00:00 Introduction: Why to Study Philosophy 08:43 Mythos to Logos 20:04 Thales 33:32 Anaximander 44:43 Anaximenes, Material Monism and Anaximander again 1:00:20 Pythagoras
Being British I thought I wouldn't like these lectures and didn't bother with them, however they are outstanding wonderful talks, derlivered brilliently , fills me with a passion to learn more.
@@dafuqmr13 maybe He/she thought the american accent would be an hard pill to swallow for a person used to hear the british english only. Or another option is that there is a secret war going on between UK and USA
@@silent_shout I challenge you to analyze your 6 month old comment and analyze whether you feel the same way about it now as you did when you first proposed it
Over 3 years later, and I’m still sharing these videos with people and watching them myself Your video on eliatic monists is only google result I can find that actually gets at the idea in an explicit way. (And it’s a topic very useful when debating with Buddhists or Nihilists)
Adam, amazing lectures. The way you deliver really engages people. Please continue with your style and do not change it. Lovely lectures. I listen to them while I drive to work and back home. Instead of some nonsense pop music played on the radio, I prefer to nurture my mind with these lectures. Also, I love the part where you say that Philosophy it is not knowing who said what, but how they said it and why (more or less is what you mention at the beginning of the lecture).
Thank you. I was first interested in learning philosophy several years ago. But the complexity and lack of easily accessible content made it really difficult. I’m now able to get to get a more complete understanding of something I was passionate about.
I wish you taught at my college! Very few teachers can present knowledge in a way that the student realises just how interesting and revolutionary those points in history were.
Best description of the Milesians I've seen on youtube. I never realized how similar they are to the Taoists. Its an interesting cultural comparison to see how Eastern civilization was more or less content to stop at that point.
He also says that the Greek word _arche_ means "structure" (by analogy with "architecture"), but it doesn't: it means "beginning" or "first cause". In fact, "architect" comes from the Greek for "first/primary/chief builder" -- the "archi-" part doesn't have anything to do with "structure". That said, this is just an introductory course, and I like the evident enthusiasm he has for the material and the students.
I think your definitions are anachronous for these first lectures. The advantage of a word like "structure" is that it better communicates the physicality in a monist sense. "Building block" would be even better, as it would communicate how elements derived from the arche are constituted by processes applied to it, but these are nevertheless physical changes to something that has materiality and, as such, structure.
Very interesting! All that discussion about "the indefinite" reminded me to "the improper decription" which can be expresed in very different ways ( like "the x which satisfies that it is the king of France and it is bald") but is actually unique and can be interpreted as the empty set in a model of set theory. What seems very attractiveto me is the idea that it can be defined but from a higher order language so its definition doesn't entail a contradiction
I read that Pythagoreans also didn’t eat beans because, as part of the reincarnation process, souls that are returning to the physical world to inhabit a new body come back from the underworld through the stalks of bean plants, kind of like a Mario Bros pipe. There’s a story about a Pythagorean successfully escaping soldiers who were trying to kill him until he ran up to the edge of a field of beans. He was caught because he wouldn’t run through it.
Hello Adam These are great instructive videos, teaching me a lot about ancient philosophy and philosophy itself. would it be possible to share the syllabus of the course? Many thanks in advance
It seems as though Anaximander may have been misinterpreted. When he refers to matter's existence creating a void or a debt in the infinite, if it were truly infinite wouldn’t the void fill itself. I personally feel that Anaximander was tiptoeing the lines of one of the most prominent rules of physics, matter cannot be created or destroyed but only changed. Perhaps the “infinite” he refers to is the constant changing of matter into energy.
Good point. It's hard to tell whether we're misinterpreting Anaximander here, or if Anaximander is just giving us a first pass on this idea and there's some conceptual tidying to be done still. This idea is going to come back in a relatively more-fleshed out way when we discuss Parmenides and the Eleatic Monists (coming up soon!). Hold on to this objection to the notion of void in the infinite. We'll tackle it again.
It rings eerily reminiscent of the concept of space being a vacuum to me. We live in a universe that is, to our understanding, made of nothing. Yet there is all this stuff that is clearly made of something. This just goes to show a lot of the questions these early philosophers were asking are still questions on the forefront on modern science/philosophy. I think it is interesting how we still bounce back and forth between the concepts of monism and pluralism as well. The argument is reflected in the notion of string theory vs standard model. is the universe one thing (strings) or many (the fundamental particles)? Why I like philosophy is because we are asking questions to which we will never arrive at a final answer, and yet we can always improve our understanding of.
