The world is ruled by numbers. Pythagoras Another famous Greek thinker, a contemporary of the Milesian philosophers, was Pythagoras of Samos (from the island of Samos), already known to us. His famous: “I am not a sage, I am only a philosopher” is considered to be the beginning of philosophy. Just like the Milesians,

Pythagoras (fantasy) Pythagoras became convinced that the Earth was spherical. He expressed this idea to his family and friends, but they only laughed good-naturedly. One day he decided to prove this idea to a crowd that had gathered for some occasion in the square. Pythagoras spoke to the people for a long time. WITH

INTRODUCTION

The relevance of this topic is determined by the fact that in ancient philosophy the main philosophical problems: the emergence of the world and man, the fundamental principle of all things, the relationship between the two main forms of existence - material and ideal, the meaning of life, death and immortality.

The emergence of ancient philosophy in Ancient Greece at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC. - part of that socio-spiritual movement, which was characterized as “the movement from myth to logos.” This is a transition from the mythological identification of the material with the ideal, the subjective with the objective, the imaginary with the real to a new, more abstract thinking associated with general ideas about the world, framed in philosophical categories.

The ancient “logos” - the inseparable unity of word and thought, made it possible to formulate the first generalizations of the diverse individual, social and political experience of people. In addition, the transition from myth to “logos” was prompted by the initial elements scientific knowledge, borrowed from the sources of the Ancient East (mathematics, astronomy) and developed and rethought in Greece.

Philosophers of the 7th-6th centuries. BC. form a system of categories that combined, albeit still very naively and imperfectly, a new rational approach to the phenomena of nature and society with bold ideological generalizations that paved the way to further development human knowledge.

Based on the above, the topic of this work seems not only relevant, but also interesting. The work examines such issues as philosophers in search of the origin of the world, the founders of ancient dialectics.

1. PHILOSOPHERS IN SEARCH OF THE ORIGINAL ORIGIN OF THE WORLD (THALES, ANAXIMANDER, ANAXIMENES, DEMOCRITUS, ANAXAGORAS)

1 The origins of ancient philosophy. Fundamentals of the world

Ancient philosophy begins with the appearance of natural philosophical ideas, i.e. from a philosophical understanding of nature. “In Greek, the word nature sounds like “fusis”, so this philosophy was called “physical”, and the philosophers of this period were called “physicists”. They intuitively formed a substantial model of the world by clarifying the fundamental principle of all things as the basis, the essence.”

At the origins of the formation of natural philosophy was the Milesian school (Miletus, Asia Minor, 7th century BC). The founder of the school was Thales (about 624-547 BC), and his followers were Anaximander (610-546 BC) and Anaximenes (585-525 BC).

Representatives of this movement focused their main attention on the search for the fundamental principle from which all specific objects and phenomena arise. Things are something temporary, they arise and disappear, but their basis is eternal, it always exists. Thales saw such a fundamental principle in water, Anaximander believed that it was an indefinite principle, which he called “apeiron,” Anaximenes took air as a fundamental principle.

The selection of these specific substances as the “first principle” of the world is not accidental. It is water, with its visual transformations into ice or steam, that suggests the possibility of an infinite number of metamorphoses, the creation from a single initial (first) form of a whole variety of qualitatively different forms.

Air, in turn, with its “all-penetration” gives rise to the idea of ​​the material “fullness” of existence, which has the ability to “condense” and “thinner”, thus giving rise to the whole variety of concrete things in the world. After all, water, air, etc. . how the “primary principles” of the world are not just ordinary “tangible” substances, they are at the same time a “visible”, “material” principle, the law of the emergence, existence and disappearance of the concrete life-like diversity of things in the surrounding world.”

2 Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras' principle. Homeomerism

ancient philosophy dialectics universe

The first major Athenian philosopher was Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 BC). He also came from Asia Minor, where he adopted the views of Anaximenes of Miletus; then moved to Athens. Anaxagoras, like most ancient Greek thinkers, was engaged not only in philosophy. He paid great attention to mathematics, astronomy, and physics.

Anaxagoras penned an essay with the traditional title of that time, “On Nature,” from which about 20 excerpts have come down to us. He, too, was looking for the beginning, but, unlike the Milesians, Heraclitus and others, it was not just one element or substance.

