everything that separates out has those seeds in it. But there is a predominance of frog type seeds in what we call frogs. Now, there's also human and grass and other kinds of seeds in the frog. But because of the predominance of frog seeds, then when you look at that entity, what you see is frog. Okay, so the seeds are all mixing together. Mind is kind of shuffling things up and they clump together and come out of this mixture in various sequences. They're seeds of every kind of stuff and every sensible thing. But the predominating seeds are the ones that give it the character and what makes it noticeable as a tree or as a frog, or as a wax or human being, whatever it may be. These seeds, remember, are infinitely small and they are infinite in number. That's why there's enough seeds to go around for all the different things you see in the world, each one having a little bit of everything in it. And the reason why you don't see the seeds of humanity or trees in the frog is because the seeds are so small. They're infinitely small. And so you can understand why Anaxagoras is called a pluralist. He has an infinite plurality of irreducible stuffs out of which the world is made. How many stuffs did the Milesians think the world was made out of? Just one. They were monist. The pluralists are not monist. They don't believe there's only one kind of thing. And for Anaxagoras, there's an infinite number of irreducible stuffs. But the problem for him is that they're qualitatively plural. They're infinite, they're small, but they're all different. They're frog things and tree things and human things. All very strange. Now, if you have an infinite number of qualitatively different seeds, then you're not really motivated to study and to dissect and analyze what each thing is made up of. Because you say, well, each thing has everything in it. It's just that this thing has more. Why is a frog a frog? Because it has more frogness in it. It has more frog seeds in it. I hope you can see that that would be a disincentive to scientific research, because the answer is always going to come down to why is something the way it is? How do you explain it? Well, a giraffe is a giraffe because it has more giraffe seeds in it. In has everything in it, but more of the draftness in it. Why is wood like wood? Because it has more woodness in it. Well, that's not very helpful as long as the infinite number of seeds are qualitatively different. And that's how you account for things. You're really just rewriting the story. When you try to analyze any particular thing in the world, it just comes down to having a lot of those particular characteristics in it. Okay, so then we move to the atomist school of thought. And I'm. Going to look at the father of atomism, Democritus. But let me put atomism up here on the board and give you the names of the four major atomists of the ancient world. First of all, we have Leucippus, L, E, U, C, I, P, P U, S Leucippus. And I've given him an arbitrary date of 450. And then we have Democritus, whom we're going to come back to and discuss in a moment. Democritus, whose dates are 460 to 370 BC we'll give him a flourishing date of 425. Democritus, 425. Then Epicurus who we will study later under philosophies of life. Epicurus E P I C U R U S and then finally Lucretius L U C R E T I U S Lucretius, who is a contemporary of Cicero, the Roman orator and who wrote the best known book expressing atomistic philosophy. The book entitled on the Nature of Things. On the nature of things. So these are the four major benelamied in the outline that I'm going to concentrate on. Democritus. And we have given Democritus a date of flourishing of about 425. How am I doing? 475 for Empedocles, 450 for Anaxagoras, 425 for Democritus. Democritus starts to sound a lot more sensible to us, even though we disagree with him. He talks more in terms and uses concepts that are familiar to us. As Democritus was a secularist, he began by saying there is no spiritual reality. This world is all you get. What you see is what you get and this is everything. There's no spiritual reality because reality for something to be real. Reality is composed of an infinite number of qualitatively identical atoms. Reality is composed of an infinite number of qualitatively identical atom. With Anaxagoras he believes in an infinite number of smallest things, but against an Axagoras, Democritus says they are qualitatively identical, they're all the same. It's not like you have frog atoms or there would be frog seeds for an axagoras and tree seeds and human seeds, but rather frogs and humans and trees are all made up of the same kind of thing called atoms. They are qualitatively identical and there's an infinite number of them. For him, these atoms are self propelling. How do you like that for being arbitrary? There's an infinite number of atoms and they propel themselves. Excuse me, how does that happen? How does it come about? Well, they're just self propelling. Now these atoms, which are infinite in number, have shape, they have size, they have velocity, but they do not have secondary qualities. I'll explain that in just a