Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Pre-Socratics Part 2 (Part 5)

Roman numeral 6 in our progress through the history of Western philosophy is Heraclitus versus the Eleatics and the problem of identity and change. The Eleatics are a series of philosophers that huddled around the area of Elea in Greece. And just as the Milesians, Milesia has nothing to do with the charact of the philosophy, with the geography, geographical area from which those philosophers hailed, so it is with the Eleatics. Heraclitus is an individual philosopher. His outlook stands opposed to that of the Eleatics in a very dramatic way. And the common problem that Heraclitus and the Eleatics addressed is the problem of identity. Before we look at either one of these schools of thought or these outlooks, we might just bring ourselves up to date what we have found so far in the history of Western thought. Among the pre Socratics, the Milesians were concerned to find the underlying oneness or unity of reality. What is it that brings everything together, that is the basic substance or stuff out of which the world is made? The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, were concerned with a rationally discovered order, a mathematical and geometrical order that was characteristic of reality. So as we, as we move to the next major problem, or the problem as it now develops, the question becomes how does the basic one, which we have rationally assumed, change into the many which we encounter in our ordinary experience? How does the basic one, which we rationally assume, change into the many that is encountered in ordinary experience? What do I mean by the many encountered in ordinary experience? Well, we find all sorts of diversity in our experience. We find hot and cold, light and darkness. We find different colors and different textures. We find people doing different things. How is it that there's all this change and manyness in our ordinary experience? That's what we perceive with our senses. How does that relate then to the rationally assumed? That is our philosophical assumption about there being a unity to this world, an underlying oneness to the world. So there's really two types of questions going on here. One, a metaphysical one. What is the one and how does it become a many? And another question is epistemological. How do I relate my rational assumption, what my mind tells me must be the case with what my eyes and ears and hands perceive about the world. How do we bring these things together? Now, these philosophers did not pose questions in the way that Dr. Bonsen is now posing them or the writers of history books. We have the advantage of years, centuries of development in philosophy, and looking back, we can be a Little more abstract and generalize and pull out. This is what the principle or the issue was that was going on. Let me take that basic question that I've given to you this morning and break it down into three issues. First, the metaphysical issue of oneness or one versus many, unity versus diversity in the nature of reality. The second is an epistemological question, very simply, do we take a perceptual or a rational route to knowing about the world? It's the empiricism versus rationalism question as it will come to be known later. And then thirdly, there's an issue here over the nature of motion, change or becoming. What is the nature of change in this world? This is in a sense the horizon that Heraclitus and the Eleatics were considering when they did their philosophy, when they tried to be critically minded, and when they tried to construct an overall picture of reality in which every part of human experience has a place. Heraclitus, first of all, his dates are, as best we can tell, 544 BC to 484 BC. 544 to 484. So what arbitrary data we're going to choose to make this easy to remember. 500. You all saw that coming. I could tell from your face. Okay, we'll just give him the date of about 500 BC for flourishing. As with many of the other pre Socratics, the works of Heraclitus don't come to us whole. We have many fragments of his works and you have to form a mosaic out of them. But the majority of scholars that have studied Heraclitus have come up with a pretty common picture of what his philosophy was like. Let's look at that for a few minutes here. Heraclitus had quite a disdain for the masses. You need to be aware of that. Heraclides thought that majority of people didn't bother to think, didn't bother to think very hard or consistently. And they were dupes to their senses. Just whatever appeared to them, they were willing to go along with. They were not critically minded, to put it simply. And he had a disdain for the way they lived their lives and their political orders and so forth. I'm telling you that for a couple of reasons. First of all, it does seem to be a general characteristic of philosophers that they are arrogant. I don't think you'll get homilies like this in most classes in the history of philosophy, but my understanding of the teaching process is you ought to learn something about life. Well, and sometimes when People, well, intellectuals in general tend to be arrogant. Maybe I should have put it that way. But philosophers especially, because it's not just that they're thinking more than most people, you know, they aren't your wanderers and your cobblers and your janitors and so forth. They're intellectuals. But they're intellectuals who go beyond what most people. And I don't think that it has to be this way. In fact, if you do Christian philosophy, you do it in a Christian way. You ought to be very humble, because everything we have comes from God, even our insights on life and so forth. But Heraclitus does illustrate for us what will be a common