The world seemed to him too diverse to derive everything from water, air, apeiron or fire. “How can hair come from non-hair and flesh from non-flesh?” - asked Anaxagoras. For him, the answer was clear: it was impossible. This means, Anaxagoras concluded, “the first principles are the smallest particles of hair, flesh, wood and all other things. He called these first principles “the seeds of all things,” and Aristotle later called them “homeomerics” (literal translation: “similar parts”).”

Each homoeomer is the smallest particle of some substance: blood, milk, gold, wood, fire, iron, etc. Homeomerisms are eternal and cannot be destroyed. Moreover, each thing contains the seeds of all things. Anaxagoras puts forward the principle: “Everything is in everything.” But there are always more homeomeries of some kind; they predominate in a given object, which is why the object becomes what it is. Gold is gold because the homoeomerism of gold predominates in it; the seeds of all other things are present in the golden ring in vanishingly small quantities. Since homeomerisms are eternal, nothing arises anew or disappears without a trace: homeomerisms only combine or disintegrate, forming new combinations, new objects.

3 Driving force the emergence of the world. Teachings of Anaxagoras

The initial state of the world, according to Anaxagoras, is a motionless mixture of all homeomeries. “All things were mixed up... And while everything was mixed up, nothing was clearly distinguishable,” wrote Anaxagoras. In order for the world to arise, it was necessary to “push” this mixture, to introduce movement into it.

The Mind (in Greek - “Nus”) became such a driving force. Nous is the creator of the cosmos, he moves the world, thanks to him, an organized world of various things emerged from a chaotic state. Moreover, Nus is the only absolutely pure one, simple force, not mixed with anything else: “The mind is infinite, autocratic and not mixed with any thing, but it alone exists by itself. For... if He were mixed with anything else, then He would participate in all things... This mixture would interfere with Him, so that He could not rule over a single thing as well as now... He - the finest and purest of all things; He has perfect knowledge of everything and has the greatest power."

The power of Nusa begins the world rotation, during which homeomeries are separated and united, which leads to the emergence of various objects and things. Moreover, the cold, heavy, dense and wet gathers in the center and the earth is formed from it, and the hot, dry, light and light rushes upward and the sky is formed. Around the world arranged in this way there is a rotating ether. The rotation of the ether lifts stones from the ground. These stones ignite due to friction during rotation - this is how stars, the Moon and even the Sun appear. They do not fall to the ground due to the rotation of the ether or, as we would say today, centrifugal forces.

The teaching of Anaxagoras is very original. All his predecessors believed that the number of first principles was finite. Anaxagoras was the first to suggest that the number of principles constitutes an infinite number of material elements, which are set in motion by spiritual force - the Mind, or Nous. But Anaxagoras was particularly interested in the problem of the transformation of things, the transition from one quality to another. Why does white and clean snow give muddy water when melting? Because the qualities of liquid and muddy were already contained in the snow, although the qualities of hard and white predominated in it. In everything there is a part of everything - this is the basic principle of the philosophy of Anaxagoras.

If the views of Anaxagoras cannot yet be called either materialistic or idealistic - on the one hand, homeomerism is material, on the other - Um-Nus is the eternal spiritual principle of the cosmos - then the natural philosophy of Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 BC) we can rightfully call it materialistic.

1.4 Democritus Atoms as the beginning of the universe

It is believed that Democritus was a student of Leucippus. Almost nothing is known about the life of Leucippus: therefore, some doubted his existence, others said that he was from the city of Abdera and taught that the world consists of atoms. This completely modern word comes from the Greek “atomos” - indivisible. For many centuries it was believed that an atom is the smallest indivisible particle of matter, although modern science already understands the atom differently: we know that it also consists of particles and has a complex structure.

Democritus was an atomist, believing, like Leucippus, that every thing consists of atoms and emptiness. Things arise and are destroyed, but the atoms of which they consist are eternal, because they have nothing to decay into: they are indivisible. These smallest and absolutely dense particles are inherent in movement (“they shake in all directions,” wrote Democritus), therefore, of necessity, there must be emptiness in the world (here the atomists fundamentally disagreed with the Eleatics). Atoms and emptiness are the two eternal principles of the universe. There are an infinite number of atoms, they differ from each other in shape, order, and position.

Democritus wrote about concave, convex, angular, spherical and other atoms. In addition, atoms differ in size. Moving in emptiness, they can hit each other, interlock, or, conversely, separate - this is how things appear and disappear. Moreover, the atoms themselves do not possess the qualities of any specific substance (unlike Anaxagoras’s homeomerics); the quality of a thing arises only when certain atoms are combined. It turns out that atoms are eternal and unchanging, but things are unstable and transient. But the movements of atoms themselves are not random; they are subject to cause-and-effect relationships, objective laws, and necessity.

