Lecture/Essay Appendix I:
HIS/THE 3463. History of Christianity I
Southwest Baptist University

The Intellectual Avenues
to Hellenistic Culture:
From the Mythopoeic to the Philosophic

by Harlie Kay Gallatin
© 2001 - 2009

Before Rational Philosophy

Intellectual Activity in Emerging Civilization

In their intellectual achievements the earliest civilized Greeks were not unlike the more civilized peoples of Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates regions. In the paragraphs that follow we explore the differences between rational thought as it developed among the Greeks beginning in the sixth century BC and the pre-rational manner of thinking primarily as it applies to the human experience. In another connection I have discussed the role of pre-rational thought as it contributes to the brand of abstract ideas we identify as religion.

The categories used today to analyze the human experience of existence in the physical world are different (better?) than those categories used by primitive, pre-rational mankind. Today we draw a sharp distinction between "objective" and "subjective" categories of experience and knowledge. We readily realize that human sensations through which we gain knowledge (seeing, hearing, feeling) can easily be misguided or confused; hence, we consider "objective" only that kind of knowledge which has been verified, qualified, analyzed, defined and conceptualized repeatedly by means of reason and rational procedures. Hence what we hold as objective knowledge of reality bears almost no direct resemblance to the day to day sensations of our existence.

Scientists today who are, unlike most of us, on the cutting edge of identifying, defining, labeling and explaining new knowledge face the same mysterious and fathomless reality faced by primitive people. If the characteristics of the new knowledge reminds the scientist of some other widely known analogous piece of knowledge he might, as observers of every age have, borrow existing terminology from analogous concepts and use it metaphorically to name and describe the new facet of reality.

While we clearly distinguish between dream visions and waking sight our very ancient forefathers sometimes did not. We readily analyze and categorize such everyday things as time, gravity and meteorological phenomena (wind, rain, snow, tornado, hurricane, etc.) as impersonal forces and processes of nature, but our very ancient forefathers had no such scientific categories and explanations available. Neither did their culture have scientific categories for objects of nature such as rivers, mountains, caves or the various species of animals, birds, and plants. Moreover, they had no means (no writing) by which to record individual experience outside their own memory except as experiences were described creatively using existing words metaphorically and analogous concepts. Then the account became part of the collective memory (oral tradition) of their community.
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The Functions of Myth in Human Society

That is not to say they had no defined categories with which to analyze their environment. They invented names for the environmental entities (animate and inanimate) but considered each entity another conscious being like the members of his clan, family, and tribe. They borrowed and applied the verbs and conceptual structure from their most advanced intensive, extensive and enduring experience from infancy onward, the realms of personal consciousness and interpersonal relationships when talking about these entities. It should not be surprising that they employed concepts and vocabulary drawn from this rich matrix of psychological and social knowledge to categorize, analyze and explain the larger physical world with all its perplexities.

Their pre-rational analysis of timeless natural reality was couched in a narrative story or a simple declarative statement. These statements dramatically describe conditions, events experienced and actions taken by self-conscious, active personalities. Many of these accounts and characterizations, these myths, were composed long before the invention of writing and preserved in the oral traditions. Only some of them were eventually written down generations later. The modern literary definition of "myth" is a narrative account in which the major active personalities are deities. This contrasts with "epic" literature in which the major actors are human beings. The surviving fragments of the earliest literature seem to reveal a disjointed and random mixture of these two types.

Since today in English the term "myth" refers to an account in which deities are the actors we assume that such accounts deal with ancient religion. However, in the most primitive human communities the myth, as an account or a story reflecting a thinking process, had a broader function than just religion. It has the very important function of providing a structure of pre-defined categories for the non-human environment directly analogous to human social experience. We might describe the function of these categories as providing understanding, causation or explanation. This type of thinking from which myths emerge has been labeled both mythic and animistic. The former word is based on mythos, a Greek word for speech, specifically a narrative account, a fable, fictitious or made up tale, and the latter based on the Latin word for soul, spirit, intellect, understanding, etc., animus.

Since myth captures reality in terms of crude (animistic or mythic) analogies with human society, physical objects of all sorts, places, natural forces and even mystifying events become actors in the myth, each with a human-like personality capable of the whole gamut of human emotions and mental processes. Movement of clouds, heavenly bodies, or air was explained by analogy with human action using available vocabulary. Such action is contemplated, the decision is made to act, and then the action is carried out. We still say "the wind blows." The mythical being seems to us at first glance to be just another god, i.e., Wind; but the ancients knew there was a significant difference between the mythical being who serves to explain why the air moves and those beings that provided them understanding of the really important mysteries.

Myths are not all long stories made up of many instances of mythic thinking strung together. Some are short, stand-alone sayings, pithy, poetic and memorable. They became parts of the language lore. They served the same pragmatic purpose in primitive culture as scientific terminology serves today in our culture. It provided a way to cope more easily with the capricious and unforgiving physical environment encountered day by day. It was the form in which their cultural understanding about nature was preserved and communicated. The ancient wise man "made a myth" to explain and communicate to his fellow man knowledge of what he had discovered. Hence the term scholars today use to label this activity is mythopoeic (a coined English adjective based on the Greek verb mythopoieo) which means "doing myth" or "making myth". This term first was employed and popularized by Henri and Henrietta Frankfort in their 1946 book The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. I have discussed the more advanced employment of myth-making in what we now label religious or theological concepts elsewhere.

In these following paragraphs we continue to look at mythopoeic thought in its arguably non-religious function in the limited but developing world-view of primitive society where men are still struggling to learn how to understand and communicate complex experiences. Most skills and crafts from the making of stone tools, to ceramic pottery, to agriculture, to the development of writing preserve in their earliest written legacy evidences of the animistic, mythopoeic understanding that supported the craft from its most simple beginnings. In the process of time a rational understanding might replace a mythopoeic one, but the old-style thinking survived for centuries side by side with the new-style thinking. The old-style understanding continued to be expressed not just in myth, but in rituals, incantations, invocations, benedictions, laws (law codes) and other expressions all built upon the foundation of mythic understanding.
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Rites and Rituals

Any human action no matter how simple or complex, with or without verbalization, intending to induce a specific mythical personality to be involved, change its involvement, or cease being involved can be understood as a rite or a ritual. It its practiced in order to communicate with a specific mythical personality or perhaps a group of such personalities. Hence, mythopoeic thinking is directly related with those rites and rituals which human societies carried out for the primary purpose of coercing, persuading, convincing, encouraging, begging, thanking, pleasing, entertaining (or any other typical human social behaviors designed to motivate or placate other human beings) certain mythical personalities.

Most mythical or animistic "beings" were thought to have the same kind of consciousness that human beings have. They sleep, they wake, they see, they hear, they sense, they understand, they decide, they act (in ways entirely appropriate for them): but as a general rule they do not speak verbally to mankind! That could simply be because they decided not to speak, but it might be because they do not know the local language nor do the humans understand theirs (e.g. thunder). Strangers and immigrants in a human community frequently utter strange sounds in place of meaningful words; neither do they understand when spoken to. In dealing with strangers who can't speak or understand your words you must communicate by signs, gestures, and symbolic enactments. Hence, ritual became a standardized sign language for communicating your wishes to the mythical personality who has not demonstrated a knowledge of your spoken language. Modern scholarship has labeled the most obvious practices of this sort of communication as "sympathetic magic".

Remember that each discrete mythical personality or "being" is believed to be responsible for specific visible results (i.e., the being's power). Consequently, in order to construct a new ceramic vessel that will indeed hold liquid they must persuade the mythical personality with the power to contain liquid to take up residence in the lump of clay and produce that result. The ritual to achieve that probably included canons of shape and thickness as well as guidelines for firing. In other words the ritual contained the techniques or "know how" related to the task of making a pot that will hold water. Primitive peoples ritually addressed the manufacture of new tools or weapons with the intent of persuading that "being" inhabiting the tool or weapon to willingly use its "power" to "do" the job. Millenniums later, a Native American "rain dance" was a ritual to persuade the "rain" personality to get on with it. Do batters sometimes still kiss the bat before stepping to the plate?
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Mythopoeic Practitioners

For communicating with the enormous variety of mythical personalities inhabiting the human environment the individual certainly must carry out his own rituals (without any necessary assistance from a professional technologist, a priest) whenever addressing the most familiar and friendly beings. For the more powerful, hence more dangerous and unpredictable beings one had better seek the advice of a specialist. The skill of communicating different kinds of messages to the mythical beings inhabiting the environment was a very valuable body of knowledge. In pre-literate society such a body of knowledge was preserved in the collective human memory of a select group of individuals who meticulously taught the knowledge to each new member of the group. These knowledgeable people we call "priests", a term we apply here anachronistically from the later religious developments.
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Divination and Observation

Since mythical or animistic beings usually do not communicate other than by overt action, the human community may develop a very healthy curiosity about what that being is thinking or contemplating. You would not be surprised to hear your neighbor say, "Is it going to rain?" In mythopoeic terms it would be "will he/she decide to rain?" for the personality must decide to act. Humans learned to look for the telltale environmental indications that "rainmaker" is about to act (i.e. rain). The fancy modern word for figuring out what mythical beings are contemplating is "divination." Simple association, coincidence, between observed conditions or changes in the environment and subsequent overt actions attributed to a mythical personality gave the humans insight into the "thinking" or "will" of the mythical being. While an ordinary member of the human community could read the omens or "signs" significant for the familiar and friendly beings, the more powerful and unpredictable a mythical being was, the more difficult it was to divine his/her will.

