Plato 9.4.2 Socrates Among the Natural Philosophers
Before there were sophists, there were natural philosophers. Starting with Thales around 600 BC and continuing down to Socrates’ time, a special group of Greek thinkers had developed theories about the cosmos and how it works. They were scientists, or perhaps more appropriately proto-scientists, who theorized about the what came to be known as Nature (physis). Breaking away from mythological explanations, they sought to understand the world around them not in terms of divine interventions by the gods, but in terms of natural processes. In a storm, lightning was not a weapon hurled by Zeus but wind escaping from a cloud; earthquakes were caused by subterranean waves rather than by Poseidon shaking the earth. The inventors of these new, naturalistic theories came to be known as natural philosophers (a term Isaac Newton still applied to himself many centuries later).
The natural philosophers seem to have attracted a few students to whom they became tutors. But they did not found anything like schools (despite efforts by later thinkers to project their institutions onto earlier times).
Aristophanes in The Clouds has Socrates appear as the headmaster of a school where he studies important scientific subjects such as flatulence in mosquitos. That Socrates studied with the natural philosopher Archelaus is a well-attested fact. Some scholars have, accordingly, suggested that Socrates started out as a natural philosopher and only later switched to studying ethical topics.[19] But there is evidence that Socrates was known as a moral philosopher well before the time of Aristophanes’ play.[20]
[19].Ferguson 1964: 70–73; Chiapelli 1891: 383–384.
[20].Arguably, Euripides is virtually debating with Socrates in his Hippolytus of 428 BC: Wilamowitz 1907:24 and n. 44; Snell 1948; Dodds 1951:186–187; Irwin 1983; Wildberg 2009. See Socrates 9.1.*