1.5 Democritus Causality and necessity

For Democritus there are no random events. An event appears to a random person, the cause of which he does not know. Democritus gave the following example: a man is walking along the road, and suddenly a turtle falls from the sky onto his head and kills him. Here is a seemingly example of a random event! But Democritus explained: no, this event is not accidental.

An eagle, having grabbed a turtle, usually throws it onto a stone to split its shell and feast on it. The man walking along the road was bald, his head resembled a stone, so the eagle threw a turtle at him. True, from a modern point of view, Democritus here confuses two different concepts: causality and necessity. Of course, there is a reason why the turtle fell on the walking man's head.

On the other hand, it was an accident that the eagle dropped the turtle on this particular person’s head. Democritus, without making a distinction between causality and necessity, arrives at fatalism. What is fatalism? This word comes from the Latin fatalis - fatal, “predetermined by fate” and means such a view of the world when everything that happens is seen as predetermined; everything happens as it should happen according to fate, fate, world law or some higher will. On the one hand, atomists abandoned the search for any divine reasons for what is happening, on the other hand, they believed that everything in the world is predetermined by the movements of atoms in the void.

The world also arose as a result of the interaction of atoms. The void is filled unevenly with atoms. In those parts of space where there are more of them, they collide with each other more often, and a vortex arises from this movement of atoms. As a result of the vortex movement, larger and heavier atoms gather in the center and form the earth. The lighter ones are pushed to the periphery and form the sky there. Since the atoms of the earth continue to move (the movement of atoms is indestructible!), the earth seems to be compacted towards the center and squeezes water out of itself. Water, filling the lowest places and depressions, forms lakes and seas.

As you can see, Democritus explained the origin of the world only by physical reasons, without resorting to the actions of the gods. But the most amazing thing is that, in his opinion, there are infinitely many worlds, and each of them has a spherical shape. At every moment of time, some worlds arise, others perish, and the Universe is limitless.

6 Reasons for the emergence of life on earth according to Democritus

Democritus also explained the origin of life on earth by natural causes. The earth, which had just been formed as a result of atomic vortices, was still soft, “mud-like.” Bubbles swelled on it, like puddles after rain. These bubbles were heated by the sun and when they burst, the first animals and people came out of them. Then the earth hardened, and animals and people began to reproduce themselves in a different way, which is familiar to us.

By the way, Democritus explained the presence of sexes by the fact that males matured in the “completely baked” bubbles, and females matured in the “underbaked” ones. Thus, according to Democritus, life arose spontaneously, which our contemporaries are unlikely to agree with.

The souls of people also consist of spherical atoms and emptiness. Ball-shaped soul atoms are more mobile than, say, angular or anchor-shaped atoms - they do not cling to each other. The atoms of the soul are spread throughout the human body and are the source of his mobility.

It is interesting that during breathing there is an exchange of atoms of our soul with the outside world: with exhalation we release a certain number of spherical atoms of the soul, but when we then inhale air, we draw most of them into ourselves again, and the atoms of air that enter the body with our pressure prevents the remaining mobile atoms of the soul from flying out. When a person dies, the exhalation is no longer followed by the inhalation, the mobile round atoms are no longer held back by anything, and the soul flies out. It turns out that the soul is mortal: after the death of the body, its atoms are scattered in the surrounding world.

But how can we know that everything is made of atoms and emptiness? Can we see or touch atoms? Of course not. Atoms are not given to us in sensations. We can know about their existence only through the efforts of the mind: “They only think that color exists, that there is sweet, that there is bitter, in reality everything is atoms and emptiness.”

It turns out that Democritus (like the Eleatics) clearly distinguishes between two stages of knowledge - sensory and rational. At the sensory level of cognition (this includes cognition through hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell), a person knows only the rough appearance of phenomena, without understanding their causes.

For example, we take honey into our mouth and feel sweet, but our senses cannot explain to us why this happens. In fact, Democritus believed that sweetness is characteristic of objects whose atoms have a rounded shape, while substances whose atoms have an angular, pointed shape, etc. have a pungent taste. Sight is possible because from everyone material bodies there is an outflow of atoms (original copies of these bodies). The atoms flowing from bodies are imprinted on our eyes, creating images of objects. That is, the sensory stage of cognition, of course, gives us true information about the world, but we are not able to understand it correctly if we are guided only by sensations. Therefore, Democritus calls sensory knowledge “dark” or “illegitimate.” According to legend, Democritus blinded himself because “atoms cannot be seen with the eyes.”

