Guthrie : Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

Page 9

Empedocles, impelled by the needs of his moral and religious, as well as of his physical system, posited two such causes, which he named Love and Strife. In the physical world, these are used in a mechanical way to bring about respectively the combination with, and separation from each other of the four elements, whereby the cosmos is brought into being. In the religious sphere they allow for a moral dualism, being the causes of good and evil respectively. Anaxagoras was hailed by Plato and Aristotle as the first man to assert that Nous, Intelligence, was the originator of the motions leading to the formation of a cosmos from the tiny spermata of matter which, in his view, were its material constituents. Moreover he explicitly insisted on the transcendent character of this Nous, which 'existed alone and by itself' and 'was mixed with no thing'.

Leucippus and Democritus did not provide as their cause of motion any separate entity existing, like the opposite forces of Empedocles or the Nous of Anaxagoras, in the same positive way as the elements themselves. For this reason Aristotle condemned them as having neglected the whole problem of the moving cause. In fact their answer was more subtle, and more scientific in spirit than those of the others. Part of the difficulty had been that Parmenides had denied the existence of empty space, on the strength of the abstract argument that if Being is, emptiness could only be the place where Being was not. But nothing exists besides Being, and to say of Being 'it is not' is a logical impossibility. Emptiness is not Being, therefore it does not exist. Outfacing Parmenides on his own ground, the common-sense of the atomists declared that 'not-Being exists as much as Being'; that is, since Being was still conceived as tied up with corporeal existence, they asserted that there must be place which was not occupied by body. They supposed the sum of reality to be made up of tiny solid atoms floating in infinite space. Once this picture is made conscious and explicit, as it now was for the first time, matter is, as it were, set free, and, of atoms let loose in infinite space, it might perhaps seem as reasonable to ask 'Why should they stay still?' as 'Why should they move?' Though he gives them no credit for it, Aristotle comes near to the heart of their achievement when he says that the atomists 'made void the cause of motion'. To appreciate this at its true worth, one must understand what a bold step it was to assert the existence of empty space in face of the new logic of Parmenides. The gradual emergence into consciousness of the problem of the first cause of motion, bound up as it is with that of the relation between matter and life, is one of the main threads to be followed in an exposition of Presocratic thought.

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W.K.C. Guthrie
A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

Learned Freeware

W.K.C. Guthrie A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

Learned Freeware

W.K.C. Guthrie
A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy