Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Pre-Socratics (Part 4)

Alright, now that you've had a topical introduction to what philosophy is and the history of philosophy and have been given some cultural background, the ancient cultures and the poets of Greece, we finally begin where most textbooks in the history of philosophy begin, with the Milesians. Roman numeral IV in your outline. The Milesian problem of Mapper. Milesian problem of Mapper. The Milesian philosophers are three in number. We'll have to find some way of making sure that you master these names and know how to identify people. Maybe your final exam will force you to regurgitate all this. For me. My lesions are Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. These annex guys. We have Anaxagoras coming up later. It can be a little confusing, especially if you don't take a lot of interest in this. You just say, well, I'm just trying to get through this, you know, those names sound very confusing. But if you get excited about this, like Dr. Bonson is, and you think there's something to it, then you distinguish them. Just like it's not hard to distinguish my children and their names because they're of interest to me. Some other family whose children I met 10 years ago that I don't have a whole lot of concern for. It's hard to remember their children's names. Okay, so let's get interested in these guys and get their names right. Thales is easy. He's the first one. So A underneath four Thales. And as I told you, Thales flourishes about 600 or 580 BC, depending on who you're reading. He falls between Hesiod and Aeschylus. In the previous survey that I gave you of the Greek poets, Thales was concerned with the question, what is the world made of? What is it that accounts for everything that we see about us and all the different appearances and changes that are part of our human experience? His assumption about the nature of reality was monistic. His assumption about the nature of reality was monistic. Let me give you a definition of monism. You can add to your growing list. Monism is the view that reality consists of only one kind of substance. Reality consists of only one kind of substance. And Thales had a monistic assumption about reality. He had a metaphysic. Yesterday I defined metaphysics for you as the study of the nature of reality and so forth. The word metaphysic means in Greek, what stands behind the physis or the nature, the natural world. What is metaphysic? And Thales looked at the natural world, the fusis about him, and he said, I think everything is water. That was his metaphysic. He monistically assumed that there was only one kind of thing behind everything or one kind of thing of which everything was made. And that one kind of thing was water. Now why would he think it Everything is water. We don't have a whole lot on Thales. He doesn't explain this. Or if he did, we don't have his explanation. But it seems likely enough that when Thales looked about him, especially living on a Greek island, he saw a lot of water. Now he also saw things that weren't water. But the point is there was a lot of water. And notice looking at those things that are not to the outward appearance, water. If you cut open an animal's body, you find many kinds of moisture or liquid in the animal blood and urine and other sorts of things. Thaileys realize that human beings, we have moisture within us. If we don't drink water, if our eyes get dry, so forth. And water appears in clouds in a different form. And you cut open a plant, you find some kind of moisture inside the plant. Maybe that's what led him to do this. But the fact is he thought the world is basically water. That's what gives the unity to reality. You need to get this in your notes. The unity. Because though he's wrong about the specific answer he gives, knows what he's trying to find out. What unifies all the diversity that we see in the world about us. And what is the stuff of which this world is made. And. And his answer was water. And even though we don't know a lot about Thales, we've learned a great deal already. He has a metaphysic. It's monistic. And in terms of it, he unifies all of his experience. Here's something else we know about Thales. His approach to philosophy was empirical or scientific. I don't mean by that that he was highly sophisticated and advanced. But nevertheless his theorizing about the world was to have a naturalistic basis. Now, when I use the word empirical, which is going to happen repeatedly in our course, I think you need to have a definition of that. I'm going to define empiricism, a school of thought. And then empirical as an adjective will be based on it. Empiricism is the view that all knowledge is dependent upon observation, experience or sense perception. All knowledge is dependent upon observation, experience or sense perception. There are some people who think we don't know anything apart from our senses. And that is the empiricist school of epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? The empiricist says, through our senses, through observation and experience. Now I'm not making Thales out to be an empiricist. I'm simply saying that his approach to philosophy in answering philosophical questions was empirical, dependent upon observation and