Democritus asked the question of how people moved from an animal state to a social one? What motivated them? From his point of view, the main driving force of progress was need. The ability to observe and imitate helped to fight poverty; people borrowed a lot from animals: they learned to weave, imitating a spider, began to sing, competing with a nightingale, began building houses, looking at swallows, etc.

Democritus defined man as an animal capable of learning. Initially, people were very friendly towards each other - after all, it is easier to deal with adversity together. Inequality and hostility appeared later, when people became more cunning and ceased to depend heavily on nature.

However, Democritus did not condemn inequality; he was sure that there would always be rich and poor. Therefore, the main thing is the correct education of people: in this case, the rich will manage their wealth wisely, benefiting the whole society, and the poor will stop envying.

In any case, Democritus wisely advised to rejoice in what you have and look not at those who live better, but at those who live worse. Moreover, he has the following reasoning: it is not the one who owns great property who is rich, but the one who is poor in desires. After all, human desires are endless, they cannot be fully satisfied, so they must be reasonably limited so as not to feel unhappy.

2. THE FOUNDERS OF ANCIENT DIALECTICS: HERACLITUS, PARMENIDES, ZENO OF ELEA

1 Heraclitus the dialectician of the ancient world

The next step in understanding the movement and formation of the whole world was made by Heraclitus from Ephesus (c. 540 - c. 480 BC). It is no coincidence that he is considered the first dialectician of the ancient world. “Dialectics (from the Greek dialektike - the art of arguing) is the doctrine of the universal connection of phenomena and development, the source of which is the presence of contradictions in the world around a person and in his consciousness.”

According to the dialectical point of view, everything in the world develops and does not stand still. The well-known saying of Heraclitus of Ephesus has reached us: “You cannot enter the same river twice,” where he likened the world to the flow of a river.

Heraclitus compared the constant course of development to the flow of a river, which cannot be entered twice. Movement is life. This is why Heraclitus is considered one of the founders of naive dialectics. Heraclitus was the first to think about the problems of knowledge. He emphasized the difficulties that arise in the process of cognition and the inexhaustibility of the subject of cognition.

The fundamental concept of Heraclitus is “struggle” (wars, strife): “Everything happens through struggle and out of necessity.” However, Heraclitus sees not only the struggle of opposites, but also harmony. “Warring people unite, and everything happens through struggle.” Harmony expresses the unity of the world, made up of opposing qualities, elements, and aspirations. The idea of ​​harmony of opposites leads Heraclitus to other thoughts: about universal fluidity, variability, but at the same time - stability and constancy, the unity of appearance and essence.

The image of the flow of all things was considered the main idea of ​​Heraclitus, expressed in the famous statement “everything flows,” and was a kind of obsession of many of his interpreters, who lost sight of the fact that with no less insistence he pointed out the stability, constancy, and natural community of phenomena: “ It is one and the same in us - living and dead, awake and sleeping, young and old. After all, this, having changed, is this, and vice versa: that, having changed, is this.”

Heraclitus considered fire to be the basis of everything: “This cosmos... was not created by any of the gods or by any of the people, but it has always been, is and will be an eternally living fire, flaring up in proportions and extinguishing in proportions.” In the understanding of Heraclitus, fire, on the one hand, is similar to the original principle among the representatives of the Milesian school. On the other hand, this concept in Heraclitus also represented a certain methodological principle. Fire cannot be imagined as motionless; it is always in motion; the recognition of fire as the basis of the universe became the basis for the dynamics of development and constant changes. Therefore, Heraclitus is considered the founder of dialectics.

Logos of Heraclitus, writes the famous researcher of antiquity A.F. Losev, “to the same extent there is abstraction and life; the divine being and the world whole, the world law and the dead body, i.e. fire, ideal form and physical element, universal mind and subjective human criterion of truth.”

This is the specificity of ancient dialectics, which finds its most clear embodiment in Heraclitus. The Logos of Heraclitus is an expression of the logical structure of the Cosmos, the entire world, given in living contemplation. The opposites of the world whole appear here in identity with each other. But this cannot be imagined in such a way that behind the contradictory world of phenomena lies the unchanging and eternal consistent Logos, whatever you call it: God, thought, law, etc. Heraclitus associates a certain constancy with the Logos, especially when he speaks of him as a divine being: “With God everything is beautiful, good, and just, but people consider some things unjust and others just.”

