Some think that the philosophy of mind only really starts as recently as Ryle in 1948. Others say that Descartes ushered in the philosophy of mind and modern philosophy at the same time, with the publication of Meditations in 1641. In an exercise in futile overkill, I’m looking for talk of the mental as far back as possible in the West, and I found myself considering Homeric poems, which some say only began to coalesce between the late 9th and early 8th century BCE. There’s talk there of ’soul’ (I don’t have Greek so I can’t really help here) as something risked during battle, something that goes howling off to the underworld at death. I suspect that the ancient author holds to some version of psychophysical supervenience.
No I don’t. In a moment of clarity this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that I don’t really know what the hell the Pre-Socratics are talking about. Does anyone? Even Aristotle has trouble with them. Worse, maybe we talk ourselves into believing some comfortable narrative which has little to do with the text that we’ve got. We say that Thales thinks all is water, that he was the first to attempt non-mythological explanations of natural phenomena. Some call him the first scientist. Well, no or at least not so fast. Of course, nothing he wrote survives. It’s possible that all we really have is this: a few intriguing lines from Plato, Aristotle and the musings of even later writers. He doesn’t say all is water, not exactly, anyway. It’s quite complicated. Some of it feels like Chinese whispers.
Leave to one side the question of what Thales really thought. Take the testimony we have as a good guide. Can we genuinely throw cognitive ropes from our own conception of consicousness all the way back to Thales? Can we engage with someone, understand someone who might have thought that magnets have souls and that all things are full of gods?
Well let me ask this as a way of creating focus:
What do we mean by “philosophy of mind?” Philosophy that has as it’s specific object cognition? Consciousness? Experience? I would really like to know how anyone gets away with calling Ryle the beginning of philosphy of mind as opposed to say…Brentano. Not saying Brentano was the first either.
Well I think we can have some insight into some of the presocratics like Heraclitus and Parmenides, because we have some of their writings, and they left long legacies. But for people like Thales and Anixamander and the like…. We only have testimony. Which isn’t to say that its bad… but we have to accept that its not their words.
The Illiad and the Odyssey do indeed talk of “phren,” “thumos” and “noos.” I recommend Bruno Snell’s “The Discovery of the Mind” as a place to start, if you’re really interested. Although I have to say that Snell could have done a better job citing his sources and explaining his reasoning. Nonetheless, it’s a good place to start.
“Can we genuinely throw cognitive ropes from our own conception of consicousness[sic] all the way back to Thales? Can we engage with someone, understand someone who might have thought that magnets have souls and that all things are full of gods?”
Yes, and yes.
We can certainly “throw cognitive ropes” back to Thales and Homer. We just have to remember that, just because a word is translated as “spirit” or “thought” doesn’t mean the original “psuche” and “noos” had the same connotations. Therefore, “spirit” is not really an adequate translation of “psuche.” Once we learn to speak their language and understand them on their own terms, the ancients have much to tell us.
An example found in Homer which I find intriguing is the use of the word “thumos” when Odysseus is in the Cyclops’ cave. “Thumos” is usually associated with the “soul” of an animal, such as a lion, but it is also used of body parts of men. On the battlefield, when an arm is severed it’s “thumos” leaves it. Anyway, at first, Odysseus a “thumos” to attack the Cyclops, after he sees his men being eaten alive. Then he has another “thumos” which suppress the first, this is why he shows restraint and waits for the Cyclops to fall asleep before gauging his eye out.
This shows that as far back as Homer the Greeks were dealing with issues related to decision making and the function of what we would call “the soul” “spirit” or “mind.” But the various functions we associate with “mind” were thought of as several entities that are sometimes used interchangeably.
Faust, I think the Ryle-folk are keen on playing up his departure from RD (although most ignore the fact that Ryle goes all behaviourist on us, which isn’t a mind-friendly thing to do).
Ancient Phil Guy, more please. I do know that there are ways in (and I find the translator’s art fascinating), but I do wonder about whether or not some of it is just beyond us. Do you have a take on the ‘all things are full of gods’ bit? Aristotle has a stab at explaining it, and I’m not sure any of us will do much better.
Two points: First, whether we are dealing with a thinker whose writings reached us intact, such as Plato, or with another about whom we only hear indirectly and very sparingly, as is the case with Thales, we have to acknowledge that our interpretation is OUR interpretation. Secondly, I don’t find Thatles’ saying that all things are full of gods odd or that it contradicts his saying that all things are water. The substance of all things may be water but there must be an inner something in that water that makes it do all the amazing things it does. For Plato the soul was the self-moving principle and I suppose Thales had some such notion. An object that is all object cannot move itself. I think this is an insight that our science-ridden minds have lost sight of.
