Assignment 1

Pre-Socratic Cosmologies

Socrates belongs to the classical period of known time, where rational explanations of
universe were being attempted by a community of intellectuals in Greece, known as the
‘sophists’. Before the sophists, any queries on the origin, constitution, movement, and
destiny of the universe were attempted by the ‘shamans’ near the beginning of civilization,
and religious authorities afterwards. Both of them offered a super-natural explanation of
various phenomena. A departure from authority meant that no one conception was above
scrutiny, and any attempt at a cosmological position was to be defended with non-
supernatural evidences.
The first widely-known Pre-Socratic philosopher is Thales of Miletus. He was the first one
to offer a rational account of the universe by observing natural phenomena. His popularity
rose by the successful explanations of previously-conceived supernatural events such as
lightning and earthquakes. He also successfully predicted droughts and solar eclipses and
earned a lot of money for it. He tried to figure out the constitution of the universe by
searching for a material that was capable of motion and change, was formative material for
all that existed, including life, and therefore essential for life. The answer for him was
‘water’. The later philosophers summarized his conception by the phrase “everything is
water”.
Anaximander, a contemporary of Thales, posited that the constitutive element will have to
be a boundless, intelligent, living whole. Everything in existence would then be a
distillation from that whole. He can also be considered a forebearer of evolution in the
sense that he considered living being, judging from fossil records, to develop from simpler
to more complex forms over time. Anaximenes considered that whole as mist and vapour,
whose condensation and evaporation produced the physical elements of earth, water, and
fire. Xenophanes considered the attempts at the time ‘anthropomorphic’, and therefore
false, as the reality is much more complex, and cannot be made sense of that easily. In this
way, he became the fore-runner of more skeptical philosophers-to-come.
Pythagoras was another famous philosopher who was also known for his mathematical
contributions, most popularly, the ‘pythagoras theorem’. He believed that the order in the
universe conformed to mathematical rules and ratios, and therefore if we could understand
the mathematics behind it, we could understand and control the formation of the universe.
Hence, mathematics rules both the forms, as well as the ideas of the universe. He also
believed that the earth was a sphere rotating around a central fire, becoming a forerunner
for the post-enlightenment philosopher and scientists who proved that model to be
accurate, against popular belief.
Heraclitus and Parmenides form an interesting chapter in the Pre-Socratic cosmology.
Heraclitus considered the universe as perpetual change, with the permanence only
observable in fragments. On the other hand, Parmenides considered the universe as a
single, unchanging substance; any change was only a different form of the same substance,
and it could never be what it is not. For Heraclitus, the changing nature of the universe
resulted in all the traditional oppositions. He chose ‘fire’ as the basic formative material, or
‘arche’, of the universe. Parmenides’ thought influenced the Eleatic tradition, including the
famous Zeno of Elea. Zeno, through his logical paradoxes, presented the impossibility of
motion. In one of his famous paradoxes, he argued mathematically that if a turtle was given
a head-start in a race against an athlete, the athlete could never overtake him due to the
absurdity of motion. He used this to argue in favour of a fixed, unchanging universe. Among
his contemporaries was Protagoras, a sophist philosopher who presented a proto-
relativistic cosmology of the universe. According to him, Man was the ‘measure of the
universe’. Since the same observation could be judged differently due to context, it was up
to the observer to make whatever they wanted to of the reality observed.
It is around this time that Socrates came about. Instead of arguing about the material and
the substance of the universe, he turned his attention to another aspect of human life: How
should we live? His focus on a moral human life is what distinguished him from the
previous and the later generations of philosophers. This also became one of the reasons for
him to be marked as a milestone in classical philosophy, and therefore his predecessors to
be called ‘Pre-Socratic’ philosophers.