2 Parmenides. The emergence of the Eleatic school of philosophy

In the VI century. BC. In the southern Italian city of Elea, another philosophical school arose - the Eleatic school, whose followers are called Eleatics. If representatives of the Milesian school took any material element (water, fire, etc.) as the basis of the world, then in Eleatic philosophy for the first time the non-specific was taken as such a basis: not a substance, but a beginning, which is designated by the concept of “being”.

They all made a sharp distinction between genuine truth (aletheia), which is the product of rational thought, and opinion (doxa), which is based on sensory knowledge. Sensory knowledge gives us an image of only the apparent state of things; with its help it is impossible to comprehend their true essence.

The Eleatics were the first in the history of philosophy to doubt the reliability of our senses. Of course, they are right - our feelings and sensations can deceive us, they cannot be trusted recklessly. For example, a boat on the horizon seems to us to be the size of a pea, but such sensory perception of this object does not give a true idea of ​​​​its size.

The Eleatics contrasted the naive belief that the world is as it is given to us in sensations with the conviction that true knowledge can only be obtained with the help of reason. True, their approach was radical: they decided to abandon sensory data altogether, which led to extremely paradoxical results.

There really is only that which can be thought without falling into contradiction. Now try to “think” non-existence. Does not work? And it won’t work: a thought is always a thought about something. Even if we think about non-existence, with our thoughts we will give it some kind of existence, make it into existence. This means, Parmenides concluded, followed by other representatives of the Eleatic school, “there is only being, there is no non-being. What is “non-existence”? The Eleatics perceived it as emptiness. Therefore there is no emptiness; the world is a ball filled with matter without voids.”

From this idea of ​​the world, absolutely surprising conclusions were drawn. Firstly, if the world ball is filled with matter without voids, it means that it is united (as Xenophanes suggested), there is not and cannot be many separate things in it. How so? There are tables in the auditorium, a lot of them. There are students sitting at the tables, there are many of them too. Outside the windows (of which there are also several) there are clouds, trees, cars - there are a lot of them! We see this clearly! Do we see? This is exactly the point: we rely on feelings, and the Eleatics invite us to discard them completely and rely only on reason. Feelings deceive us; we cannot trust them.

Let's take one grain of rice and throw it on the ground - we won't hear anything. Now let's take a bag of grain and throw it on the ground - we will hear a dull thud. But the sum of zeros must equal zero! Our senses deceived us either the first time (and there was a knock), or the second (and there was no knock).

Hundreds of such examples can be given (and the Eleatics cited them) to make sure that sensory perception and rational thinking are not the same thing. Therefore, from their point of view, there is still no plurality, the world is one, and the many trees and cars outside the window are a deception of the senses, an opinion (doxa), and not aletheia.

But that's not all! There is no movement either... And there is no development: being is one, whole and unchanging. It exists forever and cannot change. In this regard, Parmenides, for example, very sharply criticized Heraclitus for his dialectics, even called his views “drunk philosophy” - after all, only a person who has had too much wine can seriously believe that you cannot step into the same river twice and every thing contains opposites!

Movement and development are empty names with nothing behind them (you can say the words “goblin” or “phlogiston gas”, you can even describe them, but these concepts are empty, they do not relate to any real objects). It turns out that being, according to Parmenides, is eternal, one, indivisible, motionless and unchanging.

Why does Parmenides reject movement and development? Everything that exists is a being (being) that is everywhere, in all places, and therefore it cannot move. Where can something move if the entire world sphere is filled to capacity with matter? So everything is motionless...

3 Zeno. Aporias of Zeno

Parmenides' favorite student, Zeno, justified the impossibility of movement even more interestingly. Plato considered him “one of the wisest Greeks, although he did not agree with his views. Apparently, the most famous presentation of the Eleatic denial of movement and the postulation of the immutability and immobility of existence is Zeno’s aporia, which proves that if the existence of movement is allowed, then insoluble contradictions arise.”

Aporia (gr. aporia - difficulty, hopelessness) is a paradox where the logical evidence of a judgment and its unconfirmability by experience collide. Zeno formulated several such aporias. Here are some of them. The first of the aporias is called dichotomy (division in half). In it, Zeno sought to prove that a body cannot move from its place, that is, movement can neither begin nor end.

