pre-socratic philosophers/ history of psychology

pre-socratic philosophers

Parminides, zenos, Melissu’s, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Heraclitus, Diogenes

Parminides (late 6th, early 5th C BCE)

• On Nature, the only known work

• Two views of reality: one in which change is impossible; reality is timeless and uniform

• Second, in which the senses are believed and followed, leading to error

and confusion

Parminides with Zeno and Melissus created:

Eleatic school

Eleatic school

was a pre-Socratic philosophical movement founded in the 5th century BCE in the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy

zenos (c. 490 – c. 430 BC) the 5th century BCE

a pre-Socratic thinker famous for his paradoxical arguments against motion and plurality

zenos paradoxes (c 450 BCE)

• Achilles and the tortoise

• The dichotomy (the path problem)

• The arrow

a set of philosophical arguments created by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea to show that motion, change, and plurality are logically impossible

What was Zeno trying to do with these paradoxes?

Support Parmenides’ monism argument that nothing changes ... That it makes

no sense to divide space and time. All is one.

Melissu’s (5th Century BCE) 441–440 BCE

• argued that the senses are misleading

• he argued that plurality, the existence of many different things, is an illusion

• Reality differs from superficial appearances

• He was an admiral and politician

Empedocles (c 445 BCE) 5th century

argued that the condition of the world is cyclical

The world alternates between unity and division, matter becoming more and more differentiated, falling apart, merging into unity once more

• The world is both many and one, in an endless cycle

empedocles belived that the world was made of 4 elements

earth, air, fire, water

empedocles was also concerned about:

• was concerned with religion and morals as well as physics

• Living intelligent beings, daimones, (spirits), make decisions freely, sin results in punishment (and deterioration of the world)

• The sins he was most concerned with seem to be murder, and eating meat