Quizzes Sep11/12 AND Sep13/14

Getting a jump-start again this week, with both quizzes bundled in this post. Also: be thinking about your midterm group report topic. If you have one in mind but don't yet have a 3-person group, post a query (with a brief description of the topic you have in mind) to see if anyone's interested in joining you. Topics may include any philosopher up to the 17th century, any "recommended" text in the right sidebar, any "Pop culture & philosophy" title, OR something relevant you find on your own.

Quiz Sep11/12, DR 3-5. Post your own alternative quiz questions (especially from the latter half of each chapter) and claim a base for each. You may also answer alternative quiz questions posed by classmates and claim bases for answering correctly, up to the total number of questions on the quiz that day.

1. How does Gottlieb think Heraclitus would reply to Aristotle's complaint about his ambiguous syntax?

2. Why did Heraclitus compare us all to beasts, drunkards, sleepers, and children? What did he say we fail to grasp?

3. What did fire symbolize, for Heraclitus?

4. Who were Parmenides' famous teacher and student?

5. What was Parmenides' surprising claim (aside from the idea that everything is eternal)?

6. How did Parmenides say language and thought connect to the world?

7. What was Zeno trying to discredit, with his famous paradoxes of motion?

8. What did Aristotle say Zeno invented, and how did his aim differ from Socrates'?

9. How does Gottlieb solve the Achilles paradox?


DQ (Claim a base for each DQ you post and/or comment on.)

• Should philosophers be deliberately enigmatic and impenetrable? Can an obscure epigrammatic statement be profound? Or should philosophers always strive for clarity? Do you find Heraclitus "tantalizing" or "annoying"?
• Heraclitus was both introspective and empiricistic, valuing both the "inner stage" (45) and the evidence of the senses. Are you more introspective, more curious about the world around you, or both?
• What do you think Heraclitus meant when he said you can't step into the same river twice?
• Did Zeno draw the right implication when he said his paradoxes show Parmenides was right? (69)
• What do you think of Goober's pre- and post-beard persona (see "Goober the philosopher" above), and of the why his friends react to him when he changes? What moral do you think the show's writers were trying to tell, with this story? Do you agree or disagree?
• Do you expect your friends to be themselves and not change? Or do you encourage them to become themselves by changing? 
• What do you think of the SoL's advice for dealing with a crisis of meaning (see below*)? Does it help to position yourself in a wider frame of reference, with respect to the "big picture" view of yourself as a small contributing part of a species, occupying a blip of time in a vast cosmos?
• What do you think of the SoL's "problem with our phones"? Do they create a crisis of meaning, does tech generally pose an "existential threat" to life as we've known it? Or is this just more change we need to embrace and manage? 
• An old pop song proclaimed "I hope I die before I get old." (Some of the band members did, in fact.) The alternative to growing old, of course, is dying young. Will you embrace aging and the changes in lifestyle and physical capacity it represents, or resist it?
• COMMENT: A recent article says: “While most people enjoy relative continuity over the decades, being able to adapt to the changing context of our lives is the key to success throughout life.”
• [Post your DQs]

*

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Quiz Sep13/14, DR 6-7.

1. What was Empedocles' legendary "Faustian end"?

2. What did Empedocles identify as the universal elements whose interplay accounts for all phenomena including sexual attraction?  And, which of "our" elements does Gottlieb compare them to?

3. What fundamental principles of modern biology did Empedocles anticipate?

4. What was Empedocles' favorite scientific interest?

5. What did Anaxagoras bring to Athens, and what was his nickname?

6. Of what was Anaxagoras accused, like Socrates thirty years later?

7. How was Anaxagoras less extreme than Parmenides, with respect to reason and perception?

8. Was Anaxagoras a mind-matter dualist?

DQ

• If Empedocles was a "spiritual egalitarian," believing everyone once lived happily together as immortal godlike beings, why did he exalt himself as a god? In general, how is it possible to reconcile egoistic arrogance with humane and democratic values? Or is it?
• Is there any good reason to believe in reincarnation?
• Does the "big bang/big crunch" cosmological hypothesis seem plausible, relevant to your life, and compatible with personal meaning and purpse?
• Do you think you are a former daimon or spirit who's been exiled, "in an alien garment of flesh"? (86) Why or why not?
• Are you a mind-matter dualist? Why or why not?
• What do you think of Anaxagoras' response to the death of his sons? (97)
• [Post yours]