psychological characteristic of philosophers, a disdain for the masses. But I'm telling you this not just to make an ethical point this morning, but also to help you understand why Heraclitus was willing to come to conclusions that are so contrary to common sense. We're going to look at what he said about the world and you will hear these things and say, how could anybody believe that? And this is not an attempt to say that he's wrong because he departs from common sense. I'm just trying to help you understand why it didn't bother Heraclitus a whole lot, since he thought the masses were pretty stupid anyway. The fact that he came to conclusions that he thought were intellectually demanded and which did not tie in with what the masses thought would not have concerned him too much. What is the oneness of the world for Heraclitus? Well, Heraclitus said that everything is fire. Everything is fire. We've already had somebody say everything is water. We've heard somebody say everything is air. Heraclitus says everything is fire. But it would be a big mistake, I think, to interpret Heraclitus along the lines of Thales or Anaxemines. When he proposed fire, he was not thinking of fire as being the oneness of reality, and in the same way that water or air were the oneness of reality for the Milesians. I may be over interpreting here, but I would suggest that for Heraclitus, all his fire came close to being a metaphorical description. He didn't know how else to put it literally, so he said, you might think of it as fire. Fire is a good figure of spirit, a good figure of speech. For what is the underlying oneness of reality? Well, what is that underlying oneness of reality? It's not a material thing for Heraclitus. He's not looking for some stuff like air or water that you can touch and everything is made up of it. The oneness of the world, for him is the orderliness with which things change. There is a unity. But that unity doesn't come down to a material stuff that you can touch. It is rather the unity that arises because the process of change in this world shows patterns or an orderliness. And metaphorically, the idea of something that is always changing yet staying the same, metaphorically, you could call that fire. Fire is never the same. It's always, you know, has licks this way and licks that way and flickers here and flickers there, but it's always fire. And likewise, there's all this change apparently going on out there in the world. And yet there's an orderliness, a sameness to the change. And so here we have philosophy done by metaphor, by figure of speech. What is the literal? Well, not so much truth, but what is the literal claim being made here? Applies that everything is changing, but it's changing by degrees. It's changing by measure. Or, if you will, because it's changing, measured and orderly. It doesn't seem to us that everything is changing. We know some things are changing. Okay, I'm standing here, and now I've changed. I've moved over here. So there are some changes that are obvious. We change our clothes every day. We should. And yet it doesn't seem that other things are changing. For instance, the shirt that I take off doesn't stop being the very same shirt when I take it off. That's the same today and tomorrow. Now, over time, the shirt may eventually disintegrate or wear out. So it changes, but it doesn't seem to change all the time. Or we can think of something that's even more solid. Look, a rocket Gibraltar. You look at an edifice like that, you say, well, that's not changing. We look at the chair or the table, we say, well, that's not changing. But Heraclive said, everything's changing. His famous statement was, you can't step in the same river twice. Now we call it the same river. Let's say it's the Mississippi river we're referring to. I put my foot in the Mississippi, I take my foot out and put it back in just as fast as I can. Has the river changed in the time that it took for me to extract and reinsert my foot into the water? Yes. We can't step in the same river twice. We call it the same river. It's still called the Mississippi river, but the river is always changing. And so it is with everything in Life. It does not appear to us that everything is changing, but everything is. It's just the change is by measure. And so we don't pay attention to all the changes that are there. And there is an orderliness with which things change. There is a pattern to be found there. And because of the pattern of change, we don't recognize the change itself. Think of it this way. If this room were not just a room in the building where we are, but were a box, let's imagine we had a box the size of this room. And this box were falling through space. If this box were falling through space, then that means this milk carton would be falling through space too. Means I would be falling through space. And so would my notes in this blackboard and all of you and the chairs on which you sit. But now, are we all falling through space at the same rate? Yes, we are. And since we're all falling through space at the same rate, imagine we don't have any window to look out for variance and so forth. If we were all in this box falling through space, we wouldn't know that we were falling through space. We wouldn't say we were moving at all, because everything's moving at the same rate. Likewise, Heraclitus seemed to think that because things change by measure at the same rate, then we think of them as being permanent. There's kind of a substantial identity to those things, and yet they're changing, just like everything else. It's just they're changing in harmony or at the same rate with other things. And so the illusion of permanence is given. And so for Heraclitus, it becomes very important that