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The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists
Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific task. Through, for instance, Heraclitus' enigmatic sayings, the poetry of Parmenides and Empedocles, and Zeno's paradoxes, the Western world was introduced to metaphysics, rationalist theology, ethics, and logic, by thinkers who often seem to be mystics or shamans as much as philosophers or scientists in the modern mould. And out of the Sophists' reflections on human beings and their place in the world arose and interest in language, and in political, moral, and social philosophy.
This volume contains a translation of all the most important fragments of the Presocratics and Sophists, and of the most informative testimonia from ancient sources, supplemented by lucid commentary.
This volume contains a translation of all the most important fragments of the Presocratics and Sophists, and of the most informative testimonia from ancient sources, supplemented by lucid commentary.
400 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2000
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About the author
Robin Waterfield
113 books720 followersRobin Anthony Herschel Waterfield is a British classical scholar, translator, editor, and writer of children's fiction.
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July 17, 2020
The First Philosophers (2000) is a collection of the ideas of the most important Greek philosophers that lived before or were contemporaries of Socrates. This somewhat arbitrary distinction between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic philosophy becomes problematic when one reads about the ideas of these thinkers. Socrates, and even more so Plato, cannot be understood without connecting them to their predecessors – theirs was a reaction to developments in (mostly) natural philosophy – explaining the world in natural terms.
That this last step was a major one, we can all agree on. All human cultures need narratives to explain their origins, the origins of the world, the origins of humanity, and all the change and reality that is part of our world. Primitive cultures explain all of this in terms of myths: stories about ancestors from long ago, about heroes and about gods. These archetypical explanations are deemed to be sufficient and when people suffer or need some desire fulfilled, they simply turn to the gods and ancestral heroes, sacrifice something and pray for change.
The significance of the Greek philosophers lies in the fact that they started to look for explanations of the world in natural terms. Thales of Miletus is usually credited as founding father of this tradition – he offered the first rational explanations of natural phenomena in purely worldly terms. Miletus was a trading hub connecting the Greek world with the Babylonian, Egyptian and Indian worlds and hence promoting the intercourse of ideas. One of the Milesians, Anaximander, can up with the first interesting cosmogony: all change is the change of form, while the underlying material that takes on different shapes is one, infinite, indefinite and eternal being. This ultimate matter is fire, which rarefies or condenses and through this mechanism takes on different forms.
Silly as such ideas sound to us modern readers, this is a truly ground-breaking shift in thinking: looking for abstract reality instead of turning to gods.
Heraclitus took these ideas of change and reality to a whole new level. According to him, the world is in a continuous state of flux, but behind this apparent flux lies an unchanging reality. The world is one, everything is fire, and the constant change of fire into its many forms through rarefaction and condensation follows the war-principle: constant strife between generation and degeneration of forms. This led Heraclitus to the important conclusion that to grasp truth, one needs to use his senses to observe the change all around us, and then use his intellect to arrive at the underlying reality. So, when Heraclitus claims “most people are asleep”, what he means is that the road to knowledge requires both sensory experience and intellectual reasoning, something which is not given to many people.
The major pivot in Greek philosophy came with Parmenides, who developed a whole new perspective on knowledge, reality and change – in opposition to the Milesians and Heraclitus. According to Parmenides, using logical reasoning, “everything that is, is.” In other words, Being (what-is) is the foundation of the world (which clearly is). Thus, all theories of change, flux, multiples, etc. are false – they try to look for reality, Being, in appearance. All predecessors, according to Parmenides, were seduced by the human senses: we perceive change, but reason tells us this is impossible. So sensory experience is illusory and reason is the only path to knowledge. Reason tells us that what-is, one substance, is immutable, while our senses deal only with finite qualities or properties of substance.
Parmenides’ radical rationalism, doing away with sensory experience and turning the mind on itself in its quest for Truth, was the foundation of a whole new school of philosophy: the Eleatics. Zeno, part of this school, tried to defend Parmenides’ monism by offering a plethora of logical arguments – for example, arguing that since everything that is, is, nothing what-is, is not; concluding that plurality (i.e. presupposing non-existence) is impossible. He is also known for his famous paradoxes that prove motion is impossible – for example proving that an arrow doesn’t move but only takes on different locations in spacetime. That rationalism can lead to strange conclusions is something the history of philosophy can attest to; Aristotle proved that Zeno’s paradoxes can be dissolved by simply pointing to the fact that Zeno treats time in a (arbitrary) different way than space.
Another Eleatic, Melissus, tried to defend Parmenides’ rationalism on a different ground: since something cannot come from nothing; and change is destruction of what-is; change (i.e. the creation from something new out of nothing) is impossible. Thus, according to Melissus, what-is (i.e. Parmenides’ substance) exists infinitely and absolutely. Since everything material is extended (i.e. measured in magnitudes), no material is substance (i.e. infinite, unextended). With Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus, we see the retreat of the mind into itself, leaving the world of our senses more and more as not interesting in our quest for Truth.
Someone who ended up in this same position, but along totally different lines of thought, was Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans were more a mystic, religious sect than a philosophical school, notwithstanding some important philosophical and scientific discoveries made by them. Also, the historical tradition has greatly distorted their true thoughts and behaviour. In general, the importance of the Pythagoreans for philosophy lies in the facts that (1) they explained nature in terms of arithmetic (i.e. “everything is number”) and (2) they came up with the notion of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of soul.
The Pythagoreans believed souls are immortal and are placed continuously in the bodies of different organisms; according to how well you lived, your soul would either enter a higher or lower organism in the next life. This explains their strange rules of life, for example not eating or harming animals (they could be the new bodies of your deceased relatives’ souls). Finally, the Pythagoreans saw harmony as the relationship between odd and even numbers (as in the length of lyres, musical instruments) and between limited and unlimited numbers. Since the heavenly bodies (stars, planets) can be described in terms of numbers, harmony plays a part here as well, and the planets were even deemed to make harmonious music, just like Earthly instruments, albeit in such a distance from us that we can never hear it. The reduction of diverse, worldly phenomena into the same terms – numbers – is an interesting perspective which would be one of the building blocks of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.
So the main line of development is from the Milesians and Heraclitus, to the Eleatics and Pythagoreans. With the establishment of Parmenidean monism and ontology, came new thinkers who reacted to this established system of natural philosophy. So, for example, Anaxagoras claimed that everything in the world contains a portion of everything. In other words, everything in the world is composed of a mix of one all-encompassing soup of materials. The different proportions in this mix determine the character of things. This original mixture was organized by a pure, unmixed Mind, who thus created the cosmos (literally, order). This Mind participates in matter, in different degrees, and this explains the biology of all living creatures.
Another thinker, Empedocles, tried to offer a somewhat more precise system of nature. According to him, there are four roots (or elements) – fire, air, water, earth – and four qualities – hot, dry, wet, cold – which are ordered by two principles – love (attraction) and strife (repulsion). The combination of the four roots, four qualities and two principles, leads to a cyclical cosmos in which then love, then strife, dominates. Life is generated through fire (the burning souls are why living organisms are warm and dead organisms are cold) and follows a cyclical pattern as well. First, there are perfect souls, daimons, and through the eating of meat, the souls degenerate, and the cosmos ends up with human beings.
According to Empedocles, truth cannot be gained by the use of the intellect alone – we need our sense experience. How we arrive at truth is to shut off our intellect associating when we perceive the world: only through deliberate, almost apathic reflection can be perceive the world as it is. When we study the world in this way, we learn that nothing really is destroyed or created out of nothing, so Parmenides’ monism (one indeterminate and infinite substance) seems to be true. Nevertheless, all matter is composed of a mixture of the four indestructible elements, leaving room for multiplicity (contra Parmenides). The principles of love and strife regulate change.
The key thing to note in Anaxagoras and Empedocles is that both explain a dynamic universe in natural terms, without having recourse to mythology. They try to come up with rational explanations, drawn from sense experience and logic.
After Empedocles, the Atomists extended many notions of their predecessors and offered a new system of the world. Atomism is primarily a reaction against Parmenidean monism and its main ideas are: (1) atoms are indivisible constituents of matter, (2) matter is infinite (and thus there are infinite amounts of worlds), (3) void is the space in which matter moves, (4) and thus both what-is (matter) and what-is-not (void) exist. Their stance on the sense experience-reason debate is ambiguous as well: sensory information is uncertain and hence unreliable, while intelligence can grasp Truth – in a sense, this is materialist rationalism.
The Atomists also drew metaphysical conclusions from their materialism: (1) the soul is material (fire particles), (2) the gods are material, (3) particles of destroyed world hit Earth and cause plagues and disease, and (4) happiness is in the mind, leading to an ethics of seeking contentment and overcoming fear. Once again, it is not so much the precise ideas (which might sound silly to us moderns) but the search for natural causes that account for phenomena, for example explaining diseases and plagues in terms of other-worldly particles reaching Earth.
The last of the pre-Socratics, Diogenes, offered a return to Milesian-style philosophy: explaining the cosmos is terms of one, unifying principle – air, in his case. So everything is air, either in more or less, condensed or rarefied form. Bodies contain air, the heart pumps it through our bodies via the bloodstream and sperm contains air that generates new life through procreation. The interesting idea here is that Diogenes, himself a doctor, uses human anatomy to explain certain natural phenomena (bodily warmth, reproduction, etc.) and looks for an underlying, unifying natural case (air). This is a significant change from earlier mythological narratives!
In sum: all these thinkers (the Milesians, the Eleatics, the Pythagoreans, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the Atomists) busied themselves with questions about (1) reality, (2) change and (3) knowledge. And all tried to answer these questions – how silly these answers might seem to us – in terms of underlying unifying principles, natural phenomena and using either reason, sense experience or a combination of both. Socrates, but even more so Plato, build on this framework and took over many established notions – for example Plato’s theory of Forms and his metempsychosis.
But there is of course another trend visible through the history of the Presocratics. Greek culture was a mythological culture – gods, rituals, sacrifices and religious customs were important. By making gods and heroes irrelevant, or even hostile, to natural explanations, the diffusion of natural philosophy was more and more deemed to be a danger to established culture. If all various explanations could be true, and if gods weren’t necessary anymore, then what was left but scepticism and relativism?
The second part of the book deals primarily with the Sophists who seized on these uncertainties and used logical arguments to defend any position they wanted – or were paid for. It would be a mistake, though, to see these people as hirelings or rhetoricians. What they basically occupied themselves with was teaching virtue through rhetoric, built on philosophical principles. During the fifth century B.C., when the Sophists were highly influential, they mainly occupied themselves with two questions: (1) the origin of mankind and society, and (2) the values of law and nature.
In general, they all were moral relativists, in the sense that they saw morality as a convention, either naturally or politically. Most were adherents of democracy and agnosticism (in terms of religion); some tried to establish free education.
Protagoras was mainly known for his moral relativism, seeing morality as a convention; his plea for democracy and free education; and his religious agnosticism. Gorgias saw rhetoric as a neutral tool, to be used for good or bad, depending on the user (comparable to the instrumentalism of modern-day science!) and used rhetoric mainly for moral persuasion. He is also known for his scepticism: (1) nothing exists (since it either is infinite or created – infinity precludes creation, while creation is impossible); (2) even if things existed, they could not be comprehended by us (since the objects of our thoughts are not identical with the objects as they are); (3) even if things existed and could be comprehended, they could not be communicated (since language is not identical with the substance it purports to deal with). In other words: Gorgias distinguishes between appearance and existence – something that would have a fruitful future in philosophy.
Another Sophist, Prodicus, is usually hailed as an important reformer – he tried to establish consensus about the meaning of words in order to be communicate clearly and distinctly. He is also known for his denial of the possibility of contradiction – which usually is used as a criterion of truth. Words either mean something (by convention) or they don’t. Truth, in this conception, is mere resemblance of the word to the substance or property it describes, according to convention.
