Pajel, Maria Czaralene R.

Philosophy
3- Architecture Mam Ferraren
Early Philosophers
Thales of Miletus (c. 624 - 546 B.C.)
He was an early Pre-Socratic philosopher, mathematician and astronomer from the Greek city
of Miletus in Ionia (modern-day Turkey). He was one of the so-called Seven Sages of Greece, and many
regard him as thefirst philosopher in the Western tradition.
He was perhaps the first subscriber to Materialist and Naturalism in trying to define the substance or
substances of which all material objects were composed, which he identified as water.
His innovative search for a universality in the disciplines of mathematics, astronomy and philosophy
have earned him the label the "first scientist".
Anaximander
c.610 - c.546 BC
Greek Philosopher

Anaximander has been called the father of astronomy, because he was the first thinker who developed a
cosmology using mathematical proportions to map the heavens.
Anaximander was born in Miletus and might have been a pupil of the philosopher Thales. Anaximander
explained the origin of the universe with the theory of 'apeiron'. 'The universe is boundless but consists
of a primary substance'.
Anaximander wrote on geography, astronomy, cosmology and biology. He believed that human infants
were at first produced in a fishlike creature - an early form of evolutionary thinking.
Democritus
(c. 460 - 370 B.C.), he is sometimes known as the "Laughing Philosopher", was a Pre-
Socratic Greek philosopher fromThrace in northern Greece. Along with his teacher, Leucippus, he was
the founder of the Greek philosophical school of Atomismand developed a Materialist account of the
natural world.
Although he was a contemporary of Socrates, he usually considered Pre-Socratic in that his philosophy
and his approach were more similar to other Pre-Socratic thinkers than to Socrates and Plato.
Like many other Pre-Socratic philosophies, the Atomism of Leucippus and Democritus was largely a
response to the unacceptable claim of Parmenides that change was impossible without something
coming from nothing (which is itself impossible), and thus any perceived change or movement was
merely illusory.
In the Atomist version, there are multiple unchanging material principles which
constantly rearrange themselves in order to effect what we see as changes. These principles are very
small, indivisible and indestructible building blocks known asatoms (from the Greek "atomos", meaning
"uncuttable"). All of reality and all the objects in the universe are composed ofdifferent arrangements of
these eternal atoms and an infinite void, in which they form different combinations and shapes.
There is no room in this theory for the concept of a God, and essentially Atomism is a type
of Materialism or Physicalism, as well as being atheistic and deterministic in its outlook. However,
Democritus did allow for the existence of the human soul, which he saw as composed of a special kind
of spherical atom, in constant motion, and he explained the senses in a similar manner.
In Epistemology, Democritus distinguished two types of knowledge: "bastard" (subjective and
insufficient knowledge, obtained by perception through the senses), and "legitimate (genuine
knowledge obtained by the processing of this unreliable bastard knowledge using inductive
reasoning).
In the field of Ethics, Democritus pursued a type of early Hedonism or Epicureanism. He was one of
the earliest thinkers to explicit posit a supreme good or goal, which he called cheerfulness or well-
being (see the section on Eudaimonism) and identified with the untroubled enjoyment of life. He saw
this as achievable through moderation in the pursuit of pleasure, through distinguishing useful pleasures
from harmful ones, and through conforming to conventional morality. He is quoted as saying, "The
brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures".
Democritus was also a pioneer of mathematics and geometry, and produced works entitled "On
Numbers", "On Geometrics","On Tangencies", "On Mapping" and "On Irrationals", although these works
have not survived. We do know that he was among the first to observe that a cone or pyramid has one-
third the volume of a cylinder or prism respectively with the same base and height.
