Week Four

Heraclitus and Parmenides, Philosophical Fragments

What is the relation between thinking and being?

What is rationality?

What is the relation between self and nature?

The history of Greece after the fall of the Mycenean civilization goes from the Dark Ages to the Archaic and Classical periods. The Archaic might be understood as running from the foundation of the Olympic Games in 776 B.C. to the second Persian invasion of Greece (480-479 B.C.) Great spiritual forces were massing in this time, which would effloresce in the classical age. Presumably Homer’s life coincides with renewed Greek expansion into settlements along the Black Sea littoral and throughout the Mediterranean world—except for the western North African coast under the hegemony of Carthage, a Phoenician settlement. The Phoenicians and Greeks had competed for trade, but the conquest of the original Phoenician city-states by the Assyrians during the 700s B.C. left the field open for the Greeks. Increasing population levels forced migrations out of the mountain-bound (and therefore agriculturally constrained) city-states of the Greek mainland. This process of Hellenization generated a cosmopolitan dynamic (including a more direct and intimate contact with the wisdom of the ancient Near East) which catalyzed new breakthroughs for humanity, none more significant than the emergence of philosophy. Several factors are relevant: the new alphabetic literacy, trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, communication between widely dispersed independent (and often increasingly democratic) Greek poleis.

Philosophy arose in Ionia, a section of the western Anatolian coast settled by Ionians (one of the four major tribes thought to constitute the Greek people) which had belonged to the Hittite Empire (before its collapse in the late Bronze Age) and then the Lydians before Cyrus the Great made it part of his Achaemenid Persian Empire around 546 B.C. Thales of Miletus is considered the first philosopher, flourishing perhaps around 585 B.C. Miletus was one of the most important commercial cities of the Greek world. Perhaps flourishing around 500 B.C., Heraclitus came from Ephesus, another Ionian city, after its Persian subjugation. Parmenides seems to belong to the same time as Heraclitus (it is not clear whether one was responding to the other), though he was a native of Elea in Magna Graecia, the Roman name for the Greek-settled coastal areas of southern Italy, including Sicily.

- David Franks