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From Bertrand Russell's History-

Heraclitus, though an Ionian, was not in the scientific tradition of the Milesians. * He was a mystic, but of a peculiar kind. He regarded fire as the fundamental substance; everything, like flame in a fire, is born by the death of something else. "Mortals are immortals, and immortals are mortals, the one living the other's death and dying the other's life." There is unity in the world, but it is a unity formed by the combination of opposites. "All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things"; but the many have less reality than the one, which is God. From what survives of his writings he does not appear as an amiable character. He was much addicted to contempt, and was the reverse of a democrat. Concerning his fellow-citizens he says: "The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying: 'We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.'" He speaks ill of all his eminent predecessors, with a single exception. "Homer should be turned out of the lists and whipped." "Of all whose discourses I have heard, there is not one who attains to understanding that wisdom is apart from all." "The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus." "Pythagoras . . . claimed for his own wisdom what was but a knowledge of many things and an art of mischief." The one exception to his condemnations is Teutamus, who is signalled out as "of more account than the rest." When we inquire the reason for this praise, we find that Teutamus said "most men are bad." His contempt for mankind leads him to think that only force will compel them to act for their own good. He says: "Every beast is driven to the pasture with blows"; and again: "Asses would rather have straw than gold."

...Heraclitus believed fire to be the primordial element, out of which everything else had arisen. Thales, the reader will remember, thought everything was made of water; Anaximenes thought air was the primitive element; Heraclitus preferred fire. At last Empedocles suggested a statesmanlike compromise by allowing four elements, earth, air, fire and water. The chemistry of the ancients stopped dead at this point. No further progress was made in this science until the Mohammedan alchemists embarked upon their search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and a method of transmuting base metals into gold. The metaphysics of Heraclitus are sufficiently dynamic to satisfy the most hustling of moderns: "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures kindling and measures going out." "The transformations of Fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind." In such a world, perpetual change was to be expected, and perpetual change was what Heraclitus believed in...

"Couples are things whole and things not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and the discordant. The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one." Sometimes he speaks as if the unity were more fundamental than the diversity: "Good and ill are one." "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right." "The way up and the way down is one and the same." "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each." Nevertheless, there would be no unity if there were not opposites to combine: "it is the opposite which is good for us." This doctrine contains the germ of Hegel's philosophy, which proceeds by a synthesising of opposites. The metaphysics of Heraclitus, like that of Anaximander, is dominated by a conception of cosmic justice, which prevents the strife of opposites from ever issuing in the complete victory of either. "All things are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold and gold for wares." "Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water." "The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinys, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out." "We must know that war is common to all, and strife is justice." Heraclitus repeatedly speaks of "God" as distinct from "the gods." "The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has. . . . Man is called a baby by God, even as a child by a man. . . . The wisest man is an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man." God, no doubt, is the embodiment of cosmic justice. The doctrine that everything is in a state of flux is the most famous of the opinions of Heraclitus, and the one most emphasised by his disciples, as described in Plato Theaetetus...

Passing from the small to the large, astronomy no longer allows us to regard the heavenly bodies as everlasting. The planets came out of the sun, and the sun came out of a nebula. It has lasted some time, and will last some time longer; but sooner or later--probably in about a million million years--it will explode, destroying all the planets, and reverting to the condition of a widelydiffused gas. So at least the astronomers say; perhaps as the fatal day draws nearer they will find some mistake in their calculations. The doctrine of the perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it. One of the main ambitions of philosophers has been to revive hopes that science seemed to have killed. Philosophers, accordingly, have sought, with great persistence, for something not subject to the empire of Time. This search begins with Parmenides.