experience. He would be, if you will, using terms closer to our day and age, more scientifically oriented than speculative. He wanted to find some natural observational basis for his answers. So you have a man who has a view of metaphysics, reality is water. And how does he know what he knows? He has a view of epistemology, or his practice seems to have been empirical or scientific. Everything is caused by water. But that isn't enough, is it, for an adequate philosophy or even a well rounded philosophy, because obviously things change. Clouds turn to rain. Even if you do by the water hypothesis, those things that are water like change. You have clouds, you have rain. And we see things live and they die. We see things move. Some things move, some things don't. So how does Thales account for diversity and change? If everything is one, why is there a many? You all pick up on that. The one and the many question all is water. Well, okay, but why is the world different from one day to another? And why does water take different forms? And Thales answer, his way of accounting for diversity was what is known as hilozoism. H Y L O Z O I S M Hylozoism. Everything Hylo is full of life. Zoist all is full of gods, is what he said. Thales, one of the fragments we have from him is all is full of gods. Now you can interpret that in different ways. One problem we have in studying ancient Greek philosophy, especially the pre Socratics, is that we don't have a whole lot of information. We have fragments and we have quotations from later writers and so forth. And people are going to interpret those fragments differently. Some people would say the fragment all is full of gods shows that Thales was mythic or religious in his orientation. He, he wanted to bring the gods down from Mount Olympus, if you will, and fuse them into all living things. I guess that's possible. I don't think it's very likely. I think it's much more likely that when he said that he was using the term God for an active power in the universe. He's not talking about the gods anthropomorphically. Now what he's talking about is a power to do things, an active agent. And what he was saying is matter possesses life within itself. There's an active agent within all material things. So Thales may have had some elementary notion of a process of life, a process of movement that is part of the natural world. Well, that's how it all got started. I've hit on this enough times and I'm not going to miss my opportunity here. What is it about Thales that grabs people's attention? So they say, okay, when we do a history of philosophy it starts with Thales. Or if we do another, like Sahasian or W.T. jones. At least W.T. jones backs up in his later editions and puts the Greek poets as a backdrop for the beginning of philosophy. What he says is that the Greek poets were not really doing philosophy, although they were seeking explanations. The problem is their explanations were crude and mythical. And once we move away from the crude, mythical anthropomorphic explanations and get more this worldly in our orientation, then we come to philosophical analysis and explanation. Well, do you see the prejudice in that? Now of course I'm not at all attracted to the theology of Homer or Hesiod or the Greek Trajans. But the modern world, when it writes its history of philosophy says well that can't be philosophy because that's too dependent upon things beyond the natural world. Thales looked for an explanation of the unity of reality and the process of change that we see right here. In the natural world everything is water and everything is filled with active agents of change or everything is filled with God. That's why Thales gets marked out by people as the first philosopher. He may have been the first but he wasn't the best because somebody else came along soon thereafter and began to cross examine these ideas. Remember our lecture yesterday? What is philosophy all about? The critical task. Cross examines opinions, looking for more reliable foundations or presuppositions and seeks to construct an overall view of the world in which everything has its place. Anaximander. So our second Milesian did that himself as a philosopher. Cross examined Thales opinions, found them wanting and came up with his own overall view of what life and reality is about. Okay, I put down roughly 600 BC as a date for Thales just to make it easy to remember. Anaximander flourishes. Oh, I think we would say around 575. I'm trying to choose a middle date. His approximate dates are 610 to 545 BC. So I'll put down 575 just so you have round numbers. Did they know each other? I can't answer that question authoritatively. I'm not sure if thales died in 540 and Anaximandra died in 545 and they both lived on the same island or in the Milesian area. It would be very unlikely that they would not have spoken with each other or known each other. It's my commonsensical answer. Whether we could prove that they did or not is another matter. He certainly knew of Thales knew of his opinion. Anaximander is troubled, however, with this idea that everything is water. Not everything looks like water. In fact, let's take a rock, make it a big rock for a good experiment or a good consideration. This rock, when you break it open, doesn't have water in it. And