In the really tough cases (e.g., the mythical personality that explained the collective action of the human socio-political community, i.e., the patron god) the priests specializing in divination formed organizations to increase their effectiveness in observing and preserving all those important coincidences that might assist in interpreting future observations of a similar nature in the collective human memory.

Through the centuries researchers have adopted labels for some of these special types of observation for the purpose of divination. For example: Extispicy was the identification and interpretation of significant "signs" found in the entrails of sacrificed animals. Hepatoscopy deals specifically with the liver of such animals. Libanomancy was the identification and interpretation of significant "signs" seen in the smoke rising from incense. Belomancy was deriving significant meaning from shooting a series of arrows. Psephomancy identifies significance in the casting of lots or dice. Oneiromancy is the interpretation of dreams. Necromancy is finding signs through the examination of dead bodies--or by extension, communicating with the "spirits" of dead people. Cledonomancy involves seeing significant meaning in something a designated stranger utters.
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The Intellectual Leaders of Human Society

These students of ritual and divination must be seen as more than merely religious witch doctors. They were the brain trust of the whole human race in those days. They were the "research scientists" of that age researching and probing the wider physical environment with the only tools and concepts available. Whether their knowledge and understanding of the cosmos and their skills in researching it are considered legitimate in our day is not the important issue. It was the cumulative result of their efforts that enabled humankind to enlarge its culture, to cope ever more effectively and consistently with its environment. and eventually to arrive at the achievement of civilization.

In the early millenniums of civilized achievement their contemporaries held the scholars and skilled researchers we call priests in very high regard. Priests were normally the intellectual elite, the most literate and intelligent. They were the leaders and governors of the human community, they were the irrigation planners, the agricultural extension agents, the mineralogists, the astronomers, the calendar makers, the financiers, the fortification architects, the record keepers, the military strategists and the skilled diplomats in that era's version of international politics--and the list should go on. Dismissing such ancient knowledge as basically religious imagination unless it happens to agree with modern canons of truth is obviously an error of judgment too easily made. It is far more likely that our prejudice against what appears as evil superstition and pernicious polytheism on the surface prevents us from fully comprehending and appreciating the grandeur of their insights.
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Primitive Cosmology

In more advanced cultures when mythopoeic thought grappled with more detailed abstract insights the main actor was clearly identified as a god. Yet, such accounts should not be dismissed as simply "religious" in the modern sense. For even these more complex narratives involving one or more recognized gods provided early man with a sensible, coherent explanation of the mysteries of human existence he could not otherwise explain or comprehend.

The blue sky and the blue sea must have tantalized ancient man's thought processes symbolizing the boundaries of their greater environment. Go as far as you can on land in any direction and you will run into the vast body of water. Water surrounded them. What was beyond the water? Nothing known! Their "understanding" ventured even further: that really distant blue (heaven) was so far away you couldn't see the waves in the blue water. Something seemed to be holding that water up there; perhaps a solid transparent barrier--a firmament--separating the blue waters above it from the air and blue waters beneath--like a large air bubble under the water, or perhaps, an inverted, submerged boat. The dry flat earth floated in the water beneath the inverted boat!

The prevailing physical environment did pose a challenging question to the most primitive analyists. It was, after all, simply there--surely the result of an intelligent action at some time in the past. Many intelligent actions started with one thing--a physical material--and resulted in transforming it to something else, something that has a pragmatic purpose. So here is this grand result; what was it made out of, why was it made, and who made it? In mythopoeic and/or animistic thought processes it is not surprising that the actor responsible was certainly understood to be a very powerful "being", powerful enough to do the job and intelligent enough to know how and why the job needs to be done. Here is a case where we must understand that this is not primarily a religious assertion; given their framework of understanding this was a practical, relevant explanation that answered pressing questions, questions that every generation of humans still has to grapple with.

A fascinating example of mythopoeic thought from the Tigris-Euphrates heritage is the narrative known as Atar-hasis, their creation story. The account takes place in the "Deep" (water) where two powerful beings engage in a life and death struggle as though they were enraged but intelligent beasts. The one, Marduk (the patron god of Babylon), evidently represented Order and Purpose, while the other, Tiamat, threshing about unpredictably and destructively, represented Chaos. Marduk kills Tiamat and literally cuts his carcass in half (Chaos has been subdued and limits established). Here then in the "Deep" Marduk takes Tiamat's dead carcass parts and shapes them into the cosmic environment. Half of the carcass becomes the dry earth beneath and half of it is fashioned as the sky above, each part holding back the "waters" of the "Deep".

Similarly, there is an Egyptian myth preserved in a carved relief of human-like acrobatic figures. It shows the sky as a deity supported on fingers and toes, arched over the reclining (floating) earth deity and assisted by another comparatively small deity, air, who is standing on the prostrate earth-deity beneath and helping support the sky's tummy. No wonder one mythic understanding of the sun's daily circuit was his "sailing" from one side of heaven to the other in a boat during the day and "sailing" around the rim of cosmos during the night.

Before we feel too disdainful of our ancient forefathers' silly ideas we need to remember that it was only about 500 years ago that mankind began to adopt the opinion that the sun rather than the earth is the central, fixed reference point of this particular star system. Already by the sixth century BC some Greeks were of the opinion that the earth was a sphere and by the fourth century BC it began to be accepted by some scholars at Athens that the sun, moon and planets all made their circuits around the spherical earth that was itself rotating on its own axis in the center of the cosmos. That very complicated geocentric understanding prevailed for 2000 years of western civilization.
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The Beginnings of Philosophy: A Hellenic Achievement

Transition to Rational Thought

In the period when Greek civilization began to emerge the Greeks began the slow process of developing a new way of looking at and explaining or understanding the world around them. Instead of using the language of human thought processes, actions and social relationships, they began to use the vocabulary of the kitchen and the craft shop where humans work with natural objects. There is still the narrative story but the spotlight shifts from the anthropomorphic subject/actor to the objective materials and the results of specific actions in and on those materials. We call this intellectual approach Rational Thought. It is the foundation of Greek Philosophy and indirectly, of modern science.

This ancient development of rational thinking was very gradual, beginning with certain individuals in the most culturally advanced regions. These individuals were among the first world travelers and as such were able to rise above the indigenous prejudices of the localized state culture. Their higher levels of abstract thought were based on a much broader spectrum of segregated cultural expressions. It was a long time before these individuals were even numerous enough to be called a minority. The masses in their day were unaffected by their speculations! Indeed, there were instances when their ideas met intransigent and aggressive resistance not just static ignorance. The point is that earlier mythopoeic patterns of thought prevailed among the lower classes of the rural population around the Mediterranean well beyond the late Hellenistic Age of the second and third centuries AD.

Already by the second century BC the schools of rational materialism (Aristotleanism and Epicureanism) were struggling with little popular support except among a few outstanding scholars. Aristotle's legacy becomes almost invisible in the Roman realm after the days of Claudius Ptolemy at Alexandria in the second century AD. On the other hand rational idealism in the form of Platonism, especially in its third century synthesis, Neo-platonism, was the philosophic framework chosen by prominent Christian theologians, heretics and orthodox alike. Thus the Christian teachings were given rational philosophical explanations of the Platonist variety.

Moreover, it was the role of the Roman government's religious policies after the fourth century AD that attempted by law to suppress that part of indigenous mythopoeic thinking that supported the traditional polytheistic religious expression. By suppressing all religious activity except rationally explained orthodox catholic Christianity they redirected much of the mythopoeic thinking and resulting practice into "popular Christianity". Hence, cultural products of mythopoeic thinking, the core of the previous civilization itself, was preserved by being Christianized. These results have not been widely recognized because mythopoeic thinking has been too often defined as totally religious thinking and hence totally alien and inimical to the whole Judeo Christian tradition.

If you want to look into that religious culture of polytheism in the Hellenistic Age I invite you to explore the section of Appendix 2 entitled Overview of Comparative Pre-Christian Polytheism.
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The Cosmologists of the Sixth Century BC

Cosmology was the attempt by these thinkers to verbalize a narrative explanation (logia) of the ordered world of human experience (cosmos) with a new kind of vocabulary, a non-mythopoeic vocabulary. Instead of speaking of discrete parts of the environment as sentient "beings", they were determined treat those discrete parts of the environment as types of raw material of the sort a craftsman might use to build something, or a cook might use to cook something. They used common names for things and at the beginning did not define their terms. The Greek term kosmos was a noun based on a verb meaning to "arrange" or "put [objects]in order". Hence the noun was a label for that which had been arranged or put in the proper order.

