Greek myth was created by poets such as Hesiod and Homer out of prior, less poetically elaborated figures They were expressions of a worldview from which philosophy as well as polytheism subsequently evolved. They remain active today as archetypal figures of thought.

Polytheism did not smoothly evolve into monotheism. It is a common belief that one of many gods (e.g. Zeus) gradually assumed dominance over the others causing them eventually to disappear. But monotheism required a jump, an abrupt change in worldview, presumably due to individual genius. A key to understanding why, lies in the concept of Chaos.

Polytheism characteristically contains the idea that there exists a realm of being prior and superior to the gods, upon which the gods depend, and whose decrees they must obey. The character of this primordial realm varies. In more primitive forms, it is full of various forces: darkness, water, spirit, earth, sky, and so forth. The world, and the gods who rule it, emerged by a process of natural sexual reproduction. Sex served as a prototype of natural force, and the power of reproduction, as a prototype for nature’s power to transform matter. These ideas remained in the pagan background, no matter how their gods evolved. Even Zeus had to deal with fate and chaos.

Moira, a word originally meaning a portion or allotment, became the personified principle requiring the establishment of Cosmic order, which was–and still is--established when portions are allotted and respected: good fences make good neighbors. One’s portion in life is one’s destiny, and so the word's meaning also took on a sense of destiny. A modern version: your genes are your destiny.

Moira created the dasmos: the world seen as separated into domains. To carve a domain is to create a thing, form something out of a whole, to create an individual entity, to individuate. The rights, integrity, borders, and so on, of a domain were maintained and protected by its own daemon. A village had borders and rights; within them, a person's life was protected by a hedge of law. Similar hedges: a life-giving water hole required protection from pollution and over-use, the soul of an unborn child was not to be violated. There is this (conservative) sense that civilized life depends on maintaining domains.

Daemons actually preceded Moira; the latter represented their guiding principle; she was abstracted from them. Their relation illustrates a common form of explanation. Why does this daemon act this way? Because it obeys Moira: it acts according to the general principle represented by Moira. Why does it fall? Because it obeys (the law of) gravity; falling is connected to a single principle. We talk now about principles, then about gods.

The fully developed idea of Moira represented (1) Must, the idea of causality, (2) of, Destiny, the outcome of causes, and (3) of Ought (Dike), the justice of destiny. Connecting Must, Destiny, and Ought connects human and natural law: an ethical standard of living based on conformity with nature. Conformity extends from simply living a healthy life, to creating laws which take human nature into account, to recognizing in daily life what is and is not within one’s power, to tempering one’s life aspirations to realities. Nowadays it might include an ethics sensitive to ecology.

If the Olympian gods were abstracted from daemons, the latter in turn stemmed from an even older, more basic idea, called physis (Latin ‘natura’), which was a force, or carried a force, exerted by daemons to ensure the principle of Moira. The root of physis connotes growth, as initially associated with life and motion.

The form attributed to physis, an animate incorporeal fluid, derived from two still common basic beliefs. One is that only something alive can initiate motion: For how can an inanimate object suddenly ‘decide’ to move on its own?

The other belief is that force is only exerted through local contact: for A to exert a force on B, A must be in contact with B, or A must have a physical agent–a physis--which brings this force to B. This extended, for example, even to the force of social norms on individual behavior. This force was thought to be exerted by a form of physis that extended like an invisible fluid throughout society, in contact with and connecting all its members.

We often hear that societies are held together by social forces or by a shared the soul of a people. This is generally understood as a figure of speech but many people at the same time harbor deeper beliefs which involve some portion of the idea of physis. Most believe they have a soul, a kind of physis: something that leaves their body upon death. Some of them also believe that the soul connects them to a world-soul (or a Jungian Collective Unconscious). Certain non-Western peoples today call this kind of physis mana, Taoists call it Shen.

In physics, physis has lost its animism. Forms of it first became the various ‘aethers’ common to much of early science. Many of these forms were discarded in time; others evolved into mathematical structures modern physics calls ‘fields’. It is physis’ loss of life, the literal death of the world to many people, which is the focus of their fury against science.