when we look at the sand that's on the seashore, that doesn't seem very watery. It seems the very opposite of water. And so if everything is water, then that which is not water, but the very opposite of water, rocks and sand, and so forth, that which is not water is water. If you follow Thales hypothesis, that which is not water is water. That bothered him. Bothers me too. I hope it bothers you. That doesn't seem right to say that something has contradictory something is its opposite, not water. Rocks, sand are really water. That just seemed a little too mysterious for him. And so Anaximander, being a pretty good philosopher in one sense, doesn't make the mistake of trying to find something else. He says, now what if I say everything is wind or everything is fire? If I choose some other particular thing to say reality's made of, I'll have the same problem as Thales. The illustrations will change. Now, you won't be looking necessarily at rocks and sand, although you might. But the point is, anybody who chooses a particular kind of thing for the essence of reality is going to run into a logical contradiction. Because there are things which are not like that particular. There are things that are not water, are not fire or not wind. You wouldn't want to choose dirt or rocks or sand, because then you have to deal with things that don't seem like dirt, rocks and sand, like wind or fire. So what I'm getting at here is that Anaximander realized that if there is a one thing of which everything is a manifestation, if there's an underlying stuff of reality from which this whole world is made, it cannot be particular. If we're going to avoid logical contradiction, then that which is the stuff of reality must be without defining characteristics. Without defining characteristics. It's a. Well, I think some pictures in Your mind might be helpful. It's kind of like a blob, an indescribable blob. Don't think of the movie the Blob because it isn't greenish and it isn't oozy, it isn't slimy because that would be a particular kind of thing, right? Then non slimy things wouldn't be included. So that underlying stuff of reality he called the boundless. Can you understand why it was boundless? Green is bounded. Green goes this far. And then there are things which are not green. There's a beginning and end, if you will, even if it's shaded into another color. Green things are bounded. Water. Things are bounded, aren't they? There's water and there's not water. Air. Things are bounded. There's air and there's not air. Fire is bounded. There are things that are hot, there are things that are cold. So whatever the underlying reality is, it's got to give rise to contradictory characteristics. It itself can't be hot because it gives rise to hot and cold. It itself cannot be water because it gives rise to things which are water and sand or dirt or stone, like. So the underlying reality, he said the metaphusis, that which lies behind the natural world, can't have any boundaries, cannot have any defining characteristics. And so he called it a peron. In Greek, the pharon is the boundary and a means it's the alpha primitive. It's denying a boundary. Aperon means no boundary. The boundless. This is an interesting idea. There is a characterless, homogenized, boundless stuff of which hot and cold, black and white, water and sand all come from, are made up of. W.T. jones, I think, makes the suggestion that though he didn't have the sophistication to say this, it may be an anticipation of the idea that everything's made up of energy. Energy is not hot or cold, black or white, green or red, water or not water. But energy becomes atoms and atoms are made up, comprise water molecules and what makes up rocks and that sort of thing. There's an underlying chemical, characterless reality that gives rise to everything in this world. Is he monistic? Yes. He shares Thales assumption that reality is one kind of thing. But it's not one particular kind of thing, it's a particular less kind of thing. It's a universal blah stuff from which everything else comes. Now how did he learn about or come up with this idea of a particular less stuff, an aperon or boundless that underlies everything? Do you think he went out and did some scientific research. You see, he did philosophy in a way differently than Thales. And I don't want to develop this into a full blown theory of epistemology, but I want you to notice the practice was different. Thales most likely looked around the world naturally and he said there's a lot of water. Maybe everything is water. It's a bad generalization. It's a logical fallacy. He's wrong in saying that. But you see that how he came up with his answer. He looked around. Did Anaximandra look around and conclude, oh, there's a lot of boundless. I think maybe everything is boundless. Now how did he come up with this? He reasoned about it, he stopped and he reflected. He stopped and he reflected. He said, now I could contradict Thales, I could bring sand and rocks as a disproof of his theory. But if I offer anything that has particular characteristics in the place of Thales answer, somebody will come along and refute me. So instead of doing research in the empirical sense, he tried to reason his way to an answer. And here we have the beginning of the two basic