CHAPTER V Parmenides THE Greeks were not addicted to moderation, either in their theories or in their practice. Heraclitus maintained that everything changes; Parmenides retorted that nothing changes. Parmenides was a native of Elea, in the south of Italy, and flourished in the first half of the fifth century B.C. According to Plato, Socrates in his youth (say about the year 450 B.C.) had an interview with Parmenides, then an old man, and learnt much from him. Whether or not this interview is historical, we may at least infer, what is otherwise evident, that Plato himself was influenced by the doctrines of Parmenides. The south Italian and Sicilian philosophers were more inclined to mysticism and religion than those of Ionia, who were on the whole scientific and sceptical in their tendencies. But mathematics, under the influence of Pythagoras, flourished more in Magna Grecia than in Ionia; mathematics at that time, however, was entangled with mysticism. Parmenides was influenced by Pythagoras, but the extent of this influence is conjectural. What makes Parmenides historically important is that he invented a form of metaphysical argument that, in one form or another, is to be found in most subsequent metaphysicians down to and including Hegel. He is often said to have invented logic, but what he really invented was metaphysics based on logic. The doctrine of Parmenides was set forth in a poem On Nature. He considered the senses deceptive, and condemned the multitude of sensible things as mere illusion. The only true being is "the One," which is infinite and indivisible. It is not, as in Heraclitus, a union of opposites, since there are no opposites. He apparently thought, for instance, that "cold" means only "not hot," and "dark" means only "not light." "The One" is not conceived by Parmenides as we conceive God; he seems to think of it as material and extended, for he speaks of it as a sphere. But it cannot be divided, because the whole of it is present everywhere. Parmenides divides his teaching into two parts, called respectively "the way of truth" and "the way of opinion." We need not concern ourselves with the latter. What he says about the way of truth, so far as it has survived, is, in its essential points, as follows: "Thou canst not know what is not--that is impossible--nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be." "How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. "The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered." * The essence of this argument is: When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as at another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be. This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. It cannot of course be accepted as valid, but it is worth while to see what element of truth it contains. We can put the argument in this way: if language is not just nonsense, words must mean something, and in general they must not mean just other words, but something that is there whether we talk of it or not. Suppose, for example, that you talk of George Washington. Unless there were a historical person who had that name, the name (it would seem) would be meaningless, and sentences containing the name would be nonsense. Parmenides maintains that not only must George Washington have existed in the past, but in some sense he must still exist, since we can still use his name significantly. This seems obviously untrue, but how are we to get round the argument?