The most vocal of these rational thinking pioneers were all numbered among the Greek peoples who spoke the Ionian dialect. Ionians lived in a smattering of island and coastal states just south of the midpoint on the western coast of Turkey. Moreover, Ionia seems to have been the cutting edge of advancing civilization by the sixth century BC. Miletus was the leading port of the region at the time. The states of Ionia, like the states in many other regions around the Aegean in the seventh and sixth centuries were solidly aristocratic. The aristocrats had protected themselves from declining prosperity (food shortages due to overpopulation) and popular political repercussions by expelling colonies. Miletus had a hand in founding well over 80 colonies. Cultural ties between colonial state and mother state (metro polis) were always maintained but political or economic ties were not seen as important.
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Thales of Miletus

The Ionian Cosmologists beginning with the very obscure Thales of Miletus (c. 585) like their mythopoeic predecessors started with the basic assumption that water has an important role in explaining reality. Greeks before him seem to have thought of the earth as a disk floating on the surface of the water and covered with an inverted bowl, the whole thing submerged in the primeval ocean. Thales understood that the cosmos (i.e., Greek, kosmos), which we translate "world", was the result of a recipe calling for certain basic components, later called "elements". There was "earth"-- all the solid stuff. "Air" was all the windy stuff. "Fire" was all the hot and bright stuff. And "Water" was all the liquid stuff. Thales seemed to understand that the liquid stuff was the ultimate source (arché) of the other basic components. This priority given to liquid matter was not different from the other Near Eastern traditions, but the new idea was understanding that water, earth, air, and fire were things or types of stuff (not self-conscious beings) in the "ordered arrangement" (i.e., kosmos).
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Anaximander of Miletus

Anaximander of Miletus (c. 540), accepted the different types of stuff but did not believe that water was the ultimate source of the others. Rather he understood that all the elements and things have an ultimate beginning (genesis) from the same common nondifferentiated stuff (the Boundless, apieron) and might disintegrate (phthora) back into that common stuff in a certain amount of time. Hence he introduced the whole question of change (beginning and perishing) into cosmology. The genesis of the moist stuff did come first but it included all the others at the beginning. The beginning of that which was moist was evidently the result of a separation in the nondifferentiated stuff of the warm stuff from the cool stuff. The dry, hard earth stuff then settled to the bottom of the moist element while the air stuff accompanied by the fire stuff bubbled up out of the moist stuff. As the air component accumulated over the top of the moist component the fire component rose through the air to take its place at the top of the stack of basic components. He may or may not have accepted the notion that the cosmos was cylindrical with an earth core covered by layers of water, air and fire. Nevertheless, he further explained that the heat of the fire concentrated at the top of the stack of elements heated the air beneath it and evaporated the water beneath the air causing clouds to rise through the air and obscure the fire. The fire was not totally obscured; many tiny specks of fire are visible at night. There were a couple of bigger holes, "vents", he called them, where much more of the light and heat of the fire could still reach the air and the water below. The evaporation of the moist component continued causing the water level to fall, uncovering and drying out large portions of earth. Earth, air and fire were not the only things coming from the water. Aristotle reported on Anaximander's cosmological understanding as follows: "Living creatures rose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun. Man was like another animal, namely a fish, in the beginning."
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Anaximenes of Miletus

About 545 BC Anaximenes of Miletus, the successor to Anaximander, offered a different explanation. Water is not the primary stuff; rather, water, earth and fire all come out of air. Air is the first and basic stuff. When air is rarefied it becomes warm and if sufficiently rarefied fire is produced. Perhaps he demonstrated his idea this way. Breathing very gently and lightly with the lips slacked and the mouth open and relaxed certainly seems to rarefy or thin out the air. You will no doubt notice the heat produced if you breathe thus very gently and lightly on the back of your hand! Contrariwise, blowing fiercely on the back of your hand with the jaws tensed and the lips pursed tightly certainly seems to "condense" the air and cause the moisture on your hand. If you could condense air sufficiently it would turn to earth. If his hand was very dusty to start with, he might have noticed the mud produced by the droplets of moisture deposited by his earlier experiment. Air then encompasses the whole cosmos and holds it together "just as our soul, being air, holds us together." Seventy-five years later Diogenes of Apollonia was teaching that air is the intelligence, the god that governs all and exercises power over all.
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Pythagoras of Cortona

Virtually contemporary with Anaximenes of Miletus was Pythagoras of the Ionian colony of Cortona in Southern Italy. His cosmology was based on an analysis of what I would call geometric figures or shapes--"numbers" he called them--such as point, line, plane, solid, square, oblong, and sphere; together with the correspondingly opposing type of reality. One type of number (reality) he called the "limited" and described it with such words as: odd, one, right, male, resting, straight, light, good, and square. For every limited number there is a corresponding opposite, an "unlimited". This type of number was described in words such as: even, many, left, female, moving, curved, dark, bad, and oblong. Genesis occurs, that is numbers are created, when the limited draws into itself from the unlimited.

For Pythagoras and his followers the cosmos was a number--perhaps the sum total of all existing numbers--and was spherical. At its center was the cosmic point of genesis, the prime number, the central cosmic hearth, fire. Orbiting around the central fire in perfectly circular orbits were ten spheres. Orbiting nearest the fire was a huge sphere called "counter-earth". The earth in its orbit remained constantly in the "shadow" of the counter-earth so no one on earth could look directly at the fire. The light and heat from the central fire reflected off the other spheres, principally off the sun.
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Heraclitus of Ephesus

Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished about 500 BC was the next Ionian. He was not so much concerned with how the cosmos came to be as he was concerned with how it prevailed and continued. Like the followers of Pythagoras he thought of fire as the most basic component which presided over all the other components. He observed that there was more to be explained than just the four component parts, earth, air, fire and water, there was another factor in this puzzle of reality. That was the constant change that was taking place--flux, he called it. This flux or change implied that every point of existence has an opposite, an idea already suggested by Anaximander and adopted by Pythagoras. Heraclitus added to the earlier notions the fact that any of the basic types of stuff (earth, air, water) might "exchange places" with fire. Furthermore, in the light of all this potential change one should expect ongoing chaos, but that is not the case.

On the contrary, there is a degree of stability and constancy in the cosmos (i.e. the ordered arrangement) that must be explained. You cannot step in the same river twice; for the water in any river is returning to its assigned place. It falls from the clouds, and runs down to the ocean only to be taken up again into the clouds by the waterspout. The explanation for the stability--the cause of the stability--is the power of logos, the rational or logical principle that has assigned places and established limits and decreed roles (patterns of change) for all things in the cosmos. The logos then referees or presides constantly over all the change. For instance, if you heat water it returns over time to its assigned temperature. Likewise, you cool water down by lowering a container of it into the cistern where the assigned temperature is cooler than on the table. But once you bring it to the table it will warm up only to its assigned table-top temperature. If you hurl a rock high into the air it will return to its assigned level. Plants grow out of the earth and when they die they fall upon the earth seeking to return to their former assigned place. Heraclitus' followers identified the logos with the element fire, or sometimes as god.

Notice that many English words ending in -logy are actually transliterated from the Greek. These words are formed by compounding the Greek word for the subject with the Greek word based on logos. Biology, Theology, Psychology, Cosmology--all speak of a rational articulation and analysis of the subject named. The English words "reason" and "rational" in this context are based on the Latin ratio meaning "articulated account," that is, an account of the detail of a complex business transaction, or of the logical steps in a proof, a proposition, or a theory.
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The Ontologists of the fifth century BC

Parmenides of Elea

Parmenides, a poet of the South Italian Greek settlement flourished about 475 BC. He introduced a new dimension into Greek thought; the earlier philosophers were cosmologists, the new question has to do with ontology.

Ontos is the participial form of the verb "to be;" hence, the new question probes the meaning of existence. Implicit in posing the question Parmenides offered an answer and a means of determining what was real and what was not. It is a matter of what can be said about something that exists and what cannot be said about it.

• If it is true that something exists then you can say so in the most universal sense. It is and it cannot not be.
• If it is true that something does not exist then you can say so in the most universal sense. It is not and it cannot be.

Thus, something truly exists when the human experience of it corresponds without contradiction or confusion to the predication of its existence. To rule out contradiction and confusion the thing in question must be without any variation or change.

Parmenides' disciples, Zeno of Elea (fl. 450 BC) and Melissus of Samos (fl. 440 BC) further clarified the implications of the Parmenidean rule. To be without variation or change requires that it cannot:

• move,
• come to an end,
• be more than one,
• be divided into more than one,
• grow or diminish in any dimension, or
• have had a beginning.

In other words under the Parmenidean rule, existing things are eternal things.

In the world of human experience there are many things which do not meet this test. Many things change. They begin, they end, they multiply, they diminish. At one time/place, it seems to be; and the next it seems not to be. Anything about which we can only allege its seeming is not real; it does not exist.

