From Thales to Pythagoreans
Nowadays when somebody hears “philosophy” s/he imagines a different kind of religion, tale or story about difficult questions, told using complicated words. But what does philosophy really means?
Let’s start from foundation date of European philosophy — we know it from Aristotle. The first philosopher was Thales, the guy from Milesian “school”. He was born somewhere in the 7th century BC, Thales wasn’t philosopher in its modern meaning. He was a thinker. So his work was just thinking about anything around him — it’s great, isn’t it? Thales made ancient Greek calendar — 365 days, 12 months 30 days each. And 5 extra days at the end of the year. His main idea was finding ” creation material”, and he achieved it. Water — element of creation. Water is godlike.everything created of water and everything will become water. Everything existing in the world is alive. Earth is flat and stands in the ocean. The main God is Logos — son of the Zeus.
Anaximander — 6th age BC, the second representative of Milesian school. His basic element is Apeiron — something unrecognizable, temporary, everlasting, material — nowadays we can call it quantum particle(indirect). Apeiron is the basement for four nature structures: fire, more ware, air, ground. Also, he was the first Darwinist.
Anaximenes was the third great Milesian thinker. 5th age BC decided that everything had it beginning in the air. In my opinion, he’s not very interesting, but he did a couple of nice turns on philosophical board. He was the first guy who started a theme of the soul. And second — he was a neanderthal man of the atheistic idea, cause he thought that wind created gods. So gods not creators of the material world. Brilliant!
Here, I want you to mention- 7–5 ages BC. The population of the earth less than modern in hundreds of times, education is very low, there are no scientific researches — cause there’s no science. There are no books or the internet. Is it Hard enough?
7–6 ages before c. a time when science found its rights to live and it called Pythagoras. Big joke hidden in one interesting fact — Pythagorean School is an esoteric one. Let’s get involved in all this stuff.
The complete Pythagorean system consists of two parts — akousmatikoi and mathēmatikoi. Followers of akousmatikoi — servants of a religious cult; while followers of mathēmatikoi — scientists, who intended to solve the problem of four mathēms: arithmetic, geometry, spherical, harmonic. We strongly need to find sense — Pythagoras was the first guy who separated three types of knowledge and forced them to work in a proper way.
Remember my post about gnoseology? — Religious, Scientific and Philosophical.
Pythagoras didn’t know about gnoseology like a strong system, but he used it nicely. Those who can understand global picture of the world structure — will use philosophical way, those who can’t — religious. Okay, next — those who not dumb enough to “believe” but haven’t got global vision (not everybody can be nice managers) are using scientific way of understanding. As more stupid you are, the more “social weight” you need — you can become a priest, a “speaker”. Simple, but powerful.
One more thing — why is it great to combine in big social groups? Cause it gives your ideas a value — all Pythagoreans had given their ideas to their master. Therefore, Pythagoreans were the first guys who called universe — “Cosmos” which means “beautifully organized”. Their main principle was harmony/equality, and its straight way to Newton’s law of balance of forces. However, that’s not all out of their achievements –for example, dialectics — they had done it!
Well, we will figure this out later, I just want to explain that philosophy is not a tale, it’s more powerful than maths or any other sciences, but we have to understand it in a right way.