Hippias and Antiphon are commonly known as subjugators of morality. Hippias claimed man-made law is unjust, since only nature can prescribe law. In other words: when someone transgresses a man-made law, he could always appeal to the unwritten, natural law to overrule the validity of the man-made law. So when society proscribes me not stealing property from someone else, natural law (for example survival when I’m poor and hungry) overrules this man-made law: I can steal and defend myself by appealing to my poverty and hunger.
Antiphon takes this argument to a whole new level by claiming natural law is the only just law and that one should follow man-made law as long as this is necessary and can’t be avoided – in all other circumstances one should follow the (unbreakable) natural law. So, according to Antiphon, we should be moral hypocrites out of self-interest.
Another Sophist, Trasymachus, follows Hippias’ stance on natural law, but offers his own ethical guidelines: just is the advantage of the stronger party (ethical nihilism à la Nietzsche) or just is someone else’s good (natural rights) – so we should strive to be unjust, based on self-interest.
We see in the Sophists – especially Hippias, Antiphon and Trasymachus – a trend in fifth century Greece: conventional morality was under attack. Scepticism led to atheism and agnosticism; moral relativism led to the uncovering of the current morality as a tool by the rulers to keep everyone quiet and in their social stations. The preaching of moral hypocrisy, self-interest or outright injustice is, in this narrow sense, a reaction to oppression. Rhetoric was used as a tool to make people aware of all the pitfalls in long-established Greek morality and mythology.
In all, the fifth century Sophists should be seen in the light of the alternative worldviews and ethical approaches offered by the sixth and fifth century Presocratics. The possibility of explaining the world in non-traditional/mythological ways opened up the road to the possibility of coming to new philosophical and moral standards. The problem with moral relativism and scepticism is, though, that this leads either to hopeless aporia’s (in the sense in which Plato’s dialogues so beautifully portray – the only thing I know is that I know nothing) or to self-defeating criticism. If everything is unknowable, the proposition itself is unknowable, but that would mean that there is something that is knowable…
Anyway, The First Philosophers is a very remarkable collection of important material, illustrating the most important natural philosophers and rhetoricians that came prior to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It is an important book in that it teaches us that Plato didn’t pop out of a vacuum: most of his ideas (including the ideas of Socrates) can be traced back to earlier forms, and some ideas are literally taken over. It is a healthy illustration of Isaac Newton’s phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The book itself is highly readable, contains a superb introduction and it offers clear and illuminating remarks about the material of all the different philosophers. For one, it is extremely critical of the conclusions drawn by later philosophers, who distorted, misrepresented or misunderstood the original thinkers. The book also shows how little we know from original sources and how much we rely on second-hand or even more indirect sources – with all the pitfall this brings. A very nuanced, accessible and enlightening book – truly worth a recommendation!
That this last step was a major one, we can all agree on. All human cultures need narratives to explain their origins, the origins of the world, the origins of humanity, and all the change and reality that is part of our world. Primitive cultures explain all of this in terms of myths: stories about ancestors from long ago, about heroes and about gods. These archetypical explanations are deemed to be sufficient and when people suffer or need some desire fulfilled, they simply turn to the gods and ancestral heroes, sacrifice something and pray for change.
The significance of the Greek philosophers lies in the fact that they started to look for explanations of the world in natural terms. Thales of Miletus is usually credited as founding father of this tradition – he offered the first rational explanations of natural phenomena in purely worldly terms. Miletus was a trading hub connecting the Greek world with the Babylonian, Egyptian and Indian worlds and hence promoting the intercourse of ideas. One of the Milesians, Anaximander, can up with the first interesting cosmogony: all change is the change of form, while the underlying material that takes on different shapes is one, infinite, indefinite and eternal being. This ultimate matter is fire, which rarefies or condenses and through this mechanism takes on different forms.
Silly as such ideas sound to us modern readers, this is a truly ground-breaking shift in thinking: looking for abstract reality instead of turning to gods.
Heraclitus took these ideas of change and reality to a whole new level. According to him, the world is in a continuous state of flux, but behind this apparent flux lies an unchanging reality. The world is one, everything is fire, and the constant change of fire into its many forms through rarefaction and condensation follows the war-principle: constant strife between generation and degeneration of forms. This led Heraclitus to the important conclusion that to grasp truth, one needs to use his senses to observe the change all around us, and then use his intellect to arrive at the underlying reality. So, when Heraclitus claims “most people are asleep”, what he means is that the road to knowledge requires both sensory experience and intellectual reasoning, something which is not given to many people.
The major pivot in Greek philosophy came with Parmenides, who developed a whole new perspective on knowledge, reality and change – in opposition to the Milesians and Heraclitus. According to Parmenides, using logical reasoning, “everything that is, is.” In other words, Being (what-is) is the foundation of the world (which clearly is). Thus, all theories of change, flux, multiples, etc. are false – they try to look for reality, Being, in appearance. All predecessors, according to Parmenides, were seduced by the human senses: we perceive change, but reason tells us this is impossible. So sensory experience is illusory and reason is the only path to knowledge. Reason tells us that what-is, one substance, is immutable, while our senses deal only with finite qualities or properties of substance.
Parmenides’ radical rationalism, doing away with sensory experience and turning the mind on itself in its quest for Truth, was the foundation of a whole new school of philosophy: the Eleatics. Zeno, part of this school, tried to defend Parmenides’ monism by offering a plethora of logical arguments – for example, arguing that since everything that is, is, nothing what-is, is not; concluding that plurality (i.e. presupposing non-existence) is impossible. He is also known for his famous paradoxes that prove motion is impossible – for example proving that an arrow doesn’t move but only takes on different locations in spacetime. That rationalism can lead to strange conclusions is something the history of philosophy can attest to; Aristotle proved that Zeno’s paradoxes can be dissolved by simply pointing to the fact that Zeno treats time in a (arbitrary) different way than space.
Another Eleatic, Melissus, tried to defend Parmenides’ rationalism on a different ground: since something cannot come from nothing; and change is destruction of what-is; change (i.e. the creation from something new out of nothing) is impossible. Thus, according to Melissus, what-is (i.e. Parmenides’ substance) exists infinitely and absolutely. Since everything material is extended (i.e. measured in magnitudes), no material is substance (i.e. infinite, unextended). With Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus, we see the retreat of the mind into itself, leaving the world of our senses more and more as not interesting in our quest for Truth.
Someone who ended up in this same position, but along totally different lines of thought, was Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans were more a mystic, religious sect than a philosophical school, notwithstanding some important philosophical and scientific discoveries made by them. Also, the historical tradition has greatly distorted their true thoughts and behaviour. In general, the importance of the Pythagoreans for philosophy lies in the facts that (1) they explained nature in terms of arithmetic (i.e. “everything is number”) and (2) they came up with the notion of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of soul.
The Pythagoreans believed souls are immortal and are placed continuously in the bodies of different organisms; according to how well you lived, your soul would either enter a higher or lower organism in the next life. This explains their strange rules of life, for example not eating or harming animals (they could be the new bodies of your deceased relatives’ souls). Finally, the Pythagoreans saw harmony as the relationship between odd and even numbers (as in the length of lyres, musical instruments) and between limited and unlimited numbers. Since the heavenly bodies (stars, planets) can be described in terms of numbers, harmony plays a part here as well, and the planets were even deemed to make harmonious music, just like Earthly instruments, albeit in such a distance from us that we can never hear it. The reduction of diverse, worldly phenomena into the same terms – numbers – is an interesting perspective which would be one of the building blocks of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.
So the main line of development is from the Milesians and Heraclitus, to the Eleatics and Pythagoreans. With the establishment of Parmenidean monism and ontology, came new thinkers who reacted to this established system of natural philosophy. So, for example, Anaxagoras claimed that everything in the world contains a portion of everything. In other words, everything in the world is composed of a mix of one all-encompassing soup of materials. The different proportions in this mix determine the character of things. This original mixture was organized by a pure, unmixed Mind, who thus created the cosmos (literally, order). This Mind participates in matter, in different degrees, and this explains the biology of all living creatures.
Another thinker, Empedocles, tried to offer a somewhat more precise system of nature. According to him, there are four roots (or elements) – fire, air, water, earth – and four qualities – hot, dry, wet, cold – which are ordered by two principles – love (attraction) and strife (repulsion). The combination of the four roots, four qualities and two principles, leads to a cyclical cosmos in which then love, then strife, dominates. Life is generated through fire (the burning souls are why living organisms are warm and dead organisms are cold) and follows a cyclical pattern as well. First, there are perfect souls, daimons, and through the eating of meat, the souls degenerate, and the cosmos ends up with human beings.
According to Empedocles, truth cannot be gained by the use of the intellect alone – we need our sense experience. How we arrive at truth is to shut off our intellect associating when we perceive the world: only through deliberate, almost apathic reflection can be perceive the world as it is. When we study the world in this way, we learn that nothing really is destroyed or created out of nothing, so Parmenides’ monism (one indeterminate and infinite substance) seems to be true. Nevertheless, all matter is composed of a mixture of the four indestructible elements, leaving room for multiplicity (contra Parmenides). The principles of love and strife regulate change.
The key thing to note in Anaxagoras and Empedocles is that both explain a dynamic universe in natural terms, without having recourse to mythology. They try to come up with rational explanations, drawn from sense experience and logic.
After Empedocles, the Atomists extended many notions of their predecessors and offered a new system of the world. Atomism is primarily a reaction against Parmenidean monism and its main ideas are: (1) atoms are indivisible constituents of matter, (2) matter is infinite (and thus there are infinite amounts of worlds), (3) void is the space in which matter moves, (4) and thus both what-is (matter) and what-is-not (void) exist. Their stance on the sense experience-reason debate is ambiguous as well: sensory information is uncertain and hence unreliable, while intelligence can grasp Truth – in a sense, this is materialist rationalism.
The Atomists also drew metaphysical conclusions from their materialism: (1) the soul is material (fire particles), (2) the gods are material, (3) particles of destroyed world hit Earth and cause plagues and disease, and (4) happiness is in the mind, leading to an ethics of seeking contentment and overcoming fear. Once again, it is not so much the precise ideas (which might sound silly to us moderns) but the search for natural causes that account for phenomena, for example explaining diseases and plagues in terms of other-worldly particles reaching Earth.
The last of the pre-Socratics, Diogenes, offered a return to Milesian-style philosophy: explaining the cosmos is terms of one, unifying principle – air, in his case. So everything is air, either in more or less, condensed or rarefied form. Bodies contain air, the heart pumps it through our bodies via the bloodstream and sperm contains air that generates new life through procreation. The interesting idea here is that Diogenes, himself a doctor, uses human anatomy to explain certain natural phenomena (bodily warmth, reproduction, etc.) and looks for an underlying, unifying natural case (air). This is a significant change from earlier mythological narratives!
In sum: all these thinkers (the Milesians, the Eleatics, the Pythagoreans, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the Atomists) busied themselves with questions about (1) reality, (2) change and (3) knowledge. And all tried to answer these questions – how silly these answers might seem to us – in terms of underlying unifying principles, natural phenomena and using either reason, sense experience or a combination of both. Socrates, but even more so Plato, build on this framework and took over many established notions – for example Plato’s theory of Forms and his metempsychosis.
But there is of course another trend visible through the history of the Presocratics. Greek culture was a mythological culture – gods, rituals, sacrifices and religious customs were important. By making gods and heroes irrelevant, or even hostile, to natural explanations, the diffusion of natural philosophy was more and more deemed to be a danger to established culture. If all various explanations could be true, and if gods weren’t necessary anymore, then what was left but scepticism and relativism?
The second part of the book deals primarily with the Sophists who seized on these uncertainties and used logical arguments to defend any position they wanted – or were paid for. It would be a mistake, though, to see these people as hirelings or rhetoricians. What they basically occupied themselves with was teaching virtue through rhetoric, built on philosophical principles. During the fifth century B.C., when the Sophists were highly influential, they mainly occupied themselves with two questions: (1) the origin of mankind and society, and (2) the values of law and nature.
