The Presocratics: Crash History of Science

long ago some philosophers worked very hard to separate myths from what they actually knew about nature bailey’s theorized that everything in the world is made of water Pythagoras was a mathematical mystical vegetarian and Democritus we all know and love as the atom guy meet the pre-socratics the pre-socratics were named for their leader of course priests Socrates that is a joke they were several different philosophers who lived before Socrates now why start with the pre-socratics since people have systematically made knowledge about the world for millennia there’s no single starting point but a convenient place to get our footing is ancient Greece these Greeks were the cornerstone of scientific inquiry in Western Europe their theories had a terrific run like try and imagine coming up with a question about the nature that puzzles people for more than , years I can’t even decide what to have for contact pof customer support uk breakfast more practical reason to put on our thinking Tobi’s is that the ancient Greeks left behind sources writing stuff down makes history possible and here’s a protip if you want to be remembered in , years keep a diary preferably on vellum with metallic ink also get super famous so that your students make plenty of copies not all the people we think of as ancient Greeks actually even lived in Greece their culture stretched across a prosperous region called Ionia and they weren’t as ancient to some even ancient er Greeks we typically date ancient Greece’s starting around BCE after the fall of the Mycenaeans those are the dudes who burned down Troy because one of them got dumped zero chill ancient Greece ends with the Roman conquest in BC II we’re focusing on a science dense period from around to BCE these Greeks live in small towns and are very comfy out at sea they trade and fight with each other a lot and they sometimes have to deal with invading Persians they worship nature but their land is deforested and eroded they love setting up new colonies all along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea there is no public support for anything like modern science there aren’t even schools in which to study science the Greeks practiced natural philosophy meaning self conscious inquiry into nature a lot of their philosophies were about answering our first running question here on history of science what is stuff I mean really if you watched our first episode you’ll know that we can divide science into both a body of knowledge and a set of methods and you examine the work of these pre-socratic philosophers you can see two important things first they weren’t tests in a modern sense they didn’t make detailed accurate knowledge of nature based on observation but they did come up with theories that tried to account for why stuff is the way that it is in there wonky sounding theories we still find many of the themes that would drive centuries of further inquiry that divide between the abstract and the material or identifying the smallest possible particle of stuff second as these natural philosophers tried their best to separate myth from truth they developed first drafts of many of the methods we still use in value today natural philosophy became a quest for abstract knowledge this is important because it means the pre-socratics started making general claims about the real world laws that would apply in every situation not just specific instances the pre-socratics also developed schools of thought that spread their ideas around geographically and down the centuries these weren’t physical schools they were groups of teachers and students who thought about the same problems one of the reasons we know about these schools of thought is because they operated as individuals who took credit for their ideas and whose names were passed down this practice differed from many other cultures of inquiry and became a foundation for how Europeans later systematically made knowledge but the big method of knowledge making here and the one that we’re gonna focus on was rational debates between all those schools and individuals and abstract theories there was a lot of disagreement to convince people they were right a natural philosopher had to use reason logic and observation to attack the wrong seeming theories of others and bolster his own awesomeness in fact some historians argue that there’s a link between rational debate about political constitutionality or how humans should govern themselves and rational debate about the constitution of nature or how the world governs itself now there are more pre-socratics than we could possibly mention so here are a few highlights this is our rogues gallery of natural philosophers who all had their own theories and they argued they rationally debated themselves into the history of science the first European natural philosopher whose ideas survived down to the present was failings the first individual known to have proved a mathematical theorem fail ‘yes’ theorem in fact early historians attributed lots of first to fail e is making it hard tell exactly what he really accomplished regardless being the first at a whole way of doing thought is pretty unusual bailey’s set the natural world off as separate from the divine for him the world was something comprehensible by the powers of the human intellect it became an object a thing like other things this meant leaving the gods out for example bailey’s held that wind not a god caused the Nile to flood this was a general natural explanation for a phenomenon bailey’s was not however irreligious he believed that all things have a God or a soul within them filly’s was also the founder of the first European school of philosophy the Malaysians a Malaysian school was known for its theory of matter a theory of stuff this theory held that water was the primary substrate or the most basic element the earth floats on water like a ship earthquakes happen when the water rocks back and forth the soul of things may have not been material but their stuff ‘no swatter will come back to this essential dualism of soul versus matter in future episodes later Plato and Aristotle were dismissive of fáil ease and part of their argument was that they’ll ease once predicted an upcoming harvest to cornered the market on olive oil using his philosophy for personal