we distinguish between the appearance of things and the reality underlying them. Things are not as they seem. There's a common theme in the history of philosophy. Many philosophers will say things are not as they seem, or ultimate reality is not what our senses tell us. For Heraclitus, ultimate reality is constant flux. Everything's in fluctuation, everything's in motion, everything's in movement. But it doesn't seem that way to our senses. Okay? And so the metaphor for this view of reality, it's eternal fire, he called it. The world is eternal fire, always and only in change. And yet, because of the difference between appearance and reality, things will look like they are permanent, have an identity, an unchanging identity. Heraclitus went beyond this. He called the eternal fire a logos. I want to dwell on this for a few moments. A logos. The Greek word logos, as you know, is translated in the New Testament as word, ordinarily as word. In the beginning was the word, in the beginning was the logos. But logos doesn't in the Greek language always and specifically mean a spoken or verbal transaction, a word like that, a communication. Logos can stand for that which is conceptual, that which is knowable idea, or that which can be studied. Logos is a reason or a matter of thought. And thus it comes to be that which can be communicated, a word. Now we see this use of the word, this broader use of the word logos in our own language, because we study things like cosmology. You see the word logos in cosmology, the log. Well, that is the study of the cosmos, specifically its origin or biology, the study of life. So a logos is a reason, a matter of thought. Heraclitus said the eternal fire, the constant change that is reality, is also a logos. It's a. A matter of thought, it's a reason, if you will. Moreover, Heraclitus identified God with the logos, the eternal fire, the world order, the constant change according to measure that Heraclitus hypostasized was. Was. The world was also the same as God. Heraclitus disdained the popular Greek religion of his day, which wouldn't be hard to do. Obviously, popular Greek religion was full of superstition and mythology, and Heraclitus thought the masses were so stupid they make gods after their own image. But God isn't like anything man. God is the world process. So now, if we put all of this together, an interesting notion emerges. God is the logos or reason, that controls the natural process of constant change. You look at the world, you see constant. Well, you see some illusion of permanence and change. We know that underneath it all, it's constantly changing. Can't step in the same river twice. It's all flux. But this flux is also a reason, is a logos, which is God. So you have the idea that there is something which controls and makes intellectually understandable, something which gives a reason for how things and why things happen. It's not a personal God, like a man, after the order of Greek anthropomorphic religion, but it is something divine. You have a logos, a reason flowing through the natural world of change. Everything is changing, but there's a reason that characterizes it all. This is a primitive but nonetheless significant step forward in the development of what is going to be called natural law. Nature is changing, but it's changing according to a law or a logos, a reason that permeates or characterizes everything. And remember, for Heraclitus, this Natural law, as I'm anachronistically going to call it, this Logos of the constantly changing world is God. If God is the natural order or God is the reason for the natural order, God is the Logos flowing through the constant change that we call reality. For Heraclitus, this God is indifferent to human notions of justice and compassion, equity and love. The natural world is not concerned with your feelings about right and wrong. It is a non moral, neutral, indifferent force. Since it's a matter of reason, a matter of logos, then of course it's something that we could discover with the use of our own reason, our own thinking. So that's why it's often pointed out that for Heraclitus, we have the beginning here of natural law, concepts of reality. There is a law within nature, discoverable by man's mind, which is something attuned to man's mind and apprehensible. So here we have a natural religion, kind of pantheistic, but also a step toward what we call natural law. God is the process, but God is the Logos that flows through the process. Now, why should this be of particular interest to us as Christians? Eraquitus has an explanation for the world called Logos. And according to this Logos, which is apprehensible by the mind of man, the world is indifferent to our notions of right and wrong, justice and compassion. But for the Christian, the Logos is not an imminent force that brings order to the world and is indifferent to human notions. For us, the Logos is a transcendent force, not impersonal, but personal. I mean, you could write a wonderful paper on the contrast between the various notions of the Logos and how it fits into Heraclitus philosophy and that which we find in the New Testament and this Logos. This is the amazing thing. You see the wonder of the opening of John's Gospel. He says, in the beginning was the Logos and this Logos was Jesus Christ. Here we have a historical person who is identified as the transcendent Logos and reason for everything that exists. He's the one who gives order to reality and he's the one who is interested in justice and compassion, contrary to the pantheistic and morally neutral notion of the Logos that we find in Heraclitus. Does Karl Barth play off that word? It almost sounds like he would take that part of this concept or log us and run with it. Yeah, well, it's