In general, they all were moral relativists, in the sense that they saw morality as a convention, either naturally or politically. Most were adherents of democracy and agnosticism (in terms of religion); some tried to establish free education.
Protagoras was mainly known for his moral relativism, seeing morality as a convention; his plea for democracy and free education; and his religious agnosticism. Gorgias saw rhetoric as a neutral tool, to be used for good or bad, depending on the user (comparable to the instrumentalism of modern-day science!) and used rhetoric mainly for moral persuasion. He is also known for his scepticism: (1) nothing exists (since it either is infinite or created – infinity precludes creation, while creation is impossible); (2) even if things existed, they could not be comprehended by us (since the objects of our thoughts are not identical with the objects as they are); (3) even if things existed and could be comprehended, they could not be communicated (since language is not identical with the substance it purports to deal with). In other words: Gorgias distinguishes between appearance and existence – something that would have a fruitful future in philosophy.
Another Sophist, Prodicus, is usually hailed as an important reformer – he tried to establish consensus about the meaning of words in order to be communicate clearly and distinctly. He is also known for his denial of the possibility of contradiction – which usually is used as a criterion of truth. Words either mean something (by convention) or they don’t. Truth, in this conception, is mere resemblance of the word to the substance or property it describes, according to convention.
Hippias and Antiphon are commonly known as subjugators of morality. Hippias claimed man-made law is unjust, since only nature can prescribe law. In other words: when someone transgresses a man-made law, he could always appeal to the unwritten, natural law to overrule the validity of the man-made law. So when society proscribes me not stealing property from someone else, natural law (for example survival when I’m poor and hungry) overrules this man-made law: I can steal and defend myself by appealing to my poverty and hunger.
Antiphon takes this argument to a whole new level by claiming natural law is the only just law and that one should follow man-made law as long as this is necessary and can’t be avoided – in all other circumstances one should follow the (unbreakable) natural law. So, according to Antiphon, we should be moral hypocrites out of self-interest.
Another Sophist, Trasymachus, follows Hippias’ stance on natural law, but offers his own ethical guidelines: just is the advantage of the stronger party (ethical nihilism à la Nietzsche) or just is someone else’s good (natural rights) – so we should strive to be unjust, based on self-interest.
We see in the Sophists – especially Hippias, Antiphon and Trasymachus – a trend in fifth century Greece: conventional morality was under attack. Scepticism led to atheism and agnosticism; moral relativism led to the uncovering of the current morality as a tool by the rulers to keep everyone quiet and in their social stations. The preaching of moral hypocrisy, self-interest or outright injustice is, in this narrow sense, a reaction to oppression. Rhetoric was used as a tool to make people aware of all the pitfalls in long-established Greek morality and mythology.
In all, the fifth century Sophists should be seen in the light of the alternative worldviews and ethical approaches offered by the sixth and fifth century Presocratics. The possibility of explaining the world in non-traditional/mythological ways opened up the road to the possibility of coming to new philosophical and moral standards. The problem with moral relativism and scepticism is, though, that this leads either to hopeless aporia’s (in the sense in which Plato’s dialogues so beautifully portray – the only thing I know is that I know nothing) or to self-defeating criticism. If everything is unknowable, the proposition itself is unknowable, but that would mean that there is something that is knowable…
Anyway, The First Philosophers is a very remarkable collection of important material, illustrating the most important natural philosophers and rhetoricians that came prior to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It is an important book in that it teaches us that Plato didn’t pop out of a vacuum: most of his ideas (including the ideas of Socrates) can be traced back to earlier forms, and some ideas are literally taken over. It is a healthy illustration of Isaac Newton’s phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The book itself is highly readable, contains a superb introduction and it offers clear and illuminating remarks about the material of all the different philosophers. For one, it is extremely critical of the conclusions drawn by later philosophers, who distorted, misrepresented or misunderstood the original thinkers. The book also shows how little we know from original sources and how much we rely on second-hand or even more indirect sources – with all the pitfall this brings. A very nuanced, accessible and enlightening book – truly worth a recommendation!
July 26, 2024
A treasure trove of information, I never realised how much we rely on secondhand information for early philosophy.
With a great introduction and commentary on each individual philosopher, this took me a while to get through but I truly loved learning about the presocratics.
Now I’m ready for Socrates and Plato!
With a great introduction and commentary on each individual philosopher, this took me a while to get through but I truly loved learning about the presocratics.
Now I’m ready for Socrates and Plato!
April 3, 2015
This is the second time I've read most of these philosophers. The first was back in college, when I first started reading philosophy. So reading this was very much like returning to an old friend. And as anyone will tell you, reconnecting with an old friend after years of being apart, I learned new things and understood old ideas in a completely new way.
THE PRESOCRATICS
There is something strangely pure about the curious and conjecturing mind before Aristotle's advent of the scientific method. Claims about the origin of the world and mankind are made without any solid evidence. The origin of the cosmos was a hot topic of the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, and some methods to solving this were deciding which single element was the root of all things ('arche'), or to attempt to eliminate what was simply impossible, in order to arrive at the truth. The debates are rather fascinating, and it's amazing what ideas were actually not far off--astronomy and mathematics find great roots in this era, and the Leucipus' and Democritus' theory of atoms is profoundly valid.
I've always been a fan of Heraclitus and his 'change is constant' mentality. 'It is impossible to step twice into the same river...it scatters and regathers, comes together and dissolves, approaches and departs.'
But the real winning quotes for me in this read (though in the same vein) were
'Listen now to a further point: no mortal thing
Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed,
But by mortal men these practices are named "beginnings".'
--Empedocles of Acragas
'In reality we know nothing, for the truth is hidden in the abyss.'
--Democritus
THE SOPHISTS
My previous experience with the Sophists was much more limited, and with a negative connotation. I was taught that they were only concerned with charging outrageous amounts for lessons, and thrived on confusing their debate opponents rather than actually making sound logic and good arguments. While this was true for some, there are some pearls of wisdom, and some of the early Sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias seem to me to genuinely want to progress the art of debate and lecturing. One of the main subjects covered by the Sophists was the conflict between 'nomos' and 'physis' ('convention' and 'nature'): is humanity's welfare better or worse by our social norms and laws (convention), or is our natural state better? The debate raises interesting points on both sides, of course. I think Gorgias was my favorite of the bunch; he really invested in the art of winning his audiences with beautiful language and emotional pull, which is vastly important. And Prodicus of Ceos told a story of Heracles and his choice between Vice and Virtue which was very compelling.
Obviously, this type of reading is for a niche market, and very heavy on the academic side. But it was always enjoyable for me to read, and I am once again reminded of how I was born in the wrong century.
THE PRESOCRATICS
There is something strangely pure about the curious and conjecturing mind before Aristotle's advent of the scientific method. Claims about the origin of the world and mankind are made without any solid evidence. The origin of the cosmos was a hot topic of the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, and some methods to solving this were deciding which single element was the root of all things ('arche'), or to attempt to eliminate what was simply impossible, in order to arrive at the truth. The debates are rather fascinating, and it's amazing what ideas were actually not far off--astronomy and mathematics find great roots in this era, and the Leucipus' and Democritus' theory of atoms is profoundly valid.
I've always been a fan of Heraclitus and his 'change is constant' mentality. 'It is impossible to step twice into the same river...it scatters and regathers, comes together and dissolves, approaches and departs.'
But the real winning quotes for me in this read (though in the same vein) were
'Listen now to a further point: no mortal thing
Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed,
But by mortal men these practices are named "beginnings".'
--Empedocles of Acragas
'In reality we know nothing, for the truth is hidden in the abyss.'
--Democritus
THE SOPHISTS
My previous experience with the Sophists was much more limited, and with a negative connotation. I was taught that they were only concerned with charging outrageous amounts for lessons, and thrived on confusing their debate opponents rather than actually making sound logic and good arguments. While this was true for some, there are some pearls of wisdom, and some of the early Sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias seem to me to genuinely want to progress the art of debate and lecturing. One of the main subjects covered by the Sophists was the conflict between 'nomos' and 'physis' ('convention' and 'nature'): is humanity's welfare better or worse by our social norms and laws (convention), or is our natural state better? The debate raises interesting points on both sides, of course. I think Gorgias was my favorite of the bunch; he really invested in the art of winning his audiences with beautiful language and emotional pull, which is vastly important. And Prodicus of Ceos told a story of Heracles and his choice between Vice and Virtue which was very compelling.
Obviously, this type of reading is for a niche market, and very heavy on the academic side. But it was always enjoyable for me to read, and I am once again reminded of how I was born in the wrong century.
March 29, 2024
Robin Waterfield's "The First Philosophers: The PreSocratics and the Sophists" is an enlightening journey into the roots of Western philosophy. Waterfield masterfully delves into the intellectual landscape of ancient Greece, providing readers with a comprehensive overview of the PreSocratic philosophers and the Sophists.
One of the standout features of this book is Waterfield's ability to make complex philosophical concepts accessible to readers of all levels. Whether you are a seasoned philosophy enthusiast or a newcomer to the subject, you will find this book engaging and informative. The author's clear and concise writing style, coupled with his deep knowledge of the subject matter, makes for a compelling read.
Moreover, Waterfield does an excellent job of contextualizing the ideas of the PreSocratics and the Sophists within the historical and cultural milieu of ancient Greece. By doing so, he not only helps readers understand the philosophical theories of these thinkers but also illuminates the broader societal forces that shaped their ideas.
Another strength of the book is its organization. Waterfield presents the material in a logical and coherent manner, making it easy for readers to follow the development of philosophical thought from the early philosophers to the late Sophists. The book also includes helpful summaries and analyses of key philosophical texts, allowing readers to deepen their understanding of the material.
In conclusion, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of philosophy or the intellectual foundations of Western civilization. Robin Waterfield's insightful exploration and translation offers a rich and complete perspective on the origins of Western philosophical thought. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to broaden their intellectual horizons and gain a deeper appreciation for the philosophical traditions that have shaped our world.
One of the standout features of this book is Waterfield's ability to make complex philosophical concepts accessible to readers of all levels. Whether you are a seasoned philosophy enthusiast or a newcomer to the subject, you will find this book engaging and informative. The author's clear and concise writing style, coupled with his deep knowledge of the subject matter, makes for a compelling read.
Moreover, Waterfield does an excellent job of contextualizing the ideas of the PreSocratics and the Sophists within the historical and cultural milieu of ancient Greece. By doing so, he not only helps readers understand the philosophical theories of these thinkers but also illuminates the broader societal forces that shaped their ideas.
Another strength of the book is its organization. Waterfield presents the material in a logical and coherent manner, making it easy for readers to follow the development of philosophical thought from the early philosophers to the late Sophists. The book also includes helpful summaries and analyses of key philosophical texts, allowing readers to deepen their understanding of the material.
In conclusion, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of philosophy or the intellectual foundations of Western civilization. Robin Waterfield's insightful exploration and translation offers a rich and complete perspective on the origins of Western philosophical thought. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to broaden their intellectual horizons and gain a deeper appreciation for the philosophical traditions that have shaped our world.
March 30, 2020
Fragment 1: Historically fascinating, with flashes of brilliance that transcend place and time, but many the longueur in-between.
Fragment 2: Zeno, Protagoras and Parmenides all the way.
Fragment 2: Zeno, Protagoras and Parmenides all the way.
January 7, 2026
This was an excellent and very enjoyable way to learn about the presocratics and sophists. Presented in an engaging fashion that bounces between fragments and testimonies of the presocratics and sophists and Waterfield's analysis and historiography of them. These men were some brilliant thinkers. Highly recommend this especially since Presocratic philosophy is something that is often ignored.
July 3, 2021
A fascinating book. Reading the thoughts of people from 2500 years ago never ceases to excite me, and the similarities between them and us in thought is really interesting. Though, I think this book only improved over time because the sophists are a much more interesting bunch than the presocratics, though the latter are not dull at all.
