Milesians plus

LISTEN. Looking forward to Al Gore's appearance on our campus this afternoon, talking about his dad's contribution to the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the '60s.

UPDATE.

Al Gore spoke with deep gratitide for his parents' influence, & with impassioned urgency when asked what he wanted students in the audience to understand about the climate crisis. "We know what we have to do. What's not to like about doing the right thing?!" #mtsu #AlGore https://t.co/aNMGVvFmKF

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 17, 2019

And, looking forward to the second installment tonight of Ken Burns' film Country Music. Last night's debut was compelling, offering strong evidence of the genre's essential African and African-American roots and promising no "whitewash" of its troubled history with race. Burns has never ducked that fundamental part of America's story, in any of his films. One reviewer's impressions coincide nicely with our turn to pre-Socratic philosophy: it's all about coming to terms with change.

Burns’s chief takeaway from his immersion in the genre is spot on: country music is not, and has never been, static. “I think there’s a paradox that has always existed in country music,” Bill C. Malone, the lone academic voice in the series and the author of the genre’s definitive history, “Country Music, U.S.A.,” says at one point. “How much change do you embrace? And how much change can you make without completely obliterating what you were?” At its best, Ken Burns’s “Country Music” works so well because it declines to present this tug-of-war between change and the status quo as a tension in need of narrative resolution. That tension is the narrative; change is essential to the tradition. David Cantwell, Ken Burns' Delightful "Country Music" Series 

Change is essential to the tradition of western philosophy too. Just recall Zeno's paradoxes of motion, and Diogenes' solvitur ambulando refutation. It is solved by walking, more broadly by embracing the change that's always gonna come. More on that shortly. First, we ask: What changes?

It's Milesians today in CoPhi, plus (from Fantasyland) Jefferson, Joseph Smith, and others, plus Nightwalking with Dickens.

Does reality or nature consist of some kind of stuff, or stuffing? What might that be? Good questions, and though it's easy to discount the earliest attempts to answer them we really ought to appreciate the merits of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, particularly their dedication to a recognizably naturalist-secular mindset millennia before its (our) time.

To be sure, Thales made proclamations like “all things are full of gods,” and “the magnet has a soul because it moves iron,” and Anaximander said that his ‘indeterminate boundless’ was ‘divine’. But it would be a mistake to simply conclude that the Milesian philosophers were ‘spiritualists’. When speaking of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle plainly stated: “Of the first philosophers, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things.”

...It is to Thales’ credit that he sought to simplify explanations of natural phenomena by discerning that which unifies the totality of reality and depicting it as simply as possible, even if he erred on the side of oversimplification. Thales clearly marks the beginning of rational explanations in place of mythological ones. As such, he marks the beginning of Greek philosophy.

A significant advance in Anaximander’s philosophy is his appreciation of what is not perceivable. Anthony Gottlieb puts it well in his history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, pointing out that in a sense what Anaximander did not see is even more important than what he did see: “He realized that the best accounts of nature could not always rely on what was directly observable, but sometimes had to dig deeper. Instead of Thales ’ water, he postulated something invisible as the arche, or basic stuff, of the world. If the philosophy of Thales demonstrated one essential facet of scientific thinking, namely the urge to simplify and reduce observable phenomena, Anaximander’s work exemplified an additional and equally fundamental one: science says there is more to the world than meets the eye.”

...However naïve and extraordinary many views of the three oldest Greek thinkers may seem to us, it marks a powerful, fundamental change from a mythical conception to a natural, that is scientific, explanation of the world, when Iris [the rainbow], who is in Homer a living person, the messenger of the Gods, is here transformed into a physically explainable, atmospheric phenomenon” (p19).
So with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, philosophy was off to a good start. Their philosophies seem remarkably free of the extra-rational influences of religion.

Chad Trainer, The Merits of the Milesians, Philosophy Now

Did Thales really say everything is H20? Not so fast, says Anthony Gottlieb in The Dream of Reason. LISTEN...