Let us take an imaginary person, say Hamlet. Consider the statement "Hamlet was Prince of Denmark." In some sense this is true, but not in the plain historical sense. The true statement is "Shakespeare says that Hamlet was Prince of Denmark," or, more explicitly, "Shakespeare says there was a Prince of Denmark called ' Hamlet.'" Here there is no longer anything imaginary. Shakespeare and Denmark and the noise "Hamlet" are all real, but the noise "Hamlet" is not really a name, since nobody is really called "Hamlet." If you say "'Hamlet' is the name of an imaginary person," that is not strictly correct; you ought to say "It is imagined that 'Hamlet' is the name of a real person." Hamlet is an imagined individual; unicorns are an imagined species. Some sentences in which the word "unicorn" occurs are true, and some are false, but in each case not directly. Consider "a unicorn has one horn" and "a cow has two horns." To prove the latter, you have to look at a cow; it is not enough to say that in some book cows are said to have two horns. But the evidence that unicorns have one horn is only to be found in books, and in fact the correct statement is: "Certain books assert that there are animals with one horn called 'unicorns.'" All statements about unicorns are really about the word "unicorn," just as all statements about Hamlet are really about the word "Hamlet." But it is obvious that, in most cases, we are not speaking of words, but of what the words mean. And this brings us back to the argument of Parmenides, that if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist. What, then, are we to say about George Washington? It seems we have only two alternatives: one is to say that he still exists; the other is to say that, when we use the words "George Washington," we are not really speaking of the man who bore that name. Either seems a paradox, but the latter is less of a paradox, and I shall try to show a sense in which it is true. Parmenides assumes that words have a constant meaning; this is really the basis of his argument, which he supposes unquestionable. But although the dictionary or the encyclopaedia gives what may be called the official and socially sanctioned meaning of a word, no two people who use the same word have just the same thought in their minds. George Washington himself could use his name and the word "I" as synonyms. He could perceive his own thoughts and the movements of his body, and could therefore use his name with a fuller meaning than was possible for any one else. His friends, when in his presence, could perceive the movements of his body, and could divine his thoughts; to them, the name "George Washington" still denoted something concrete in their own experience. After his death they had to substitute memories for perceptions, which involved a change in the mental processes taking place when they used his name. For us, who never knew him, the mental processes are again different. We may think of his picture, and say to ourselves "yes, that man." We may think "the first President of the United States." If we are very ignorant, he may be to us merely "The man who was called ' George Washington.'" Whatever the name suggests to us, it must be not the man himself, since we never knew him, but something now present to sense or memory or thought. This shows the fallacy of the argument of Parmenides. This perpetual change in the meanings of words is concealed by the fact that, in general, the change makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the propositions in which the words occur. If you take any true sentence in which the name "George Washington" occurs, it will, as a rule, remain true if you substitute the phrase "the first President of the United States." There are exceptions to this rule. Before Washington's election, a man might say "I hope George Washington will be the first President of the United States," but he would not say "I hope the first President of the United States will be the first President of the United States" unless he had an unusual passion for the law of identity. But it is easy to make a rule for excluding these exceptional cases, and in those that remain you may substitute for "George Washington" any descriptive phrase that applies to him alone. And it is only by means of such phrases that we know what we know about him. Parmenides contends that, since we can now know what is commonly regarded as past, it cannot really be past, but must, in some sense, exist now. Hence he infers that there is no such thing as change. What we have been saying about George Washington meets this argument. It may be said, in a sense, that we have no knowledge of the past. When you recollect, the recollection occurs now, and is not identical with the event recollected. But the recollection affords a description of the past event, and for most practical purposes it is unnecessary to distinguish between the description and what it describes. This whole argument shows how easy it is to draw metaphysical conclusions from language, and how the only way to avoid fallacious arguments of this kind is to push the logical and psychological study of language further than has been done by most metaphysicians. I think, however, that, if Parmenides could return from the dead and read what I have been saying, he would regard it as very superficial. "How do you know," he would ask, "that your statements about George Washington refer to a past time? By your own account, the direct reference is to things now present; your recollections, for instance, happen now, not at the time that you think you recollect. If memory is to be accepted as a source of knowledge, the past must be before the mind now, and must therefore in some sense still exist." I will not attempt to meet this argument now; it requires a discussion of memory, which is a difficult subject. I have put the argument here to remind the reader that philosophical theories, if they are important, can generally be revived in a new form after being refuted as originally stated. Refutations are seldom final; in most cases, they are only a prelude to further refinements. What subsequent philosophy, down to quite modern times, accepted from Parmenides, was not the impossibility of all change, which was too violent a paradox, but the indestructibility of substance. The word "substance" did not occur in his immediate successors, but the concept is already present in their speculations. A substance was supposed to be the persistent subject of varying predicates. As such it became, and remained for more than two thousand years, one of the fundamental concepts of philosophy, psychology, physics, and theology. I shall have much to say about it at a later stage. For the present, I am merely concerned to note that it was introduced as a way of doing justice to the arguments of Parmenides without denying obvious facts. 