First of all, Waterfield provides one of the best introductions to a book I've ever read: his introduction alone, and the way he navigates the question of mythos and logos, the rational and the irrational, in introducing the presocratics is masterful.
Starting with the Milesians (Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander), I did not find them to be too interesting, if only because we don't have too much material on them. The next chapter, covering Xenophanes, is interesting. His poetic aphorisms are quite delightful and make for nice, easy reading, if a little shallow in philosophical thought. Then we go to Heraclitus, who is confusing but someone I'd like to read more about. His development of arkhē(divine elemental principle) is essential to presocratic philosophy, and would continue to influence philosophers until Socrates changed the object of philosophy from arkhē to arete(virtue), though one could argue that this was actually done by the sophists. Overall, I found Heraclitus more interesting than Xenophanes.
But the highlight of the presocratics has to be the Eleatic monists (Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus). Though I still retain my earlier opinion from reading Plato's Parmenides that these monists were too concerned with the material implications of nondualism, and did not really question the nature of reality using nondualism, like the Upanishads.
The point from which I start Is common; for there shall I return again.
Parmenides' acceptance of what-is is really confusing because there is zero explanation for it. To me, though, it only appears as a sort of acceptance of this reality as true and a rejection of otherworldly mysticism -
There is the way that it is and it cannot not be:
This is the path of Trust, for Truth attends it.
Then there is the way that it is not and that it must not be:
This, as I show you, is an altogether misguided route.
Neither will I allow you to say
Or to think that it grew from what-is-not, for that it is not
Cannot be spoken or thought. Also, what need could have impelled it
To arise later or sooner, if it sprang from an origin in nothing?
Zeno develops Parmenides' thought by arguing that -
If every existing thing is infinitely divisible into parts, then either nothing exists or everything is one.
And Melissus -
It always was what it was and always will be. For if it had come into existence, there was necessarily nothing before it came into existence. Now, if there was nothing, there is no way that anything could have come into existence from nothing.
If it is unlimited, only one thing can exist; for if there were two things, they could not be unlimited, but would have limits in relation to each other.
The praxis of Pythagoreanism is fascinating because of its parallels with that of Vedanta - for example, how a belief in transmigration of the soul leads to vegetarianism in both these schools. However, I am somewhat put off by their mathematical determinism, though I suppose that is a sign of their time.
Through this book, I also learned that Aristotle's theory of potentiality was inspired by Anaxagoras. Beyond this, I was not very impressed by Anaxagoras' thought.
I am surprised by some of the antinatalist implications of Empedocles' thought: he devises a myth of original sin that makes birth a punishment.
Alas! Poor wretched race of mortal creatures!
What discord and grief have given you birth!
He also writes beautiful poetry (I will be quoting many of his below) -
For narrow are the means spread over their bodies,
And many the afflictions that burst in and blunt their thinking.
In their lives they see a meagre portion of life, and then,
Doomed to a swift death, like smoke they fly away on high,
Trusting only in whatever each has encountered as he was driven
Here and there; yet he falsely claims to have discovered the whole.
Not thus are these things to be seen by men, nor heard,
Nor grasped with the mind. But since you have withdrawn here,
You shall learn. Mortal wisdom has aroused no more than this.
no mortal thing
Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed,
But by mortal men these processes are named ‘beginnings’.
And, among them, love, equal in length and breadth.
Look on her with your mind; do not use your eyes and sit bewildered.
She is regarded even by mortals as inherent in their bodies,
And thanks to her they can feel affection and perform deeds of unity;
The names by which they call her are Joy and Aphrodite.
They sought her blessing with pious statues,
With animal paintings and infinitely varied fragrances,
With offerings of pure myrrh and scented frankincense,
And by pouring on to the ground libations of yellow honey.
No altar was bathed with the unspeakable slaughter of bulls;
In fact, there was no greater abomination among men
Than to deprive a creature of life and to eat brave limbs.
Democritus importantly questions a lot of our assumptions on knowledge -
in reality we know nothing about anything, but that belief restructures things for each of us
He then gives aphorisms on ethics that are really similar to those of his pupil, Epicurus (this one has Epicurus written all over it) -
All those who derive their pleasures from their guts, by eating or drinking or having sex to an excessive and inordinate degree, find that their pleasures are brief and short-lived, in that they last for only as long as they are actually eating or drinking, while their pains are many. For the desire for more of the same is constant, and when they get what they desire, the pleasure passes rapidly. They get nothing good out of the situation except a fleeting pleasure—and then the need for more of the same recurs.
Now, on to the sophists. I personally really liked Protagoras - agnostic, relativist: what more could you want?
In cases of conflicting opinions, no one party is right while the other is wrong; both are equally ‘measures’, and both equally infallible.
He reminds me of the syadvada theory in Jainism, because he embodies a similar form of radical perspectivism.
Another cool thing about the Sophists is their nomos-physis debate, and Waterfield provides a great introduction to that here. Nomos (convention) and physis (nature) are two things over which people have fought over for ages, and this debate does reflect itself in later debates in moral philosophy. The nomos-physis debate reminds me of the Heart Sutra, where Avalokiteshvara would argue that the very nature of reality is nomos (convention), because reality is marked by emptiness, and all that is left is nothingness that somehow appears in conventionally-recognised form to individuals. Nothing has any physis (true nature).
Protagoras' relativism argues that "A is F for person X" and "A is not F for person Y" should be used, instead of saying that "A is F" or "A is not F". This also reminds me of a quote from one of the Sutras in the Pali Canon, where Buddha explains how one can state one’s beliefs and it would be a true statement: only because it is prefixed by the statement “this is my belief”. Above all, the fact that Protagoras was an agnostic and therefore shared my own religious beliefs (or lack thereof) 2400 years ago is amazing.
After Protagoras, I really like Prodicus as well! He argues -
the gods worshipped by men neither exist nor have knowledge, but that the ancients exalted crops and everything else which is useful for life
Antiphon is an early pessimist -
It is incredibly easy to find fault with life, my friend: it contains nothing remarkable or important or significant, but everything is petty, feeble, ephemeral, and bound up with terrible grief.
Some people do not live the life they have, but thoroughly occupy themselves with plans, as if they had another life to live, not the one they have. And meanwhile time passes them by.
Plato, in many ways, justified the norms of Greek culture against the Sophists who could often be atheistic and question objective morality. Through this book, I now have some context to why one is remembered as the first philosopher and the others are unknown or face the opprobrium of history, just because of their questioning.
First of all, Waterfield provides one of the best introductions to a book I've ever read: his introduction alone, and the way he navigates the question of mythos and logos, the rational and the irrational, in introducing the presocratics is masterful.
Starting with the Milesians (Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander), I did not find them to be too interesting, if only because we don't have too much material on them. The next chapter, covering Xenophanes, is interesting. His poetic aphorisms are quite delightful and make for nice, easy reading, if a little shallow in philosophical thought. Then we go to Heraclitus, who is confusing but someone I'd like to read more about. His development of arkhē(divine elemental principle) is essential to presocratic philosophy, and would continue to influence philosophers until Socrates changed the object of philosophy from arkhē to arete(virtue), though one could argue that this was actually done by the sophists. Overall, I found Heraclitus more interesting than Xenophanes.
But the highlight of the presocratics has to be the Eleatic monists (Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus). Though I still retain my earlier opinion from reading Plato's Parmenides that these monists were too concerned with the material implications of nondualism, and did not really question the nature of reality using nondualism, like the Upanishads.
The point from which I start Is common; for there shall I return again.
Parmenides' acceptance of what-is is really confusing because there is zero explanation for it. To me, though, it only appears as a sort of acceptance of this reality as true and a rejection of otherworldly mysticism -
There is the way that it is and it cannot not be:
This is the path of Trust, for Truth attends it.
Then there is the way that it is not and that it must not be:
This, as I show you, is an altogether misguided route.
Neither will I allow you to say
Or to think that it grew from what-is-not, for that it is not
Cannot be spoken or thought. Also, what need could have impelled it
To arise later or sooner, if it sprang from an origin in nothing?
Zeno develops Parmenides' thought by arguing that -
If every existing thing is infinitely divisible into parts, then either nothing exists or everything is one.
And Melissus -
It always was what it was and always will be. For if it had come into existence, there was necessarily nothing before it came into existence. Now, if there was nothing, there is no way that anything could have come into existence from nothing.
If it is unlimited, only one thing can exist; for if there were two things, they could not be unlimited, but would have limits in relation to each other.
The praxis of Pythagoreanism is fascinating because of its parallels with that of Vedanta - for example, how a belief in transmigration of the soul leads to vegetarianism in both these schools. However, I am somewhat put off by their mathematical determinism, though I suppose that is a sign of their time.
Through this book, I also learned that Aristotle's theory of potentiality was inspired by Anaxagoras. Beyond this, I was not very impressed by Anaxagoras' thought.
I am surprised by some of the antinatalist implications of Empedocles' thought: he devises a myth of original sin that makes birth a punishment.
Alas! Poor wretched race of mortal creatures!
What discord and grief have given you birth!
He also writes beautiful poetry (I will be quoting many of his below) -
For narrow are the means spread over their bodies,
And many the afflictions that burst in and blunt their thinking.
In their lives they see a meagre portion of life, and then,
Doomed to a swift death, like smoke they fly away on high,
Trusting only in whatever each has encountered as he was driven
Here and there; yet he falsely claims to have discovered the whole.
Not thus are these things to be seen by men, nor heard,
Nor grasped with the mind. But since you have withdrawn here,
You shall learn. Mortal wisdom has aroused no more than this.
no mortal thing
Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed,
But by mortal men these processes are named ‘beginnings’.
And, among them, love, equal in length and breadth.
Look on her with your mind; do not use your eyes and sit bewildered.
She is regarded even by mortals as inherent in their bodies,
And thanks to her they can feel affection and perform deeds of unity;
The names by which they call her are Joy and Aphrodite.
They sought her blessing with pious statues,
With animal paintings and infinitely varied fragrances,
With offerings of pure myrrh and scented frankincense,
And by pouring on to the ground libations of yellow honey.
No altar was bathed with the unspeakable slaughter of bulls;
In fact, there was no greater abomination among men
Than to deprive a creature of life and to eat brave limbs.
Democritus importantly questions a lot of our assumptions on knowledge -
in reality we know nothing about anything, but that belief restructures things for each of us
He then gives aphorisms on ethics that are really similar to those of his pupil, Epicurus (this one has Epicurus written all over it) -
All those who derive their pleasures from their guts, by eating or drinking or having sex to an excessive and inordinate degree, find that their pleasures are brief and short-lived, in that they last for only as long as they are actually eating or drinking, while their pains are many. For the desire for more of the same is constant, and when they get what they desire, the pleasure passes rapidly. They get nothing good out of the situation except a fleeting pleasure—and then the need for more of the same recurs.
Now, on to the sophists. I personally really liked Protagoras - agnostic, relativist: what more could you want?
In cases of conflicting opinions, no one party is right while the other is wrong; both are equally ‘measures’, and both equally infallible.
He reminds me of the syadvada theory in Jainism, because he embodies a similar form of radical perspectivism.
Another cool thing about the Sophists is their nomos-physis debate, and Waterfield provides a great introduction to that here. Nomos (convention) and physis (nature) are two things over which people have fought over for ages, and this debate does reflect itself in later debates in moral philosophy. The nomos-physis debate reminds me of the Heart Sutra, where Avalokiteshvara would argue that the very nature of reality is nomos (convention), because reality is marked by emptiness, and all that is left is nothingness that somehow appears in conventionally-recognised form to individuals. Nothing has any physis (true nature).
Protagoras' relativism argues that "A is F for person X" and "A is not F for person Y" should be used, instead of saying that "A is F" or "A is not F". This also reminds me of a quote from one of the Sutras in the Pali Canon, where Buddha explains how one can state one’s beliefs and it would be a true statement: only because it is prefixed by the statement “this is my belief”. Above all, the fact that Protagoras was an agnostic and therefore shared my own religious beliefs (or lack thereof) 2400 years ago is amazing.