He was also the first philosopher we know who realized that the celestial body we call the Milky Way is
actually formed from the light of distant stars, even though many later philosophers (including Aristotle)
argued against this. He was also among the first to propose that the universe contains many worlds,
some of which may be inhabited. He devoted many of the later years of his life to researches into the
properties of minerals and plants, although we have no record of any conclusions he may have drawn.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
(a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a Greek philosopher of the 5
th
century B.C.E. (born ca. 500
480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in Athens. He propounded a physical theory of
everything-in-everything, and claimed that nous(intellect or mind) was the motive cause of the
cosmos. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious
for his scientific theories, including the claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the moon is
earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. Anaxagoras maintained that the original state of the cosmos
was a mixture of all its ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients are thoroughly
mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is evident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or
homogeneous. Although every ingredient is ubiquitous, some ingredients are present in higher
concentrations than others, and these proportions may also vary from place to place (even if they do
not do so in the original state of the cosmos). The mixture is unlimited in extent, and at some point in
time it is set into motion by the action of nous (intellect). The mixture begins to rotate around some
small point within it, and as the whirling motion proceeds and expands through the mass, the
ingredients in the mixture are shifted and separated out (in terms of relative density) and remixed with
each other, ultimately producing the cosmos of apparently separate material masses and material
objects, with differential properties, that we perceive.
Pythagoras of Samos
(c. 570 - 490 B.C.) was an early Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher and mathematician from the Greek island
of Samos.
He was the founder of the influential philosophical and religious movement or cult
called Pythagoreanism, and he was probably the first man to actually call himself a philosopher (or lover
of wisdom). Pythagoras (or in a broader sense the Pythagoreans), allegedly exercised an important
influence on the work of Plato.
As a mathematician, he is known as the "father of numbers" or as the first pure mathematician, and is
best known for hisPythagorean Theorem on the relation between the sides of a right triangle, the
concept of square numbers and square roots, and the discovery of the golden ratio.
Because of the secretive nature of his school and the custom of its students to attribute everything to
Pythagoras himself, it is difficult today to determine who actually did which work. To further confuse
matters, some forgeries under his name (a few of which still exist) circulated in antiquity. Some of his
biographers clearly aimed to present him as a god-like figure, and he became the subject of elaborate
legends surrounding his historical persona.
The school that Pythagoras established at Croton was in some ways more of a secret
brotherhood or monastery. It was based on his religious teachings and was highly concerned with
the morality of society. Members were required to live ethically,love one another, share political beliefs,
practice pacifism, and devote themselves to the mathematics of nature. They alsoabstained from meat,
abjured personal property and observed a rule of silence (called "echemythia"), the breaking of which
was punishable by death, based on the belief that if someone was in any doubt as to what to say, they
should remain silent.
Pythagoras saw his religious and scientific views as inseparably interconnected. He believed in the
theory of metempsychosisor the transmigration of the soul and its reincarnation again and again after
death into the bodies of humans, animals or vegetables until it became moral (a belief he may have
learned from his one-time teacher Pherecydes of Syros, who is usually credited as the first Greek to
teach the transmigration of souls). He was one of the first to propose that the thought processesand
the soul were located in the brain and not the heart.
Another of Pythagoras' central beliefs was that the essence of being (and the stability of all things that
create the universe) can be found in the form of numbers, and that it can be encountered through the
study of mathematics. For instance, he believed that things like health relied on a stable proportion of
elements, with too much or too little of one thing causing an imbalancethat makes a person unhealthy.
In mathematics, Pythagoras is commonly given credit for discovering what is now know as
the Pythagorean Theorem (orPythagoras' Theorem), a theorem in geometry that states that, in a right-
angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of
the squares of the other two sides. Although this had been known and utilized previously by
the Babylonians and Indians, he (or perhaps one of his students) is thought to have constructed the first
proof.
He believed that the number system (and therefore the universe system) was based on the sum of the
numbers one to four ([Link]), and that odd numbers were masculine and even numbers were feminine.
He discovered the theory of mathematical proportions, constructed from three to five geometrical
solids, and also discovered square numbers and square roots. The discovery of the golden
ratio (referring to the ratio of two quantities such that the sum of those quantities and the larger one is
the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller, approximately 1.618) is also usually
attributed to Pythagoras, or possibly to his student, Theano.
