FEW REMARKABLE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS OF 6TH CENTURY BC

 

    HERACLITUS: He is from the Ionian city of EPHESUS and was born in 535 BC. He believed that everything changes continuously and all things are in a state of flux. He also said that you cannot bathe in a river twice because by that time the river changes too.

Heraclitus said, there is nothing everlasting in the Universe and everything is in a state of FLUX. He was born as an Aristocrat and therefore detested Democracy. He claimed that he discovered something that no other philosopher before him did and said that the Universe evolved from FIRE.

He said that everything in the Universe is evolving and constantly turning into another thing. He believed that all things have dyads in nature. 

     PARAMENIDES: He was born in the Greek city of Elea in Italy in 540 BC. He is an interesting character and his philosophy is totally opposite to that of Heraclitus who said everything is in a state of Flux. Nay said this guy and made the theory of Parmenides stand on its head. He said that nothing changes in the Universe and it is an illusion to think that there is any change at all.

Like Socrates before him Parmenides too had disciples and disciples of disciples and is known as the Eleatic school. The greatest disciple of this guy is Zeno who is the founder of Dialectics.

Whatever is there will never change. It has existence. It is everlasting, indivisible, homogeneous, uniform, and motionless and does not change.

Then, what is all this change, differences, plurality, birth, death etc.? Parmenides says like our Sankara that all those are our imagination. There is no sensible world and it is only an appearance. 

No one created something that exists. Neither can anyone destroy it. It is complete, infinite, and motionless. One can never say that it existed before or will exist in future, because it is there at present. It exists as a whole, inseparable and continuous. It is motionless and stands still at one place. It exists in itself.

Parmenides said that motion is impossible. Does motion not mean an object going to a place where it is not present? Since there is no place that it does not exist, motion is impossible. 

     ZENO: He was born in Elea in 490 BC. Dialectics is the art of accepting an argument and then by logic try to find paradoxes in the argument to counter it. Zeno was the first philosopher top use Dialectics.

To support his guru Paramenides theory of no change, he narrated the famous 4 paradoxes which could only be answered in the modern day 2400 years after they were narrated. 

1^st Paradox: It is impossible to go from one place to another. For example if a person has to travel 100 meters first he has to travel 50 meters, before that 25 meters, before that 12.5 meters etc. infinitesimally. The time given to the person is finite whereas he has to cross an infinite number of divisions. This is impossible. 

2^nd Paradox: Remember the story of Achilles and the tortoise? Zeno was the first person to narrate this. In a hundred meters race the tortoise was kept 10 meters ahead of Achilles. By logic Achilles should easily cross the tortoise. But for this first he has to cross 10 meters. By this time the tortoise would have gone some distance. Again Achilles will have to cross that additional distance. In the meantime the tortoise would have gone a little ahead again. Like this an infinite number of divisions had to be crossed by Achilles in a finite amount of time, which is impossible.

3^rd Paradox: At any single indivisible instant in time, a flying arrow occupies a space equal to it and is at rest. If time is composed of these static instants, and the arrow does not move during any single instant, then motion cannot happen at all.

4^th Paradox: This involves objects moving past each other in a stadium at different speeds, creating logical contradictions regarding relative speeds and the assumption that time is composed of indivisible minimum units.