the little ebook of big ancient ideas

Put a sock in it again, Socrates!

2010-09-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

Hello again! So what do you want to tell us now Socrates?

"The people of Athens didn't really know how to think for themselves. So I used to discuss important things with them to wake them up. They were like lazy horses who didn't want to move, and I was like the gadfly, stinging them into life!"
Ouch! that sounds painful!
"I had a special method. Say I met a boy - call him Miletus - in the city square. I would ask him a question, pretending to be a bit stupid. Miletus would answer. Then I would ask him another question, making him think about whether his answer was as sensible as he had thought. It usually wasn't!"
So pretending to be stupid was a trick?
"Oh yes. By asking lots of questions about people's answers, I made them see how they couldn't be right."
But if lots of people were watching, wouldn't it have been embarrassing for Miletus?
"That was the trouble. Some people thought I was making a fool of them, especially if they were important city officials! They got jealous too, because the young men of Athens were listening to me, not to them."
I can see they wouldn't like that.
"So they took me prisoner and put me on trial. They accused me of not believing in the Greek gods, and of putting wrong ideas into the minds of young people. I told the jury that I was acting for the good of the state and the people of Athens, whom I loved."
But they didn't accept that?
"No, they just wanted to get rid of me. And because I wouldn't go away from Athens, they gave me a horrible punishment."
Oh no! I can hardly bear to hear this!
"They told me I had to drink hemlock."
Hemlock? What's that?
"A plant. You can make a deadly poison from it. I got the hemlock myself, and called all my friends around me. Then I drank it - and of course I died."
But why did you have to die?
"I didn't have to. I chose that way, because I was not going to give in to their bullying - I stuck up for myself, and for what is right. Nobody should be punished for saying what they think."
Goodbye Socrates, thanks for explaining everything.
"Think nothing of it. I still like talking, even though I've been dead for about two and a half thousand years - who's counting anyway!"

PUT A SOCK IN IT, SOCRATES!

2010-09-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

Now let me introduce a well rounded and very popular philosopher who lived in Athens at the same time as Protagoras. His main interest was OTHER PEOPLE. (Much good it did him, too!)
Let the great Socrates (Sock-rat-ees) speak for himself...

"If I had put a sock in it, I wouldn't have met the GRISLY END that I did!
"Spouting off in the Agora - that's the market-place to you - in Athens turned out to be a very dangerous hobby!
"If I'd stuck to growing flowers (waste of time), or making clay urns (tried that and they came out all wrong), or doing gymnastics (what, with my figure? I'd be a laughing stock), then I'd probably have lived to a ripe old age, and never got into trouble at all.
"But no - talking and thinking is what I was good at! I loved standing on the steps of the Temple of Zeus or sitting in a shady corner of the Agora, with a crowd of people around me, talking about right and wrong, good laws and bad laws - getting people to think for themselves instead of just accepting what they'd always been told.
Did they get sick of you, Socrates?
"Most people loved and respected me, but I had some enemies too. People who made the laws, important people who governed Athens...
"And the way they finished me off wasn't nice...!"

Socrates lived from 470 to 399BC so he came after the Very Ancient philosophers we've met so far. That's why they're often called the pre-Socratic philosophers, because they lived before Socrates. This shows what a famous and important philosopher Socrates was.
He was born in Athens, Greece, and his life was spent talking to people in the squares and market places. He loved city life.
"The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing," he said.
Socrates never wrote anything down.
But one of his young students, called Plato, later became very famous too. He wrote about all the things he had heard Socrates say.
Socrates enjoyed having discussions with people. In fact, he liked to have a good old argument. He would start by asking a question, as if he knew nothing. People would answer the question in different ways. Then, by asking more questions, he would get them to think more deeply and change their views. This kind of argument is called 'SOCRATIC DIALOGUE' after him.

Did you know that Socrates was quite ugly, with bulging eyes and a little round nose, a fat belly and flat feet?
Does that really matter? One of his friends said - 'You can look for him in the present or in the past, but you will never find anyone to equal him!' That's more important than what he looked like isn't it!
Find out what happened to Socrates next time!

Septic or Sceptic?

2010-03-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Septic or Sceptic?
If you cut your finger and it later goes black, throbs and fills with oozing pus, you could say your finger had gone SEPTIC and you would mean germs had got into the cut and started their dirty work.
On the other hand, if you went around saying that we don't know for sure what is true and what isn't, and will never be able to find out for certain, then you could call yourself a SCEPTIC.
One of the first sceptics was a fantastic philosopher called Protagoras, who lived around 450 BC.
He is famous for saying:
MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS.
He meant that people decide for themselves what they want to think of as right or wrong, true or false.
Do you agree with Protagoras?
Or do you think that there would be a right or wrong, true or false even if humans didn't exist?
People like Protagoras, who think you can never know the real truth about anything, are still called sceptics. And if someone is sceptical of what you are saying, it means they aren't sure that you are telling the truth!

