The Pre-Socratics

I learned [yesterday and today] about the Pre-Socratics, a group of philosophers labeled by historians as such because they all [had in common having flourished] before Socrates. From Wikipedia, it is said that the term was popularized by Hermann Diels’ work The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics. These philosophers include the Milesians, the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, and the Atomists. [How is the world created, where does the world come from, and what the relationship between nature and mathematics are some of the questions they investigate.]

Continue reading for [details that is] very likely to be really boring.

Philosophy and its Appearance of Uselessness

Beside my computer is The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb, the executive editor of The Economist. It is a book on “a history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance”. Like my previous posts, I will write in my own words as far as possible what I have learned from each of the chapters. Be prepared to read many posts related to philosophy for the next few days. If time permits, I will continue to write about other stuff that I encounter – that [means possibly] two posts a day while I’m on this book.

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Introduction

Mr Gottlieb [began] his introduction saying that he did not expect to find philosophy [not in existence] when he started writing the book. Yet that was precisely what happened, because philosophy [seemed] to be a study of everything.

He then approached to define the field by stating that philosophy is so extensive such that any attempt to define it runs the danger of oversimplification. It is a field very susceptible to change. In the Middle Ages, whatever that was not theology was [subsumed] under philosophy. Up to the early 19th century, what we now call “science”, including some parts of philosophy was also classified under “natural philosophy”. Science as a field was created when a few Greek philosophers began seeking for natural explanations instead of believing in the Gods for events. Computer science too has its origins in formal logic. Economics, psychology, and sociology are other notable examples of fields once considered part of philosophy. The result of philosophical study, as we can observe by tracing its history, is that whatever mundane and esoteric in philosophy that had later found practicability broke off to carve its own field of enquiry. What is left then appeared useless, despite the fact that  philosophy is very much [otherwise]. [To] quote the author,

“One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise. This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress.”

The last few paragraphs left of the introduction was an attempt to define philosophy by its approach. He quoted a description of philosophy offered by the psychologist William James, that it is “a peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly. And this is what makes philosophy distinctive. In his (the author’s)  words, “for the one thing that marks it off from other sorts of thinking is its unwillingness to accept conventional answers, even when it seems perverse not to do so from a practical point of view.”