5. Explain the meaning and significanse of “the arche question”

Ionian school

• In fact the scientific investigations of the Ionian School can be reduced to just one question and the question is: “what is the general principle of nature?”

• The first philosphers may be also reffered to as the first.physicists.

What is the general nature of everything?

= the arche question

The first principle of everything

The general prcinicple of everything

• “Water constituted ('stood under') the principle of all things.„ –

• the first philosophical sentence

• Anaximenes: the principle of everything is the air

• Anaximander: the principle of everything is Apeiron

• (endless, unlimited mass known also as infinity)

• Empedocle: the constitution of the nature could be explained by four elements

• All matter is one

• There is a general principle or principles of the nature which explains its origins, changes and motion

• Matter is eternal

• there is a form of life in all meatrial objects (the objects move because the motion is an inseparable and inherent component of objects) – this view is reffered to as hylozoism

6. The being and becoming dilemma in early Greek philosophy

• Very soon the ancient philosophers noticed the difference bewteen being and becoming. They assumed that some things exist while others just happen to be, namely they become and then they vanish and most importantly they change.

• Therefore the most important question here is whether being is a unity or a plurality

• The Eleatics sated that being and thought were identical and only the unchaining laws of thought could reveal the truth; sensory experience, that is empirical data, being contradictory and changeable was just an illusion

DEMOCRITUS

• Nothing exists except atoms and empty space: everything else is opinion”

• Atomism: the theory that all matter is composed of indivisible and irreducible units

• Atom = uncuttable

• Atom is a tiny particle – eternal, changeless, identical, self-moving and indivisible

Atoms do not change

• Atomism offered a solution to the problems of motion and chaneg that vexed the ancients: how to reconcile being with becoming.

• Atoms are eternal: what is made of atoms seems to change

• Atomism =materialism

7. Explain Zeno’s paradoxes

Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to prove the indivisibility of space and the impossiblity of motion.

He did this with imaginary demonstrations that led to logical contradictions and absurdites

Paradox - a seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true

• Zeno proved that assuming that motion exists and therefore change is a fact leads to paradoxes

• There is only being and it is being itself – one, unchangable, unmoving, immutable and timeless. Everything elese is an illusion:

8. Is total flux chaotic? Explainthe nature of change in the system of Heraclitus

• Heraclitus teaches that all things are flux or change; contrary to what sense data might indicate at times, nothing is permanent, but everything is constantly becoming something else or going out of existence.

Heraclitus uses the river as a metaphor to describe the nature of all things: superficially a river may appear to be a permanent and stable entity, but closer inspection reveals that it continually changes, not being the same river from one moment to the next