Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers
CHAPTER 2
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS
Let's begin this chapter -- the title of which simply replaces "Mythology" with "Philosophers," but
it's still Greek -- with a summary of our journey to this point. We embarked into a shadowy
underworld of murky and ill-defined rivers destined for perhaps nowhere. And as we know from
Greek myth, the gods who rule such things can be rather capricious. An inauspicious start.
But there are lanterns ahead!
The Greeks' pivotal contribution to Western civilization was not the family of remembered deities.
Nor was it the yet-retold epic tales of human fete. The greatest contribution was that of a natural
philosophy, by which we mean the scholarly discipline that in ancient and medieval times pursued
an orderly investigation of our physical world. The field today is called “science,” as
contemporary philosophers have come to be seen -- perhaps incorrectly, but we're talking about
public perception -- as contemplators of the intangible.
The intellectual challenge in Hellenist times was that of recognizing the patterns. As contrasted in
the Introduction, whether such determination is "scientific" or "superstitious" can only be judged
by one who knows reality. Most of us today have an inviolate, physically-based bias in the
matter, of course, but we’ll not impose our predilections on those 2,000 years before us.
We will draw most of this chapter's illustrations from Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle
(1493), the German reference of its time regarding matters classical. While we rather doubt that
the ancient Greeks dressed as Teutonic burgomasters, the drawings serve a larger point, a
theme we will again and again encounter in our journey. As cultural creatures, we're forever
regarbing past beliefs.
Born in Miletus (now part of Turkey), our first three Hellenist philosophers were Milesians, the
etymological source of “millers.” It's doubtful that these three ground grain, however, as they
weren't slaves.
Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC) is best remembered for his prognosis of
a solar eclipse. Likely having traveled to Egypt where eclipses were
long chronicled and observing that a year contains 365, not 360, days
probably accounted for his accuracy.
Thales was a monist, one believing that all substance is derived from a
single primordial matter. To Thales, the world was water, the only
substance having solid, liquid and gaseous form. Moreover,
nourishment for both plants and animals is moist. Water is thus an
image of a cosmic unifying power. (Note the qualification,
"image of," however. We'll see how Plato institutionalized the
concept of duality later in this chapter.)
Sidestepping religious tradition, Thales concentrated on natural processes. "All things
being full of gods," supported both religious lore and a physical River Oceanus flowing
unceasingly around the earth. Under the effect of winds, waters of the seas were thrust towards
the interior, elevating the pressure within and causing underground rivers to erupt through
earthquake in the earth's skin.
Hydrologists think of Thales as the water-philosopher, but in larger picture, it was this philosopher
who argued that for every observable effect, there is a physical cause. The term "physical" marks
the onset of what we know today as "science."
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