How then could the elements exist and yet appear to change? The flux of Heraclitus only seems to be; it is therefore unreal, illusory. Perhaps the test is too hard for nothing in the realm of human observation seems to exist. Indeed, What is there in human experience that is without either beginning or ending, variation or division? What about the Pythagorean numbers?
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Empedocles of Acragas

The first attempt at a cosmological explanation that saves the appearances and meets the stringent Parmenidean test of existence was offered about 460 BC by Empedocles of Acragas on the south coast of Sicily. The first to limit the basic elements or "roots", as he originally called them, to four, he argued that each "root" changelessly exhibits a single quality: Earth=dryness, fire=hottness; air=coolness; water=moistness. The changes and variations that humans experience are the constantly changing distributions and proportions of the four elements. To explain the existence of the constantly shifting distributions and proportions of the eternally changeless elements, he introduced two alternately prevailing forces that he called love and strife. Love unites unlikes and separates likes while strife reverses the process uniting likes and separating unlikes. When strife is finished and all the elements are consolidated and isolated from each other; then love begins to work. When love is finished and all the elements are interspersed in a huge mixture, then strife begins its work segregating and separating the elements again. He seems to have theorized that these alternating forces were at work in every discrete part of the visible world so that while strife was prevailing in some parts, love was prevailing in other parts.
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Anaxagoras of Clazomenae

Anaxagoras came to Athens about 455 BC offering yet another cosmological suggestion. Empedocles had failed to work out the details of and name those "discrete parts" of the root or elementary stuff which are real (that is, eternal and changeless). Anaxagoras started by naming them "seeds". These seeds each contain a mixture of all the qualities of Empedocles' four elements. Anaxagoras calls these qualities "powers". Although each seed contains all the powers not all the seeds display the same proportions of each power; hence, some seeds are predominately moistness while others are predominately dryness, and so on. A seed of one quality can be transformed into a seed of another quality by trading off some of its power to other seeds. The example he gave was that bread seeds were transformed into flesh and bone seeds on one hand and waste product seeds on the other hand by the process of digestion. Anaxagoras has no need of Empedocles' two contravalent powers to work within the seeds for he explains the apparent qualitative changes observed as the result of the seeds being "rotated"--that is, stirred by nous. Nous is the word for mind, intelligence. Here is a sudden intrusion of mythopoeic thought. Nous has the power to decide and act as an agent, as an explanation of the apparent qualitative variations. But the rational framework of Anaxagoras' understanding puts Nous outside the material world and acting upon it--stirring the seeds.
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Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera

Finally, the cosmological speculation reaches its full extent when Democritus of Abdera came to Athens about 420 BC. Democritus was a disciple of Leucippus of Miletus who was his slightly older mentor. What is real? That was the question still. For Leucippus and Democritus there were three eternal verities: (1)The void = an endless, limitless emptiness, the real place where reality exists. (2)The fixed and unchanging number of discrete parts of reality, that is, the atoms. An atom is a particle of matter which is too small to divide ("a" is the prefix of negation, tomein is the verb, to cut or divide. Hence a+tomein means un-cutable or indivisible.). Atoms are the smallest particle of reality; their individual qualities are eternally unchanging (i.e., real), and (3) their activity is eternally unchanging (i.e., real). That activity is "falling" at a constant velocity through the endless void.

While Anaxagoras had attempted to solve the problem presented by the contradiction between the flux of Heraclitus and the eternal changelessness of Parmenidean reality by introducing intelligent activation, Leucippus and Democritus employed a theory of accidents. Everything in the Parmenidean cosmos of seeming and the observed flux of Heraclitus is explained as accidental congestions or traffic jams--my word--amidst the constantly falling atoms. These traffic jams appear as the sun, moon, stars, the elements, the earth, plants, animals, things, life itself, thought and intelligence. These traffic jams prevail in time apparently because they "fall" at a slower unchanging rate than the atoms. Atoms are constantly falling into, through and out of the jams. This constant transfusion of atoms explains all the kinds of visible changes, in particular locomotion--e.g., how the arrow gets from the bow to the target.
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Popularizing Philosophy: The Sophists of Athens

In the middle of the fifth century Athens attracted wise-men (sophistes) from every corner of the Hellenic world. Athens demonstrated the openness and tolerance for intellectual activity that seemed to be lacking elsewhere in Greece. The earlier Greeks had assumed that the qualities of man's nature, his character, were the gift of the gods, but the new attitude was that man's character could be changed and molded by developing mental skills. They cultivated great pride in an individual's intellectual accomplishments. Indeed these wise men made their living in Athens as private gurus dispensing their particular brand of smarts under contract to their curious and ambitious students. The Sophists dealt with many subjects, from the basics of expression and persuasion like the study of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic to the issues of defining and measuring reality. Neither did they hesitate to tackle more difficult problems such as questioning man's ability to know reality, and seeking to know if, or how, it is possible to know right from wrong.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 450 BC), teaching at Athens, taught that man is the judge of reality and that his judgment is faulty. Gorgias of Leontini (c. 440 BC) taught that nothing is real, but if anything were real man could not comprehend it. Even if he could comprehend it he could not communicate it. Melissus of Samos (c. 440 BC), a disciple of Parmenides, taught that reality is not only eternal and changeless but also singular and indivisible. Antiphon (c. 425 BC) taught that laws do not produce justice because they are contrary to nature and they do not prevent injury or aggression. Ethics are relative to social status and community, whereas all men possess identical natures. Democritus of Abdera (c. 420 BC), a disciple of Leucippus of Miletus, introduced classical atomic theory to the Athenians.
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Socrates and the Challenge of Ethics

While the sophists taught that man was the judge and measure of all things, what then is the rule for human behavior? Is there a way to know what is proper and right? The right answer seemed always to depend on the circumstances. Socrates, who disavowed being a sophist, argued that there was an absolute that was knowable to all that would think carefully enough to discover it. Socrates never had "the answer" ready to give, but he always knew the kinds of questions his contemporaries should be asking in order to discover the answer. None of Socrates' generation left any major written works, but Socrates' student, Plato, through his Dialogues written in the following century, gives us glimpses of the views of Socrates and his contemporaries.

Socrates was tried and convicted of leading the youth of Athens astray in 399 BC. His decision to drink the hemlock rather than to go into exile was traumatic for his students. Plato left Athens only to return to establish his private school about 386. Since Plato's property was near the grove of oak trees sacred to the Attic tree-god, Academus, Plato's school was known as the Academy. This school would have a long, uneven but influential history until it was eventually closed by Emperor Justinian in 529 AD because of its continued emphasis on the traditional world-view of Late Hellenism in a world that was struggling to develop and maintain a Christian world-view.
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Academic Philosophy

Plato's Academy

Academic philosophy, was the school of thought that was synthesized by Plato (d. 348 BC) in his school, the Academy, at Athens. In the first century AD classical academic philosophy was neither widely popular nor well represented. Indeed, the faculty of the Academy since the middle of the first century BC (Antiochus of Ascalon, d. c. 68 BC.) had displayed one of the several forms of eclectic philosophy. Eclecticism attempted to synthesize the teachings of the Academy with those of the Peripatetic and Stoics Schools. What has been called Middle Platonism, a somewhat compromised form of classical Platonism did have a voice primarily in Alexandria, Antioch and other Hellenistic cities of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD.
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Platonic Ontology

Plato synthesized the teachings of several of his predecessors, most notably Socrates (d. 399 BC) whom we know almost exclusively from Plato's reports. Plato, and presumably Socrates before him, derived ideas about ontology (definition of reality) from Pythagoras, Parmenides and his disciples, Zeno and Melissis.

Pythagoras of Samos (Aegean Island) and Crotona (Southern Italy, c. 540 BC), had developed concepts regarding "numbers," i.e., geometric figures, and a set of opposing categories which divided all reality. The Pythagorean cosmogony taught that "all things are numbers" and that "the limited (compare Plato's concept of "form") draws unto itself from the unlimited (compare Plato's concept of "matter") and makes numbers."

Parmenides of Elea (southern Italy, c. 475 BC) and his disciples, Zeno of Elea and Athens (c. 450 BC), and Melissus of Samos (c. 440 BC) introduced and developed a grammatical analysis of ontology or existence (reality, truth). It rested on the assumption that "it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be." Whatever can be thought can also be predicated with the verb "to be", and therefore must exist. This existence is absolute, without beginning or end, and without variation or movement. If his assumption were true it should be impossible (i.e., unintelligible) to think of something, or to predicate existence of something, that does not really exist. However, many intelligible things do seem to exist in this world. Such things are said to exist at one time or place and not to exist at another time or place. Such intelligible things only seem to be; for, they are demonstrably not real. The only things that really exist are things that are eternal and absolutely unchangeable.

Plato therefore understood reality (ontos, "being", "existence", "reality") as consisting of whatever intelligible things are eternally and totally without any degree of change, without beginning and without end, singular and indivisible. Existence or reality, by this definition, is certainly true of the Pythagorean "number" or other mathematical concepts or "forms" such as "line", "triangle", or "sphere", etc. So it must be equally true of all other intelligible forms such as of "good", "beauty", "just", "city", "man", "law", "the state", etc. Pure matter separated from any "form" would be unintelligible, hence, unreal. Elements and objects 'formed' out of matter have a beginning, they are subject to changes and they eventually have an ending; consequently, they are not real. Only the "form" (eidos) has reality. This material cosmos and all that man senses, including his body, only "seems to exist."

Non-material reality is intelligible to man because each human soul is itself eternally changeless, according to Plato. Human souls knew reality immediately, totally and perfectly, before each one became isolated in a living, material body. Once imprisoned in the body the soul is bombarded with the unrelenting confusion of sensations but it preserves an infallible memory of what it had once known first hand. Since the human intellect develops at the mercy of capricious experience and instruction, notions, beliefs, and opinions derived from the world of "appearances" upstage the memories of the soul. Conversational discussion (dialectos) among men helps to sort out the false, the unlikely and the untrue from among their opinions.
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Platonic Epistemology

"What is knowledge and where does it come from?" These were basic questions for Greek philosophers beginning with Plato. Notions, beliefs and opinions based on the realm of "appearance" are not true knowledge. They are at best imperfect approximations of knowledge and can never be considered true. True knowledge is based only on existing things as defined by Parmenides. Intellectual training begins with the mathematical objects--such as a triangle drawn on a slate or the spherical shape of an apple. The process here is "thinking through" (dianoia) from the unreal realm of appearances--what seems to be--to the realm of reality and truth--what "is"; hence, to grasp knowledge of the one and only true and perfect triangle or sphere. Dialectic also allows man to refine his understanding and application of the knowledge of mathematical forms.