The unconscious connection of inner order with Cosmic order already discussed manifested itself in a conscious connection: Moira gave weight and meaning to the classical ideal of moderation in all things. Meaning because one cannot really know what moderation is without knowing what is immoderate--where the bounds are. The weight of cosmic or natural law was the heaviest of sanctions. Such law provided bounds to animate and inanimate behavior. There was no clear distinction between them. Thus, wisdom and the understanding of nature were bound together in this archaic source of Western civilization.

As already discussed, the idea nature could be described in terms of mathematics arose along with natural philosophy. Mathematics was an world of an infinite variety of structures–in geometry, made up of line segments, in arithmetic, made up of subsets of integers–composed of elementary parts, described and connected by logic with perfect certainty. It provided a breathtaking vision of what might be true of the phenomenal world.

But two technical ingredients were missing. One was an level of understanding of mathematics that needed another two thousand years to develop. To begin the first step towards its proper role, mathematics needed to develop a completely systematic notation, and algorithmic arithmetic, and then soon afterwards, algebra, analytic geometry, and calculus, to complete the first step.

The second ingredient was quantitative experiment. Pythagoras did the first one we know of. Centuries later, Archimedes did some more. But many factors delayed it real beginning until the work of Galileo at the start of the 17^th century. At that point, the start of the Scientific Revolution, experiment and mathematics stimulated one another and exploded into modern science.

Until the Scientific revolution, and with the important exception of Astronomy to be separately discussed, connections between phenomena were overwhelmingly verbal. This means they were qualitative, uncertain, and limited in depth by the limitations of verbal logic already discussed.

Multiple ideas such as life, force, and matter, combined to form that of physis. As they began to separate and their associations with souls, daemons, and gods, diminished, physis gradually approached the modern concept of nature. This began, circa 600 BCE, with the first kind of Philosophy--Natural Philosophy--in the Ionian city of Miletus situated on the Mediterranean shore of Asia about half way between Athens and Babylon. Philosophers attempted to explain all phenomena on the basis of a single form of physis.

Thales (640-546 BCE) is the first man generally credited with attempting this goal. He hypothesized that water or moisture was the basic physis. This choice had a number of things to recommend it. First of all, water–or the ocean–had always been a popular mythic form for Chaos. Then, it seemed to be the crucial element necessary for bringing forth life from earth (more so than sunlight because the Mediterranean was normally sunny and the ground, normally dry). Not only plants emerged from mud or water, but also insects and toads. Newborn animals emerge from water filled wombs. It was also believed that the land emerged from the waters.

Thus, water was both a substance and a source of other substances: Different forms of sensible matter developed from it (most obviously, ice and vapor). It was called a 'principle', or archetype.

After Thales came Anaximander (611-547 BCE) who had a more abstract conception of physis. It could not be identified with any known form of matter. It itself had no intrinsic attributes that could be sensed; only its forms determined humanly sensible attributes.

Anaximenes’ (fl. 550 BCE) physis was air (or perhaps moist air) instead of water, however, his important contribution was the idea of physical mechanism: how did the different forms of matter come about? His answer was a change of density. At highest density air appeared, say, as earth, lower density as water, then as ordinary air, and then at lowest density, as fire; out of these four, all forms of matter were produced.

Each of these Milesians introduced a kind of idea found in modern physical theory: Thales, that every form matter is formed from a basic kind; Anaximander, that sensible attributes arise from the forms and are hence to be explained in terms of them; Anaximenes, that a description of process is part of an explanation.

In sum, the Milesian school attempted to show how many things were appearances of one thing–a philosophy called Monism--and how many phenomena could be explained in terms of fewer and simpler phenomena: pushes, condensations, whirling vortices, and so on. Winds are produced by the expansion of condensed air; hail is produced by water freezing as it falls; earthquakes are caused by contractions and expansions of earth due to changes in moisture content. It was the beginning of natural philosophy.

They were materialists: physis, or matter and its properties, such as movement, constituted their ultimate reality. As people say today, only 'physical' things were real to them.

They were Empiricists in the sense that direct sense experience was their preferred source of ideas and inquiry. For example, they did not start by assuming the world moves on the basis of love. They did not start by imposing such hypotheses. This should be considered an ideal; how well they and we can actually follow it is a subtle question. In what sense, for example, is direct sense experience direct if information reaches us only as screened through and constructed by our sensory templates?