not just Karl Barth, so I'm going to say no in the sense that he particularly or creatively did this. But it has been a characteristic of non Christian and heretical Christian thinking throughout Western thought to develop what are called Logos theologies. And they go all sorts of different ways. And you do have a strain of that in Barth. But you can see what a fruitful notion this is and how it could easily lead to a lot of different ideas not always glorifying to God and true to the Scripture. Heraclitus had a Logos theology, a Logos metaphysic of his own. We step back and look at what Heraclitus has said about the nature of reality. The interesting thing is it doesn't match up with common sense. Heraclitus, as I told you at the beginning, disdained the masses. It didn't apparently bother him that from an intellectual standpoint, you're driven to certain conclusions which conflict with the way most people see the world with common sense. Moving on to Xenophanes B in our outline, the dates given to him, as you have discovered, are 570 to 500 BC. We're going to make him 525. Just choose an in between date. So he's roughly a contemporary Heraclitus, maybe a little older. The Xenophanes was born in 570, if that's true, Heraclitus 544. So some difference. Heraclitus would be a younger contemporary. Xenophanes also had a pantheistic view of the world and also disdained the popular religion of his day. He thought the old mythical ideas of the gods were silly and ridiculous. He rejected them and wanted to naturalize what they had been saying. Instead of believing that there was a God of the oceans and a God of the mountains and so forth, Xenophanes would naturalize that and make all of those forces of one God, that is the whole of reality. Or to put it very simply, it would appear that Xenophanes thought that everything is God. He wanted a sense of unity in reality. Everything must be one. And he said this one is God. To quote him, there is one God, neither in form, like unto mortals, pardon me, nor is in thought. The thought of God's mind is what changes everything. But it's not a God that is different from the world, apparently, but rather a God who is the world or which is the world. So here we have a of pantheistic oneness. But what's in common with Heraclitus? He agrees. We've got to get rid of these anthropomorphic gods, these mythical concepts that the Greeks were following at that time. Okay, let's look at Parmenides, Parmenides dates are 515 to 450 BC. 515 to 450. I'm going to assign him a medium date of 475. Hey, don't laugh. It works. You'll find it easier to remember this in the order to put him in and so forth. No, Xenophanes had said, everything is one. Parmenides agreed, everything is one. The universe for him is a single permanent substance. A single permanent substance. It is uncreated, it is indestructible, it is unchangeable. And I want to take you through the steps by which he arrived at these conclusions. The universe is a single permanent substance that is uncreated, indestructible and unchangeable. The premise from which he deduced or inferred these conclusions is that there is nothing. There is no nothing. That's pretty clever. Why would he say there is no nothing? Well, in the first place, everything that you can think about has an existing objective referent. All thought has an existing objective referent. We can think about trees, and there are trees. You can think about something. It exists. You say, okay, well how about Pegasus? We can think about Pegasus. Does that mean Pegasus exists? Parmenides would say, yes, Pegasus exist in thought. There must be an object that you're thinking about, so there must be the notion of Pegasus that exist. Everything you can think about must exist. An inconceivable object could not exist. An inconceivable object could not exist. Can we think about nothingness? Well, nothingness is non being, right? The absence of existence, it's nothing. So I'll put this on the board. You have non being, or what we call nothing. Nothingness. Now, if we can think about non being, since there must be an object that we're thinking about, then non being as being. And as any fool can see, that's contradictory. Non being can't have being and therefore non being is inconceivable. Non being does not exist. Non being is nothing. Or as later philosophers like to say, say the nothing nothings itself or negates itself. There can't be nothing. Non being cannot be. So Armenides has rationally convinced himself that non being is an impossible concept. Non being cannot be. To say nothing exists. Let me put this on the board. This short sentence, nothing exists is self contradictory. Are you impressed with this thinking? That sentence is contradictory, self contradictory. Nothing exists. So it must be that nothing doesn't exist. There is no nothing. There is no non being. Now, I don't have. I'm not really impressed with these puns and plays on words and so forth. But let's say that we've arrived at something significant here. If nothing is impossible, there can be no nothing. Well, then there can be no nothing out of which the world came. If there is no nothing, then the world cannot have come out of nothing constantly. So it follows the world's eternal right. Well, at least it's uncreated. It can't have a beginning, but maybe it can go out of existence. Well, if it goes out of existence, then it becomes what? Nothing. But nothing doesn't exist, so it can't go out of existence. Not only is it uncreated, it's indestructible. And we're flying now. We're making some real big conclusions about the nature of reality from an observation that nothing is contradictory. The idea of an existing nothing is contradictory. Well, if there's no nothing from which