second. They have shape, I.e. pythagorean geometric forms if you will. There's a shape to the atoms. They do have size and they are being self propelled at a certain velocity. So they do have those characteristics which are often called primary qualities in a shape, size, velocity. But Democritus said they have no secondary qualities. A secondary quality would be something that is a result of the interaction of the object with a sense organ. A secondary quality would be like color. Now let me explain why it's secondary. Color is secondary. Now I've got a book in front of me that's basically yellow, or so it seems. This book seems yellow to your senses. But you know what happens if we start changing the light in this room? If we dim the light in the yellow phase, doesn't it? It will tend toward what? Green or something. I don't know the physiology of all these illustrations. But we can bring neon lights in and change the yellow. Or we could give you drugs. If you go to the eye doctor and he puts drops in your eyes, you see colors differently depending on what drops he puts in your eyes. So I could have the same book. And if you've been drugged or the eye drops have been put in and we change the light, it doesn't look yellow. It might look orange or green or something else. And so that's why it's called. A color is considered a secondary characteristic of something because it's the result of the interaction of the thing with the sense organ. Taste is the same way I've been enjoying this week, that variation. When my stomach's been in good shape, everything tastes fine. But when I start getting sick to my stomach and things don't taste the same, and moreover, something that tastes sweet to you, or let's say it's kind of sweet and sour, but you think the sweetness predominates, the other person may pick up the vinegariness of it and say, no, it tastes more sour. So there's variation in secondary qualities, but there is no variation in the shape, size and velocity of these atoms. According to Democritus, why are there qualitative differences between things? Why are there trees and frogs? What's the difference between a tree and a frog? The mechanical arrangement of atoms. The frog is made up of the same kind of thing the tree is made up of, but the arrangement and. And the number of atoms is different. That sounds very modern, doesn't it? And naturally enough, this fellow is emphasized in books on the history of philosophy, especially those written by unbelievers, because he seems to anticipate the modern scientific mentality. Things are different because of their atomic structure being different. This is what Democritus said. On the downside, however, we have to remember Democritus did not say this because of scientific research. In fact, according to Democritus, you can't trust your senses. All knowledge from the senses is person relative. Remember I said A minute ago, you might think something tastes sweet, another person thinks it tastes sour. Knowledge from the senses is not reliable. It's not universal, it's not uniform. So how then did Democritus know about the atoms? Through reason. He apprehended them by his intellect, he said, not his senses, but his intellect taught him about the atoms. And in that sense, Democritus is like what two philosophers we've already studied this morning, which philosophers have said, you can't trust your senses. You have to go with what your intellect or reason would take tell you. Heraclitus and Parmenides, right? Don't you love it? Here are these guys who are relying upon intellect, so you would think they'd all come to the same conclusion. Well, Heraclitus says everything's changing. It's all a underlying metaphorical fire. Parmenides says nothing is changing, it's all a one. Democratus says my intellect says things are made up of an infinite number of imperceptible atoms. Reason tells us about these atoms and their primary qualities. We know the second of the secondary qualities. But reason must tell you about the atomistic underlying reality of what our senses encounter. Well, a question arises then. What is it that's going on? When my intellect is working, is my intellect nothing more but brain tissue? You know, the gray matter in my head, what do I call this function of the soul or reason? And here Democritus was kind of inconsistent with his materialistic philosophy. And I'm pointing this out because every unbeliever I know who's a materialist is inconsistent in the same way. Democritus said, well, there is a function of reason that's not exactly the same as the brain, and that is a divine activity, he said, accounted for by refined fire atoms. It's kind of like I have no idea how I can make a physical thing into an organ of intellect. How reason, which is immaterial and is telling me about immaterial things, or at least telling me about things that my material senses can't discern. How can I account for the activity of reason if I say it's nothing more but atoms in motion as well? And so what he does is he kind of fudges. He says, well, it's kind of a divine activity of refined fire atoms. And now, homily number two for this morning