CHAPTER VI Empedocles THE mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science, and charlatan, which we found already in Pythagoras, was exemplified very completely in Empedocles, who flourished about 440 B.C., and was thus a younger contemporary of Parmenides, though his doctrine had in some ways more affinity with that of Heraclitus. He was a citizen of Acragas, on the south coast of Sicily; he was a democratic politician, who at the same time claimed to be a god. In most Greek cities, and especially in those of Sicily, there was a constant conflict between democracy and tyranny; the leaders of whichever party was at the moment defeated were executed or exiled. Those who were exiled seldom scrupled to enter into negotiations with the enemies of Greece--Persia in the East, Carthage in the West. Empedocles, in due course, was banished, but he appears, after his banishment, to have preferred the career of a sage to that of an intriguing refugee. It seems probable that in youth he was more or less Orphic; that before his exile he combined politics and science; and that it was only in later life, as an exile, that he became a prophet. Legend had much to say about Empedocles. He was supposed to have worked miracles, or what seemed such, sometimes by magic, sometimes by means of his scientific knowledge. He could control the winds, we are told; he restored to life a woman who had seemed dead for thirty days; finally, it is said, he died by leaping into the crater of Etna to prove that he was a god. In the words of the poet: Great Empedocles, that ardent soul Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole. Matthew Arnold wrote a poem on this subject, but, although one of his worst, it does not contain the above couplet. Like Parmenides, Empedocles wrote in verse. Lucretius, who was influenced by him, praised him highly as a poet, but on this subject opinions were divided. Since only fragments of his writings have survived, his poetic merit must remain in doubt. It is necessary to deal separately with his science and his religion, as they are not consistent with each other. I shall consider first his science, then his philosophy, and finally his religion. His most important contribution to science was his discovery of air as a separate substance. This he proved by the observation that when a bucket or any similar vessel is put upside down into water, the water does not enter into the bucket. He says: "When a girl, playing with a water-clock of shining brass, puts the orifice of the pipe upon her comely hand, and dips the waterclock into the yielding mass of silvery water, the stream does not then flow into the vessel, but the bulk of the air inside, pressing upon the close-packed perforations, keeps it out till she uncovers the compressed stream; but then air escapes and an equal volume of water runs in." This passage occurs in an explanation of respiration. He also discovered at least one example of centrifugal force: that if a cup of water is whirled round at the end of a string, the water does not come out. He knew that there is sex in plants, and he had a theory (somewhat fantastic, it must be admitted) of evolution and the survival of the fittest. Originally, "countless tribes of mortal creatures were scattered abroad endowed with all manner of forms, a wonder to behold." There were heads without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without foreheads, solitary limbs seeking for union. These things joined together as each might chance; there were shambling creatures with countless hands, creatures with faces and breasts looking in different directions, creatures with the bodies of oxen and the faces of men, and others with the faces of oxen and the bodies of men. There were hermaphrodites combining the natures of men and women, but sterile. In the end, only certain forms survived. As regards astronomy: he knew that the moon shines by reflected light, and thought that this is also true of the sun; he said that light takes time to travel, but so little time that we cannot observe it; he knew that solar eclipses are caused by the interposition of the moon, a fact which he seems to have learnt from Anaxagoras. 

He was the founder of the Italian school of medicine, and the medical school which sprang from him influenced both Plato and Aristotle. According to Burnet (p. 234), it affected the whole tendency of scientific and philosophical thinking. All this shows the scientific vigour of his time, which was not equalled in the later ages of Greece. I come now to his cosmology. It was he, as already mentioned, who established earth, air, fire, and water as the four elements (though the word "element" was not used by him). Each of these was everlasting, but they could be mixed in different proportions, and thus produce the changing complex substances that we find in the world. They were combined by Love and separated by Strife. Love and Strife were, for Empedocles, primitive substances on a level with earth, air, fire, and water. There were periods when Love was in the ascendant, and others when Strife was the stronger. There had been a golden age when Love was completely victorious. In that age, men worshipped only the Cyprian Aphrodite. The changes in the world are not governed by any purpose, but only by Chance and Necessity. There is a cycle: when the elements have been thoroughly mixed by Love, Strife gradually sorts them out again; when Strife has separated them, Love gradually reunites them. Thus every compound substance is temporary; only the elements, together with Love and Strife, are everlasting. There is a similarity to Heraclitus, but a softening, since it is not Strife alone, but Strife and Love together, that produce change. Plato couples Heraclitus and Empedocles in the Sophist (242): There are Ionian, and in more recent time Sicilian, muses, who have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles (of the One and the Many), is safer, and to say that being is one and many, and that these are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting, ever meeting, as the severer Muses assert, while the gentler ones do not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but admit a relaxation and alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife. Empedocles held that the material world is a sphere; that in the Golden Age Strife was outside and Love inside; then, gradually, Strife  