To overcome the path segment AB, the object must first travel half of this segment - AB1. However, to get to point B1, you need to go half of the intended half (quarter) - AB2. And to go through half of a half, you need to go through half of this quarter - AB3 (one eighth).

And this is repeated ad infinitum (after all, we can divide any segment into an infinite number of parts). Therefore, the body will never be able to reach point B, no matter how close it is, because it must “pass” an infinite number of points. Impeccable reasoning from the point of view of formal logic!

In another aporia, Zeno asks a strange question at first glance: can Achilles catch up with the tortoise? Zeno argues that “even the fastest of men will never be able to overtake even the slowest creature if it has set out before him. Achilles, running ten times faster than the tortoise, will not be able to catch up with it. Let the tortoise be a hundred meters ahead of Achilles. When Achilles runs those hundred meters, the tortoise will be ten meters ahead of him. Achilles will run these ten meters, and the turtle will be one meter ahead, etc. The distance between them decreases all the time, but never becomes zero.

This means that Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise. Or, more generally: Achilles, in order to catch up with the tortoise, must first cover the distance from his place to the place where the tortoise was at the moment of his start. But during the time it takes him to cover this distance, the turtle will again move forward a certain distance, and this situation will repeat again and again. So, in order to catch up with the tortoise, Achilles will have to overcome an infinite number of sections of the path.”

Zeno's aporias caused great confusion because they are not so easy to refute. You can, of course, get up and start walking, but this will appeal to the feelings of the audience: they will see that there is movement, but feelings cannot be completely trusted... The secret here is that the space is at the same time discontinuous (consisting of individual segments and points), and continuous, that is, to solve such problems one must be able to find the limit of the sum of infinitesimal quantities.

4 Philosophical ideas of Parmenides and Zeno. Their conclusions and justifications

From a philosophical point of view, the undoubted merit of the Eleatics was to raise the question that sensory and rational, intelligent knowledge are not the same thing. From the standpoint of sensory knowledge, many provisions, for example, of modern physics seem impossible. Today there is no doubt that it is impossible to focus only on sensory certainty and evidence. And although Achilles, of course, will catch up with the tortoise, the problem posed by the Eleatics was extremely important and deep: how do sensory and rational knowledge relate!

The most profound ideas of this philosophy were developed by Parmenides and Zeno. Parmenides divided the world into true and untrue. Being is true because it is eternal and unchanging, always identical to itself. The world of concrete things is an untrue existence, because things are constantly changing, today they are different from yesterday, and tomorrow they disappear altogether.

Zeno provided a logical basis for Parmenides' conclusions. Developing the teacher’s views, he emphasized that it is logically impossible to imagine the multiplicity of things and the assumption of movement - this leads to contradictions. In accordance with the principles of the Eleatic school, Zeno separated sensory and rational knowledge. Only rational knowledge is recognized as true, and sensory knowledge is considered limited and contradictory.

CONCLUSION

In diverse philosophies and schools ancient world the main trends in the future development of philosophical thought are anticipated. The most valuable acquisition of ancient philosophy was naive materialism and spontaneous dialectics, which laid the foundation for the scientific understanding of reality.

For all representatives of the Milesian school, the main question was the question of the origin and essence of the world. And although the answers to this question were given differently - whether water, “apeiron” or air would be considered the primary principle - the focus on a theoretical, rational explanation of nature indicates that we are no longer dealing with mythology, but with a fundamentally new attitude to the world, which and marked the beginning of the formation of not only philosophy, but also science.

The first philosophical searches, the first philosophers give different explanations of the world. Philosophical concepts bear not only the stamp of time, but also the stamp of the character of their creator (for example, the aristocrat Heraclitus treats the “crowd” with obvious arrogance and writes in a language incomprehensible to a poorly educated person, but Anaximenes strives for simplicity and clarity). However, there is something that unites the early philosophers.

Firstly, this is the search for the origin of the world. All objects in the world are different, but the world must have a common fundamental principle in order to be unified and whole. Behind the visible diversity lies an invisible unity, which the first philosophers tried to explain. The beginning of ancient Greek philosophy was associated more with the study of nature than with the study of man. Philosophy took the form of natural philosophy.

Secondly, this is a theoretical search for the origin of the world. Water, apeiron, air, fire, logos, law, necessity - these are no longer mythological or artistic images, but concepts. The development of the conceptual apparatus of philosophy, the rules of logic, the principles of reasoning begins - everything that distinguishes theoretical knowledge from mythology and art.