Knowledge (episteme) and intelligence (noesis), are terms used by Plato to speak only of the direct grasp of the absolute, eternally unchanging truth. It is therefore impossible "to know" anything false. Knowledge or intelligence is a process of pure intellect; a kind of insight-memory that completely ignores all sense data as it grasps that memory of intelligible reality preserved by the soul. So human beings can truly have conscious knowledge about reality even if they can never in this life experience reality first hand. Knowledge of the real "form" (eidos) of each part of reality enables man to recognize the temporal, material replicas of reality that man's senses attest to. So beauty is recognized in material objects because the non-material form of true beauty is recovered and known from the soul's memory. In the same way, that which is "just" in human society can be recognized by comparison with that non-material form of "the just" preserved in the soul-memory. The trick is to make those soul-memories part of our conscious knowledge.

While many words can be used to describe a material tree in great detail, words fail when man attempts verbally to describe the knowledge of non-material forms recovered from the soul. You can no more express the real truth in human language than you can draw the real triangle on a blackboard. No verbalized account of reality can ever be more than "a likely story". Plato's dialogues are likely stories, accounts of conversations among scholars. They are designed to guide his readers through the mental processes and logical steps leading to that point where the reader himself may experience insight and grasp a memory from his soul. The teacher cannot communicate such truth to the student in verbal form. Each student must seek to recover that knowledge for himself from within his own soul.

Plato's dialogue that is most widely read in university classrooms today is one alluded to above. It deals with the illusive identification of justice. Its title is customarily abbreviated and rendered in Latin as The Republic. Plato's Greek title is more revealing as to his purpose for writing this "likely story". Politeia e peri tou dikaiou, "Polity: or concerning the just". To be sure, the text treats the structure and organization of political units and activities in human society for the purpose of discovering that which is "the just". "The just" is the true unchanging, reality we are seeking amidst those political behaviors that "seem to be". [To sample The Republic click here.]
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Plato's Ethics

The issue of human behavior, ethics in all its dimensions, is the broad focus of all dialogues, the surviving literary works of Plato. What we would be tempted to call the psychological structure of the human being is treated as a reduced image of the constitutional structure of the state. Conversely stated, politics is to the group what ethics is to the individual. In every ethical or political question Plato was looking for that one and only "form," eidos that corresponds to it. This form may be known only by discovering it deep within the memories of one's soul.
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Platonic Reason

In Plato's last work, The Laws, he synthesized two important earlier concepts in a way that became typical of later Platonic thought. Heraclitus the Dark of Ephesus introduced the concept of divine order or logic (and by extension, reason), the logos, about 500 BC. In his view the task of the logos was providentially to referee all changes while maintaining order in the cosmos. Then about 455 BC Anaxagoras of Clazomenae teaching at Athens introduced the concept of the supreme intelligence, nous. Nous was the divine entity whose willful action initiated and facilitated the creation of the cosmos. Plato (Laws, 645, a-c) integrated these two concepts to explain how the efforts of the human lawgiver are inexorably linked through the logic of the cosmos, logos, to the autonomous divine intelligence, nous, responsible for all existence.
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Plato and the Cosmos

By rejecting the reality of the "realm of appearance" the Academy was not prepared to contribute much to the understanding of the material world. The primary and not insignificant contribution in this respect was the school's advancement of part of the Pythagorean tradition, particularly the mathematics. Eudoxus of Cnidus, a student of the Academy introduced a very important idea there about 355 BC. He suggested that the apparent wandering paths followed through the sky by the sun, moon and planets could be explained by Pythagorean mathematics if each heavenly body were understood to ride on the surface of a set of transparent (invisible) spheres. These spheres are nested together concentrically with the axis of the inner spheres affixed to the inner surface of the next outer sphere some degrees away from the outer sphere's axis. By this sophisticated mechanical notion Eudoxus hoped to prove that the celestial objects actually moved in perfect, that is, divine, circles instead of the wavering or irregular paths observed by mankind. This Pythagorean religious notion that the sphere is the most perfect shape and that circular motion is the only motion that meets the Parmenidean definition for reality was going to dominate astronomy for better than a millennium. Each sphere rotated in perfect circular motion on its own axis with the earth stationary in the common center. The outer sphere of the fixed stars was furthest from the earth.

According to Eudoxus the moon and the sun ride on sets of three spheres each while the five planets ride on sets of four. Callippus, another student at the Academy argued for a different number of spheres. He thought each of the three smaller planets, the sun and the moon rode on sets of five spheres while the two larger planets required four concentric spheres.

Plato adopted the idea of the concentric spheres, but was persuaded by Eudoxus' fellow student, Heraclides of Pontus, that the earth, which was located in the center of all the spheres, was not stationary but rotated on its axis. Heraclides was also the first to suggest that paths of Venus and Mercury seemed to be circling the sun rather than the earth, but the idea was not accepted by his contemporaries and he did not extend that understanding to the other heavenly bodies.

Plato and Eudoxus accepted the Pythagorean assertion that the most perfect intelligible form is the sphere, but the Academy rejected the earlier Pythagorean teaching about the cosmos; namely, that the earth itself was in a circular orbit around a "central fire" which was stationary at the center of the cosmos. The fire was not visible on earth because another planet-like body whose orbit was between the earth and the fire and whose revolution around the fire exactly paralleled that of the earth obscured it. Removing the "fire" from the center of the cosmos, their view placed the earth at the center. This understanding started with the absolute reality and came up with a way to "save the appearances". This basic geocentric view of the universe prevailed until the sixteenth century AD.

While rejecting the reality of the "realm of appearance" Plato's interest in the truth and reality behind or beneath the things that appear led him to write yet another dialogue probably late in his career. The Timaeus presents Plato's grandest and most comprehensive application of his thought and methodology. In it he discusses, among many other subjects, the creation of the cosmos--doubtless as a likely story to save the appearances. Another likely story or myth deals with the Atlantians and their continent once located where the Atlantic Ocean is now to be seen. Many of the concepts presented can easily be labeled "revolutionary" for his day. Some of them still seem surprisingly modern to us today. Most importantly, the Timaeus was Plato's one dialogue that never completely disappeared from circulation through the rise and fall of western Rome and on through the rise of Medieval civilization in Western Europe. [There are several Internet translations available. This one seems readable.]
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The Academy and Skepticism

Some of Plato's predecessors such as Protagoras of Abdera (c. 450 BC) and Georgias of Leontini (c. 440 BC), both sophists at Athens, had doubted man's ability to know about ultimate reality. And Plato's successors were equally plagued with doubts. Pyrrho of Elis (c. 325 BC) argued that both man's senses and his reason were deceptive. Contradictory propositions seem to be equally true. The wisest approach was to consider all possibilities without making hasty or preemptive decisions one way or the other. This position came to be known as Skepticism, based on the Greek word skopos, "to see, to view, to watch" with the connotation of observing for the purpose of gaining knowledge, "to seek". The Academy adhered to this position under Arcesilaus, between 315 and 240 BC and then again between c. 212 and c. 128 BC under Carneades. Next the Academy under Antiochus of Ascalon (d. 68 BC) adopted the way of eclecticism attempting to synthesize the teaching of the Academy with those of the Peripatetic and Stoic schools.
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Hellenistic Neo-Pythagoreanism

The Pythagorean views reemerged in a popular but somewhat Platonized form during the last century BC in Alexandria. Its revived emphasis was on the religious aspects of Pythagorean tradition, particularly the ascetic, communal life-style and a body-soul dualism which had characterized the original Pythagoreans in the sixth century BC. These so-called Neo-Pythagoreans eclectically used sometimes Stoic, sometimes Peripatetic concepts (about the material world) and sometimes Platonic concepts (about nonmaterial reality). Best known among them in the first century BC was a Roman named Figilus living in Alexandria. The group also emphasized direct intuition or revelation both as a (non-verbal) mystical experience (encountering and knowing god) and as a source of truth (verbalized propositions pertaining to reality).

Neo-Pythagoreans also began to formulate the idea of the transcendence of divinity--gods, at least some of them, are not natural beings; rather they are "beyond being" or above nature. This spiritualizing of the traditional Pythagorean emphasis on "number" resulted in the teaching that the "point" of cosmic origin--the number-one or first number--was somehow supremely divine--a supreme god over all other gods. This is one of the earliest examples of universal "henotheism" (henos, first in a sequence).

The "philosopher" among the Neo-Pythagoreans was often cast in the role of wonder-worker and prophet. The most lionized of their later representatives was Apollonius of Tyana (in south central Turkey) who flourished in the first century AD. Later near the beginning of the third century AD Philostratus wrote a Life of Apollonius.