epistemologies that govern non Christian thinking. The one being empirical, rely upon observation and experience. The the other being rational, rely upon your conceptualizations and clarity of thought. Stop and reflect. Try to mentally come up with an answer here that makes logical sense. So let me give you another term. Although an acts of Mandra is not a full blown rationalist, I want you to note the two different approaches to epistemology I've defined. Empiricism. I'll define rationalism as the view that some knowledge is independent of observation, experience or sense perception. Some knowledge is independent of observation, experience or sense perception. The empiricist says all knowledge is dependent on observation. The rationalist says no, there are some things we know that are independent of observation. And in that sense an aximander had to be a rationalist because he didn't observe the boundless. And yet he claimed to know that reality is made up of the boundless. So he was being rational or rationalistic rather than empirical in this approach. Something else about Anaximander's metaphysic that is important. I'm talking slow now and making sure we know these words, but that day will be behind us and you'll have to master them eventually. What is metaphysics? It's the nature of reality. The nature of reality. Anaximander's metaphysic was deterministic. Deterministic. Anaximander knew that there was a process of Change going on within the natural world. Thales had said, everything is full of life or gods, an agent of change. Anaximander adds to this assumption that there's a process of change going on, that that process is a necessary one, that it doesn't happen just chaotically, but there is a principle or a repeating pattern. There's a rationale for the change. And so one of the fragments we have from Anaximander reads from what source things arise to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed, from what source things arise to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed. The idea that there is a pattern of necessity in the way things arise and are destroyed. So Anaximander is our first example of a secular determinist thinking that the process of change is a regulated and necessary one. Let me now add to your vocabulary, your building list of vocabulary, the term determinism. Determinism is the view that there is no contingency for every event is necessary according to some laws. Again, the view that there is no contingency for every event is necessary according to some laws. Now, if we want to advance a big leap down the road, historically, determinism in its more sophisticated expression is the view that every event is theoretically predictable. Every event is theoretically predicted, predictable because if it happens necessarily according to some laws, then if we could learn those laws and the factors that went into anything, we could predict what event would take place. Determinists would say, if I knew all of the conditioned response mechanisms that worked upon you and your childhood and upbringing, if I knew all the factors that go into your brain, into your body, what you ate for breakfast, you know, what your emotional structure is like and so forth, I could predict who you're going to vote for, for president, you know, and not just predict in the sense that I got a really good idea, but if we knew enough, we could say with certainty, that's with confidence, what you would do. Now, human beings are tougher, obviously. There's a lot of deterministic thinking when it comes to the natural world. We don't send people up in rockets without having some pretty good idea of how we can project where they're to going, going to be, how they'll go into orbit and how we're going to get them back. People see how the natural world can be manipulated, can be controlled, how we can predict outcomes, and so forth. And so determinism becomes a pretty attractive idea to many people. And then they go on to apply it to human nature too, which is where it's a Big mistake. They say, well, in the same way that I can project the path of a rocket, if I knew enough about you and all the factors that go into you, I could project like you as a rocket, where you'll end up too. I could tell you how you're going to vote, how you're going to respond to this joke, what you're going to choose to eat for dinner tonight. Well, Anaximander was not a full blown, highly worked out behaviorist and determinist, but he had the seed of that. And when he said from what source things arise to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed, there is something that controls the changes in this world, making them deterministic. Okay, so what do we know about Anaximander's metaphysic, his view of reality? We know that it's monistic, we know that it's deterministic. We know that whatever this world looks like, the reality is different, that the world appears one way, but the reality that lies behind the world is different. The world looks like hard and soft, wet and dry, hot and cold, black and white, but the reality behind it all is, is different than that. What do we know about his epistemology? What's his theory of knowledge? How do we know what we know? Well, at least in some major areas, we know what we know by stopping