Where did atom bombs come from?

2009-11-29T08:23:00.000-08:00

Two of the most amazing things about the late, great twentieth century were:

someone learned how to split the atom;
someone else invented atom bombs!

Even more amazing - all this atom business started off with a mate of - guess who?

-Heraclitus, Anaximenes and Empedocles!

So hello to Democritus!

Well, he was born a while later than them, but he cerainly knew about them and was very interested in their ideas.

he agreed partly with Empedocles. Nothing really changed, he thought, because the stuff that things are made up of, is always the same. But he also disagreed partly with Empedocles. He said, "No, everything is not made up of Earth, Air, Fire and Water mixed together. Everything is made of tiny invisible blocks! Things come and go, but these tiny blocks are around forever!"

Guess what he called the tiny invisible blocks? Exactly! Atoms!

Did you know that the word 'atom' means 'uncuttable' in Greek?

Do our senses tell us lies?

2009-08-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

Parmenides, who lived around 540BC, did not trust his senses.
He did not believe that things in the world around him were really what they looked, or felt, or tasted like.
He thought long and hard about how we could really find out about what was in the outside world.
After all - you might have seen a ghost - lots of people have - but does that mean there was really one there?
You may hear someone shouting your name - you turn round and find your hearing has let you down - they'd been shouting to someone else.
Parmenides decided that you had to trust REASON, not your senses. The Ancient Greek philosophers had a word for reason. It was LOGOS. Some of them thought that LOGOS guided the whole world.
Parmenides was the first rationalist (rash-on-a-list) philosopher. This is someone who thinks you can use pure thought, or reason, to work out how things really are. If it doesn't fit with what you see - then what you see is wrong!
He tried to prove that change is impossible - things only look as though they change. He said that if you can think of something that will exist in the future, or has existed in the past, then it also exists in your mind now. So coming into being and passing away are illusions - really everything is changeless and eternal.
But what is the difference between existing in the world and existing in the mind? Think of a dragon. Does you thinking about it make it exist now, in the past, or in the future? Parmenides thought it did, in a way, because 'Nothingness is not possible' and 'For it is the same thing to think and to be.'
This may sound a bit woolly now but fair play to Parmenides - he set western philosophy lots of questions about existence, and change, and logic which have been debated ever since.
What do you think? If you think something, do you make it 'be'? Do you believe in the evidence of your senses? Are the past, present and future really all one?
Great ideas you set for us Parmenides.
Much much later - in the 17th century- the French philosopher Descartes became famous for saying 'I think therefore I am'. He was another rationalist philosopher who said that we should not believe in what our senses tell us - we could all be the victims of a great lie by an 'evil genius' and nothing might be as it seemed. The only thing I can really know to be 'real' is my own thought that I am having at this moment. And as I am thinking a thought, I must exist. I think Descartes was influenced just a little bit by Parmenides here!
Can you think of any science fiction films that have Parmenidean type themes? That the world around us is not what we think it is? That we are being tricked? There's a lot of philosophy in science fiction.

More Cracking Conclusions!

2009-02-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

More cracking conclusions from Heraclitus and his ancient acquaintances!

Choose one of these for a philosophy group or just to chew over on your own!

I'll tell you my favourite at the end.

Much learning does not teach one to have intelligence.

(Heraclitus)

I've always thought schools were a bit overrated.

It is easier to guard against an enemy than a friend.

(Alcmaeon of Croton)

Hmmm...I happen to trust my friends. Yours sound a bit risky Alcmaeon.

The body is earth but the mind is fire.

(Epicharmus of Syracuse)

That famous French philosopher Descartes thought he'd invented the mind-body problem - but no - Epicharmus, you got there first. So are the mind and the body really two different things...?

The best men choose one thing rather than all else: everlasting fame. The majority are satisfied, like well fed cattle.

(Heraclitus)

So it's OK to want to be famous after all? But famous for what?

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

(Xenophanes)

Still looking for that elusive 'substance of which all things are made' I see.

In the same river we both step and we do not step, we are and we are not.

(Heraclitus)

You were thinking that everything changes all the time, that nothing stays the same even for a second...even the water in a river is constantly changing, so you can't step into the same river twice. Things only seem to look the same. Now science seems to be backing you up Heraclitus!

And as for certain truth, no man has seen it.

(Heraclitus)

Well, that could be true...

And what on earth gave Anaximander of Miletus this idea?