They were Naturalists who invented the idea of nature: the realm in which phenomena occurred according to fixed law, and hence without the intervention of free-will, whether of God, gods, or humans.

They did not think, however, that nature operated without intelligence or life; in fact it seemed to require it. They, like most others for the next two millennia, were Hylozoists, believing that matter and life were inseparable, and that physis carried life. How else could a planet follow its path if it did not 'know' that path; and how could it know if it were not alive? In fact, just the ability to change, both place and form, seemed to be a property of life; and observation also suggested that only living things could instigate motion, grow and decay.

It is a common observation that observation is uncertain. Upon close examination, nothing can be measured precisely, and nothing remains forever the same: stones wears with time, motions cease. Therefore, it seems that no thing ever truly is a well-defined something. A state of absolute Being never exists. Being is always in the process of becoming. This was why Anaximander would not identify physis with any known form of matter. (Is this an empiricist viewpoint?)

Heracleitus of Ephesus (536-470 BCE), a generation after the Milesians, seems to have pushed this idea even further. He questioned the meaning of Being: the idea that things are, that there are definite things. One commentator (Wildeband) described his idea as follows:

Can there be motion without something (a material or substance) moving? Can matter be made of not-matter, of motion? Are matter and motion then identical? At least according to Aristotle, Heracleitus' had in mind a hidden substrate, a physis presumably similar to that of Anaximander, which is doing the changing:

Many ideas are mixed into and connected to those of Heracleitus. Perhaps the most basic is the foundation of existence upon Chaos. Beneath all appearances, at the most microscopic live, there is unceasing chaotic motion. Of course, to some extent that is confirmed by modern physics: all matter above a temperature of absolute zero is in chaotic motion which is only limited in extent by the forces of nature, exactly as the Greek poets claimed.

At an even deeper level we should recognize that the Greeks never completely separated matter and force and therefore the chaos in each. Ovid talked Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd. The seeds were those of order contained already in chaotic matter. This picture has often lent itself to the idea of a chaotic element–a degree of uncertainty–in natural law. In particular, it suggests that the order we find about us, is at least to some extent, imposed by us (as by our inner templates) on the data we receive. This idea is an important component of post-modernism.

And finally, independent of chaos, the idea that matter is no more than a form of motion, is a very powerful one. It was taken up by Descartes who made it the foundation of a whole theory of the universe; it is implicit in Einstein’s equivalence between mass and energy; and it is not in necessary disagreement with modern physics.

The popular form in which materialism is generally understood today is the same as described in Plato's dialogue The Sophists where it was described as the worldview of 'Giants' in a

Many commentators have interpreted his thesis more strongly as follows: that which it is possible to conceive is identical with that which is. Although this may have been his meaning, I avoid it because it is not necessary in order to reach his conclusions. The two statements are not the same to the extent that something that can be, might not necessarily actually be. For example, an extinct animal specie might be but is not; a unicorn might be, but never has been.

The word think is used in Ref 4. rather than conceive. I prefer the latter which is somewhat less ambivalent; it suggests a more completely formed thought. But important ambivalence remains. Do we conceive (of) infinity? The answer may be yes or no. We certainly have a conception of infinity (it is commonly used in mathematics), while on the other hand, no one can form a mental picture of an infinite collection of objects. Furthermore, modern physics suggests that an infinite amount of anything does not exist in the world described by it. Even so, because we conceive it, should we not say the conception exists?

In a similar vein, do we conceive of God? It also is a commonly used idea even by those who deny any possible attribute given It and therefore mental picture of It.

It seems clear from Parmenides’ own use of his thesis that he means conceive in a relatively strong sense: that of forming a mental picture. We form a mental picture of some thing; if there is no thing, there is nothing to form a definite mental picture of. His thesis requires that because we cannot conceive nothingness it does not exist.

We can form a mental picture of empty space and this is commonly taken to be what a vacuum would look like. But according to Parmenides, it is perceivable and thus is some thing. It is not empty. A true vacuum was supposed to contain nothing, it could not exist, could not be seen. Volumes taken to be vacua, really were filled: the world was a plenum.