about the tendencies of philosophers. I've already indicated philosophers tend to despise the masses and are intellectually arrogant. Philosophers are also like to bamboozle people with saying, well, it's so complicated. It's fire atoms, you know, Somebody ought to say, excuse me, fire atoms. In my mind, I'd like a little more explanation than that, you know. Democritus couldn't give off a very good explanation because there was an internal tension in his philosophy. What did I tell you our first day? Unbelieving philosophies of life inevitably bring about dialectical tension. He wants to say, everything is material. There's no spiritual reality. But then in that case, there shouldn't be the spiritual reality of intellect. And so he has to make intellect material too. And he does it by this kind of bamboozling of fire atoms. How should we live our lives? According to Democritus, he said, the ethical goal that we have is happiness. Everyone strives for happiness. Is that true? Everyone strives for happiness? Well, it can be made true. By definition, you can say everyone strives for happiness because whatever anybody strives for is because that's what they think will make them happy. But that's not ordinarily the way we use the word happy. There are people in this world who apparently aren't living to be happy. I think of missionaries who have given their lives to very, very difficult circumstances. Painful, diseased, uncomfortable, threatening circumstances. I wouldn't think in an ordinary sense, we'd say they're striving after happiness. Somebody will then say, but of course, that's their way of getting happiness, because they're happy serving the Lord. So you see how the word happiness really takes on different meanings. You have to be careful when you study the ancient Greeks, when they start laying down as a fact, everyone strives after happiness. But then the word happiness takes on kind of a different, different meaning than we ordinarily would attach to it. Not everyone's looking to, you know, to feel gaiety or rejoicing, you know, or to feel good or to have pleasure, whatever. According to Democritus, true happiness, true joy is not found through sense experience. When we live for our senses, here's the person who is materialistic and sensual and wants physical pleasure. We are really depending upon coarse atomic activity. That is, the atoms that give us physical pleasure are coarse. The activity is a coarse kind of atomic activity. Democrates felt that true happiness, true joy was attained through knowledge of the truth, that refined atomic activity of the fire atoms. And when we stress the life of contemplation and intellect, the refined rather than coarse activity of fire atoms that will result in tranquility for us, tranquility or moderation. As we look back at the philosophy Of Democritus, there's no question about his creativity and his advance. If you're thinking in non Christian terms, his advance, his creative contribution to the development of a secular view of this world. There is no spiritual activity. Everything comes down to atoms. That sounds very modern. To be sure, for all of the refinements and sophistication we could add in the modern world, that basic idea comes from Democritus. Another thing we want to see in Democritus is that he is a dualist in his metaphysic, a dualist in his epistemology, and a dualist in his ethics. First, he is a dualistic metaphysic. Reality is composed of matter, an infinite number of small bits of matter, but nevertheless it's made up of matter. And yet he does allow for what he calls divine or spiritual activity, the refined intellectual activity of the Fire Adam. So he does have two levels of reality, the coarse and the refined. He also has two levels of epistemology. We can learn the secondary qualities of things through our senses, like color and taste and texture. We learn those things through our senses, although everything we learn through our senses is relative to the person doing the sensing that knowledge is not uniform and reliable. It's fluctuating. But we can also learn things through our intellect. And that's what Democritus claimed to have done. By the exercise of his mind, he found out that reality is made up of atoms. So his epistemology is dualistic. You have knowledge through the senses, perceptual knowledge, and you have knowledge through the intellect, which is the more reliable and what gave him the information about atoms. And then lastly, we saw that he had a dualistic ethic. Some people seek joy through coarse atomic activity. These are the party animals among us. Other people seek joy through more intellectual activity, contemplation, knowledge of the truth, so that they might have tranquility rather than the excesses of the body. If we were to move ahead in our outline of Greek philosophers that address the metaphysical and the epistemological questions, what is reality? And how do we know what we know? It would be the natural step to move ahead now to look at Plato. And Plato's dates are 427 to 347. We'll come back to that tomorrow. But I'm just trying to show you that in terms of the