World History For Dummies by Haugen Peter

Author:Haugen, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Loving Wisdom: The Rise and Reach of Philosophy

In This Chapter

Questioning the workings of the universe

Crediting the influence of early philosophers

Going Greek with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Broadening thought following the conquests of Alexander the Great

Philosophy often gets dismissed as mind games — idle speculations cooked up by eccentrics with overactive imaginations. If that’s all philosophy were, you wouldn’t have to take it into account when considering history. But philosophy keeps bumping into history by getting into religion, politics, and government and influencing how people conduct their lives. Therefore, any overview of world history includes looking at philosophy and where it comes from.

Traditionally, philosophy is thought to come from the ancient Greeks, although they probably picked up on earlier cultures’ philosophical traditions. Wherever they got their inspiration, the Greeks — a culture of thinkers and talkers — made the most of it.

Asking the Big Questions

Philosophy can sound wild, especially when you ponder what the guys trying to practice it more than 2,500 years ago had to say. But they were doing the best they could with the knowledge and tools they had. And most of what they wrote has been lost, which makes it difficult for history to give them a fair shake.

For example, Thales, who was born about 625 BC, said the world floated on water. He also seemed to think that everything was made of water. Actually, he just could have been impressed by how much water there was.

What Thales was talking about with regard to everything being made of water isn’t clear. No complete texts of philosophical works from that far back survive. However, it seems that Thales and the philosophers following him — proposing such things as air and fire and the infinite as the basis of all matter — were thinking about a reality based on observable phenomena.

What exactly do philosophers do? They tackle the big questions, which include the following:

What is the world?

Who am I?

What am I doing here?

Does reality consist of what people see and experience?

If not, what is reality?

What does it mean?

Founding science in philosophy

Today’s scientists answer questions empirically, or based on physical evidence. But before modern scientific methods, scientists were philosophers: They asked questions and thought about possible answers without hard data to back them up.

In Greece almost 3,000 years ago, few tools were available for conducting scientific experiments. Thales couldn’t take samples of water, marble, fingernail clippings, and olive oil and run tests that would show him that they weren’t all forms of the same thing. So, scientist philosophers did the best they could in formulating theories that seemed to explain the world they observed.

Testing a theory but blowing the methodology

Unlike some early philosophers, Anaximenes, who came along a bit later than Thales (Anaximenes died around 500 BC), conducted experiments. They were flawed experiments, but they had an inkling of scientific method about them.

Anaximenes thought everything was made of air, which could transform into other matter by compression or expansion. He decided clouds were made of condensed air on its way to becoming more condensed.

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