Philosophic tradition running parallel with Neo-Pythagoreanism but more or less eschewing the wonder-worker and prophet imagery is frequently labeled Middle-Platonism. Middle-Platonism of Philo of Alexandria is discussed in Appendix IV.
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Peripatetic Philosophy

Aristotle

Aristotle originated the Peripatetic school of thought at Athens. After studying at the Academy for approximately 20 years (366 to 345) Aristotle had studied on his own in Aeolia (the western Turkish coast) before becoming the tutor of the young prince Alexander of Macedon. After Alexander the Great departed on his famous campaign Aristotle returned to Athens, c. 335 BC, and established a school where he taught for thirteen years. The school was known as the Lyceum because it was located beside the Temple of Apollo Lyceus. The philosophy was commonly called "Peripatetic" because of Aristotle's habit of lecturing while "walking around" (peripateo) the colonnaded porch (peristyle) that circled the entire Temple. After the death of the last great scholar of the Lyceum in 269, the Museum in Alexandria inherited the Lyceum's reputation and leadership in the organization and management of all types of knowledge. The Museum was established by the first Ptolemaic (Greek speaking Macedonian) king of Egypt (305-283) at the Temple of the Muses in Alexandria. The Museum continued to be an important center for research on into Roman times through the second century AD.
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Aristotle's Dependence on the Early Natural Philosophers

Aristotle was dependent not only on Plato and his predecessors but also on a group of scholars whose ideas Plato had, indeed, rejected. This included the early philosopher of Nature (physis), Anaximander of Miletus (c. 560 BC). Anaximander introduced some important concepts about nature. Already his predecessors had offered the idea that there were four fundamentally different components in the physical environment: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Anaximander introduced a fifth component, the Indefinite or Boundless (apeiron). The Boundless was the principle source (arché) of all existing things including the other parts of this world as well as the heavenly bodies. When he taught that all existing things "come into being" (genesis) out of the Boundless and "pass away" (phthora) back into the Boundless, he introduced the issue of change in nature.
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Aristotle's Ontology

Aristotle refined the understanding of ontology by identifying ten aspects or categories of existence. The first category identified the particular thing in question while the second through the tenth categories characterized and defined that thing. Aristotle's ontological analysis operated both in Plato's realm of appearances, which Aristotle called "Nature" (physis), as well as in Plato's realm of intelligible (i.e., non-material) reality. Because Aristotle discussed the ontology of non-material (i.e., supernatural) things after his teachings about nature (physis), the study of non-material things came to be labeled Metaphysics (metaphysis, literally meaning "after Nature".) The following is an outline of the analysis.

• The #1 category, usually known as "substance," was further broken down into three kinds, three senses, and two classes.
  • The three kinds of first class substance are:
    1. That which is perceptible, changeable and eternal. This kind consists of inanimate "mathematical objects" like triangle or sphere.
    2. That which is non-perceptible, unchangeable and eternal.
    3. That which is perceptible, changeable and perishable. This kind is animate, largely consisting of plants and animals.
  • The three senses in which any substance may be spoken of are:
    1. The three senses of the first kind of #1 substance are matter, form, and the whole materialized form, i.e. a natural object (simple or complex, unitary or composite).
    2. The three senses of the second kind of #1 substance are: potentiality, actuality1, and potentiality/actuality2
    3. The three senses of the third kind of #1 substance are: body, soul, and the whole, consisting of soul and body together, i.e., a living plant, animal, or organized group.
  • A substance in the second class always predicates either a species or genus. For example, "this tennis ball (first substance) is a kind of ball (second substance--species)." or, "this kind of ball (second substance) is a sphere (second substance--genus).
• Categories #2 through #10 are normally labeled "Accidents" because each category is a kind of incidental variable that may be asserted relative to the item identified in the substance category.
  2. Quantity is expressed in terms of some measure.
  3. Quality includes such characteristics as are detected by the senses e.g. color, texture, aroma, etc.
  4. Relation/comparison of the substance to other substances.
  5. Place or location of substance relative to the environment of other substances.
  6. Time period.
  7. Position/posture relative to the substance's potentiality.
  8. State/habit relative to the substance's potentiality.
  9. "Enactivity" (This is a word I coined to better express Aristotle's meaning here when he uses poiein, to do, to make) is that potential activity proper to the particular substance.
     • Activity (energeia) is that function proper to the particular being or substance, i.e., what it is good for. Potentiality refers to the activity before it is enacted. Actuality refers to the activity after it has been enacted. Actualization refers, of course, to the "enaction" of the activity, and always involves two potentialities, the 'enactive' one and the passive one.
     • The "enactive" function is more clearly expressed by the question, what can you do or make with it.
  10. Passivity (paschein, to suffer, to allow, i.e. be passive) is that passive potentiality proper to the particular substance. The passive function is more clearly expressed by the question, "what can be done to it or made of it?"

Aristotle's Four Causes

There are four approaches to inquiry, sometimes called four causes.

• What is it made of? The material cause.
• What is it? What form does it embody? The formal cause.
• What produced it? The Agent or Efficient cause.
• What is it good for? The Final or End cause is usually understood as the activity best suited for the substance.

Aristotle's Analysis of Change

There are three kinds of change in perceptible first substances. Here Aristotle is going against his Platonic upbringing to elaborate and correct some ideas from Anaximander of Miletus (c. 560 BC) and Heraclitus the Dark (c. 500 BC) of Ephesus. Anaximander argued that the elements that come into being (genesis) also pass away (phthora) into that from which they came in a cycle of time. Heraclitus did not discuss the idea of genesis and phthora. Rather he chose to start with existence as a given: "This order, the same for all, did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures." He taught that opposites are not different things but the polar aspects of single things, equally good--e.g. war <> peace; winter <> summer; day <> night; up <> down; beginning <> end. Change occurs within these polar opposites. The clash of opposites is the perpetual condition of life. A counter movement toward the other must compensate every movement toward one pole. Even the elements interchange, or exchange places, with one another and especially with fire but certain limits are maintained. The limit, e.g., a river, remains unchanged while the stuff out of which it is made, e.g. water, is constantly moving. Aristotle integrated the teachings of these two predecessors in a comprehensive fashion.

• The transformation from imperceptible to perceptible (genesis). Things do not come into being from not being or nothing; rather they are actualized out of their opposites.
  • Every form in nature possesses both a potentiality to actualize the potentiality of matter and a contrary or opposite potentiality called "privation of proper form."
  • When the form and its privation are actualized in matter a substance begins.
• The transformation from perceptible to imperceptible (phthora). Substances do not become non-existent or disappear into nothingness when they pass away; rather they pass into a condition contrary to actuality, namely, potentiality.
  • Since form and matter never exist apart or separately in nature, Aristotle seems to have understood that matter, too, has something of an opposite which is centrally related to all five of the basic natural elements (aether, fire, air, water and earth). This substratum of matter exists potentially, while ordinary actualized matter exists actually.
  • Privation of proper form has the function of reversing the actualization process, potentializing what had been actual, and separating the form from the matter. Hence, when a substance passes away, its actual existence is changed back to potential existence in the substratum of potential matter.
• The change in perceptible things (kinésis, movement) is indirectly reflected by several of the accidents, but pertains basically to only three: Quantity (involves growth or diminution), Quality (involves alteration of sensible qualities), and place (involves locomotion which is either circular or rectilinear). All noted changes in other accidents (e.g. Time) are the incidental result of basic change or movement in Quality, Quantity and Place.
  • Aristotle defined the "enactive" activity of kinésis as "incomplete actualization of potentiality as potentiality." This is a way of saying that it is an ongoing process viewed at any given point within the process. Kinésis in natural bodies with organs always consists of growth.
  • A seedling tree is a single substance, an actualization of body and soul together, equipped with all the potentialities proper to a tree of its species. But the actualization is incomplete; for it will not be completed until the tree has grown to maturity. The soul's activity of kinésis is to repeatedly actualize the potentiality of growth as a potentiality for more growth until a mature, full sized tree is completely actualized.
  • As the tree grows and matures through the 'enactive' activity of kinésis it may well display other "enactive" activities such as giving shade, providing shelter for animals, or expressing beauty. Even after the tree is mature and kinésis is no longer operative the tree will continue its "enactive" activities. It also has certain passive potentialities; it can be trimmed, used as a support or hiding place, etc.

Aristotle's Approach to Ethics and Politics

The same principles of change, namely, growth, activity, and natural purpose apply to ethics and politics. The newborn infant human with the potentialities proper to man must first grow up to maturity (kinésis) in stature and strength. As the child grows physically (kinésis) he will develop habits or dispositions to regularly act in certain ways. One purpose of politics (life in highest sort of human community, the polis or state) is to assist the child to acquire the habits of behavior that are as near to his natural potential as possible. Habits that do not approximate the potentiality nature has given the individual are unnatural and hence moral vices; habits that are as nearly in accord with nature as possible are moral virtues. Health is bodily virtue; intellectual virtues are learned habits or dispositions relative to intellectual activity, i.e., thinking, valuing, and reasoning as fully in accord with your natural potential as possible.

The final cause or supreme good of the mature, virtuous man is activity in accordance with virtue. Activity in accord with virtue is happiness whether it is in accord with the bodily virtues, the moral virtues or the intellectual virtues. The intellectual virtues may include productive skills, practical or deliberative wisdom and contemplative wisdom which is the highest. The greatest happiness comes from activity in accordance with the highest virtue and that activity is contemplation.

In another connection Aristotle applied a similar argument to a consideration of divine virtue. The eternal happiness of god would likewise be the "activity" of thought or contemplation. In order for the activity of thought to be divine, however, it must be thought about the very highest and most divine subject of all. Therefore, god must be "thinking of (himself) thinking" (noésis noésôes).
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Aristotle on the Cosmos

There are five basic natural elements in the universe. Earth, water, air and fire are the terrestrial elements. Aristotle introduced the notion that all the celestial bodies and the structures necessary to explain their movements were made of the fifth element, aether, and not subject to any kind of change. The cosmos is in shape a sphere; here Aristotle's Academic training came through. He also accepted the physical ideas of Anaximander of Miletus (c. 560 BC) and his successors that earth (the element) was at the stationary center of the cosmos surrounded by layers of water, air, and fire. But, just as Aristotle rejected the Pythagorean central fire theory, he also rejected Anaximander's explanation of the celestial appearance. Anaximander described the moon, the sun, and the stars as glimpses of the surrounding layer of fire shining down through holes in the obscuring layer of vapor that originated from evaporation of the water as it is heated by the layer of fire above.

In the matter of light Aristotle rejected both Pythagoras and Anaximander's notions that celestial light was the result of the element fire. For Aristotle fire is an element that is exclusively terrestrial; hence, it cannot explain celestial light. Light is a result of an actualizing power activating a potentiality. For example, aether, air, water, and several solids possess the potentiality of being rendered transparent. When this potentiality is actualized in the various elements, the elements become transparent and act as a medium through which images and colors are transported to the human eye. The fire element exercises the power called luminosity that actualizes the potentiality of transparency in, for example, the element air. Aristotle describes the action of luminosity as "making the potentially transparent actually transparent." It appears that the celestial bodies, namely, the sun, moon, planets, and stars must possess the power of luminosity.

Moreover, the element fire is not to be equated with flame, which he describes as "excessive boiling". The reason flame demonstrates the power of luminosity is not because it made up of the substance "fire" but because the substance fire and some other substances cause intense heat. Heat is not a substance (i.e. element) but is a quality characteristic of certain substances including fire. The sun, for example, is an aethereal substance that, like the terrestrial substance fire, possesses both the power of luminosity and the quality heat. Now the bodily framework of the sun is constructed of aether, a totally imperceptible element with the potentiality of transparency. Hence, the origin of the luminosity and heat of the sun is the contents of the aethereal container.

Aristotle was impressed by the fact that warm-blooded creatures also seemed to possess the quality heat within their bodies, while plants and cold-blooded creatures depended on the sun for heat. He concluded that the sun's heat was the efficient cause of reproduction, nutrition, and growth in plants and cold-blooded animals, while the internal heat of warm-blooded creatures similarly accounted for those processes. Conversely Aristotle concluded that the quality cold was the efficient cause of decay and death in the terrestrial cosmos. The alternation of heat and cold measured out by the sun in its regular circuit provided Aristotle with a causal explanation of all weather events, as well as the motive forces that mixed up the terrestrial elements.

Taking the idea from the Pythagoreans Aristotle taught that the only natural motion proper to celestial bodies is circular while the natural motion proper to the terrestrial elements was rectilinear. While the natural movement of air and fire is upward and the movement natural to earth and water is downward the elements could move out of their natural relation to one another as a result of some motive force not proper to their own nature. This allowed him to explain how the terrestrial elements could become mixed up and disorganized rather than appear in four distinct, isolated and pure layers of earth, water, air and fire.

Even more interesting were Aristotle's teachings on the celestial cosmos. Aristotle's fellow student at the Academy, Eudoxus of Cnidus, had apparently suggested that twenty-six celestial spheres would be necessary to explain all the erratic course deviations observed in the heavenly bodies (sun, moon, planets and fixed stars). Six pairs of those were identical in polar orientation with the sphere of the fixed stars and the sphere directly inside it. Callippus increased the total to thirty-three and kept the six pairs. When Aristotle considered these explanations he soon saw a problem they hadn't addressed. Additional spheres would be necessary to prevent the movement of the one celestial sphere from effecting all the spheres within it. He calculated that an additional twenty-two counter-rotating spheres were needed to correct this, making a grand total of fifty-five concentric aethereal spheres containing the terrestrial spheres inside them.

The prime mover (i.e. Aristotle's efficient cause or god) rotates the outer sphere (that of the fixed stars) and that circular motion is transmitted through the whole concentric nest of spheres. This circular motion ultimately accounts for the specific movements of all the celestial bodies and consequently, is the ultimate motive force at work through the cycle of life-giving heat and death-giving cold that produced the ongoing disorganization among the terrestrial elements.

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Aristotle's Successors on the Cosmos

The Lyceum where Aristotle had taught for thirteen years before his death in 322 BC enjoyed continued importance under two prominent successors, Theophrastus of Lesbos (322-287 BC) and Strato of Lampsachus (287-269 BC), and then lost its leadership in the realm of natural science to the Museum in Alexandria. The Museum was, like the Lyceum, a fruit of Macedonian patronage and curiosity. It was founded at the Temple of the Muses in Alexandria and its head, appointed by the Ptolemaic king, carried the title of high priest. At its height the Museum employed nearly a hundred research scholars representing all field of knowledge. Each scholar was assigned living quarters and provided food and clothing.

The Museum scholars developed techniques for the preservation, criticism and accurate transmission of texts. The library consisted of over half a million scrolls. Standardized texts of all major Greek authors were meticulously prepared from various conflicting versions. Medical and pharmacological knowledge was forwarded to its most advanced level before modern times by scholars like Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Chios. Pioneering research was also done in mathematics, astronomy, calendar development and geography.

Aristarchus of Samos (c. 260), one of the first great scholars of the Museum in Alexandria, attempted to calculate the sizes of the sun and moon and the distances from the earth. He also took the idea of Heraclides of Pontus, that Venus and Mercury appeared to orbit the sun and seems to have developed a true heliocentric theory for all the planets. His successor at the Museum, Seleucus of Babylon (c. 250), likewise pursued the heliocentric explanation. Seleucus discovered the connection between the oceanic tides and the earth's rotation relative to the moon's orbit. However, their contemporary, Apollonius of Perga rejected the heliocentric theory and revived and revised the geocentric theory of Eudoxus, Callippus and Aristotle.

Apollonius of Perga's (c. 240 BC) contribution was the notion of epicycles, a circular path traced by the planet as it revolves around a point on the surface of the sphere. The point itself is carried in circular orbit by the rotation of the sphere. This replaced Aristotle's cumbersome 55 spheres with only eight spheres. Each sphere except the outer one carried an epicycle, a much simpler system! The heavenly spheres were numbered in ascending order: Moon = 1, Mercury = 2, Venus = 3, Sun = 4, Mars = 5, Jupiter = 6, Saturn = 7, and the fixed stars = 8.

Hipparchus of Nicaea, c. 190-124 BC, at the Museum, rejected the heliocentric theories of Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Babylon and adopted the views of Apollonius of Perga. He went ahead to explain the mechanism by which the circular orbit of the sun produced seasons of unequal length; this was because the earth's axis was slightly off from the center of the sun's orbit. His measurement of the length of the year was the most accurate so far, being only 6 minutes and 26 seconds too long by today's standards. Utilizing the observation records kept for over 150 years at Alexandria he discovered and measured for the first time the precession of the Equinoxes. By modern calculations he fell short by only 10 seconds on this annualized measurement of 1 degree, 23 minutes and 30 seconds. This slight movement of the equinoxes relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac "precesses" through the entire zodiac every 26,000 years. Hipparchus estimated it closer to 36,000 years. This discovery is now understood to be an important contribution both to Stoic philosophy and in the development of the Mithras mystery in the first century AD. It was also Hipparchus who devised the first system of latitude and longitude for precise locations on the earth's surface and for more precise measurements of the star and planet locations. He calculated and recorded the precise locations of over 850 fixed stars.

The last great Museum scholar was Claudius Ptolemy (died c. 161 AD). He wrote a comprehensive textbook including all the physical science knowledge so far developed. It was his book that communicated the geocentric theory of the universe to later civilizations.
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The Ethical Philosophy of Stoicism

Zeno of Citium and his Successors

Stoic philosophy was founded by Zeno, a Phoenician from Citium (on Cyprus), who established his school of ethical philosophy in the Athenian marketplace about 300 BC. This philosophy is called Stoicism from the famous structure in the Athenian market place called the stoa poikilé, the painted stoa, where he taught. A stoa is a porch-like building open on three sides under which merchants display their goods. Chrysippus of Soli (a suburb of Tarsus, in Cilicia) who headed the school c. 232-207 BC, was the systematizer and publicizer of Stoicism. Chrysippus is alleged to have written over 500 books. (Two subsequent head's of the Stoa came from Tarsus, Chrysippus' student and immediate successor, Zeno of Tarsus, and Antipater of Tarsus, who lectured after c. 150 BC.) During the first century BC Stoicism broadened under the influence of eclecticism and absorbed considerable Perso-Babylonian astrology. The greatest scholar since Aristotle was the Stoic Posidonius who taught at Rhodes from 97 to 50 BC. Stoicism was the most popular ethical philosophy among the relatively wealthy and mobile merchant classes in the cities of the Mediterranean world by New Testament times.
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Sources of Stoicism

Zeno based his understandings on the teachings of Heraclitus of Ephesus as well as contemporary Cynics, Crates of Thebes and Stilpo of Megara, and certain Academic philosophers. Heraclitus of Ephesus, whose ideas on change and the opposites influenced Aristotle also, suggested an important role for logos (cf. logic, reason, order) as the regulating force of uniformity, order, coherence, as well as the driving force of ongoing change in the cosmos. Heraclitus seemed close to identifying logos with the element fire.
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The School of Cynicism

Cynicism traced its origin to the Athenian student of Socrates, Antisthenes, but particularly to the latter's pupil, Diogenes of Sinope, who taught at Athens c. 325 BC. The good life according to Cynicism depends on an individual's worth and that worth is limited. The traditions and conventions of property, family, citizenship, class, or reputation counts for nothing; indeed, Cynics mocked these and other prevailing modes of behavior and belief. The suppression of personal desires and the development of physical endurance leading to a primitive kind of individual self-sufficiency were ideals to strive for. Incidentally, the Latinized term "Cynic" is based on the Greek kynikos, "dog-like", from kyõn, "dog"; it was an epithet of derision employed by their critics. It implied that the philosopher has no more sense of responsibility or appreciation of proper behavior than does a dog that hasn't been house broken. The above mentioned Diogenes repudiated the convention of wearing clothing in public, and made his home beneath an abandoned washtub.