The existence of vacua later became an important issue in the history of physics. Today, the issue no longer exists within science: words have changed their meanings and assumption implicit in the issue have been discarded. This is a very common fate of such long-lived controversies. On the other hand the existence of infinity, God, or nothingness is still debatable within metaphysics because these issues hinge on the meaning of words (e.g. exist and thing) that form a person’s basic vocabulary.

The vacuum issue was also central to a critical analysis, made by Parmenides, of the natural philosophy of his predecessors--the philosophy(called monist) that attempted to show how all things were appearances of one thing: a basic physis. He warns us that his analysis will be difficult to swallow. His reasoning….

What he has to say is much disputed, and needs to be judged by adhering to logical argument:

He states that motion is only possible if something moves into a space previously unoccupied–but no such space can exist. He states that change in form due to change in density (the idea of Axanimenes) is impossible because less dense regions must be ones in which there is some empty space. He states that what is (or ‘it’)….

His basic conclusion is that under the assumption of monism, there is no way to construct Becoming from what is, and that the constructions of previous philosophers are illogical and incoherent. He further concludes that what is, is homogenous, isotropic, immobile, and eternal–one and indivisible in space and time, and nothing like anything we sense. What is, or what truly exists, bears no logical relation to the world of phenomena, a world of individuated things in continual flux, continually becoming: that which we normally consider to be existence!

At this point one might reasonably ask: Why then, are he and his writings remembered? And not merely remembered: he has been given by various people, all the following honorifics The father of Materialism,…of Idealism,…of Logic, and …of Metaphysics! He is called the father of Materialism because he based his reality on matter. He also fathered Idealism, the anti-thesis of Materialism, because his reality ended up being unobservable, a pure idea. His understanding of the necessity of faithfully adhering to the logical consequences of axioms, if one is to think coherently, grants him claim to fathering strict Logic (outside of mathematics). Metaphysics is his because his main inquiry was concerning the most fundamental assumptions of natural philosophy–certainly not natural philosophy itself which he concluded was incoherent; and he was the first to inquire in this way. All in all, quite impressive for someone whose thinking led to such a negative conclusion.

I would credit Parmenides, possibly anachronistically, with yet another first: the first to conclude that what is often thought of as "Pure Reason" cannot lead to Science. It is now more widely appreciated than then, that there is nothing pure at all about any sort of Pure Reason, that everything we take as reasonable is merely familiar experience, and that even our processes of reason–how we process those reasonable assumptions--is taught us by experience. It was a solid and uncompromising turning to and rooting in experience–and in particular in experience of the experimental sort--that finally freed science of the shackles of metaphysics after a long and hard term of servitude.

The Sophists were teachers of sophistry, professional instructors in the analytical and rhetorical skills underlying law and politics. Practitioners of the latter interpret words and ideas in order to achieve competitive advantage. Objective or intended meanings are of subordinate interest.

Some conflicting metaphysical opinions exhibited in the previous section were about the following: (1) What constitutes reality? Does it have objective, or subjective, or any existence? (2) Is something either real or unreal or can it have degrees of reality, and if so, what does that mean? (3) Are ideas more or less real than matter or phenomena, or are they completely unreal? (4) How real are sense perceptions?

The alternative to principled sophism in human affairs is based on the idea that human law is guided by natural law, or by supernatural inspiration. If the sources of the two are presumed to be the same, there should be no inherent conflict between them. Or, if there is no supernatural inspiration, then we are guided (perhaps inspired?) by natural law alone. Thus the Greek study of ethics, initiated by Socrates, began with goals parallel to those of natural philosophy.

Natural philosophy tried to understand phenomena by relating them to, if not logically deriving them from, invariant elementary matter and principles. Appearances are subject to time and to opinion, but elements are not. Ethics also required elementary principles which were eternally valid, exalted above change, and not subject to changeable opinion. Laws, like appearances, could change with circumstance but to command authority they needed to always be seen to be in conformity with invariant basic principles, a basis of shared beliefs: a set of axioms.

Modern sophisticated opinion holds that although an homogeneous group can reasonably share a set of ethical axioms, such as the Ten Commandments, they would be guilty of laughable provincialism and dangerous arrogance to assume it to have universal validity.