and reflecting rather than going out and looking and seeing, trying to observe the world. Okay, let me add a couple more notes about Anaximander that make him culturally relevant to us today. The first is that he was the first person known to be an evolutionist in the history of Western thought. If everything is the boundless, the ape, Rome, how do we get things that are wood and some things that are stone and some things that are water? How do we get giraffes and bears? All the diversity of the world that we experience? Well, Anaximander tried to account for it this way. He said the apeiron is kind of like a reservoir. You might think of it as a really, really, really big mixing bowl. And in the midst of this mixing bowl is the cookie dough. But it's not really doughy. I mean, it's really. It's been mixed so much that it's rarefied, that it's like water in its consistency. And in this mixing bowl there's a circular motion that's been set up. And so all the apeiron, all the goop is spinning around. Now what happens if you get a little too frisky with a bowl full of water or something? Of that general consistency as you're shaking it. You probably have all had this experience. Maybe you've had a glass of Coke or milk or something when you're growing up and you saw that you could make it spin, and then you could make it spin faster and faster and faster, and pretty soon a little bit of it goes flying off the edge of it, right? Well, the apeiron is in this circular motion in this reservoir. And what happens is some of it flips out or flies out, and as it does so, it becomes different things by chance. It becomes different things by chance. Well, or is it by necessity, Is it determinist? So as these things come out, it's by chance, but then they're controlled by determinism, I guess, when they come out and they become the different things that we see now. Some of the things that come out, they don't survive. They don't do so well. But a fish kind of thing came out once, and that fish did all right. And the fish developed, and men developed from fish, according to Anaximander. So let's not be too enamored of the evolutionary theory advanced by Darwin, as though science has finally come up with this idea of origins. And philosophers came up with that idea a long time ago. Darwin was only giving a superficial, scientific, cosmetic appearance to it. But speculation was that men evolved from fish way back when. And the last thing we'll say about Anaximander is that he also had an elementary idea of transmigration of souls. Transmigration of life maybe would be a better way of putting it for him. Cosmic matter, as we've already seen, creates itself, the reservoir. The boundless spills over, but then it disintegrates and recreates itself. Life develops out of the reservoir, it disintegrates, comes back to the reservoir and then recreates itself. There's a perpetual life process, a transformation of soul, understood as life, from one thing to another. An entity lives, dies. But then that entity comes back in another form. It's not the highly dramatic form of transmigration that you find in Hinduism. You might come back as a Brahma bull or an aardvark or something, but it is, in philosophical, abstract concept, the same idea. Life disintegrates and then recreates itself, comes back in another form. We've only done two Greek philosophers already. Got a whole bunch of wild ideas running around, don't we? What is this world like? Is it water or is it boundless? Is it free or determined? Do you know? By looking and observing or do you know by stopping and reflecting? Where did life come from? Where is life going? The Greek philosophers had answers to these questions. They weren't great answers, but they were answers. And you notice that in every case they are answers which defy the truth revealed by God himself about himself, this world and the nature of man. The third, my legion, after Thales and Anaximander is Anaximenes. And I have for his dates approximately 5:88 to 5:26 B.C. 588 to 526. And if we take kind of a medium date there, we'll just call him 550. Flourishing about 550. You see how much Dr. Bonson likes you. He makes it so easy up here on the board. Isn't it obvious? 600, 575, 550. Now it's all, of course historically inaccurate. It's just a rough approximation, but it gives you some idea of where they lived and where they stood relative to one another. Anaximenes has problems with the theory advanced by Anaximander. What is this? Boundless. On the one hand, it's something particular. It's that thing from which or that something, stuff from which everything else arises. So it is particular and yet it's not particular. It's nothing in particular. Right, because it has no defining characteristic. So it's a thing, but it has no thingness about it. There's nothing that distinguishes it from anything else. How can you have an unbounded thing or stuff if it's unbounded? It can't ever be defined or delimited as a stuff or a thing from which everything else arises. So Anaximenes says, no, this is really blowing my mind. I can't follow this. You can't have one thing, a particular ape, Ron, which is itself not particular, is nothing in particular. And so we're back to the problem. What then is the unity for life? How is the many that we