Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in Greece and Rome > The inquiry into nature

The Inquiry into Nature

What the first Greek thinkers called their work Plato’s Socrates remembers: “When I was young, Cebes, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call investigation of nature” (Phaedo 96a, tr. Fowler), peri physeos historia, inquiry into nature. They survive in fragments quoted by later writers. The name later given to them, “Presocratic”, was coined in the eighteenth century and made current by Hermann Diels in the nineteenth, and some scholars now avoid it; “philosophers” is almost certainly not what they called themselves.

Heraclitus set inquiry and understanding apart. “Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed” (B35, in John Burnet’s translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed., 1908, as are the other fragments on this page), where “acquainted with” renders historas, inquirers, and whether he wrote “lovers of wisdom” at all is doubted; but “The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hekataios” (B40). Of himself: “I have sought for myself” (B101).

Xenophanes set seeking against revelation, and gave it a limit: “The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better” (B18), and yet “There never was nor will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of” (B34). Parmenides’ goddess sets argument over the senses: “nor let habit by its much experience force thee to cast upon this way a wandering eye or sounding ear or tongue; but judge by argument the much disputed proof uttered by me” (B7).

Asked what human beings are born for, Pythagoras said “to be an observer of the sky”, and called himself “an observer of nature”, “and it was for the sake of this that he had passed into his way of life”; Anaxagoras, asked the same, named “the sky and the stars around it, as well as moon and sun” (Aristotle’s Protrepticus, from Iamblichus, tr. Hutchinson and Johnson). The Republic says that Pythagoras’s followers still speak of “a certain way of life the Pythagorean” (600b, tr. Shorey). Of Democritus a hostile witness reports that “he would rather discover one single law of causation than receive the kingdom of Persia” (Dionysius of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 14.27, tr. Gifford).

Aristotle placed the beginning of philosophy in wonder. “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then … about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe” (Metaphysics A.2, tr. Tredennick). He read his predecessors for what they could teach him about causes: “let us avail ourselves of the evidence of those who have before us approached the investigation of reality and philosophized about Truth … we shall either discover some other kind of cause, or have more confidence in those which we have just described” (A.3). On that reading “Of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things”, and Thales was “the founder of this type of philosophy” (A.3, tr. Ross).