The danger was spelled out by the modern philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. He pointed to the danger of such presumed universally valid and binding standards of knowledge and action starting with fanatical Jewish monotheism, extending through the French revolution that lubricated the guillotine to modern libertarian and/or Marxist defenders of Science, Freedom, and Dignity. These he associated with those who advocated rationalism, and Western science and who denied that the world was as rich and knowledge as complex as commonsense realism, the intellectual justification for which we have just traced back to the Sophists.

The 20^th century has been dominated by bloody struggles growing out of beliefs believed to be grounded in supposedly universally valid and binding standards. Interrelated ideas of social Darwinism, dog-eat-dog capitalism, and racism were derived by their adherents from widely accepted 19^th century theories in biology, economics, and psychology. Similarly, Marxism was derived from economics and its elaboration as 'scientific' socialism attempted to ground it in other fields as well. Science was supposed to do away with religious dogmatism and superstition and the two millennia of conflict arising therefrom, but it has only seemed to make matters worse.

This recent history has created considerable backlash against the dual hegemonies of science and religion. Nietzsche announced not only the death of God, but of all restraint upon freedom of interpretation. Neither God nor any other possible source of universal natural law, exists to restrain individual persons or groups from measuring truth to their perceived advantage. Thus the now popular assertion that the science and religion of the most obscure tribe are as true as are those of modern Europe--'true' having only relative meaning.

Developments leading up to ancient and modern Sophism had some similarities. Both were preceded by revolutionary advances, one in ancient natural philosophy, the other in modern science. The societies producing both did so during periods of great economic and political expansion--conditions that demanded correspondingly greater levels of social sophistication. Both found that neither natural philosophy nor science had provided satisfactory guidance towards achieving these goals.

Although we now look back upon the first bloom of natural philosophy with wonder and admiration, the Greeks saw their achievements somewhat differently. Natural philosophy attempted to emulate mathematics in the certainty of its results. While the Pythagoreans began the reduction of geometry to its axioms, Parmenides similarly attempted to state axioms of nature and draw strictly logical conclusions from them. But his efforts failed, and no certain philosophy of nature emerged from two centuries of effort. It became clear that natural philosophy had as yet not provided a basis for development of social and moral philosophy.

Was this because it could not in principle or because it was as yet unprepared to do so? This same question faces us today. The Sophistic answer was that it was impossible in principle. An alternative possibility was investigated by Socrates who did not abandon the vision of a philosophy going beyond relative truth and the goal of personal advantage. What is most important about Socrates from the viewpoint of the development of the scientific worldview was how he attempted to achieve that vision.

Socrates agreed with the Sophists that Man is the measure of all thing refers to immediate sensual perceptions, but disagreed with them concerning the judgements derived from perceptions. Sophists maintained that someone's judgement might be poor not because it was untrue, but only because it was not good for that person. They taught the path not to (a non-existent) truth, but to what was good for each of us. Socrates sought not this relative good but The Good. The latter was an objective reality.

How are we to gain knowledge of The Good? The search was based on the assumption that knowledge of the Good is already within each one of us, and that only clear thinking is necessary in order that we perceive it. The validity of this assumption is certainly open to question but is irrelevant to the question of how this inner knowledge is to be discovered.

Although our judgements may be faulty and unwise they are usually clearly felt and easily accessible to investigation. Socrates was therefore able to use our ethical judgements as data for an analysis ethics. He attempted to construct a science on the basis of this data using a process called dialectic as his scientific. It worked as follows.

Euthyphro feels he has a clear understanding of piety. Socrates asks him what it is. Euthyphro responds with instances of pious behavior. Socrates points out that instances do not suffice:

Thus he extracts a definition. After making sure that Euthyphro also clearly feels that one cannot be simultaneously pious and impious, Socrates points out that this is in contradiction to the fact, previously agreed upon by Euthyphro, that the gods do often disagree amongst themselves about what pleases them. Thus the proposed definition fails.

In another dialogue, Meno feels he has a clear understanding of virtue. Pressed to define virtue rather than give mere instances of it, he states that virtue is the ability to rule justly and wisely. Socrates then points out one would deduce from this that a virtuous slave should rule wisely, and both agree that by this test, the definition fails. Similarly, Polemarchus, in the Republic, defines justice as giving every man his due, but when its consequences are deduced by Socrates, this definition is found to be vague and inadequate.