see round about us a one? What is the unity that underlies the diversity of our experience, the diversity of this world? And Anaximenes proposes that it's air. It's air. All is air. Now, if you have been listening to my explanation, you might be thinking, well, at this point somebody's going to jump right in and refute this guy. Anaximander knew better than that. Anaximander said, if I choose any particular thing, somebody's going to come along and give its opposite and say, see, you're wrong. You've got a non water Thing, a rock which is supposed to be water, it can't be that way. And if you choose air, somebody's just going to jump in and do the same thing. Ah, but Anaxemnes probably thought he had a way around that. Because, you see, air has a certain quality about it that you don't find in rocks or water and other things. Air has a density. It can be heavy, it can be light, Which is to say air can change quantitatively. Air can change quantitatively, it can be compressed, it can be expanded, You say, yeah, so what? Well, but if it's subject to contraction and expansion, maybe those quantitative changes are what account for the qualitative changes we see in the world. Everything is one, but it's an expandable, contractable one kind of thing. And those changes in quantity, measurable changes, if you will, mathematical changes, account for the changes in quality. Hot and cold, hard or soft? Soft things are more airy, hard things are more compressed. Now, this is pretty primitive thinking still, and yet it has a fascinating foreshadowing of modern science, doesn't it? What Anaxeminates, if I have him right here, and again, I'm following others. This is not my own thinking. But if we're right in seeing Anaximanes choosing air for its quantitative, for the fact that it has quantitative change that could account for qualitative change, then he really has proposed what we might call a quantitative reductionism for reality. All the qualities we find really come down to quantitative differences. And that's the thrust of modern science. Modern science wants to use a quantitative description of the world, doesn't it? Modern science is not content to leave things at the level of vinegar and water, oil, blood and so forth. What's it want to do? It wants to reduce those things down to primary chemicals. Right? Well, but then you have the periodic chart with all these chemicals. But is modern science happy to leave the periodic chart with all of its diversity? No, the periodic chart comes down to quantity differences, the number of electrons, protons and so forth. And of course, more sophisticated subatomic particles and all that. But the point is, everything has a quantitative account for how they. How something differs from another. Anaximenes may have been the first one to have caught on to that way of thinking. Qualitative changes reduce the quantitative change changes all is air. Well, but of course there are problems. If everything is air, how does air become water? And if air becomes water, then there isn't one kind of thing, is there? There's two kinds of things now, air and water. If Air becomes water, does it remain air? Well, that seems a funny thing to say. And yet if you don't say it remains air, then you don't have a unity underlying all the diversity of the world, because now you have two things. In fact, why say that something becomes something else at all? Why say that air turns into something that seems the opposite of air, like water? How can something be its opposite? How can it become its opposite? Is it the same thing? Here's one of the major questions that I gave you yesterday in my introductory lectures. Is there identity through change in this world? What is the identity of things through change? Is air still air when it becomes water, or does it become not air? So Anaximenes had something to be said for his theory, but it obviously wasn't going to hold water either. Pardon the pun. Well, let's move ahead then. We've looked at the Milesian problem of matter. Roman numeral 5 in our outline will be the Pythagorean wonder of ordered. I'm changing the word so in the outline to indicate that while the Milesians struggled with this problem, what is the matter or stuff of reality? The Pythagoreans were not really struggling with the problem of order. They were discovering the wonder that there is order in this natural world round about us. The dates for Pythagoras himself are 580 to 497 BC. These are approximately. And so I'm going to choose a median date. You know how I like to do this. The history department would probably get all over Dr. Bronson for the way he does this, but just to make it a little simpler to remember the chronology and so forth, I'm going to make Pythagoras about. What should we say, 545, 30 B.C. give him a. An age of 525. Oh, 525. Okay, good. All right. Highland history. I love it. At least you guys can look at this like, hey, there's a pattern. I see this. 600 for Thales, 575 for Anaximander, 550 for Anaxemines. And we're going to choose as an arbitrary day to flourish. And 525 for Pythagoras. Now, this is the one philosopher you all know something about already, is that right? Because you've all studied, not just math, geometry in particular. And believe it or not, though, there's a practical