entered and Love was expelled, until, at the worst, Strife will be wholly within and Love wholly without the sphere. Then--though for what reason is not clear--an opposite movement begins, until the Golden Age returns, but not for ever. The whole cycle is then repeated. One might have supposed that either extreme could be stable, but that is not the view of Empedocles. He wished to explain motion while taking account of the arguments of Parmenides, and he had no wish to arrive, at any stage, at an unchanging universe. The views of Empedocles on religion are, in the main, Pythagorean. In a fragment which, in all likelihood, refers to Pythagoras, he says: "There was among them a man of rare knowledge, most skilled in all manner of wise works, a man who had won the utmost wealth of wisdom; for whensoever he strained with all his mind, he easily saw everything of all the things that are, in ten, yea twenty lifetimes of men." In the Golden Age, as already mentioned, men worshipped only Aphrodite, "and the altar did not reek with pure bull's blood, but this was held in the greatest abomination among men, to eat the goodly limbs after tearing out the life." At one time he speaks of himself exuberantly as a god: Friends, that inhabit the great city looking down on the yellow rock of Acragas, up by the citadel, busy in goodly works, harbour of honour for the stranger, men unskilled in meanness, all hail. I go about among you an immortal god, no mortal now, honoured among all as is meet, crowned with fillets and flowery garlands. Straightway, whenever I enter with these in my train, both men and women, into the flourishing towns, is reverence done me; they go after me in countless throngs, asking of me what is the way to gain; some desiring oracles, while some, who for many a weary day have been pierced by the grievous pangs of all manner of sickness, beg to hear from me the word of healing. . . . But why do I harp on these things, as if it were any great matter that I should surpass mortal, perishable men?" At another time he feels himself a great sinner, undergoing expiation for his impiety: There is an oracle of Necessity, an ancient ordinance of the gods, eternal and sealed fast by broad oaths, that whenever one of the daemons, whose portion is length of days, has sinfully polluted his hands with blood, or followed strife and foresworn himself, he

must wander thrice ten thousand years from the abodes of the blessed, being born throughout the time in all manners of mortal forms, changing one toilsome path of life for another. For the mighty Air drives him into the Sea, and the Sea spews him forth upon the dry Earth; Earth tosses him into the beams of the blazing Sun, and he flings him back to the eddies of Air. One takes him from the other, and all reject him. One of these I now am, an exile and a wanderer from the gods, for that I put my trust in insensate strife. What his sin had been, we do not know; perhaps nothing that we should think very grievous. For he says: "Ah, woe is me that the pitiless day of death did not destroy me ere ever I wrought evil deeds of devouring with my lips! . . . "Abstain wholly from laurel leaves . . . "Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans!" So perhaps he had done nothing worse than munching laurel leaves or guzzling beans. The most famous passage in Plato, in which he compares this world to a cave, in which we see only shadows of the realities in the bright world above, is anticipated by Empedocles; its origin is in the teaching of the Orphics. There are some--presumably those who abstain from sin through many incarnations--who at last achieve immortal bliss in the company of the gods: But, at the last, they * appear among mortal men as prophets, song-writers, physicians, and princes; and thence they rise up as gods exalted in honour, sharing the hearth of the other gods and the same table, free from human woes, safe from destiny, and incapable of hurt. In all this, it would seem, there is very little that was not already contained in the teaching of Orphism and Pythagoreanism. The originality of Empedocles, outside science, consists in the doctrine of the four elements and in the use of the two principles of Love and Strife to explain change. He rejected monism, and regarded the course of nature as regulated by chance and necessity rather than by purpose. In these respects his philosophy was more scientific than those of Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle. In other respects, it is true, he acquiesced in current superstitions; but in this he was no worse than many more recent men of science...