After Protagoras, I really like Prodicus as well! He argues -
the gods worshipped by men neither exist nor have knowledge, but that the ancients exalted crops and everything else which is useful for life
Antiphon is an early pessimist -
It is incredibly easy to find fault with life, my friend: it contains nothing remarkable or important or significant, but everything is petty, feeble, ephemeral, and bound up with terrible grief.
Some people do not live the life they have, but thoroughly occupy themselves with plans, as if they had another life to live, not the one they have. And meanwhile time passes them by.
Plato, in many ways, justified the norms of Greek culture against the Sophists who could often be atheistic and question objective morality. Through this book, I now have some context to why one is remembered as the first philosopher and the others are unknown or face the opprobrium of history, just because of their questioning.
November 24, 2020
To call this book a translation is a bit misleading. To be sure, there are translations to be found here. But the general gist of a translation is that there is a bit of introductory material that helps explain the context of a work and then the reader has the chance to read the translated material and come to one's own conclusions. This book, it must be admitted, does not have that tendency that one is used to saying. Instead, every single section of this book--and there are a lot of sections here--has a somewhat heavy-handed introduction, sometimes as long as the translated material, that tries to frame how it is that the philosopher in question should be viewed, and then many of the translated materials themselves are not writings from the thinkers themselves but of quotations of the writer as cited by others, and then also how the writer was evaluated and viewed by other writers. The result is that one barely gets a chance to see the material of these ancient writers except beneath layers of interpretation, and that prevents the reader from getting to know these first philosophers at all, and that is a great shame, to the extent that they are worth getting to know.
This book is more than 300 pages long and is divided into two large parts with numerous smaller elements. The book begins with a preface and acknowledgements, after which there is an introduction, select bibliography, a note on the texts, and then timeline of the thinkers included here. After this material, which is nearly 50 pages of unnumbered pages, the book proper begins with an exploration of the pre-Socratic philosophers who survive--often barely--in the historical record. This part includes a look at the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, Pythagoras and his school, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the atomists, and Diogenes. The second part of the book discusses the sophists, namely Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Anitphon, Thrasymachus, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. Each of the discussions contains three parts: an introduction that expresses the translator/editor's own view of each philosopher and his work, translations of fragments and writings from others that discuss and evaluate the philosopher, and then sources. After that the author discusses the Double Arguments and various anonymous and miscellaneous texts before the book ends with explanatory and textual notes, a concordance with Diels/Kranz, and an index of translated passages.
And that is an open question. Is it worth getting to know the first philosophers? The translator/editor obviously thinks so. If he views the presocratic philosophers as generally having the wrong answers, he appreciates their agnosticism and the questions that they ask of the earth. And it is similarly clear that the author appreciates the political aspects of the sophists, and seems also to want to defend the ethical interests of some of the philosophers who have been lumped into that school as well. All of that invites the question on the part of the reader as to whether a sophist who has ethical concerns and an appreciation of moral development that comes from philosophical learning is really a sophist at all. Even as a reader who has a certain degree of skepticism about the approach of most of these philosophers, it is clear that some of them are well worth knowing at times for the content of their thinking (Heraclitus, for example), and some for the questions that they brought up (Zeno, for example), but it is rare when a philosopher here has a moral perspective that is worth appreciating. There are a few, and those are to be treasured, but even here it depends on how one interprets their fragmentary thinking, whether kindly or not.
This book is more than 300 pages long and is divided into two large parts with numerous smaller elements. The book begins with a preface and acknowledgements, after which there is an introduction, select bibliography, a note on the texts, and then timeline of the thinkers included here. After this material, which is nearly 50 pages of unnumbered pages, the book proper begins with an exploration of the pre-Socratic philosophers who survive--often barely--in the historical record. This part includes a look at the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, Pythagoras and his school, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the atomists, and Diogenes. The second part of the book discusses the sophists, namely Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Anitphon, Thrasymachus, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. Each of the discussions contains three parts: an introduction that expresses the translator/editor's own view of each philosopher and his work, translations of fragments and writings from others that discuss and evaluate the philosopher, and then sources. After that the author discusses the Double Arguments and various anonymous and miscellaneous texts before the book ends with explanatory and textual notes, a concordance with Diels/Kranz, and an index of translated passages.
And that is an open question. Is it worth getting to know the first philosophers? The translator/editor obviously thinks so. If he views the presocratic philosophers as generally having the wrong answers, he appreciates their agnosticism and the questions that they ask of the earth. And it is similarly clear that the author appreciates the political aspects of the sophists, and seems also to want to defend the ethical interests of some of the philosophers who have been lumped into that school as well. All of that invites the question on the part of the reader as to whether a sophist who has ethical concerns and an appreciation of moral development that comes from philosophical learning is really a sophist at all. Even as a reader who has a certain degree of skepticism about the approach of most of these philosophers, it is clear that some of them are well worth knowing at times for the content of their thinking (Heraclitus, for example), and some for the questions that they brought up (Zeno, for example), but it is rare when a philosopher here has a moral perspective that is worth appreciating. There are a few, and those are to be treasured, but even here it depends on how one interprets their fragmentary thinking, whether kindly or not.
June 10, 2025
Favorites: Antiphon, Parmenides, Empedocles
Least Favorite: All of the Atomists
Kinda hysterical how much of our knowledge on Ancient Greece is dependent on whether Aristotle and Plato were representing them as either Chads or Soyjaks
Least Favorite: All of the Atomists
Kinda hysterical how much of our knowledge on Ancient Greece is dependent on whether Aristotle and Plato were representing them as either Chads or Soyjaks
March 17, 2018
A compilation of fragments by the authors (very little original material remains). The collection is especially good for the Sophists and the introductory commentary is excellent.
May 14, 2025
This is the second book I have read that focuses directly on the Presocratic philosophers. Since I have already written a brief review of Geoffrey Kirk’s "The Presocratic Philosophers," I will use this review to discuss in greater depth two figures this book has helped me appreciate further: Parmenides and Heraclitus.
While Thales of Miletus is often credited as the founder of Western philosophy, Parmenides has a strong claim to that title as well, despite being born around the time of Thales’ death. This is because, after On Nature was written, it became the central philosophical challenge that later thinkers either had to respond to or build upon—shifting focus away from the Milesian tradition. Our current time has also influenced this perception; much of what the Milesians speculated about (such as the fundamental substance of the universe) has been subsumed by modern physics and biology. In contrast, Parmenides’ metaphysical arguments have remained central to philosophy.
Parmenides presents his philosophy as a divine revelation, written in the dactylic hexameter used by Homer and Hesiod. In this poetic framework, a goddess imparts two fundamental premises to him:
1. There is being, and there is not-being.
2. You think.
From these, it seems one could think of either being or not-being. However, Parmenides argues that the latter is impossible. Any attempt to conceive of not-being still results in a thought that has being. A helpful analogy is considering sight and blindness: a sighted person may assume that closing their eyes simulates blindness, but in doing so, they are still perceiving darkness—something, rather than nothing. To truly imagine blindness, one would need to conceive of what they "see" from their elbow, which is an impossible task.
Thus, for Parmenides, to think nothing is to not think at all. From this, he concludes that thinking and being are the same. This leads to his famous doctrine that what is must have always been and must always remain. Since being cannot emerge from non-being, and being cannot turn into non-being, reality must be eternal, unchanging, and homogenous. The radical conclusion follows: there is no time, space, motion, or differentiation—only a singular, undivided being. Any perception of change or multiplicity belongs to the deceptive "way of seeming," rather than the "way of truth."
In a recorded lecture, Professor Angie Hobbs highlights a key flaw in Parmenides’ reasoning: his subtle shift in the use of "being." Initially, he speaks of being in the existential sense (e.g., "Socrates is"), where denying being seems impossible. However, he later applies the same reasoning to predicative statements (e.g., "Socrates is snub-nosed"), where negation is entirely possible. If this critique is valid, then Parmenides’ argument against differentiation collapses, as we can meaningfully distinguish between different kinds of being.
A more radical interpretation, also presented by Hobbs, suggests that Parmenides was aware of this logical slide and that "On Nature" is intentionally self-refuting. Evidence for this comes from the very structure of the poem: it features two distinct figures—the goddess and the young Parmenides—which contradicts the monism it seeks to establish. Under this reading, Parmenides was not merely an overzealous metaphysician but a dialectician, in the tradition of his student Zeno. He may have been illustrating the limits of both pure reason (the "way of truth") and sensory perception (the "way of seeming"), leaving us caught in a circular paradox. Perhaps this is why Parmenides describes truth as a sphere and wrote, "It matters not to me where I begin, for I shall return there again."
Heraclitus is often contrasted with Parmenides, as he is associated with relativism and flux, whereas Parmenides constant and singularity instead. However, they are both deeply concerned with the nature of being.
Heraclitus is fascinated by how change both preserves and dissolves identity. His famous river analogy illustrates this paradox: a river remains a river precisely because its waters are in constant motion. Without this flux, it would be more like a stagnant lake. Yet, over time, the river's banks erode, its contents shift, and it may even split or dry up. If we step into a river today and then again tomorrow, is it truly the same river? What if it has altered beyond recognition? This challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of identity and being.
His relativism is best exemplified by the fragment: "The road up and the road down are one and the same." Whether a road is described as leading up or down depends entirely on the traveler’s perspective. The road itself remains unchanged, yet its nature is relative to the observer. For Heraclitus, being is never absolute—it exists only within a shifting context.
If identity is constantly changing, this raises ethical questions. A person undergoes dramatic transformations throughout life. Physically and mentally, they are almost entirely different from their younger self. Yet, we maintain the notion of personal continuity. But if identity is fluid, what does this mean for moral responsibility? If I make a promise today, on what basis must I uphold it years from now, when both I and the world have changed?
Interestingly, despite emphasizing flux, Heraclitus reaches a conclusion comparable to Parmenides’ monism: "All is one, and there is harmony throughout the world." He argues that opposites—light and dark, life and death—are not truly distinct but part of the same continuum. In fact, one cannot be conceived without the other. Just as change sustains identity, conflict sustains harmony.
Even in ethics, Heraclitus suggests that good and bad are interdependent. Without suffering, could we recognize joy? Without injustice, would we grasp the meaning of justice? This perspective troubled Aristotle, who criticized Heraclitus for rejecting the principle of non-contradiction. For Heraclitus, reality is not composed of static truths but is a dynamic interplay of forces. He maintains that, though we may never fully perceive the unity underlying change, philosophy allows us to glimpse it: "They (mortals) do not comprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself: it is a harmony turning back upon itself, like a bow and a lyre."
I believe this quote perfectly encapsulates Heraclitus's vision of a world held together by opposing forces. At first glance, harmony and variance seem contradictory, but they are inseparable—harmony is not the absence of conflict but rather the result of it.
The bow functions by maintaining a delicate balance of tension: the more the string is drawn back, the greater the potential energy, yet that same tension risks snapping the bow. The lyre, similarly, produces sound only because of the tautness of its strings. If they are too loose, no sound emerges; if they are too tight, they will break. In both cases, the very thing that enables their function—the tension—is also what places them in a state of perpetual risk. This reflects Heraclitus' broader metaphysical vision: being exists because of tension, yet is also at its mercy.
This principle extends beyond physical objects to the very fabric of reality. The cosmos, in Heraclitus’ view, is not a static order but a dynamic equilibrium maintained through the interplay of opposing forces. Life and death, creation and destruction, war and peace—all are bound together in an endless cycle. One cannot exist without the other, just as the function of the bow and the lyre depends on their opposing tensions.
Ethically and existentially, this view has profound implications. It suggests that struggle is not an obstacle to harmony but an essential part of it. Human existence, like the bowstring, is defined by the tensions we navigate—between stability and change, between identity and transformation. This idea also aligns with Heraclitus’ famous statement that “war is the father of all things”, emphasizing that conflict, rather than a mere disruption, is the very engine of reality.