progression historically, it would be natural now to look at Plato. And it would also be the correct thing to do is we look at the systematic development of Greek thought, because what happens is you take the Milesians, and they have this unresolved problem of what is the underlying stuff or matter of which the natural world is made. They want to know what the nature of reality is, the stuff. And that's unresolved. We have the Pythagoreans who have found the wonder of mathematical and geometric organization, order in the world, and yet we've seen the inadequacies of their philosophy as well. We have the dispute over change in motion and identity. Heraclitus is one approach to identity and change. He denies that there's change, excuse me, denies that there's anything that really has identity over time. And then you have Parmenides, the Eleatics, who say, no, change is the illusion. Everything is one unchanging thing. These problems continue until we finally get philosophers that want to look at the whole picture and try to give a systematic account of how we know what we know what the nature of reality is and how we should live our lives. And that's really something of the greatness of Plato and Aristotle, is that they were so systematic. They tried to bring all these branches of philosophy together into a more coherent whole. The pluralist have brought us to the point of seeing the world as a many rather than a one and a many. That's in motion all the atoms that are self propelling. If you follow Democritus, Here's an interesting insight. If we were to combine the insight of the pluralist and the Pythagoreans, what would we get now? They didn't do it in their day. But let's look at two elements of what we've observed already, two elements in the philosopher's report, observed already in the pluralist. Beginning with Empedocles, through Anaxagoras, and then finally to the more advanced atomistic theory of Democritus, we see a rejection of the Milesian and Parmenidean assumption that there's one underlying material substance instead of there being one substance substance. The pluralists say the world is reduced to the spatio temporal relations of a particular many that differ only in size and speed. There's a particular many, it's not apeiron, but they are identical in the kind of things they are these atoms. And the world all comes down to atoms in their spatio temporal relationships. That's what the pluralists contribute to Western thinking. The world is reduced to atoms that are a particular meaning, Spatiotemporal relations between these little bits of matter, that's the world. The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, saw that the world displayed simple mathematical relationships, or if you will, the world was measurable, and that our calculations, having to do with math and geometry, were predictable and universal. What do we get if we put these two together? From the pluralist, we get a many atoms that make up reality, and from the Pythagoreans, that these relationships are measurable. They show mathematical and geometric relationships. Isn't that at base modern physical theory, that you have a number of irreducibly small bits of matter, subatomic particles perhaps, and these things are measurable and show mathematical geometrical relationships to each other? And that's what accounts for all the diversity in this world, atoms and their measurable relationships. And once again, they didn't put those ideas together. But you see already the development of factors or basic aspects of modern physical theory in the Presocratic Greeks, and I think that's rather remarkable. They didn't do this because they were gifted with physical experimentation and advanced tools for investigating the physical world. We basically have modern physics, not all put together, but we have the elements of modern physics. Through philosophical reflection on the world world. The question is going to eventually have to be asked, well, how should we live our lives? I mean, whatever your view of reality is, your metaphysics, however you think you come to know that whatever your epistemology is, it all comes down to how should we then live, to use the title of Shaffer's book. I mean, given this view of reality, given this view of knowledge, what attitude should we have toward life? What kind of ethic or conduct should we pursue? And I'm going to now step out of historical sequence for the sake of a thematic construction of ancient Greek philosophy. And we're going to look at the philosophies of life that are promulgated through about this time. I mean, we're roughly in sequence. But I'm going to go beyond Plato and Aristotle and talk about the development of these attitudinal philosophies of life. And then we're going to finally go back and pay special attention to Plato and special attention to Aristotle. So I'm just warning you to advance that we're kind of departing from our historical sequence a bit, as Plato would be the next one we would study, but I'm going to put him on the shelf temporarily and now start looking at how we should then live according to the pre Socratic Greeks.