The earth is like a stone column!

So now we come to my own favourite:

The fairest universe is but a dust-heap piled up at random!

(Heraclitus)

Good to repeat this to yourself on a bad day. Could the universe really be a random pile of dust? Perhaps Heraclitus should have been having a duvet day when he wrote that.

But wait a minute - he says 'the fairest universe'. Did he think there's more than one universe then? Now that's interesting. And we thought multiverse theory was modern!

All of these early philosophers lived between about 580BC and 500BC. These are just fragments from their writings. Even so, we see the seeds of later philosophy: the search for basic substances, the problem of change, the apparent distinction between mind and body, the idea of truth, the difference between knowledge and wisdom, order and disorder in the universe, and ethics - how to be good, or happy.

Western Philosophy's weird beginnings

2009-02-05T01:23:00.000-08:00

THALES, PYTHAGORAS AND HERACLITUS - BEST AND MOST ANCIENT

There was once a very ancient philosopher called THALES. He was born in Miletus, in modern Turkey. He was fascinated by water. He saw that water can be a solid, a liquid and a vapour. He worked out that all life needs moisture, and probably decided that the world's basic substance is water, or that 'all things are water'.
Why 'probably'?
- Because he lived in the seventh century BC and only a few fragments are left of his writing. People have guessed a lot of things about him, and have even forged ideas and claimed them to be his. He comes to us through a watery haze of time. But we think he was thinking about cause and effect, as well as looking for a basic substance that everything is made of.
Did he do experiments with water, like changing states?
-We don't know.
According to another ancient guy called Aetius, Thales said that 'god is in all things'.

What could he have meant by this? What do you think?

About fifty years later along came PYTHAGORAS, who lived on the Greek island of Samos. He founded a school so he could teach his ideas to a select little band of followers.
Do you like eating beans?
-Then you would not have wanted to go to his school. Beans were off the menu permanently. Pythagoras liked them too much to eat them.
In fact he had to pay his first pupil to attend!
But if you like maths then you would have learnt a lot there. Pythagoras thought the world is basically mathematical. He said, 'Everything is number' and 'Numbers are in everything'. Everything in nature changes, he reasoned, but numbers never change. He investigated patterns and relationships between numbers and shapes. He especially loved geometry and is famous for 'Pythagoras's Theorum' -although the Babylonians had probably worked this out before him.

Pythagoras said that numbers can't be seen or touched, but are always there.

What do you think?

An ancient guy called HERACLITUS also lived around these times. He had an unusual habit.
He would lie on the floor with one foot in the air.
He would move his foot around until the sun was quite behind it. When he got it right, he couldn't see the sun any more (a bit like a foot eclipse).
After a lot of thinking, this is what he said:

'The sun is as big as a foot!'

He could practise this party trick a lot (if he wanted to) because the sun shines fairly often in Ephesus, the place in Turkey where he came from.

DID YOU KNOW THAT...

In these ancient days there was no such thing as science?

You could say that these first philosophers were proto-scientists, or near-scientists because they were carrying out observations and then making up a theory to fit the observations. Some of them were doing investigations.

Good for you, guys! It's just a pity, Heraclitus, that you hadn't worked out that things look smaller as they get further away. Then you could have modified your theory a bit!

I use 'Ancilla to the pre-Socratic Philosophers' (by Kathleen Freeman) to get my facts right. This snazzy book tells me exactly what fragments of writing survive from these ancient times. We don't have any original writings from Pythagoras - but he talked a lot, and his ideas were passed on.

Pre-Socratic means 'the times before Socrates'. We'll come to Socrates himself later on.

The Little ebook of Big Ancient Ideas

2009-02-03T08:24:00.000-08:00

eWARNING!

If you think philosophy will give you all the answers to life's big questions, think again! If you think you might be better off feeding the cat or kicking a ball against your garden wall - well, so did the French philosopher Voltaire. He said - after a lot of thought - 'il faut cultiver le jardin' - we should all stop thinking so much and do sensible practical things like digging the garden.

He didn't follow his own advice though!

But if you want to know about some ancient ideas right at the beginnings of philosophy, then here's the place to begin.

Philosophy is something that, once started, you can't help doing. It's like peeling layers off an onion bulb - each layer taking you deeper down to layers and depths you hadn't known were there.

It's like eating a peach, and each bite takes you nearer to the stone, which is the absolutely brilliant, astounding thought or idea that makes your brain tingle with excitement.

It's like a space voyage, guided by the rules and knowledge of the known universe, heading towards the vast, tremendous unknown...

The Ancient Philosophers started us off on our exciting journeys of the mind, and this little ebook is dedicated to them.