In this way, Heraclitus offers a vision of a world where contradiction is not to be resolved or eliminated but understood as the fundamental condition of existence. His philosophy challenges us to embrace change, recognize the necessity of opposition, and see in the apparent disorder of the world an underlying unity—just as a lyre, through its tension, produces a beautiful and coherent melody.
All in all this notion offers a hopeful vision for philosophy—it suggests that, with effort, we can push past our limited perceptions and better understand the world. In this way, Heraclitus presents not only a metaphysical vision but an epistemological challenge: to see deeper, think more critically, and embrace the complexity of existence.
Hobbs on Parmenides:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Yt6...
Hobbs on Heraclitus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpkJ7...
Another video on Heraclitus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzpXF...
While Thales of Miletus is often credited as the founder of Western philosophy, Parmenides has a strong claim to that title as well, despite being born around the time of Thales’ death. This is because, after On Nature was written, it became the central philosophical challenge that later thinkers either had to respond to or build upon—shifting focus away from the Milesian tradition. Our current time has also influenced this perception; much of what the Milesians speculated about (such as the fundamental substance of the universe) has been subsumed by modern physics and biology. In contrast, Parmenides’ metaphysical arguments have remained central to philosophy.
Parmenides presents his philosophy as a divine revelation, written in the dactylic hexameter used by Homer and Hesiod. In this poetic framework, a goddess imparts two fundamental premises to him:
1. There is being, and there is not-being.
2. You think.
From these, it seems one could think of either being or not-being. However, Parmenides argues that the latter is impossible. Any attempt to conceive of not-being still results in a thought that has being. A helpful analogy is considering sight and blindness: a sighted person may assume that closing their eyes simulates blindness, but in doing so, they are still perceiving darkness—something, rather than nothing. To truly imagine blindness, one would need to conceive of what they "see" from their elbow, which is an impossible task.
Thus, for Parmenides, to think nothing is to not think at all. From this, he concludes that thinking and being are the same. This leads to his famous doctrine that what is must have always been and must always remain. Since being cannot emerge from non-being, and being cannot turn into non-being, reality must be eternal, unchanging, and homogenous. The radical conclusion follows: there is no time, space, motion, or differentiation—only a singular, undivided being. Any perception of change or multiplicity belongs to the deceptive "way of seeming," rather than the "way of truth."
In a recorded lecture, Professor Angie Hobbs highlights a key flaw in Parmenides’ reasoning: his subtle shift in the use of "being." Initially, he speaks of being in the existential sense (e.g., "Socrates is"), where denying being seems impossible. However, he later applies the same reasoning to predicative statements (e.g., "Socrates is snub-nosed"), where negation is entirely possible. If this critique is valid, then Parmenides’ argument against differentiation collapses, as we can meaningfully distinguish between different kinds of being.
A more radical interpretation, also presented by Hobbs, suggests that Parmenides was aware of this logical slide and that "On Nature" is intentionally self-refuting. Evidence for this comes from the very structure of the poem: it features two distinct figures—the goddess and the young Parmenides—which contradicts the monism it seeks to establish. Under this reading, Parmenides was not merely an overzealous metaphysician but a dialectician, in the tradition of his student Zeno. He may have been illustrating the limits of both pure reason (the "way of truth") and sensory perception (the "way of seeming"), leaving us caught in a circular paradox. Perhaps this is why Parmenides describes truth as a sphere and wrote, "It matters not to me where I begin, for I shall return there again."
Heraclitus is often contrasted with Parmenides, as he is associated with relativism and flux, whereas Parmenides constant and singularity instead. However, they are both deeply concerned with the nature of being.
Heraclitus is fascinated by how change both preserves and dissolves identity. His famous river analogy illustrates this paradox: a river remains a river precisely because its waters are in constant motion. Without this flux, it would be more like a stagnant lake. Yet, over time, the river's banks erode, its contents shift, and it may even split or dry up. If we step into a river today and then again tomorrow, is it truly the same river? What if it has altered beyond recognition? This challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of identity and being.
His relativism is best exemplified by the fragment: "The road up and the road down are one and the same." Whether a road is described as leading up or down depends entirely on the traveler’s perspective. The road itself remains unchanged, yet its nature is relative to the observer. For Heraclitus, being is never absolute—it exists only within a shifting context.
If identity is constantly changing, this raises ethical questions. A person undergoes dramatic transformations throughout life. Physically and mentally, they are almost entirely different from their younger self. Yet, we maintain the notion of personal continuity. But if identity is fluid, what does this mean for moral responsibility? If I make a promise today, on what basis must I uphold it years from now, when both I and the world have changed?
Interestingly, despite emphasizing flux, Heraclitus reaches a conclusion comparable to Parmenides’ monism: "All is one, and there is harmony throughout the world." He argues that opposites—light and dark, life and death—are not truly distinct but part of the same continuum. In fact, one cannot be conceived without the other. Just as change sustains identity, conflict sustains harmony.
Even in ethics, Heraclitus suggests that good and bad are interdependent. Without suffering, could we recognize joy? Without injustice, would we grasp the meaning of justice? This perspective troubled Aristotle, who criticized Heraclitus for rejecting the principle of non-contradiction. For Heraclitus, reality is not composed of static truths but is a dynamic interplay of forces. He maintains that, though we may never fully perceive the unity underlying change, philosophy allows us to glimpse it: "They (mortals) do not comprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself: it is a harmony turning back upon itself, like a bow and a lyre."
I believe this quote perfectly encapsulates Heraclitus's vision of a world held together by opposing forces. At first glance, harmony and variance seem contradictory, but they are inseparable—harmony is not the absence of conflict but rather the result of it.
The bow functions by maintaining a delicate balance of tension: the more the string is drawn back, the greater the potential energy, yet that same tension risks snapping the bow. The lyre, similarly, produces sound only because of the tautness of its strings. If they are too loose, no sound emerges; if they are too tight, they will break. In both cases, the very thing that enables their function—the tension—is also what places them in a state of perpetual risk. This reflects Heraclitus' broader metaphysical vision: being exists because of tension, yet is also at its mercy.
This principle extends beyond physical objects to the very fabric of reality. The cosmos, in Heraclitus’ view, is not a static order but a dynamic equilibrium maintained through the interplay of opposing forces. Life and death, creation and destruction, war and peace—all are bound together in an endless cycle. One cannot exist without the other, just as the function of the bow and the lyre depends on their opposing tensions.
Ethically and existentially, this view has profound implications. It suggests that struggle is not an obstacle to harmony but an essential part of it. Human existence, like the bowstring, is defined by the tensions we navigate—between stability and change, between identity and transformation. This idea also aligns with Heraclitus’ famous statement that “war is the father of all things”, emphasizing that conflict, rather than a mere disruption, is the very engine of reality.
In this way, Heraclitus offers a vision of a world where contradiction is not to be resolved or eliminated but understood as the fundamental condition of existence. His philosophy challenges us to embrace change, recognize the necessity of opposition, and see in the apparent disorder of the world an underlying unity—just as a lyre, through its tension, produces a beautiful and coherent melody.
All in all this notion offers a hopeful vision for philosophy—it suggests that, with effort, we can push past our limited perceptions and better understand the world. In this way, Heraclitus presents not only a metaphysical vision but an epistemological challenge: to see deeper, think more critically, and embrace the complexity of existence.
Hobbs on Parmenides:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Yt6...
Hobbs on Heraclitus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpkJ7...
Another video on Heraclitus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzpXF...
March 21, 2021
Contains detailed commentary and biographical notes, as well as a well translated collection of the surviving fragments of the Presocratics.
May 16, 2017
Great collection with glosses of their general beliefs supplemented by selected testimonies and fragments in their own words. Informative of the philosophical tradition Plato and Aristotle engage with and how they interpret them.
February 28, 2025
This was a DNF for me. Life’s just too short for me to keep attempting to read this book. I made it to about the 28% point, and that’s enough.
I should start off by saying that philosophy really isn’t my thing. I was trying to read this in preparation for a class that starts in a couple months and is going to touch on some of the early Greek philosophers, as well as many other topics. But, I just can’t continue with this book. It is just a bad reading experience for me. That doesn’t mean the book is bad. It just means I’m clearly not the target audience. I liked some of the parts by Robin Waterfield when he describes the differences between various philosophers. However, the bulk of the book is filled with snippets from such ancient authors as Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine, Aristotle, etc. with bits of what the various philosophers believed. Honestly, I had trouble keeping them all apart (notably Anaximenes and Anaximander).
If you’re longing to know more about the various early schools of Greek philosophy (Milesians, presocratics, etc.) and particularly many of the individual philosophers, this may be the book for you. As for me, I know a bit more than when I started, but this book was just not to my taste and I’m giving up on it.
I should start off by saying that philosophy really isn’t my thing. I was trying to read this in preparation for a class that starts in a couple months and is going to touch on some of the early Greek philosophers, as well as many other topics. But, I just can’t continue with this book. It is just a bad reading experience for me. That doesn’t mean the book is bad. It just means I’m clearly not the target audience. I liked some of the parts by Robin Waterfield when he describes the differences between various philosophers. However, the bulk of the book is filled with snippets from such ancient authors as Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine, Aristotle, etc. with bits of what the various philosophers believed. Honestly, I had trouble keeping them all apart (notably Anaximenes and Anaximander).
If you’re longing to know more about the various early schools of Greek philosophy (Milesians, presocratics, etc.) and particularly many of the individual philosophers, this may be the book for you. As for me, I know a bit more than when I started, but this book was just not to my taste and I’m giving up on it.
Read
March 18, 2020I read only the pre-Socratics, about two-thirds of the book. (Pre-Socratics specified for my Philip Ward 500 books reading project.)
Well presented book. Waterfield summarizes the opinions of each philosopher, then presents a selection of the available fragments of his works and the testimony (descriptions /interpretations) of what he said/wrote by later commentators, e.g. Aristotle, Simplicius, Diogenes Laertius.
I couldn’t read it late at night without falling asleep, but in small chunks earlier in the day it was quite digestible. The. Chapters on Pythagoras and Democritus are the most interesting as they contain lasting math concepts and the earliest atomic theory. But the others are useful in showing the mix of ideas that was available to subsequent philosophers, meaning both concepts and the idea of how one ‘practiced’ philosophy.
Well presented book. Waterfield summarizes the opinions of each philosopher, then presents a selection of the available fragments of his works and the testimony (descriptions /interpretations) of what he said/wrote by later commentators, e.g. Aristotle, Simplicius, Diogenes Laertius.
I couldn’t read it late at night without falling asleep, but in small chunks earlier in the day it was quite digestible. The. Chapters on Pythagoras and Democritus are the most interesting as they contain lasting math concepts and the earliest atomic theory. But the others are useful in showing the mix of ideas that was available to subsequent philosophers, meaning both concepts and the idea of how one ‘practiced’ philosophy.
February 23, 2024
The Presocratics (and Sophists) are those philosophers who flourished before Socrates, who died around 399 BC. They are an interesting group of thinkings because they were nibbling away at some important questions of truth and justice which are still very much live issues today.
They also had some rather odd views about the nature and composition of reality, picturing it as floating on water, or air, or composed of fire, etc. Some of their views are unsurprisingly provincial, and some are astonishingly universal, arguing for the need for education for the whole community at public expense, or querying whether there are significant differences between a civilised Greek and an uncivilised Barbarian.
This translation is particularly good at providing introductory notes. Every extract is prefaced with an explanation of what the extracts are, and how they relate to each other. This is extremely helpful as some of the extracts are fragments which would be otherwise difficult for a reader to place in a context.
Around a quarter of the book is notes and additional materials, with a section devoted to explaining concepts which crop up in the texts, and those concept can range from references to peculiar musical instruments to idiomatic phrases of the era.
Overall, I think this is a good collection and translation of the textual fragments. Readers get a feel for the original authors style, while engaging with those authors through a very readable English translation.