If we were to look at the history of philosophy world wide rather than just the Greek then the Upanishads of the Vedic tradition must be first in the consideration of the nature of consciousness. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad estimated to have been written ca. 10th. 5th. Century B.C. has in it a dialogue between the Emperor Janaka and the sage Yajnavalkya in which they discuss the source of consciousness (Brh.Up.IV.iii.1 pass). They discuss the states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep and trace the persistence of the sense of self and the awareness/consciousness that goes with it. Interestingly the state of Deep Sleep is not without self-awareness as there is a quasi-memory of it according to them. You wake up in the morning after a deep dreamless sleep knowing that you have had a dreamless sleep. Is this an inference or is it immediate knowledge?
D.R. - I agree with a lot of that, and what you say is part of what we all say…but I still have trouble with it. You say (and I say and everyone else says) that Thales thought everything is water. But none of the fragments have him saying that. They attribute the thought that ‘water is the first principle of all things’, whatever that means. When you read Aristotle reporting it, he tries to explain it with a few examples…’getting the idea, I suppose, because…’ which suggests to me that even he is having some trouble expressing what Thales et al were on about.
I don’t mean to make a lot of this, but I’m not sure we get the presocs at all. Or at least we don’t get much of them. Can we, really, without distorting them into our own way of thinking? (Maybe that’s how you understand anything alien, come to think of it.) But we seem to fit them into the story of philosophy anyway with a comfy gloss that’s not quite right.
Michael, the Upanishads are all Greek to me.
“Do you have a take on the ‘all things are full of gods’ bit?”
I have several takes. First of all, we don’t know if this is something that Thales even said, none of his words actually survive. That said, we can not just ignore the fact that he supposedly said this or that and that he supposedly predicted or explained an eclipse. There is a definite trend emerging amongst scholars of ancient philosophy in which Thales and Pythagoras are marginalized because we don’t actually have “fragments” of there ideas. Anaximander’s fragment is generally regarded as the oldest of the extant pre-Socratic fragments. We should also remember that, according to mainstream Greek theology at the time, Gods were thought to be in pretty much all things. For example, the North Wind was a god (Boreas), Revenge/Vengence(s) was a/were goddesses (Nemesis/The Erinyes), the Earth was a goddess (Gaia), the Ocean (Okeanus), etc. Then there is the story of Prometheus (fore-thought) and Epimetheus (after-thought) whose story can be found in Hesiod. Thales’ supposed statement that gods were in all things, sounds mystical to us, but it might not have been as novel as we believe when it was first heard by the ancients. On the other hand, it was deemed worthy enough to record, so I don’t think it was a common-place idea. Regarding Plato and Aristotle, by the time they started recording what their predecessors had said I tend to think that much of the material had already been lost. Take Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things…,” this is pretty much the only fragment we have from Protagoras, yet he was an adviser to Pericles. However, Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus and others all know this one liner. Like Thales’ statement, we don’t really know what it means, and it doesn’t seem like Plato or Aristotle did either (since Plato interprets it differently in different dialogues).
Regarding what the ancients thought, I think it is helpful to look at the extant plays, poems, songs, histories and other writings in addition to the “fragments” of the presocratics.
“Aristotle has a stab at explaining it, and I’m not sure any of us will do much better.”
Much of Aristotle’s treatment of his predecessors is shallow and cursory, so if it was, for example, his interpretation of the Odyssey or of Plato’s “forms,” I would have to disagree. But since we have so little to help us access his interpretation of Thales, it’s hard to disagree with him there.
> I recommend Bruno Snell’s “The Discovery of the Mind” as a place to start, if you’re really interested.
Bah! Too boring and milquetoast!
If you want a hardcore argument against understanding people from that far back, you can’t go wrong with Jaynes’s _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_.
It’s boring and milquetoast for the same reason that it’s a better resource than Jayne’s work: Snell is a classical philologist. When it comes to ancient philosophy, philologists are our friends (up to a point).
There is the repeated thought that soul or something mental is diffused throughout the whole universe or actuates things or explains movement. I can line the words up, I just can’t get them to make sense.
I was talking about this with a friend in the pub, and he’s taken not by talk of souls, but by the thought that everything is FULL of gods, i.e. everything is just jam-packed, stuffed with gods.
Thanks for the references.
I don’t know if this will count as just the same problem over again, but Malebranche in the seventeenth century argued that, in fact, anyone who believes in causal dispositions, powers, capabilities, abilities, whatever of that sort, is in fact not saying anything other than people like Thales (although he doesn’t mention Thales in particular; he uses the example of Roman paganism); they are doing basically the same thing, just not calling them gods. Hume actually mentions this in passing in Section VII Part I, which is heavily influenced by Malebranche. So one way in would be to go a Malebranche route and say, OK, perhaps the view that all things are full of gods seems a little odd — we don’t talk about gods that way. But look at it a different way and you can be struck by how some of us, using different words, do exactly the same sort of thing as Thales was doing in saying that things were full of gods.
Sorry, I should have said, “Section VII Part I of the ECHU”.
All things are full of hidden causal powers…
Could he have meant- all things are made of energy?