and geometric application of this that is part and parcel of his philosophy. Pythagoras discovered that there are reliable, predictable mathematical relationships in this world, what we now call mathematical relationships. Now, you know it from geometry. He learned something about angles, right? When you study triangles, what's the Pythagorean theorem? A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Pythagoras had. He discovered there was this relationship, and it's true of all triangles, right? Isn't that amazing? There's a kind of order to the world. Now, I don't want to see these smirks and grins about this from you guys, because it is wondrous when you stop thinking about it. You were taught it, you went to school, assuming there's an order to reality, and your teachers are going to lay it out for you. But there was a day when somebody was doodling around and working at things and saying, look at this. This works on this triangle, and it works on this triangle. There's a pattern here. There's a regularity in the natural world that you can't break. Isn't that something we know the regularity of the seasons. But the seasons are not exact, are they? Sometimes we think summer is ending and fall is coming, and then we get Indian summer back. You know, we get a real hot week or two again. Some winters there's a lot of rain, other winters there's not a lot of rain. So there's a kind of regularity, but it's not exact. But when it comes to triangles, there's a regularity that is predictable, and that was wondrous. They found this out with respect to music, too. If you take a string and stretch it, and if it's one that resonates enough so that you can hear when you pluck it. Pythagoras found out that the tone was. If you put your finger halfway down the string and plucked it, the tone would be exactly twice as high as if you only put your finger a quarter of the way down the string. And so the development of musical art is based on a kind of geometric progression within. Of course, we now know that that is in fact geometric, but it's the geometry of what? The vibrations of the string. But that correlated. That correlated to the length of the string and where you place your finger and the halvings and the quarterings of the string. And so the Pythagoreans find a mathematical, predictable order in this fluctuating natural world. What does that lead them to do? They say, well, all reality must have an explanation that's mathematical. Then some things can be explained mathematically. Maybe everything can be explained mathematically. So for Pythagoras and The later Pythagoreans, like Philolaus. You read about Philolaus in your book ultimate reality consists of numbers and geometric shapes. What's the world made of? Numbers and numerical relationships, geometrical shapes. Now that seems really strange to us. You know, when you're drinking a milkshake, you don't think that you're drinking a geometrical shape or a combination thereof. But though it seems strange to us, you can see how later there's a certain kind of truth to that. Right, I'm drinking a chocolate milkshake. Why does it have the consistency that it does and the taste that it does? What has to with do do with the molecular bonding and if you will, the shape of the molecules and the number of them and so forth. There is a kind of mathematical explanation for chocolate milkshakes. Well, that isn't what the Pythagoreans were thinking of particularly, but they thought all of reality must be governed by numbers and by geometry. Physical phenomena becomes what it is. Phenomena. The appearance, the physical appearance of things is determined by mathematical relationships of shape and proportion. Now, of course, the physical world all around us is changing all the time, isn't it? It's changing, changing, changing. But through all that constant process of change, you know what stays unchanged? The geometric and numerical relationships. Isn't that right? If you have three apples and two apples, you have five apples. And even though the apples may rot and get brown and smell it, you still have five rotten, smelly things. It doesn't change. The numbers stay the same and the geometric laws stay the same. So through all the constant process in the physical world, what is unchanging are numerical and geometric relations. So what are the laws of nature? Well, the laws of nature are mathematical principles for potential Pythagoras and his disciples. So for the Pythagorean school of thought, they discovered the wonder of order and look for a mathematical explanation of all reality. That's what I want you to pick up on. Now, there's some other aspects of Pythagoras as a philosopher that we should note as well. His metaphor metaphysics tends to be a non natural metaphysic, isn't it? He's not looking at something you can touch, like water or air or something. He's looking at numerical relations as the basis of reality. Geometric relations. Let's add to this that Pythagoras took a religious approach to life. He wasn't just a secular philosopher in the sense that, like W.T. jones respects Thales for being more naturalistic. Pythagoras was very religious. He had an orientation that was, well, religious in the superstitious sense, but nevertheless, according to him, the highest, the supreme