He was one of the first to think that the Earth was round, that all planets have an axis, and that all
the planets travel around one central point (which he originally identified as the Earth, but later
renounced it for the idea that the planets revolve around a centralfire, although he never identified it
as the Sun). He also believed that the Moon was another planet that he called a counter-Earth".
Anaximenes of Miletus
He was a Pre-Socratic Philosopher, (585 BCE - 528 BCE). Like all Pre-Socratics, little remains of the work
by Anaximenes and little is known in regards to the details of his life. It has been postulated that the
philosopher was born around 585 BCE and died around 528 BCE. He is considered, after Thales
and Anaximander, the third philosopher from what has come to be known as the Milesian school of
philosophy, operating in the ancient Greek land of Ionia, or present day Turkey. Like his predecessors,
Anaximenes was preoccupied with cosmology, searching for the worlds origin in which he is most
known for his assertion that air is the most basic and originary material and the source of all things. In
addition to this main concentration, Anaximenes also made studies in meteorology.
In the Milesian tradition, in which the members of the school are often referred to as being material
monists," Anaximenes sought to articulate one particular substance as responsible for all things. This of
course diverts fromAnaximander, presumably the young philosophers teacher, who postulated the
notion of aperionthat which is indefinite and boundlessas the origin of the cosmos. Anaximenes
disagreed with this notion of an indefinite stuff" and believed that there must be a particular substance
and that substance was air. Interestingly enough, his observation and understanding of air and its
transformative properties actually positions his interpretation of the origin of the world in between that
of Anaximander and Thales, the latter of whom considered water to be the essential element, rather
then in direct opposition to either.
Air is the nearest to an immaterial thing; for since we are generated in the flow of air, it is necessary that
it should be infinite and abundant, because it is never exhausted.
For Anaximenes, air was the essential element because it was, likeAnaximanders aperion, neutral and
because it was infinite and always in motion. Air was everywhere, and everywhere it was transformable.
It could transform into every other basic element, and hence everything else in the world. And this
notion was an empirical one for Anaximander; he based his election of air" on the observable fact that
it transforms and his belief that it was the originary substance to transform into the other elements
from which everything else could then be generated.
[Air] differs in essence in accordance with its rarity or density. When it is thinned it becomes fire, while
when it is condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, when still more condensed it becomes water, then
earth, then stones. Everything else comes from these.
Air, because it has such varying properties, is distinct and ideal as the candidate for an essential element
according to Anaximenes. And, as he postulated, it was due to the fact that it has an innate means for
transformationcondensation and rarefactionthat the element of air can produce and thus produces
everything else. In effect, everything exists from varying densities of air itself. When air is condensed it
becomes precipitation then water then earth then stone; when air is rarefied it becomes fire, which
further rarefied becomes air, then wind, which can then precipitate again.
Euclid
was an ancient Greek mathematician born in 365 BC in Alexandria, Egypt. In ancient Greece,
mathematics and philosophy were not as distinct as they are today. Mathematical relationships were
considered fundamental to understanding the nature of reality and held in high regard
by Pythagoras and Plato. In Athens, Euclid studied at Platos Academy, where it was written on top of
the entrance Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. Euclid famously demonstrated the basic
principles of geometry from just a few initial axioms in his work the Elements, which served as the
essential textbook on mathematics until the 19th century.
Euclids system is based on classical logic, as presented byAristotle, which states that something cannot
be and not be at the same time (also known as the law of noncontradiction). Euclid used indirect proofs
(also known as proof by contradiction) for his theorems by showing how if one were false it would imply
a contradiction, and therefore it must be true. He also employed the method of exhaustion to
determine the area of a shape by inscribing within it a sequence of smaller shapes that together add up
to the larger shape. This is seen as a precursor to calculus. Much of what Euclid wrote in the Elements is
now considered algebra and number theory.