The Endless Journey: The History of the Natural Philosophy of Western Civilization
By Dr. Bill J Grossman
Introduction
I would like to invite anyone who is interested, to come along on a journey through time with me. Before we embark on our trip, I need to establish the historical setting for the beginning of our story. I would like to choose a familiar ancient historical reference point to start our tour. Since our voyage begins in Ancient Greece, the obvious place to start is the site of Homer’s Iliad which occurred in the Aegean Sea around 12th century BC.
The 12th century BC was a tremendous time of change in the western world. It was near the end of The Bronze Age. Centuries earlier, the Minoan culture had been overthrown by the Mycenaean’s who were now in command over much of Greece as well as the Aegean Sea. Some of the Minoans may have escaped to found the city of Troy at the northwestern border of Asia Minor during the waning of the Hittite Empire. The Middle East was in a constant state of war between the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians.
The Trojan War had taken a toll on the resources on the Greeks and it was about that time that vast migrations of the mysterious “Sea Peoples”, occurred throughout the Aegean, settling in Asia Minor and the Middle East. It was probably these events that led to the “Dark Age” of Ancient Greece. Not much history survives about this period because the Greeks lost the ability to write anything down. It was not until 3 centuries later that one group of the descendants of the Sea People’s, the Phoenicians, reinvented written language and passed it on to the Greeks, around the 9th century B.C. allowing the poet Homer to write about the Trojan War in his famous epic soon afterwards.
During this time, the Ionian Greeks set up colonies all along the coast of Asia Minor. These colonies became the spawning grounds for some of the earliest known ancient Greek philosophers. Now that I have given the reader the historical and geographical background for the beginning of my story in ancient Greece, I would like to take a moment to describe the world view of the people in that part of the world at that time.
Human beings have the innate desire to understand and control nature in order to survive as a species. This has been going on since the beginning of civilization over 5 thousand years ago. The earliest civilizations were pagan, meaning that they believed in the existence of many gods. Each god had a special purpose as far as nature was concerned. If you wanted to control the wind, sun, rain etc., you could sacrifice to the god who controlled that aspect of nature in order to achieve the desired result.
Ancient pagan western civilizations such as the Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians noticed that the movements of the heavenly bodies such as the sun and moon and the correlated with events in nature on Earth such as the seasons and the tides. They also used the constellations to navigate and developed astrology as a means of predicting the future.
The Ancient Greek world view was first compiled in writing in the 8th century B.C. by the poet Hesiod in his work entitled “Theogony”. In this work he discussed how the universe and everything in it was created by a genealogy of gods in an orderly fashion. In it, the earth was a flat disc surrounded by an ocean on all sides. Above this earth was a hemisphere known as the heavens and below the disc was an equally big hemisphere known as Tartaros which was dark and mysterious. This was the theological world view of pre-classical western civilization prior to the dawn of Natural Philosophy.
The Milesian School:
The Dawn of Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy
The earliest known Ancient Greek natural philosopher was Thales, who lived in the Ionian town of Miletus in the 6th century B.C. He was a legend in his own lifetime. He made a fortune in the olive oil business which gave him the time and resources to travel, especially to Egypt, and pursue his scholarly interests such as astronomy, math and engineering. He was not satisfied with the traditional pagan worldview which involved accepting nature as subject to the whims of a pantheon of deities who required regular sacrifices from humans in exchange for miraculous favors.
Thales is credited with being the first person in history to ask the first metaphysical question: “What is the world made of?” He was a keen observer and noted that water was unique because it can exist in all the known states; solid, liquid and gas. He postulated that the fundamental substance that everything else is derived from must be water. Even though his postulate later proved to be wrong, he is credited with starting Western Civilization on a scientific quest to discover whether there is a fundamental substance from which everything else is made of. This quest continues to this day where quantum physicists are still trying to answer the question, but I am getting way ahead of myself.
As I mentioned earlier, Thales was also interested in astronomy. As an astronomer he wondered about the structure of the universe (Cosmos in Greek) which became the discipline known as “Cosmology”. Later classical Greek historians and philosophers, such as Plato credit him as being the first person to correctly predict a solar eclipse. Thales started the first known school of natural philosophy in Ancient Greece; we refer to it as “The Milesian School”.
The journey of the evolution of Natural Philosophy had begun. The seed had been planted. Ancient Greek philosophers began to ask metaphysical questions about nature such as how the universe was created, what is it made of and how does it work, without resorting to theological, spiritual or mystical explanations. That is the underlying principle of natural philosophy.
Let us follow the succession of scientific breakthroughs as the torch has been passed down over the ages. One of Thales most famous students as well as his successor was Anaximander. He is credited with publishing the first book about Natural Philosophy, which he aptly entitled “About Nature”. Anaximander agreed with Thales that there was a fundamental substance. He didn’t agree with Thales that all substances could be derived from water. He felt that the true nature of this fundamental substance was yet to be discovered. He proposed that this substance is infinite and eternal. Everything else was created from this universal substance through the process of “Eternal Motion”. There were three stages to eternal motion; coming into being, existing, and passing away.
Anaximander had introduced some basic metaphysical concepts that formed the frame work for future generations; infinity, eternity, being, causality and change. He was way ahead of his time. Other competing schools of philosophical thought would arise in Greece and build on these concepts to form their own conclusions. Unfortunately, the old adage, “History is written by the victorious” holds true for philosophy as well. Much of what we know about ancient philosophy survives in the writings of philosophers such as Plato, Theophrastus and Aristotle who may not have shared the views of the other philosophers that they were arguing against. This is what held back the acceptance of atomic theory and the heliocentric theory for so long.
