it sure has been a while since i last did this… i have been quite busy – whenever im not at work, eating, or out and about , i am busy consuming the infinite fountain of wisdom some call “instagram reels”. the world could use some innovation in the year of 2025 – we can start by replacing the nonsensical gibberish of lorem ipsum with relatable idioms like “lirili larila”, “bombardiro crocodillo”, “bombombini gusini”, and “tralalero tralala”
with yapping out of the way, rui mistook the quotations in the last episode (which were almost all of it) as mine own writing and thought i had suddenly become a man of sophisticated eloquence, but alas, as i have mentioned, he was gravely mistaken. i do find myself rewording way too often though while writing these blogs, perhaps i am conscious of the fact that i am bad at english. thats kinda inauthentic tho innit, ill try to not do that hopefully and just stream-of-consciousness away. oh yea also there was too much quoting and not enough of my own writing, ill try to avoid that too this time
the presocratic philosophers
thales
thales is the “first person we definitely know of who wondered about the nature and origins of the universe”, hence his title of “the father of philosophy”. grayling claims there must have been thousands of citizens of the flourishing civilizations that were before thales who pondered the same philosophical questions. while that is believable, i have never had the urge think about these things – is it because ive been indoctrinated with the big bang theory, the book of genesis, 盘古开天辟地, etc.? a curse of knowledge of sorts? while not reading this book on the history of philosophy, i thought about whether reading this book is actually limiting myself from creating my own philosophy, but it would be embarrassing to find out whatever idea i crafted myself ended up being 1500 years out of date
one of the chief interests of the presocratics was the question of the nature and source of the world, and thales’ theory was that the arche, “that of which all existing things are composed and that from which they originally come to be and that into which they finally perish”, of the cosmos is water. it sounds naive now that we know water consists of 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom and is most definitely not the arche of anything, but i find knowing that as a fact to be kinda boring and unintriguing – the box with the cat is best left sealed shut, to leave room for guessing. i guess its the same when it comes to whether or not i should text my north star – she may or may not hate my guts, but id rather be kept on the edge than to find out, but, alas, i digress, egregiously
grayling tells us that aristotle tells us that he interpreted thales as having held that “soul” (anima) is what causes motion – that things that move have little souls in them i guess. a magnet has a soul because it moves iron, and thales supposed that all things are full of gods. it was pretty foreign to me the use of the term of “god” here, probably because of all the christian influence which deeply indoctrinated me with the idea that “god” is a singular, omnipotent, omnipresent, human-like figure. if i give it some more thought it becomes clear that it is used here akin to “灵” and perhaps “kami”. grayling proposes that this theory came to be because explanations for motion and change were few back then, and the “one thing available for an explanation of how things can move or change was an analogy with one’s own human experience of agency” – that the stone made a splash in the pool because i threw it, so the same mechanism of agency must be driving other motions
anaximander
anaximander had some crazy theories – crazy as in theyre crazy accurate – humans came originally from fish, and the sun is pure fire and not smaller than earth. he did say we should not eat fish, on the grounds that they are our kin, and got burned by grayling who said evolution tells us all living things are kin so on his view we should not eat anything 💀
anaximander’s most distinctive thesis is that the arche is apeiron, “the infinite” or “indefinite”, “that from which everything comes into being and into which everything finally reverts”, smth smth, basically disturbing and restoring the “balance”. aristotle explains that he chose the infinite to be the principle of things because it “can have no other purpose than to be a principle, and can itself have no principle” and therefore “cannot derive from anything more fundamental than itself”. this kinda reminds me of an empty set in set theory, or the unit type in type theory.
aristotle also remarks that infinity is attractive since in infinity there is no difference between being possible and being actual, and that “generation and destruction will come to an end unless there is something infinite from which what comes into being is subtracted”
anaximenes
anaximenes agreed that the arche is apeiron but that it is not indefinite but material – it is aer, supposedly loosely translated as “air”. “becoming finer, it turns to fire; when condensed, it comes to be wind, then cloud; and when further condensed, it becomes water, then earth, then stones, and the rest come to be from these”, and to think grayling said anaximander was the most imaginative of the ionians…
grayling praises anaximenes for his attempts to make sense of observation in a sysmatic and inclusive theory, but it does feel like a bit of overfitting
im never finishing this book at this pace…