Indeed, Cynicism, seemed to survive as a kind of lunatic fringe down into the first century AD. Wandering Cynic philosophers gathered crowds of listeners on the street corners as they ranted and raved, denouncing the materialistic corruption and social evils of the prevailing urban life style and calling for a kind of "conversion" on the part of their listeners to a much simpler, more honest life style.
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The Assumptions of Stoicism

The major assumptions of Stoicism were elaborated upon Heraclitus' teaching about the role of the logos. Zeno and his followers sometimes referred to the logos as god, sometimes as divine intelligence or mind, sometimes as fire, and sometimes as "the active principle". Whatever name is used, the logos is a type of elementary material substance that is found everywhere and throughout everything in the material cosmos. As the logos holds inorganic objects together it is called "spirit". The logos is called "nature" as it causes organic life, accounting for growth and movement. It is called "soul" in its role as the basis of animal life, accounting for growth, movement and action; and it is called "reason" in its role as the highest component of human intelligence. By the first century BC the religious aspects of these concepts were well established. The logos is the supreme god and all the lesser gods at the same time. The supreme god is the divine intelligence that inhabits the aether surrounding the divine cosmos beyond the outer sphere of the fixed stars. Every object in the cosmos is permeated by logos and in that sense everything is considered a part of the supreme god. The logos is the soul and consciousness of the divine cosmos. It is also the logos as fire that produces the light of the sun, moon and stars, as well as the heat of the sun.

All the decrees of the logos are predetermined and unalterable. The logos contains "seeds", perhaps "causes", for everything that exists. The logos determines everything, even human behavior; therefore, individual freedom exists only in the decision either to agree with--welcome, accept-- what the logos decrees or to resist it. Resisting the will of the logos is evil and only makes the individual miserable and unhappy; willfully accepting what the logos has decreed results in individual happiness.

Stoic epistemology rejected the skeptical assertion that man could not know anything for sure except his own feelings. They argued that some impressions (phantasiai) based on the senses were better than others. You could rely on those that seem convincing because of their manifest clarity. The reliable impressions were those described as providing a kataléptiké phantasia, "grasping impression" or "direct apprehension".
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Stoic Ethics

Ethical behavior is achieved by exercising rational control over the human will. The virtuous man is one whose will is most completely under rational control. He has achieved the Stoic ideal of apathy (to be passionless), having subdued his passions (pathos, e.g. anger, lust, hatred, etc.) that struggle to overpower his will. His apathy allows his rational mind to anticipate and welcome whatever the logos decrees with regard to his physical environment, both bodily activity and events external to his body. Among the clearest of the anticipated bodily activites in the social context were activities that society in general calls duties or obligations. The logos decrees such activities because they follow logically from previous decrees. This virtuous man is considered a kosmopolites, world-citizen, for he has good will toward all men regardless of their language, city of origin or other differences. This latter concept made a strong contribution to Roman Law in the Imperial period.
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Stoicism and History

The whole of history, a limited period of time, is dictated by the logos. It begins each time the supreme god, the primal cosmic fire, transforms itself into other material elements and things--objects, planets, mountains, gods, men, animals, trees, etc.--according to its intelligence (nous) and reason (logos). History and all reality as we know it is terminated in a cosmic conflagration (ekpurôsis) in which all material things once again "become fire." The conflagration that transforms all the elements (earth, air, water) into fire not only terminates reality, but creates a new reality exactly identical to the one that was terminated. First (hot) air comes from fire, then from half the (hot) air water is made, half the water becomes earth, the other half of the hot air becomes cool air. The activities called history occur in the time from one conflagration to the next. History is repeated over and over for eternity.

Speculation about the length of history in years from beginning to end was greatly stimulated when Hipparchus of Nicaea working at Alexandria c. 130 BC was able to identify and measure for the first time the phenomenon today called the precession of the equinoxes. Measuring from a given starting point marking the earth's location in the pattern of fixed stars at the Fall Equinox he speculated that it would require approximately 36,000 years for the earth to complete the 360 degree sweep of the fixed stars and return to the starting point. Hipparchus made only an educated estimate about the length of this great cosmic or zodiac year. His estimate of 36,000 years was 10,000 years too long according to modern calculations measuring the same phenomenon. Nevertheless, his observations clearly suggested that there was a cosmic basis for the Stoic notion of a Great Year within which the whole of history from conflagration to conflagration would occur. Unfortunately for them, they could find no clue indicating what point in the pattern of the fixed stars might mark the next conflagration and new beginning.
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Stoicism and Astrology

Meanwhile Stoicism understood that the logos scheduled and controlled all events on earth and among the divine beings (sun, moon, planets and stars) in the heavens. The Cosmos is like a huge interconnected machine. Observed movements in the heavens correspond directly to events on earth. Astrology, both then and now, is based directly on this premise. Although the roots of astrology are attributed to Iraq in the fifth century BC, Stoicism actively facilitated its spread through the Mediterranean areas under Roman control by giving it a certain philosophic legitimacy. The major non-philosophic purveyors of astrology in the Empire during the first century AD were the "Chaldeans" or "magicians" who were often persecuted by governmental authorities.
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The Ethical Philosophy of Epicrueanism

Epicurus and his Disciples

Epicureanism was a school of philosophy founded by Epicurus, an Athenian citizen from the Aegean island of Samos who opened a school at Athens in 306 BC in his private house. The school was willed to his pupils and came to be called the Garden. As a philosophy Epicureanism was never popular with the rank and file, but it became the view favored by many scientifically inclined scholars. It directly rejected Aristotle's emphasis on natural purpose. Nature, that is, physical existence is an unexplainable, accidental result of an ongoing collision of atoms as they fall through the void.
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Sources of Epicurean Physics

Epicurus adopted the physical science of Democritus of Abdera (420 BC) and the latter's forerunner, Leucippus of Miletus (c. 435 BC). According to Leucippus and Democritus, reality consisted of an eternal and unchanging number of indivisible particles, i.e., "atoms", of matter that "fall" eternally through the eternal and unchanging "void" at an unchanging rate. Everything else is a compound, property or accident of "atoms and void". This universe and all that exists therein is the result of an accidental, ultimately unexplained but continuing, pile up (traffic jam) of falling atoms. Atoms fall into the congestion, work their way down through it and fall away to continue through the void. The atoms vary in size, shape, texture, and other qualities; there are air atoms, water atoms, soul atoms, fire atoms, stone atoms, earth atoms, etc. Reality as it is known consists of transitory congestions of atoms; rocks, plants, animals, fire, celestial bodies and even the gods and men are nothing more than brief isolated pile-ups in the ongoing congestion. Man's knowledge is tentative, subjective and based on sense perception. Man's nature is learned.
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Epicurean Assumptions

The major assumption of Epicureanism is that this physical existence is all there is. All bases for human fear of death, or of the gods, could be repudiated by this understanding. Surely the gods share in the same physical existence as men, except they live longer. They enjoy a blissful existence during their lifetimes partly because they are isolated and insulated from mankind on other planets in the cosmos. The gods are unmoved by the prayers of men and unconcerned with their plight. Gods and men alike are totally non-existent after death; life is all the reality there is!
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Ethics

For his ethics Epicurus was highly influenced by the Cyrenaic school and the Skeptics. The founder of Skepticism, Pyrrho of Elis, who also had an influence on Platonism, argued that the absence of pain (ataraxia) was the priority goal of man. Aristippus of Cyrene, c. 370, an Athenian sophist who had been influenced by Socrates, was the founder of the Cyrenaic school. He taught that pleasure (hédoné, e.g. Hedonism) is the supreme good for man. Happiness, according to Aristippus, is a proper balance between the pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the mind. Everyone must determine that balance for himself and should exercise self-control so as to enjoy pleasure, and not become a slave to it. (The Cyrenaics were the true advocates of the "Eat, drink and be merry while you may" doctrine so often falsely attributed to Epicurus.)

Since pleasure (hédoné) is, according to Epicurus, following Aristotle, a case of kinésis or change, it is typically short-lived. There are pleasures that are more durable and long-lived. He calls them katastematic hédoné. They are more durable since they do not involve change. The most enduring pleasure (ataraxia, i.e. the absence of pain) constitutes true human happiness, the supreme good. The tranquil life of sober self-control and independence well away from the main stream of human activity is the ideal. The health of the body and the calmness of the soul should be the rule determining all choice and avoidance. The supreme virtue of man is the ability to weigh the potentials of pleasure and pain and act in one's own best interest.
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Return to the Lecture/Essay Table of Contents for Part I.

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Most recently edited 16 February 2009