[Lecture One] Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 33 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: In this lecture, Dr. Peikoff explains the origins and early developments of ancient Greek philosophy. He examines why philosophy was born in Greece and indicates some of the fundamental questions the early thinkers asked that led them to formulate philosophic answers. He reviews the thought of the early pre-Socratics, who reckoned with the questions of change and multiplicity, including Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Zeno. He concludes with a review of the first school of philosophy in the followers of Pythagoras.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| This course was given in the early 1970s. Do you think Dr. Peikoff’s characterization of the modern world still rings true today? |
| Other than those provided by Dr. Peikoff, do you see examples of Heraclitus’s influence (general or specific) in today’s world? |
| Why does Dr. Peikoff call the battle between Heraclitus and Parmenides a “catastrophe in the making”? |
| Do you see examples of the “package deals” referenced by Dr. Peikoff — ideas that do not rationally belong together — in today’s world? |
| Dr. Peikoff makes the case that the study of philosophy is different from the specialized sciences. Can you describe the subject matter of philosophy in contrast to some other field of study? |
| Using your own concrete examples, can you explain why the questions of “change” and “multiplicity” were the starting points for Greek philosophy? |
| How did the monism of the early Greeks influence the Pythagorean “solution” to the basic questions of Greek philosophy? |
| Dr. Peikoff referred to the paradoxes of Zeno and suggested we think about an answer to them. Before you hear the answers given by later thinkers in Greece in future lectures, can you devise an answer to his claims that motion is impossible and that multiplicity is impossible? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:08:36 | How could Parmenides think of a shape for the universe? What would be outside that shape? Wouldn’t the universe have to be infinite without shape? |
| 2:10:24 | What does shape mean, then? Anything I can think of that has a shape is something that I can stand outside of and see what shape it is. |
| 2:11:00 | Did Oriental thought have any influence on the early Greek philosophers? |
| 2:11:40 | If you traveled in a straight line through the universe, wouldn’t you have to come to the end at some point, and wouldn’t that imply that there’s an ‘outside the universe’? |
| 2:13:30 | Why must the dualist choose one of their realities as the “real one” and the other as “just a result of our distorted senses”? |
| 2:14:07 | Why wouldn’t the same argument Zeno used to disprove a whole of many parts apply to a whole of one part? In other words, why couldn’t the one be divided infinitely? |
| 2:14:34 | Is there any such thing as a vacuum or is the universe completely filled with matter of some sort? |
| 2:16:40 | Would you say that a major problem for the pre-Socratics was that they did not understand the natures of time and space, for example the problems of “change” and “multiplicity”? Would you say that time and space are poorly understood today? |
| 2:17:40 | Did the early Greek metaphysics have any influence on the politics of that time? |
| 2:18:48 | Did the politics of that time have an influence on the philosophy? |
| 2:19:42 | Would you elaborate on the definition of “philosophy,” explaining why the five main branches you included are grouped together, while psychology, mathematics, etc. are omitted? |
| 2:22:24 | Why didn’t Heraclitus say that the “law of change” was the world-stuff rather than change itself? |
| 2:23:40 | Since he invalidated the senses, by what means did Heraclitus discover change? |
| 2:24:35 | Do you recommend any history of philosophy texts for this course? |
| 2:28:45 | When you say “that which is not, is not,” is that a principle about nothing? |
| 2:29:20 | Did Zeno originate the implications of the paradoxes he put forth? |
| 2:29:43 | Can you think of “nothing” if you think of it in relation to “something”? |
| 2:31:34 | Would you say that one of the problems of the early philosophers was their failure to differentiate various kinds of change? |