They also had some rather odd views about the nature and composition of reality, picturing it as floating on water, or air, or composed of fire, etc. Some of their views are unsurprisingly provincial, and some are astonishingly universal, arguing for the need for education for the whole community at public expense, or querying whether there are significant differences between a civilised Greek and an uncivilised Barbarian.
This translation is particularly good at providing introductory notes. Every extract is prefaced with an explanation of what the extracts are, and how they relate to each other. This is extremely helpful as some of the extracts are fragments which would be otherwise difficult for a reader to place in a context.
Around a quarter of the book is notes and additional materials, with a section devoted to explaining concepts which crop up in the texts, and those concept can range from references to peculiar musical instruments to idiomatic phrases of the era.
Overall, I think this is a good collection and translation of the textual fragments. Readers get a feel for the original authors style, while engaging with those authors through a very readable English translation.
August 11, 2019
Quite satisfied with this book. Not too long, not too short, and there's a good balance of fragments, testimonia and commentary. The Presocratic and Sophist philosophy itself is interesting enough, and I know I'll be referring back to parts of it when I get to Plato and Aristotle. It just gets annoying to read some of the incorrect physics and bad argumentation at times, but I suppose it's necessary to include in an overview of these thinkers and the questions they asked and gave answers for.
June 19, 2021
It's a solid introduction to ancient Greek thought whose only fault is the fact that the introductions appear before the fragments and are often full of the personal judgments of the editor. Still, the book exceeds in its goal of introducing the reader to the trends in ancient Greek thought that have been influential in debates that we are still having. Recommended for people looking for a good intro, though maybe reading the introductions after the fragments is a good idea.
July 4, 2024
I still don't believe Socrates existed.
July 8, 2023
I can honestly say that I went into this not to gain a better understanding of presocratic philosophy but to enjoy the gleaning of now lost sources through extant works. The same can be said for trying to reconstruct someone's thoughts or sources based off of what they have mentioned in their works. Although many of the philosophers mentioned in this book probably did not write anything themselves, its interesting to start with a later sources understanding and rewording of an idea and work backwards to try to better understand what the original intent was.
Was it as enjoyable as some of the Loeb collections (like fragmentary republican latin)? Absolutely not... but I am biased more towards classical history than philosophy. I would definitely still recommend this book though
Was it as enjoyable as some of the Loeb collections (like fragmentary republican latin)? Absolutely not... but I am biased more towards classical history than philosophy. I would definitely still recommend this book though
Read
February 17, 2021THE PRESOCRATICS AND THE SOPHISTS
580-400 BC
(08 January 2021)
It is remarkable that so much of this has come down to us, especially as most of these philosophers lived before the age of recorded history. But it seems that suddenly, as if emerging from the “Apeiron,” the entire discipline began in a flash and set off a 2,500 year tradition of inquiry and thought. This is a tedious read and much of what we have is either speculation on the makeup of the world (much of what is now ‘junk science’) or incomprehensible contemplation on the nature of being. Reading this now, it may be easy to patronizingly chuckle at Anaximedes’ assertion that the Sun was Earth-like until it caught fire from moving so fast through the air, but one must remember that he made that assertion when the prevailing thought was that the Sun was actually the corporeal avatar of Helios and his chariot.
They were all equally wondrous, curious, and totally irreverent. Xenophanes provides the perfect example:
“If cows and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make things as men can, horses would have drawn horse-like gods, cows cow-like gods, and each species would have made the gods’ bodies just like their own. Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, and Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.”
Or, more brutally, Heraclitus:
“Corpses should be disposed of more readily than dung.”
Of these philosophers, I only found Aniximander and Heraclitus truly worth reading. Anaximander asserted that the “Apeiron,” the boundless, infinite, was the source of all else. He also somehow described the law of the conservation of energy (albeit primitively) and the water cycle.
Heraclitus famously asserted that the world was in constant flux and one could never step in the same river twice. Flux, chaos, or “war” -- as he puts it -- is the driving force of everything. “War is the father of all and king of all. Some he reveals as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.” This reminds me of a certain character from Blood Meridian. The only thing that unites all is the logos, the word (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God???”), the reason, the order. And Heraclitus of course cannot resist, as all philosophers cannot resist, pontificating on the superiority of the examined life: “the general run of people are as unaware of their actions while awake as they are of what they do while asleep.” But “everyone has the potential for self-knowledge and sound thinking.”
There are other interesting philosophers in this volume such as Parmenides (if you can figure him out, I could only penetrate the surface), the Pythagoreans, and the Atomists, but of them I will not speak.
The Sophists were more comprehensible but less interesting. The only one who I found to be worth reading was Protagoras, who asserted -- as we all know -- that “Man is the measure of all things -- of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” This extraordinary statement of humanism, coming from a man born in 481 BC, reverbs down all the way to Dostoevsky’s theory of collective sin and Sartre’s doctrine of collective definition. Was Protagoras the first ‘postmodern’ thinker? He was certainly a relativist, as he asserted that there is no truth and all is perception. Despite this, Protagoras believes that good leaders can make their communities more ethical, an idea as prescient now as it was then. Protagoras seemed to develop the state of nature 2,000 years before Hobbes and even almost came to state his dictum “bellum omnium contra omnes.”
Aside from those mentioned above, most of these philosophers are not worth reading but for historical value. Most of their ideas are either scientifically useless or ethically surpassed by later thinkers. We do, however, owe enormous debt to these gentlemen for daring to ask.
580-400 BC
(08 January 2021)
It is remarkable that so much of this has come down to us, especially as most of these philosophers lived before the age of recorded history. But it seems that suddenly, as if emerging from the “Apeiron,” the entire discipline began in a flash and set off a 2,500 year tradition of inquiry and thought. This is a tedious read and much of what we have is either speculation on the makeup of the world (much of what is now ‘junk science’) or incomprehensible contemplation on the nature of being. Reading this now, it may be easy to patronizingly chuckle at Anaximedes’ assertion that the Sun was Earth-like until it caught fire from moving so fast through the air, but one must remember that he made that assertion when the prevailing thought was that the Sun was actually the corporeal avatar of Helios and his chariot.
They were all equally wondrous, curious, and totally irreverent. Xenophanes provides the perfect example:
“If cows and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make things as men can, horses would have drawn horse-like gods, cows cow-like gods, and each species would have made the gods’ bodies just like their own. Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, and Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.”
Or, more brutally, Heraclitus:
“Corpses should be disposed of more readily than dung.”
Of these philosophers, I only found Aniximander and Heraclitus truly worth reading. Anaximander asserted that the “Apeiron,” the boundless, infinite, was the source of all else. He also somehow described the law of the conservation of energy (albeit primitively) and the water cycle.
Heraclitus famously asserted that the world was in constant flux and one could never step in the same river twice. Flux, chaos, or “war” -- as he puts it -- is the driving force of everything. “War is the father of all and king of all. Some he reveals as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.” This reminds me of a certain character from Blood Meridian. The only thing that unites all is the logos, the word (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God???”), the reason, the order. And Heraclitus of course cannot resist, as all philosophers cannot resist, pontificating on the superiority of the examined life: “the general run of people are as unaware of their actions while awake as they are of what they do while asleep.” But “everyone has the potential for self-knowledge and sound thinking.”
There are other interesting philosophers in this volume such as Parmenides (if you can figure him out, I could only penetrate the surface), the Pythagoreans, and the Atomists, but of them I will not speak.
The Sophists were more comprehensible but less interesting. The only one who I found to be worth reading was Protagoras, who asserted -- as we all know -- that “Man is the measure of all things -- of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” This extraordinary statement of humanism, coming from a man born in 481 BC, reverbs down all the way to Dostoevsky’s theory of collective sin and Sartre’s doctrine of collective definition. Was Protagoras the first ‘postmodern’ thinker? He was certainly a relativist, as he asserted that there is no truth and all is perception. Despite this, Protagoras believes that good leaders can make their communities more ethical, an idea as prescient now as it was then. Protagoras seemed to develop the state of nature 2,000 years before Hobbes and even almost came to state his dictum “bellum omnium contra omnes.”
Aside from those mentioned above, most of these philosophers are not worth reading but for historical value. Most of their ideas are either scientifically useless or ethically surpassed by later thinkers. We do, however, owe enormous debt to these gentlemen for daring to ask.
August 12, 2022
My advice? Start with the Greeks.
September 20, 2013
This anthology, edited by the Greek scholar Robin Waterfield, consists of a series of extracts, with commentary, from the work of a number of Greek thinkers who lived in the couple of centuries before the first megastar of western philosophy, Socrates – hence the name by which they are known to us: Presocratics. Well, “a series of extracts” is pushing it, since not many of them wrote anything down, so the way we know what they thought is largely through secondhand (and no doubt distorted) accounts, whether by disciples, critics (including Plato, Socrates’ chief scribe and the second megastar of western philosophy, who pitted some of them in dialogue against his hero), or historians writing many centuries later. What survives is a series of fragments, like the cracked mosaics of some ancient palace floor.
That’s enough, though, to throw light on their strange and distant world. And yet in some ways not so distant: for these men (all men) were the first to think like we do. Anyone who has read their precursors, the great Greek epic poets Homer and Hesiod, knows that the gods pulled all the strings: whatever a phenomenon might appear to be, it ultimately had a supernatural cause. We don’t know what it was that triggered the shift away from mythological thinking to the search for explanations in nature; but somehow, with the Presocratics, it happened, and it’s been with us ever since.
Some of the wackier beliefs of Pythagoras’ followers sound like those of a new age cult (the moon “is inhabited, just like our earth, but by creatures and plants which are taller and more beautiful; for creatures there are fifteen times as strong as those here, and never excrete anything, and their day is fifteen times longer than ours”), but they also laid the basis for much of modern mathematics, including mathematical relationships in music. And while some Presocratic scientific speculations sound quaintly cute to modern ears (“the sun is larger than the Peloponnese”, exclaims Anaxagoras), others were spot on (“the moon does not have its own light, but gains it from the sun” – Anaxagoras again), while still others are almost eerie in their prescience (Anaxagoras hypothesized a “big bang” origin for the universe – though set in motion by Mind – while Democritus posited atoms in motion and the combination of elements, and even asserted that the Gods – like us – were the products of atomic combination). There’s a mystical streak too – most of these thinkers believed that everything is one, and that nothing can come into being from non-being – but without that precluding a fair dose of common sense: Heraclitus held that “what awaits men after death cannot be anticipated or imagined”.
The Sophists, by contrast – or at least their flashier representatives – come across as superficial, boorish trivializers, interested only in egotistical point-scoring and well deserving of the opprobrium in which history has held them; though again, since we lack original sources, it’s hard to know how much of this impression is based on malevolent caricature.
For the most part, though, these distant philosophers seem just like us, fumbling with all their native curiosity and ingenuity towards the most coherent explanations of the universe they can find; but they were there first, and we owe them.
That’s enough, though, to throw light on their strange and distant world. And yet in some ways not so distant: for these men (all men) were the first to think like we do. Anyone who has read their precursors, the great Greek epic poets Homer and Hesiod, knows that the gods pulled all the strings: whatever a phenomenon might appear to be, it ultimately had a supernatural cause. We don’t know what it was that triggered the shift away from mythological thinking to the search for explanations in nature; but somehow, with the Presocratics, it happened, and it’s been with us ever since.
Some of the wackier beliefs of Pythagoras’ followers sound like those of a new age cult (the moon “is inhabited, just like our earth, but by creatures and plants which are taller and more beautiful; for creatures there are fifteen times as strong as those here, and never excrete anything, and their day is fifteen times longer than ours”), but they also laid the basis for much of modern mathematics, including mathematical relationships in music. And while some Presocratic scientific speculations sound quaintly cute to modern ears (“the sun is larger than the Peloponnese”, exclaims Anaxagoras), others were spot on (“the moon does not have its own light, but gains it from the sun” – Anaxagoras again), while still others are almost eerie in their prescience (Anaxagoras hypothesized a “big bang” origin for the universe – though set in motion by Mind – while Democritus posited atoms in motion and the combination of elements, and even asserted that the Gods – like us – were the products of atomic combination). There’s a mystical streak too – most of these thinkers believed that everything is one, and that nothing can come into being from non-being – but without that precluding a fair dose of common sense: Heraclitus held that “what awaits men after death cannot be anticipated or imagined”.