Thirdly, the formation of philosophy in Ancient Greece was inextricably linked with the development of scientific knowledge; philosophy at that time was also a protoscience and included any theoretical knowledge. It is not for nothing that the first philosophers were also the first geographers, astronomers, and mathematicians.

Fourthly, divisions philosophical systems into materialistic and idealistic has not yet happened. The first philosophers were neither materialists nor idealists; their views combined elements of both directions. The debate between materialism and idealism will begin later.

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3. Volkogonova, O.D., Sidorova N.M. Fundamentals of philosophy. - M.: Publishing House "FORUM"6 INFRA-M, 2006. - 480 p.
4. History of philosophy in brief. - M.: Mysl, 1991. - 591 p.
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The emergence and evolution of the idea of ​​origin (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes)

“First Principle,” arche, is a very typical and at the same time unusual construction for ancient thought (and since the time of Aristotle, a concept). This is a kind of centaur concept. On the one hand, the Greeks seek and find the origin in something quite definite, more or less concrete. And this definite thing is at first merged with some natural element. Aristotle, outlining the “opinions of philosophers,” writes about Thales: “Thales of Miletus argued that the beginning of existing [things] is water... Everything is from water, he says, and everything decomposes into water. He concludes [about this], firstly, from the fact that the beginning (arche) of all animals is sperm, and it is wet; so all [things] probably originate from moisture. Secondly, from the fact that all plants feed on moisture and bear fruit, but those deprived of it dry out. Thirdly, from the fact that the fire of the Sun and stars itself is fed by water vapors, as well as the cosmos itself. For the same reason, Homer expresses the following judgment about water: “The ocean, which is the progenitor of all” (12a; 109).” The essence of Thales' argument is that water is indeed interpreted as the first principle (first principle).

Considering the origin as a material, natural element is a natural course of human thought at the stage when it begins to soar to the heights of abstraction, but has not yet become truly abstract. That is why in the history of philosophy there have been and are ongoing disputes about Thales’s “water”. Some say: the choice of water as the first principle was inspired by the most specific and real observations. This is, for example, the judgment of Simplicius: “They believed (we are talking about Thales and his followers - N.M.) that the beginning is water, and they were led to this by sensory perception" (13; 110). Others (for example, Hegel ) claim: “water,” as Thales understands it, has an indirect relationship to everything concrete. The word “water” itself is used allegorically. But the question still remains, why did Thales choose water? Many historians of philosophy have tried to answer this question, starting from ancient times. Their opinions, if summed up, are as follows.

1. Thales chooses water as the primary principle primarily under the influence of mythology. The ocean is a very popular mythological origin. An additional argument: Eastern, say, ancient Indian philosophy also passed through a stage similar to Thales’s. There, too, there were forms of initial philosophizing that traced everything back to water as the World Ocean. This explanation seems quite valid and important. Mythological cosmogony, like mythology in general, evoked similar associations and pushed thoughts towards the idea of ​​“water” as the first principle.

There are a number of other arguments that explain the appearance of the idea of ​​origin in the “Thales” form.

2. Greece is a maritime country. Therefore, the Greeks did not need to prove the vital importance of water. Their life was closely connected with the sea. The sea element seemed to them like something very vast: they sailed from one sea and ended up in another... What's next, beyond the known seas? The Greeks assumed that, most likely, it was also an ocean - a river.

3. The water element is vitally important and universally fruitful and life-giving. Aristotle, following other doxographers, cites the opinion of Thales about the importance of water in the life of all organisms, including humans. This opinion simultaneously appeals to both common sense and the first scientific (physical) observations. Wetting or drying of the body is associated with a change in its size, i.e. increase or decrease.

However, what was important for the development of philosophy was that even earlier than the idea of ​​the first principle as a special material element (or a set of such elements) a long way, which turned out to be a kind of dead end, it began to become clear how unusual, special meaning content, and essentially from the very first steps of philosophizing, was invested by Thales and his followers in the concepts of “water” and “air” when they were interpreted as the first principle. Here a kind of splitting of thought took place, similar to that which was spoken of in relation to fusis, nature. After all, the concept of “nature” covered everything that exists: what happens, what was, is and will be, everything that arises, is born, and perishes. But there must also be a fundamental principle of what exists. The philosophizing Greek cannot answer the question about the origin in any other way, but only by highlighting some part of nature and, as it were, placing it above everything else.

