Appearance
10.1 — Before Socrates: The First People Who Asked What Things Are Made Of
Around 600 BCE, in a Greek trading city on the coast of what is now Turkey, somebody asked a question that nobody had asked in that form before.
**Not "who made the world" — every culture had an answer to that. "What is the world made of?"
The difference is that the second question expects an answer you could check.
Miletus
The city was Miletus, a wealthy port with contact across the Mediterranean and into Mesopotamia and Egypt. Trade, foreigners, competing stories about the gods, and money. Exactly the conditions that produced the Buddha's century in India (6.1), at almost exactly the same time.
Thales, around 585 BCE. He said everything is water.
Which sounds foolish and is not. Look at the reasoning: water is the only substance he knew that appears as solid, liquid and gas; life requires it; it is everywhere. He is proposing a single underlying substance that takes different forms.
And the important part is not the answer. It is the type of answer. No gods, no story, no genealogy — a natural explanation, proposed as a claim about how things are, open to disagreement.
He is also credited with predicting a solar eclipse in 585 BCE, which if true means he was using Babylonian astronomical records, and which either way tells you what kind of person he was.
Anaximander, his student, disagreed. He said the basic stuff cannot be any of the familiar things, because if it were water then fire could not exist. So he proposed apeiron — the boundless, the indefinite — an unlimited something from which the opposites separate out.
That is an abstract theoretical entity, invented because the observable candidates fail. It is a genuinely sophisticated intellectual move and it is happening in the second generation.
He also said the earth floats free in space, held by nothing, because there is no reason for it to move in one direction rather than another — a symmetry argument, in the sixth century BCE. And he said the first humans developed from fish-like creatures, because human infants cannot survive alone and so could not have been the first form.
Anaximenes said air, condensing and rarefying. And the mechanism is the contribution: one substance, changing by density, producing everything. Quantity producing quality.
The two positions everything after runs between
Heraclitus
From Ephesus, around 500 BCE, and he wrote in deliberately compressed, oracular fragments.
Everything flows. You cannot step into the same river twice, because new water is flowing.
And the sharper claim: the stability you see is not the absence of change but a pattern in it. The river is a stable thing made entirely of motion. A flame keeps its shape while nothing in it stays.
And: conflict is the father of all things. Opposites in tension are what produce a stable structure, the way a bow works only because the string pulls against the wood.
His underlying substance is fire, which is not a substance at all but a process, and that is the point.
Parmenides
And the exact opposite, from a Greek city in southern Italy.
His argument is pure logic and it is genuinely hard to escape.
Whatever is, is. What is not, is not — and cannot be spoken or thought about, because to think about nothing is to think about nothing.
Therefore nothing can come into being, because it would have to come from what is not. And nothing can perish, because it would have to become what is not. And nothing can change, because change means being what you were not.
Therefore: reality is one, unchanging, indivisible and eternal, and the world of change your senses report is not the truth.
This is the first time anybody argued that reason should be trusted over the senses when they conflict, and the whole subsequent history of philosophy is downstream of it.
His student Zeno defended it with paradoxes. Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, because by the time he reaches where it was, it has moved on, and so on infinitely. An arrow in flight is, at each instant, at rest in a space equal to itself, so how does it move?
Zeno's paradoxes were not fully resolved until the mathematics of infinite series and limits was developed — Volume II covers that — and they were not silly. They were pointing at something real about the continuum.
The attempted resolutions
Everything after Parmenides is an attempt to save the appearances without abandoning his logic.
Empedocles: four elements — earth, water, air, fire — which do not come into being or perish, but mix and separate. Change is rearrangement, so nothing actually comes from nothing. Driven by two forces he called Love and Strife.
Anaxagoras: everything contains a portion of everything, and change is a change in proportion. And he introduced nous, mind, as the ordering principle — the first appearance of intelligence as a cosmological cause.
He also said the sun is a red-hot stone larger than the Peloponnese and that the moon is made of earth and reflects the sun's light, for which he was prosecuted for impiety and had to leave Athens.
And Democritus and Leucippus: atoms and void.
The atomists
Because this is the one that turned out closest to right, and the reasoning deserves setting out.
If matter were divisible without limit, then dividing completely would leave nothing, and you could not reassemble something from nothing. Therefore division terminates in indivisible units — atomos, "uncuttable."
The same argument the Vaisheshika school made in India (9.6), apparently independently.
And Democritus's system: atoms differ only in shape, size, arrangement and position. They move in a void — which required arguing that empty space exists, against Parmenides, who said what-is-not cannot be. Everything that happens is atoms colliding and combining, with no purpose and no design.
Sweet, bitter, hot, cold and colour exist by convention, he said — in reality there are only atoms and void. A distinction between what a thing is and how it appears to a perceiver, in the fifth century BCE.
The sophists
And the last group before Socrates, who are usually dismissed and should not be.
They were professional teachers who charged fees, mostly for rhetoric and argument, in a democracy where the ability to persuade an assembly determined everything.
Protagoras: "man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, and of those that are not that they are not." Relativism, stated first. And on the gods: "concerning the gods I cannot know whether they exist or not, or what they are like; many things prevent knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life."
They were detested for charging money and for teaching people to argue either side of a case. And the second charge is more interesting than the first — teaching someone to argue both sides is either sophistry or the beginning of critical thinking, and it is exactly what Volume VI recommends as being your own devil's advocate.
What this founding period established
Three things, and they are the reason it matters.
That the world has a natural explanation and that you can look for it. Every science descends from this.
That reason and the senses can conflict, and that this is a real problem. Parmenides opened it and nobody has closed it (15.2).
And that a claim should be argued for rather than asserted. Thales said water; Anaximander said no, and here is why. A tradition of disagreement was established in the first generation and it never stopped.
What to carry from this page
The question "what is it made of" expects a checkable answer, and "who made it" does not. Almost all intellectual progress consists of converting the second kind of question into the first.
The stability you see may be a pattern in motion rather than the absence of it. Heraclitus's river, and 15.3 says the physics agrees.
When reason and observation conflict, something interesting is happening, and both of the available responses — trust the argument, trust the eyes — have been wrong at various times.
And the atomic argument arrived independently in Greece and India from the same reasoning about divisibility. When two isolated traditions reach the same conclusion by the same route, that is worth noticing.
Next: 10.2 — a man who wrote nothing, taught nothing, claimed to know nothing, and changed everything.