The simplicity of these dialectic excursions hides their importance. Socrates elicits individual opinions--is this or that pious, virtuous, or just--that serve as data. He then has each subject propose a 'law' to explain the data; the law is the definition. For just as law in the natural sciences describes all the data points in its domain as instances of itself, so also are individuals' opinions supposed to be instances of their definitions. Definitions are theoretical hypotheses whose validity is, or at least should be, continually tested by comparison with new data.

Meno's hypothesis concerning virtue was tested with the case of children and slaves. If virtue is as hypothesized, and if there are virtuous children and slaves, then there are children and slaves who rule justly and wisely. Similarly, a woman who does not rule, cannot be virtuous. Given such deductions, Meno was convinced that his first hypothesis failed : the data,--his experience,--did not fit his theory. This method, hypothesis conceived on the basis of data followed by the testing of deductions, is basic to both dialectic and modern science.

Socrates acts like a scientist in these investigations also in other respects. He implores his partners in dialogue to answer honestly. Although his tone is often ironic, at the same time, at another level, he is quite serious. They are not to think of dialectic as an argument that one wins and another loses (they are not to engage in eristic), but are to engage in a mutual search for understanding. And in a similar scientific spirit, more often than not, Socrates ends a dialogue without having reached a definite conclusion. Each dialogue, just as each effort in science, does not inevitably lead to a grand solution.

True understanding of a concept comes via definition rather than by multiplication of instances. It is demonstrated by application. To rationally and objectively determine when something is an instance of a concept, we must be able to deduce the instance from the definition. To reason with a concept, it must be defined--in the language of Socrates and Plato, it must become a form, by being defined in terms of other forms,--just as only a formula containing or defining a mathematical or physical quantity allows it to be used in mathematical reasoning.

Socrates realized that although conceptions are opinion, qua data, they are certain: we are normally not uncertain about what they are. Moreover, they are obtainable just for the asking, whereas data from nature (aside from astronomy) is very hard to gather with certainty. Data gathering from nature required the invention of experiment two thousand years after Socrates to become available. In order to obtain the data necessary in his attempt to analyze an individual's ethics, Socrates did not need experiment, but only skill at eliciting honest opinion.

Dialectic is one-on-one; it does not deal with the statistical uncertainty encountered in the study of the distributions of opinions within a group. Its personal nature turns dialectic into a therapeutic as well as an investigative technique. It reveals, and therefore opens the way to heal ordinarily hidden breaks and inconsistencies in the structure of an individual's thinking. But mental structures, like physiological ones, are densely woven systems that connect to a person's whole psychology and culture. Their complexity precludes--certainly for the forseeable future-- their complete understanding. Only initial steps could be attempted by Socrates. Local connections between concepts could be uncovered, tested, and repaired, but a complete theory was, and still is, not feasible. Because of this, the therapeutic role of dialectic, and of much of philosophy,--its ability to promote the health and vigor of individual thought structures,--overshadows in importance and service to humanity any of its particular theoretical structures .

The use of hypothesis and deduction by both dialectic and science is not by chance but by necessity, for this method is the only practical way to create a logically consistent theory based on and describing phenomena. When Aristotle praised Socrates for having introduced the method of induction he referred to this broad idea and not to the narrower meaning now given this word. The latter has been described using the example of the person who, having bitten into many green apples, and having found them all to be sour, infers that all green apples are sour. Although it is true that this is an example of induction, it is of the weakest possible type, and thinking of it as typical is a misinterpretation that has long been responsible for a bleak view of science and the scientist. It has given the impression that scientists mindlessly--using no presuppositions or theoretical guidance --collect huge data sets, and then are somehow driven by them into forming classifications: very simple generalizations such as the inclusion of green apples in the class of sour tasting foods. This simplistic conception is relevant to those disciplines which have had to classify an extraordinary abundance of diverse phenomena and things (such as beetles) before being able to begin constructing real theories. Such an abundance is characteristic of life, and therefore the life sciences rather than of the physical sciences.

The scientific method of hypothesis and deduction is nothing but our natural method of thought, consciously realized and writ large. Despite being driven to it through necessity, it was to Socrates' credit that he contributed greatly towards this method's conscious realization especially by systematizing it through dialectic .