gain is that ok depends on who you ask Bailey’s is a star student was Anaximander he’s thought to have been the first European philosopher to write down his own ideas like Bailey’s Anaximander believed that nature is ruled by discoverable laws but Anaximander rejected a faiis watery Universal substrate proposing instead a formless initial state called the appearin Anaximander proposed that this primal formlessness would then devolve into opposite properties that could be experienced like hot or cold wet or dry heavy and light etc Anaximander worked in astronomy geography and mathematics one of his contributions was introducing the gnome on the part of the sundial that cast the shadow to Greece these had already been used in China for two millennia the Noman was good for more than just telling time it helped people better understand the movement of the Sun and it helped Anaximander develop a model of the cosmos that envisioned heavenly wheels shirt by holes letting leg through one of our earliest examples of natural philosophers tried to conquer the where are we question the last great thinker associated with the Malaysians was empedocles who was probably also influenced by Pythagoras and pair amenities almost every Greek philosopher had a book called on nature it’s super confusing in empedocles on nature he put forward the theory of the four classical elements earth air fire and water mixed by two forces love and strife while this conversation on pof theory of course seems hopelessly misguided now remember that simply by asking what is stuff the Malaysians were moving away from mythology and toward modern physics probably the pre-socratic philosopher most well-known today is Pythagoras that triangle guy Pythagoras studied the philosophy of the Malaysians but he was a more mystic thinker which is a nice way of saying Pythagoras was a cult leader he believed in reincarnation and outlawed beans seeing them as impure probably historians love to debate the bean thing at least we’re pretty sure he was a vegetarian how can he be vegetarian without beans hi grace is focused on the pure dovetails with the fact that we think of him as having introduced the notion of idealism to science idealists generated abstract models of perfect stuff this was unlike Malaysians who were materialists they started theorizing about actual stuff in terms of math Pythagoras’s idealism meant a shift from practical arithmetic inherited from egypt and mesopotamia to a new pure geometry for pythagoras numbers were not just a way of counting stuff they were sacred pythagoras loved whole numbers he hated irrational numbers of such as the square root of he called the square root of the Allegan or the unutterable to even know that irrational numbers existed you had to join the cult of the pythagorean’s and work your way into the innermost circle this is so great for our purposes the thing that Pythagoras added to science is the role of the mathematical proof Egyptians and Babylonians knew about Pythagorean triplets that is like the whole number solutions to the Pythagorean theorem that was useful a practical guide that can be in lamented by ancient engineers but Pythagoras understood it and proved it in a purely mathematical abstract with Pythagoras creating an elegant abstract proof became a model for justifying a new claim to knowledge another major threat in Greek thought before Socrates was Adam ISM the theory that the world is made of particles that you can’t divide any further this was associated with Democritus who made heavy use of rational debate through dialogues our wonder of this period for this he is the star of this episode’s thought-bubble Democritus held that everything is made of atoms indestructible uncreated always in motion and infinite in number and they came in all kinds of shapes and sizes and his focus on matter Democritus was a materialist like the Malaysians he’s even credited with holding a bottle of air underwater to show that air is made of stuff thus giving rise to the experiment as a way to illustrate a theory still Democritus had a lot to prove he would ask what is air and people would be like nothing Democritus and that’s when he’d say that’s where you’re wrong most famously Democritus argued against other theorists Parmenides and Zeno using something that we call the void hypothesis Democritus was like everything is made of little indivisible bits of stuff I call them atoms then Zeno is all but Democritus my friend what is between two atoms then Democritus says nothing between the atoms there is only a void and then Zeno replies you’re caught in a paradox friend if everything is made of atoms and the void is a thing then the void is made of atoms but then what is between the atoms of the void and then presumably Zeno dropped a BCE equivalent of a mic and the crowd went wild thanks thought bubble this was rational debate this particular debate would go on for centuries but more importantly the structure of the dialogue the celebration of rational debate as almost a sporting event for these nerds was a new and valuable way to analyze our universe this debate is just one example of how the pre-socratics elevated being curious about the world into Natural Philosophy it’s important remember that the natural philosophers of ancient Greece lives in a very different world both physically and socially from that of like jeopardy and github but the way that this group of thinkers framed problems about stuff changed nothingness mathematical elegance perception truth than the cosmos has echoed across the centuries next time we’ll watch Plato and Aristotle Duke it out over idealism and empiricism it’s gonna be a Throwdown for the ages crash course history of science is filmed in the doctor Cheryl C Kinney studio in Missoula Montana and it is made possible with the help of all of these nice people and our animation team is thought cafe crash course is a complexly production if you want to keep imagining the world complexly with us check out some of our other channels like the financial diet scishow space and Mental Floss if you’d like to keep crash course free for everyone forever you can support the series at patreon a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love thank you to all of our patrons for making crash course possible with their continued pof username recovery