CHAPTER VIII Anaxagoras THE philosopher Anaxagoras, though not the equal of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, or Parmenides, has nevertheless a considerable historical importance. He was an Ionian, and carried on the scientific, rationalist tradition of Ionia. He was the first to introduce philosophy to the Athenians, and the first to suggest mind as the primary cause of physical changes. He was born at Clazomenae, in Ionia, about the year 500 B.C., but he spent about thirty years of his life in Athens, approximately from 462 to 432 B.C. He was probably induced to come by Pericles, who was bent on civilizing his fellow-townsmen. Perhaps Aspasia, who -61- came from Miletus, introduced him to Pericles. Plato, in the Phaedrus, says: Pericles "fell in, it seems with Anaxagoras, who was a scientific man; and satiating himself with the theory of things on high, and having attained to a knowledge of the true nature of intellect and folly, which were just what the discourses of Anaxagoras were mainly about, he drew from that source whatever was of a nature to further him in the art of speech." It is said that Anaxagoras also influenced Euripides, but this is more doubtful. The citizens of Athens, like those of other cities in other ages and continents, showed a certain hostility to those who attempted to introduce a higher level of culture than that to which they were accustomed. When Pericles was growing old, his opponents began a campaign against him by attacking his friends. They accused Pheidias of embezzling some of the gold that was to be employed on his statues. They passed a law permitting impeachment of those who did not practise religion and taught theories about "the things on high." Under this law, they prosecuted Anaxagoras, who was accused of teaching that the sun was a red-hot stone and the moon was earth. (The same accusation was repeated by the prosecutors of Socrates, who made fun of them for being out of date.) What happened is not certain, except that he had to leave Athens. It seems probable that Pericles got him out of prison and managed to get him away. He returned to Ionia, where he founded a school. In accordance with his will, the anniversary of his death was kept as a schoolchildrens' holiday. Anaxagoras held that everything is infinitely divisible, and that even the smallest portion of matter contains some of each element. Things appear to be that of which they contain most. Thus, for example, everything contains some fire, but we only call it fire if that element preponderates. Like Empedocles, he argues against the void, saying that the clepsydra or an inflated skin shows that there. is air where there seems to be nothing. He differed from his predecessors in regarding mind (nous) as a substance which enters into the composition of living things, and distinguishes them from dead matter. In everything, he says, there -62- is a portion of everything except mind, and some things contain mind also. Mind has power over all things that have life; it is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing. Except as regards mind, everything, however small, contains portions of all opposites, such as hot and cold, white and black. He maintained that snow is black (in part). Mind is the source of all motion. It causes a rotation, which is gradually spreading throughout the world, and is causing the lightest things to go to the circumference, and the heaviest to fall towards the centre. Mind is uniform, and is just as good in animals as in man. Man's apparent superiority is due to the fact that he has hands; all seeming differences of intelligence are really due to bodily differences. Both Aristotle and the Platonic Socrates complain that Anaxagoras, after introducing mind, makes very little use of it. Aristotle points out that he only introduces mind as a cause when he knows no other. Whenever he can, he gives a mechanical explanation. He rejected necessity and chance as giving the origins of things; nevertheless, there was no "Providence" in his cosmology. He does not seem to have thought much about ethics or religion; probably he was an atheist, as his prosecutors maintained. All his predecessors influenced him, except Pythagoras. The influence of Parmenides was the same in his case as in that of Empedocles. In science he had great merit. It was he who first explained that the moon shines by reflected light, though there is a cryptic fragment in Parmenides suggesting that he also knew this. Anaxagoras gave the correct theory of eclipses, and knew that the moon is below the sun. The sun and stars, he said, are fiery stones, but we do not feel the heat of the stars because they are too distant. The sun is larger than the Peloponnesus. The moon has mountains, and (he thought) inhabitants. Anaxagoras is said to have been of the school of Anaximenes; certainly he kept alive the rationalist and scientific tradition of the Ionians. One does not find in him the ethical and religious preoccupations which, passing from the Pythagoreans to Socrates and from Socrates to Plato, brought an obscurantist bias into Greek philosophy. He is not quite in the first rank, but he is important as the first to bring philosophy to Athens, and as one of the influences that helped to form Socrates.