Before I leave the Milesian school, I must mention their most famous cosmologist, Anaximenes. Anaximenes attempted to explain their causes. Anaximenes cosmology is as follows:
The heavenly bodies including the earth are flat discs surrounded by air. The earth is in the center and the rest of the heavenly bodies evolved as the moisture of the earth evaporates from earth and turn into fire as they become rarefied. He noted that the movement of the visible planets was different than the rest of the stars. He rightly postulated that they were earth-like bodies and that they were cooler than the stars.
Other natural philosophers arose from Ionia, including Anaxagoras and Pythagoras. Pythagoras was born in Samos around 572 B.C. and started a secret cult society in Sicily. He was likely influenced by Egyptian Philosophy, as evidenced by his belief in the immortal nature of the soul, reincarnation, and the divine nature of certain shapes including triangles and pyramids. He credited to be the first person to apply mathematics to explain the universe. He is best known for the Pythagorean Theorem which he uses to predict the sizes of the sides of a right triangle (A²= B² + C²), which sowed the seed for the development of geometry later on by Euclid. He held that certain numbers were sacred such as 4 and 10. By summing up the numbers up to 4 you get ten.
The Tetrachus
1 (point) + 2 (line) + 3 (triangle) + 4 (pyramid) = 10
One of the many revolutionary concepts he is credited with is introducing the concept of a spherical earth into Greek cosmology, which may have also come from Egypt.
Anaxagoras was born in Smyrna around 500 B.C. He was the first to theorize that the moon derives its light from the sun and a lunar eclipse occurs when the earth blocks the suns light from reaching the moon. He also hypothesized that about the creation of the universe similar to the big bang theory. In his theory all substance was once one great whirling vortex which used centrifugal force to expand into air and aether. The aether was dry and hot and spread out further than the air which was moist, colder and denser. The air coalesced and condensed to form the earth. Anaxagoras is thus credited with being the first person to try to explain lunar eclipses as well as the concepts of centrifugal force, aether and a precursor to the big bang theory.
Anaxagoras was invited by the Pericles, the leader of Athens to move there. Unfortunately it was a bad time for Pericles because Sparta and Athens were embroiled in The Peloponnesian War. Athens was a city of intellectuals and Sparta was a society of warriors and Sparta won the war. One of the generals, Thucydides, wrote a detailed account of how Sparta won the war. During the war Anaxagoras was briefly jailed for heresy for his radical beliefs but Pericles was able to secure his release.
Go with the Flow
Heraclitus came taught the Ionian town of Ephesus. He was a contemporary of the Pythagorean and Milesian school in the 6th century B.C. The basis of his world view is that everything must change. He stated that a man can never step in the same river twice. In this allegory, the river represents the Universe which is in a constant state of flux. Change represents the driving force behind the creation of everything else. He did not think that change was random. Instead he postulated that change followed certain natural laws which he cumulatively termed the Logos. He stated that the Logos was hidden inside of the structure of the creation of everything, like an ancient form of Intelligent Design, which Plato later termed “The Forms”.
He also pointed out that reality and perception are not necessarily the same and that we need to train our senses of perception and powers of observation in order to perceive what is true knowledge. Plato developed this concept further in his philosophy of epistemology,
This started a debate at that time between Heraclitus and Parmenides, who stated that nothing ever changes. Parmenides and his pupil, Zeno also proposed that what we perceive as reality is actually an illusion and we can’t perceive it no matter how hard we train our powers of observation. Aristotle later refuted these beliefs successfully as being unscientific because they were untestable.
The Atomists: The Beginning of Atomic Theory
Most people think that atomic theory is a relatively new development in physics. In actuality it has its roots in Ancient Greece in the 5th century B.C. with the Ionian, Leucippus. He brought the concept to Thrace where his most famous student Democritus (460-370 B.C.) was credited with its creation. The concepts were later refined in Athens by Epicurus (342-270 B.C.) and poetically described by the Roman Epicurean, Lucretius, in 58 B.C. in his stunningly enlightened treatise of natural philosophy, De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).
None of the original writings of Democritus survives, however his theory persists in the writings of his rivals as well as his followers. Here is a summary of atomic theory as it existed in the 3rd century B.C.
If you cut everything into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually you will get to the elementary particles which cannot be cut any further which they called Atoms (uncuttable). These atoms are colorless, tasteless and odorless. They differ only in their shapes and have no other intrinsic properties. The atoms are randomly moving in space which they termed the Void. It is the way the shapes interact with each other that determines the property of matter as we know it.
Thus in summary one can see how the basic questions of Natural Philosophy had been asked by the beginning of the 5th century B.C. such as:
1. Is there a prime substance or substances out of which the universe is made of?
2. Does the universe change?
3. Are things created by randomness or by some form of intelligent design?
4. Can the universe be explained using math as the universal language?
5. Can we trust our senses to give us true knowledge of reality?
6. What is the cosmology of the Universe?
If I may be allowed to jump ahead a few thousand years for a moment, these topics continue today in the
Particle Theory of Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg vs. the Relativity Theories of Albert Einstein and The Wholeness and Implicit Order Theory of David Bohm,
Creationism vs. Darwinism,
Realism vs. Empiricism
Various Theories of Cosmology