The contradictory logic of such thinking will not be slow to manifest itself: after all, this logic already contains the idea that none of the natural elements, or even all of them, can be placed “above” nature as the integrity into which they are included. This means that thought must get out of this dead end by moving along some other path. However, the path of thought, which turned out to be a dead end, was nevertheless not philosophically fruitless, making it possible to draw profound conclusions from reasoning about “water” or another element as the first principles, the fundamental principles. After all, these reflections and statements were already philosophical. They could lead to what philosophy arose for. Namely: to aim human practice at working with the general, and then give birth to the universal and work with it.

In other words, to awaken and instill the skills of working not only with the subject, but also with thoughts about the subject - and, moreover, not with specific thoughts relating to this or that subject, but with thoughts about the subject in general, or with thoughts not only about specific people, but about man as such, about the human world. Without this, the existence of humanity as a relatively unified whole would be impossible. Thus, the task of working with the universal, working with essences was put forward. Philosophy took such an important place in culture because it - at first spontaneously, but gradually with an increasing degree of consciousness - isolated its subject, which did not coincide either with the subject of mythology or with subjects of specific sciences.

The pre-philosophical, and then philosophical view starts from the fact that the cosmos, nature and the beginning, which must be embedded in nature, in the cosmos, are homogeneous and united. And since nature consists of material (in later terminology (Such terms, of course, were not used by the first Greek philosophers, because for a long time they did not have the very word “matter.”)) states, which means that the first principle must be a material element. However, the concepts of “materialism” and “idealism”, which we habitually operate with in relation to early ancient philosophy, appear at a rather late stage in the development of philosophical thought. And clear ideas about the struggle between materialism and idealism are formed only in modern times. Then they seem to overturn the previous history of philosophy.

It has become a commonplace in Marxist literature that the first Greek philosophers were spontaneous materialists. Meanwhile, one of the immutable and very important facts is that the first philosophers did not know that they were thinking materialistically. They only entered spontaneously, led by the still hidden. the logic of the problem of origin, on a road that only centuries later will lead to the concept of matter, not to mention the concept of materialism that arose in the even more distant modern era. Further, it is also a fact that materialism becomes a consciously developed concept when it has an antipode - idealism. And until the enemy was born, the view that affirmed the principle of idealism did not arise, projecting the struggle of materialism and idealism onto antiquity hardly makes sense. True, such projection was also carried out by idealists. For example, Hegel believed that the first philosophers were idealists, because “water” or “air” already appeared for them as purely abstract principles, i.e. ideas. And it was the idea that was put, Hegel reasoned, at the forefront. But, by the way, this is not how Plato thought: he fought with the “physicists” because, in his opinion, they do not know the world of ideas.

So, there is a logic to the idea of ​​origin, which has been reproduced more than once in the history of thought: following its inventors, the ancient Greeks, as well as its other independent inventors, the ancient Chinese and Indians, philosophers of other times and peoples will begin to enrich and update the corpus ideas concerning matter.

However, when analyzing the history of ancient Greek philosophy from the point of view of the development of the idea of ​​origin, it is important to carefully trace a slightly different mental logic. Not in isolation from the intellectual movement just considered, but in a certain logical independence, philosophers led the idea of ​​origin along the path on which the concepts of “idea” and “ideal” were born. They were also gradually given the meaning of the first principle, the beginning of the world. Already the philosophy of the Eleatics indicates that the spontaneous movement is being replaced by the first reflections on those ways of thinking that were characteristic of the earliest philosophizing. First of all, of course, it was a reflection on the problem of origin, an attempt to think through this idea. But at the same time, ideas were comprehended that were later called dialectical.

The first Greek sages essentially approached the world as a whole, one, but also as existing in diversity. The world appears before human thought along with the processes of emergence and death, movement and rest. The confidence that the world is exactly as they observe it - changing, mobile, moving - also exists spontaneously, grows on the roots of everyday human life. But it is enough in a general form, abstracting from the specifics and particulars, to turn one’s thoughts to changes - and dialectics will arise in its most ancient varieties. It will be fixed, legitimized, starting from the first attempts at philosophizing.

Literature:
Motroshilova N.V. The emergence and evolution of the idea of ​​origin (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes)./History of philosophy. West-Russia-East. Book one. Philosophy of antiquity and the Middle Ages.- M.: Greco-Latin Cabinet, 1995 - p.42-45