If you read Anaximander's fragments, as I have been recently and it's how I came across this video, you might walk away with the impression that instead of "infinite" it should be translated "undefined." And the logic would seem to be this: "It does not make sense, if we assume all objects to derive from [combinations of] four elements, for one of those elements to be most basic. What inherent in the element would produce the other three? How could it react with itself to produce the others? You need another variable, be it a cause of some kind that reacts with, and therefore seems just as basic as your arche, to produce the cosmos as we observe it." So Anaximander assumes that, beneath the four principle elements, there is another, which he calls "undefined" for lack of any ability to study it. Despite some important differences, I think Plato tacitly agrees with this in the Timaeus by making all matter a combination of different sized triangles. Although he is "defining" the arche, he at least concedes that you need more than one primal substance, observing, e.g., that each of the elements does not by virtue of itself change. You need factors like motion, heat/cold, combinations of elements, etc. to yield changes. Maybe Anaximander assumed the same thing and didn't regard the arche as uniform in every way because presumably it would mean that the universe never would have had the potential to be more than a cosmic soup of X. By assuming different magnitudes and adding a Demiurge to make different combinations and maintain order, Plato takes it a step further, but it seems to assume some validity to Anaximander's theory.
It seems to me that the relation between Apeiron and Peiron is the same as Plato´s Archetypes and Types. Apeiron and Archetypes are the Universals, and Peiron and Types are their representations in the material world.
I would encourage you to rethink that analogy in light of the standard readings of each. On the one hand, Apeiron is not a universal but an Arche, hence every material object derives from it. Plato's Archetypes supply a model for the Demiurge in the Timaeus, but that is as close as they come to interaction with the cosmos. So the way Apeiron acts as a universal is not the way universals work for Plato, and your own explanation bears this out, as Apeiron is necessarily represented in everything (being the most basic constituent of matter) whereas Types, as you say, are representations, but only of the Archetypes in which they participate.
Did the Seven Sages actually all come together as a group or was he just exaggerating for effect? I presumed they were just linked because they were all known for their wise sayings, not because they actually met.
It's an unsubstantiated rumor (but I suppose this is par for the course with many of these very early figures). From Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers... "This seems the proper place for a general notice of the Seven Sages, of whom we have such accounts as the following. Damon of Cyrene in his History of the Philosophers carps at all sages, but especially the Seven. Anaximenes remarks that they all applied themselves to poetry; Dicaearchus that they were neither sages nor philosophers, but merely shrewd men with a turn for legislation. Archetimus of Syracuse describes their meeting at the court of Cypselus, on which occasion he himself happened to be present; for which Ephorus substitutes a meeting without Thales at the court of Croesus. Some make them meet at the Pan-Ionian festival, at Corinth, and at Delphi." en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_I
I define "the infinite" as things we can not know. such things as what is outside the universe, what was before the universe, what happens after death, etc. undefined seems wrong. When we are dealing with epistemology, the first major problem is how can we know anything when we don't know about the infinite, Aristotle used first principles to cross the divided from the infinite to objective reality aka things we can know to be true and gain knowledge about.
What about the ether. Nobody talks about the ether. The DNA is a double helix? Consider that a strand of ether is also intertwined. All things come in threes -- no?
This lecture talks about many things except the pre-Socratic and ancient greek thought (and rather says more about our modern way of thinking and our culture rather about the Greeks). Where do they teach you still such things ? I couldn't even bear to watch it until the end (but after all, this kinds of representations are something still very common and insist). But, these approaches are completely outdated even for today, except from all other things. Pre-Socratic philosophy is much more interesting, genius, deep and enigmatic than you presented here and you think. The ancient Greek world is an entire parallel different universe that has little or nothing to do with the way we think and perceive things today, even if the way modern humans think of the world derives from them (from us, for me, as i am a greek). It is better one, to not present a philosophy and such ideas and especially from ancient greece at all, rather to completely distort them with the excuse that it "simplifies" them and makes them more "accessible" to the public (and more-over when someone it is supposed to be an "expert" and a "teacher" of philosophy). In truth, this ideas, the past two centuries - and not only - are totally distorted and butchered by the most of modern academia and univercities in the west (except some rare cases the last decades, such as Heidegger, that i would suggest you to start from there if you want a more serious or deeper or more presize and more of an ancient greek way of approaching and mentality of the pre-socratic thought. You approached the subject as a human of the 18th century of the "enlightment" and with these terms. This approach already has been shown by many of the most important philosophers or scholars of the 20th century, οn ancient greece, that had dedicated all of their lifes in studying it - and if someone can claim that they are "experts" - I personally take a distance and do not believe in this dubious concept in that sense - on the field, then they are the only one than can claim it - that it is completely wrong and full of prejeducies and modern "classicistics" projections ). The pre-socratic thought and the ancient greek world, has almost nothing to do of what you represented here. Even your representation of the ancient greek myths is full of modern and "classicistic" banalities. The Greek myths are not "fairy tales" for little children, they go very deep in the realm of knowledge, even if they have their kind of poetic knowledge and logos. The Greek Myth is not "fairy tales", it is a very deep logos with its own unique logic, and once someone understands it in some way, opens to him a whole new different world that it is as genius and sophisticated and inspiring and "modern", as the most pioneering qvuantum physics or any post- modern philosophy, and even more. Those myths plays a very crucial and fundemental role in the philosophy of the philosophers you are mentioning here. The pre-socratic and ancient greek thought is not also, a kind of "proto-philosophy" the way that you mean all that here (a "primitive not yet so progressed" thought but "baby steps"), the opposite of that is way more true.
