PHILO | The Pre-Socratic Philosophers and the Existentialist Philosophers

Pre-Socratic Philosophers (The Arche)

• Thales of Miletus

• Anaximander

• Anaximenes

• Heraclitus

Thales of Miletus | Element

water is the first principle and basic nature

Thales of Miletus

• something is valued not for its content but its form

• first philosopher to use reductionism, the act of simplifying

• first thinker

Anaximander | Element

earth

Anaximander

• subscribed to an early view of entropy

• believed in apeiron: "What is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise."

Anaximenes | Element

underlying nature is air, modified through its thickening/thinning

Anaximenes

• differences in quality are differences in quantity

• continued reductionism project through condensation and rarefraction

Heraclitus | Element

exchange of all things for fire and fire for all things

Heraclitus (The Arche)

• reality is composed of a process of continual creation and destruction.

• observable Logos governed change that made it a rational phenomenon rather than the chaotic arbitrary one it appeared to be

Pre-Socratic Philosophers (The One vs The Many

Heractlitus, Parmanides, Zeno

Heraclitus

• He presented his ideas through paradoxical aphorisms

• Anything of value must be obtained through hard work and effort..."those who seek gold dig much earth and find a little."

• Most men are useless and ignorant conformists.

• Truth is common, thus it is objective

• There is a single principle called "Logos" which permeated all of reality.

• Men lived as if they had a private understanding of their own (constricted reality)

Heraclitus | Three main Ideas

1. Everything is in flux; knowledge of the sensible world is impossible

2. World is an ever-living fire; world order is constantly changing

3. War is the father of all, everything comes into existence through the destruction of something else

Parmenides

• Claim is not derived from what’s empirical, rather from reason

• Being is spherical since it is equally real in all directions

• Being is uncreated, indestructible, eternal and indivisible.

• Change is an illusion

• Motion is impossible because motion would involve Being going from where Being is to where Being isn’t.

• The idea of empty space was an impossible idea.

Zeno

• Opponent’s position is refuted by showing that accepting it leads to absurd, unacceptable, or contradictory conclusions.

• motion is not real (Flying Arrow)

• multiplicity/pluralism is false

Karl Jaspers

• existing is transcending oneself through limited situations and eventually finding God

• vertical transcendence of man

Martin Heidegger

• man is daesin, there-being, thrown into the world to realize himself, and is doomed to the potentiality, the extreme which is death

• freedom is equal to self-transcendence intime, the being-ahead-of-itself of daesin while having-been and making-present entities in his world

Gabriel Marcel

• to exist is to coexist

• participate in the fullness of Being through love, fidelity, and faith

• the affirming power of freedom is man’s ability to say yes to Being, and go out to others in love, participate in something greater than himself

Jean-Paul Satre

• to exist is to be condemned to fredom

• existence precedes essence, as man creates his own essence

• man cannot help but be free

• stems from the negating power of consciousness, the no-thing of the world, the being-in-itself

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• man is condemned to meaning

• freedom as situated freedom due to man’s body and situations

Albert Camus

Like Sisyphus pushing and rolling the bolder, to exist is to live the absurdity of life

Soren Kierkegaard

• existence is a religious category, the situation of the single, finite, unique individual who has to make a decision before God

• freedom enables man to pass from aesthetic state to the ethical

• making a leap of faith is the highest act of man’s liberty