the world could come and know nothing into which it could go, there's also know nothing from which one thing could be and not be, that is change, there can be no change either, because what would change be? Let's say that. Something changed from hot to cold. I've had this happen. I order my dinner, I let it sit too long, it becomes cold. But that really cannot have happened. Because if it is cold and was not previously cold, then cold came out of nothing. Of course, it makes no sense to say hot became cold. Those are contradictory. So cold could not have come from hot, hot its opposite. And it could not have come from nothing for which there isn't anything. So it didn't become cold. And so Parmenides concluded that reality is a single permanent substance in which there is no change, no beginning and no end. So being does not consist of different elements. Being is all fundamentally the same substance. So here we've taken the pantheism of xenophanies and we've turned it into an unchanging, indestructible, uncreated, undifferentiated, permanent substance. Because there can be no empty space, no nothing. Parmenides denied the reality of change and denied the reality of motion. Because all motion is change, isn't it? I think you should go move your car. It's blocking the driveway. You could rightly respond to me. It's impossible because motion is impossible, Dr. Bonson. There is no empty space out of which or into which I could move the car. Well, it's worse than that. I couldn't even go through the motions of noticing the car, could I? Because that assumes that there's a change or a differentiation between the car and myself. What I was thinking at one time, what I was thinking at another means I couldn't go through the motions of using my mouth and speaking to somebody to go move the car. There's no motion at all. Reality is unchangeable. And if I were to speak one word that I hadn't been speaking previously, then there would be change. But there can be no change. Don't you get the point? We've proven there can be no change. Which is just to say, and I'm not just doing this to be light hearted. From a Christian standpoint, Parmenides was so rational, he made his own position impossible to express. See, if there's no motion, then there can be no thought changing from one thing to another, words changing from one thing to another, no expression. There can be no philosophizing either. Parmenides would say, fine, the real is the rational. It may seem from your senses that we are told, talking, thinking through things, moving cars, our dinners are getting cold. It may seem to our senses that there's an empirical world that is in change and fluctuation, but it isn't. That's an illusion. What is real is whatever is rational. The real is the rationale. You may remember yesterday, I introduced you to the idea of two ways of doing philosophy, two different kinds of epistemology. I said, there are those philosophers who say, look and see. You want to answer questions, you need to open your eyes, perceive the world, look and see. There's another philosopher, say, no, stop and think. Let's work this out rationally, conceptually. Parmenides is at the far end, the extreme end, for those philosophers who say, don't look and see, you can't trust your senses, stop and think. Now, here's a fascinating comparison. Heraclitus was also one of those stop and think philosophers, wasn't he? Because Heraclitus said, there's a difference between the world as it really is and the way it appears to our senses. I want you to get this in your notes. Heraclitus and Parmenides had this in common. They both distinguished between reality and appearance and said, you can't trust your senses. You take the perceptual approach to knowledge, it'll mislead you. So they agreed on that. Here's the fascinating thing. When they stop to think, what is the. The nature of reality? They all just completely disagreed. Paracletus says, everything's changing. Parmenides says, nothing's changing. All is an identity, A1. So how do they agree? They agree that you can't trust your senses. You have to stop and think about the nature of reality to get it right. And when they stop and think about the nature of reality, they come to diametrically opposite conclusions. Now, in this particular course at the college, we do not go as far as the Continental rationalist and the British empiricist of the 17th and 18th centuries. But when we get up to that point, I want you to remember this day that I said, those who want to take the rational approach, stop and think rather than go with common sense or trust your senses. Look at the world, observe. Use experience as a basis. Those who want to get away from experience because it's misleading and want to say we must rationally work it out ourselves. What is the nature of reality? End up disagreeing with themselves about the nature of reality. We have a school of thought that's coming later in our next course, known as Continental Rationalism. Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz all agreed that we have to have clear and distinct ideas that we count on in our philosophizing about the world, that it isn't important that you go out and use your senses and experience. That can be very misleading. Well, we've got to stop and think about the nature of reality. The nature of reality is not what it appears to be. But you know what Descartes said? All of reality is in two substances, mind and body. Spinoza said all of reality is one substance, God or nature, whichever you want to call it. And Leibniz said all of reality is made up of an infinite number of substances called monads. So he was an atomist or a pluralist. So here you have a dualist, a monist and a pluralist, an atomist in essence. But they're all doing the same, trying to use their clear and distinct ideas, their concepts, to work out the nature of reality. Well, we have that in the early days of the Greeks as well. Parmenides and Heraclitus were agreed that you cannot use your senses. They will mislead you. You can't go with the common notions of the masses. They've got it wrong. But then, the philosophers didn't agree with each other either. One says reality is in flux. The other says reality shows complete, unchanging identity. Let me put on the board, fourthly, Zeno, not to be confused with Zorro, who is a much later figure in literary history, Zeno developed certain paradoxes by which he could support his teacher Parmenides. I mean, you can imagine what people thought when they heard Parmenides. Conclusions. Parmenides said, nothing changes. There is no motion. People are going to ridicule this. They're going to say, that is asinine. How could any philosopher be so stupid as that? Zeno said, do you think it's stupid? Well, let's see if you can answer these problems. So Zena developed intellectual puzzles by which he could support his teacher Parmenides and show the impossibility of Mother. And I'll give you one of these puzzles just for the sake of illustration. Let's say that we're going to shoot an arrow, and I'm standing right here, The archer, and I shoot the arrow. Does that look like an arrow? Not too bad. I shoot the arrow at a target. That's 30 yards away. Now, Zeno said it only stands to reason that if the arrow is moving, if motion really is real, that the arrow must first go half the way to the top. And so we'll call this the halfway point. If the arrow is going to get from me, the archer, to the target, it's got to go halfway before it can go all the way. Everybody's going, yeah. So he says, well, but if the arrow is going to get from me, the archer, to halfway, it's got to go half of that first, doesn't it? So we'll put that up on the board. Now somebody goes, yeah. So Z note goes on. Well, if it has to go half of half the way before it can go all the way, then it has to go half of half of half the way. So now we're down to what, 1 8, right? Here's 50%, 25. Now we're at 12 and a half percent, 1 8, half of that. So. Well, but if you're going to go half the way to this line, the 1 8th, you're going to have to go half of that first 1 16. So, well, if you're going to go half the way to 1:16, you're going to have to go 1:32. You're going to have to go half of that. Now, what are we getting at? Zeno said you can keep halving the distance. The word is halving the distance. H, A, L, V, I, N, G. Not halving. You can half the distance and then half the half and half the half of the half and on and on and on. How far does the halving go? It's infinite, isn't it? There's an infinite number of halves between you and the target. So that means the distance between you and the target is Infinite. And obviously, if the distance between you and the target is infinite, a finite arrow in a finite amount of time cannot traverse it. Since the arrow first has to get to half of half of half of half, it can't get to half of half of half. And if it can't get to half of half of half, it can't get to half of half or half of half of half. The point is, the arrow could not be moving at all then. So Zeno had this intellectual puzzle that proved that there could be no motion. Reason conflicts with perception then, doesn't it? Reason tells you it's impossible that the arrow moves, but perception seems to tell you that the arrow is moved from the archer to the target. Since reason conflicts with perception, Zeno and Parmenides said, trust reason. That's one major strain in the history of philosophy. Those who trust reason stop and reflect more than trusting perception. Go out and look. Can anyone see how to answer Zeno's problem? It's not as easy as it might appear. If it is an infinite space between the archer and the target, then in a finite amount of time you can't traverse infinity. But you know what the false premise is? That there's an infinite space between the archer and the target. What there is is an infinite number of fractions. There's an infinite number of proportions. I'll just call it fractions. Up. But the fact that this is an infinite number of fractions doesn't mean that the space itself is infinite. Besides, I never wanted my physical arrow to go through an infinite number of fractions. I wanted to go through a finite amount of space. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy that. You might understand a little bit better why some Greek philosophers ended up down this very rationalistic line and came to the conclusion. Rationalistic? That from a metaphysical perspective there is no change and all is one. So we have a debate between Heraclitus on the one hand, and the Eleatics is an office. Parmenides and Xeno. I maybe didn't mention that the LA Attic School is B, C and D up here on the board. Does there need to be a date for Zeto? No, he's just a disciple of Parmenides. I mean, I think you can get a date, but I am not going to make that. What is it, 450? Well, I'll go with 450. Seems to fit the pattern of arbitrary dates that we've been using. They're not totally arbitrary, remember, they have to fall within the range of the guy's life. They got to be toward the middle or later part of his life when he, you know, is a professional philosopher and is well regarded and is writing books and so forth. But anyway, we have Heraclitus, about 500, Parmenides, 475. Parmenides is responding to the absurdities of Heraclitus, and he responds by giving his own absurdities. Isn't that right? Okay. The next step in the development of the history of philosophy, Number seven in our outline, will be the pluralist.