The Sophists, by contrast – or at least their flashier representatives – come across as superficial, boorish trivializers, interested only in egotistical point-scoring and well deserving of the opprobrium in which history has held them; though again, since we lack original sources, it’s hard to know how much of this impression is based on malevolent caricature.
For the most part, though, these distant philosophers seem just like us, fumbling with all their native curiosity and ingenuity towards the most coherent explanations of the universe they can find; but they were there first, and we owe them.
January 28, 2021
Fascinating and informative survey of the presocratics and sophists. I wish I would have started with this book before ever dipping into Plato and Aristotle — for one, P&A mischaracterize many of these thinkers for their own ends; and two, P&A are much easier to comprehend in a meaningful way with knowledge of their influences. Even further than them, one can see the influence these thinkers had on many later philosophers and philosophical systems. The presocratics and sophists are truly the building blocks of western philosophy and I’m now convinced of their indispensability.
As this is my first foray into the “first philosophers,” I’m not in much position to evaluate Waterfield’s approach in presenting them to the reader. However, she gives me every reason to believe that she evaluates each thinker in an academically honest way: the philosophers are allowed to speak for themselves after a brief introduction, and each introduction is transparent about translation issues and differing interpretations that exist in the academic community. Waterfield makes clear disclaimers when she imposes her own view on any given philosopher and even challenges the reader in the introduction to interrogate the texts and develop their own theories. In this way her approach to interpretation seems similar to that of Protagoras: no one interpretation is necessarily 100% correct, but there are certainly better interpretations than others.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone with an interest in western philosophy.
As this is my first foray into the “first philosophers,” I’m not in much position to evaluate Waterfield’s approach in presenting them to the reader. However, she gives me every reason to believe that she evaluates each thinker in an academically honest way: the philosophers are allowed to speak for themselves after a brief introduction, and each introduction is transparent about translation issues and differing interpretations that exist in the academic community. Waterfield makes clear disclaimers when she imposes her own view on any given philosopher and even challenges the reader in the introduction to interrogate the texts and develop their own theories. In this way her approach to interpretation seems similar to that of Protagoras: no one interpretation is necessarily 100% correct, but there are certainly better interpretations than others.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone with an interest in western philosophy.
September 9, 2017
The presentation of the philosophy was succinct, perhaps overly so, but overall the book is a good survey of the Presocratics and Sophists. As for the philosophy itself, some of it is painfully outdated and sometimes a bit frustrating to read (well, it is 2500 years old), whilst some of it left me astounded as to how relevant the queries and conclusions still are today. Overall a fascinating read.
November 27, 2021
Explains the thoughts of some of the major philosophers that predated Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
1. Beginning with Heraclitus and his assumptions about split reality, with reality consisting of an eternal "logos", which represents a common and objective, unchanging truth. However, the masses base their perceptions of the world based off of opinions, personal beliefs, and desires. This material world is always in flux, just like a flowing river. The material world that we derive our meaning from is always changing, being replaced, and will decay into dust, nothing can be preserved. But the eternal logos outlives it all. Heraclitus calls on people to "wake up" and listen to the eternal truths of the universe.
2. Eleatic Monist School
Parmenides believed that "all is one", concluding controversially that all states of "non-being" and change as a concept in itself is illogical, if we come to exist, we must come from something that already exists, for we can't begin to exist out of non-existence. Nothing moves, for it implies there's empty space to move into, reality itself, to Parmenides, was an illusion. This was opposed to Heraclitus's view of constant flux. Zeno and Melissus supported Parmenides's Monism, which claimed that "all is one" and "all is unchanging", and that we experience "life" through unreliable senses that stimulate for us the illusion of actively existing.
3. Milesian School
Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes began to attribute natural occurring phenomena to elements that make up the universe rather than to Gods of the the Greek Pantheon. First exploration of materialist science to counter superstitious assumptions of tradition.
4. Xenophanes critiqued Homeric and Hesiodic gods of tradition by stating that there is one supreme God, not anthropomorphic or in charge of one specific field of knowledge, but rather, it is all-knowing and eternal.
5. Pythagoras has no writings contributed to him but famously taught that mathematics was crucial for understanding the universe, and that the soul was independent of the body, and that the soul could be purified by ascetic practices such as vegetarianism.
6. Anaxagoras claimed that our minds are reflections of a "universal mind" that works through our material bodies. This would imply that our minds are distinctly separate from the matter that makes up our physical bodies.
7. Empedocles believed that life is made up of four different elements, fire, air, earth, and water. Two cosmic forces combine these elements to make matter, being love, which brings attraction and harmonious mingling, and strife, which compels the separate parts to break from each other and seek their own kind. He proposed cyclic cosmic stages that the universe cycles through.
- Rule of Love: Love is wholly dominant, everything good exists in a wholly divine sphere.
- Advance of Strife: Strifes moves in and the four elements seek their own kind.
- Rule of Strife: Strife is wholly dominant, all four root elements are separated.
- Advance of Love: Segregated elements begin to mingle again, new life is created.
Empedocles believes that long ago the universe was in a cosmic state of "Love" an Eden-like "Golden Age" but when strife moved in, and this divine whole dissolved and birthed "sin". Empedocles claims that humanity can only be saved from this by "Apotheosis" or elevation to the divine, this includes participating in practices such as vegetarianism, sexual moderation, and seeking universal knowledge.
8. Atomist School
The Atomists claimed that the universe was made of eternal, tiny, always moving, particles that only changed according to our illusionary senses. Democritus claimed that these atoms had no qualities on their own, but the subjective mind taints them with qualities. He advocated for a "contentment of mind", believing that atoms are equally distributed in our bodies and that disruptions can be physically/psychologically unhealthy, this means contentment in emotions, character, intellect, and abstinence from excessive physical hedonism.
9. Sophists
Protagoras believed that "man is the measure of all things", all interpretations of reality pass through human senses so we must assign them measurement. For example, air is universally air, but it's up to us to perceive it as "hot" or "cold". He denied objective truth, believed all sides could be equally justifiable. Believed that no objective standard for truth/law/decency/justice existed, but they were all relative to their pragmatic application in real life, believing laws should differ according to location and tradition. Hippias on the other hand, believed in objectivity, claiming that there were "unwritten laws of nature" that supersede human laws. The use of rhetoric regarding "unwritten laws of nature" being used as an excuse in Athenian courts and debates was forbidden as a proper rebuttal. Antiphon declared "self-preservation" as the ultimate natural law in the birth of Egoism, but suggests people go on to follow convention laws for the sake of order despite being contradictory to our best interests. He hedonistically encourages people to follow instinctual urges to guarantee pleasure. Thrasymachus believed that "justice" was the advancement of the stronger party at the expense of the weak, believing in "might being right", claimed that man-made laws are arbitrary, used to protect the weak from the strong, promoting a state of injustice.
1. Beginning with Heraclitus and his assumptions about split reality, with reality consisting of an eternal "logos", which represents a common and objective, unchanging truth. However, the masses base their perceptions of the world based off of opinions, personal beliefs, and desires. This material world is always in flux, just like a flowing river. The material world that we derive our meaning from is always changing, being replaced, and will decay into dust, nothing can be preserved. But the eternal logos outlives it all. Heraclitus calls on people to "wake up" and listen to the eternal truths of the universe.
2. Eleatic Monist School
Parmenides believed that "all is one", concluding controversially that all states of "non-being" and change as a concept in itself is illogical, if we come to exist, we must come from something that already exists, for we can't begin to exist out of non-existence. Nothing moves, for it implies there's empty space to move into, reality itself, to Parmenides, was an illusion. This was opposed to Heraclitus's view of constant flux. Zeno and Melissus supported Parmenides's Monism, which claimed that "all is one" and "all is unchanging", and that we experience "life" through unreliable senses that stimulate for us the illusion of actively existing.
3. Milesian School
Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes began to attribute natural occurring phenomena to elements that make up the universe rather than to Gods of the the Greek Pantheon. First exploration of materialist science to counter superstitious assumptions of tradition.
4. Xenophanes critiqued Homeric and Hesiodic gods of tradition by stating that there is one supreme God, not anthropomorphic or in charge of one specific field of knowledge, but rather, it is all-knowing and eternal.
5. Pythagoras has no writings contributed to him but famously taught that mathematics was crucial for understanding the universe, and that the soul was independent of the body, and that the soul could be purified by ascetic practices such as vegetarianism.
6. Anaxagoras claimed that our minds are reflections of a "universal mind" that works through our material bodies. This would imply that our minds are distinctly separate from the matter that makes up our physical bodies.
7. Empedocles believed that life is made up of four different elements, fire, air, earth, and water. Two cosmic forces combine these elements to make matter, being love, which brings attraction and harmonious mingling, and strife, which compels the separate parts to break from each other and seek their own kind. He proposed cyclic cosmic stages that the universe cycles through.
- Rule of Love: Love is wholly dominant, everything good exists in a wholly divine sphere.
- Advance of Strife: Strifes moves in and the four elements seek their own kind.
- Rule of Strife: Strife is wholly dominant, all four root elements are separated.
- Advance of Love: Segregated elements begin to mingle again, new life is created.
Empedocles believes that long ago the universe was in a cosmic state of "Love" an Eden-like "Golden Age" but when strife moved in, and this divine whole dissolved and birthed "sin". Empedocles claims that humanity can only be saved from this by "Apotheosis" or elevation to the divine, this includes participating in practices such as vegetarianism, sexual moderation, and seeking universal knowledge.
8. Atomist School
The Atomists claimed that the universe was made of eternal, tiny, always moving, particles that only changed according to our illusionary senses. Democritus claimed that these atoms had no qualities on their own, but the subjective mind taints them with qualities. He advocated for a "contentment of mind", believing that atoms are equally distributed in our bodies and that disruptions can be physically/psychologically unhealthy, this means contentment in emotions, character, intellect, and abstinence from excessive physical hedonism.
9. Sophists
Protagoras believed that "man is the measure of all things", all interpretations of reality pass through human senses so we must assign them measurement. For example, air is universally air, but it's up to us to perceive it as "hot" or "cold". He denied objective truth, believed all sides could be equally justifiable. Believed that no objective standard for truth/law/decency/justice existed, but they were all relative to their pragmatic application in real life, believing laws should differ according to location and tradition. Hippias on the other hand, believed in objectivity, claiming that there were "unwritten laws of nature" that supersede human laws. The use of rhetoric regarding "unwritten laws of nature" being used as an excuse in Athenian courts and debates was forbidden as a proper rebuttal. Antiphon declared "self-preservation" as the ultimate natural law in the birth of Egoism, but suggests people go on to follow convention laws for the sake of order despite being contradictory to our best interests. He hedonistically encourages people to follow instinctual urges to guarantee pleasure. Thrasymachus believed that "justice" was the advancement of the stronger party at the expense of the weak, believing in "might being right", claimed that man-made laws are arbitrary, used to protect the weak from the strong, promoting a state of injustice.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2018
The single greatest starting point for anyone interested in philosophy and ancient Greek thought. The introductory essays that accompany the fragments and testimonies make this a very intelligible read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 28, 2019
Clear and Concise, a very good review of those Philosophers who wrote before Plato ( Socrates). I would have no hesitation in recommending this general overview of early Greek thinking to anyone interested in Philosophy. Well worth the small cost for such an informative book.
September 26, 2023
SAVE YOUR TIME AND MIND
Unless you really want to read the Fragments (Toronto Editions) of all these guys just read this.
Unless you really want to read the Fragments (Toronto Editions) of all these guys just read this.
February 11, 2026
i mean… she does talk about the first philosophers! she’s got that for her
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