value for human life is intellectual. The highest value is not pleasure or sex or power. It is rather intellect. And of course, Pythagoras lived that out in his own life, didn't he? What do we see in Pythagoras? A great deal of intellectual activity. He's a mathematician, a geometric and musically inclined scholar. But that was his religious approach to life. All men should be contemplative and intellectual. But he went beyond that. He believed in the transmigration of souls. Also. He believed that the soul develops during its life in the body and that eventually it moves on to another body and continues its development or is set back. How will anyone reach the final state for the soul, according to Pythagoras, through ascetic purification rites and intellectual activity. If one will exercise his brain, become a good student and scholar, reflect and emphasize reflection in his life, and if he will purify himself ascetically. You know what asceticism is, the denial of the body. There were various practices that were necessary that you would be pure. Obviously you don't want to overindulge in food or sex or sleep and so forth. So you must liberate your soul from bodily ties, according to Pythagoras. Now, I'm just going to stop and give my Christian commentary here. Isn't that something. He sees the wonder of God's intellect in this world, that there are mathematical relationships that are reliable, that the world shows God's mathematical character, if you will, the orderliness with which God has created the world and how we can think things through, and that there are abstract universal laws of math and geometry. And what he does is, instead of appreciating that that's due to the Creator God and loving this world and the body in which God has made us. He says, well, then we must become like those mathematical principles rather than we must become like God. Then we must get away from the body. We must become liberated from physical things and practice ascetic purification. He creates an idol. You know, he may not have bowed down to wood or stone, but it's just like the apostle Paul says. He finds some good thing of the created order that reflects God's goodness. And he starts worshiping and finding, following as an ultimate authority that which God has made. He follows the reflection rather than the source of the reflection, God. One more thing about Pythagoras, he held to the brotherhood of all living things. The brotherhood of all living things. What did that lead to? Well. Well, he was a vegetarian. If all living things are brothers, transmigration of souls, then you don't want to eat animals. You might be eating your father or mother or your brother for all you know. Or grandfather. Does that mean that vegetables weren't alive? That you could consider that part of the living things? Well, you beat me to one of the punchlines for Christmas. That's one of the problems that unbelievers have when they try to generalize or make universal moral laws. Can't be done when it originates from man who does not have omniscience, is not God. When men try to make universal laws and they run into that, we must respect all living things. So don't eat deer and don't eat bear, don't eat chickens and so forth. But if you have to respect all living things, then you shouldn't eat anything. What did Thales say? Everything is full of life. Hylozoism. And so if he listened to Thales, he would starve to death. Anyway, he was a vegetarian. He also believed that women were equal to men. That's why Pythagoras is well liked today by some parts of our society. The brother who of all living things entails also the equality of male and female living things. So men and women are equal. And finally, Pythagoras had a view of world harmony. He felt that if we all practice vegetarianism and equality, there would be harmony rather than warfare in the world. Well, it's obvious that there's an overlap between Eastern mysticism and Western philosophical speculation and development. Pythagoras is a beautiful illustration of that. He still has this concept of the unity of all things being non physical and that there is life beyond this life, but it's a transmigration rather than coming before your maker. And so he has a lot of Eastern influence in his thought. Now that may not be the best way of putting it. Is it the case that you have Hinduism and Eastern thought influencing Pythagoras or vice versa? Or is there kind of like a common zeitgeist or mentality that he illustrates and the Hindus illustrate? I'm not going to comment on which of those theses is correct. But you do see the parallel, that's for sure. Are the dates pretty close? Hinduism goes back much, much further back than Pythagoras. But I can't give you the exact dates without looking them up. Okay, well, we do have a nice set of dates up here on the board though, don't we? Hope you can remember this. The Milesians 600, 575, 550. And we have Pythagoras flourishing. We've given him an arbitrary date of 5, 25. So in 25 year increments we have the development of philosophy. This is kind of like the reconstruction of the history of philosop philosophy to make it a little more orderly and tidy. And when we continue tomorrow, we'll take up as Roman Numeral 6 Heraclitus and the the problem of identity and change.