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Lesson 1.4: Magma
14 Plays3 months ago
Topics discussed:
- A brief synopsis of the views of Parmenides
- Anaxagoras' notions of an "original mixture" and Mind (an early version of the laws of nature)
- Empedocles' theories of Love and Strife
- The sociological factors behind intellectual progress
- Empedocles' defense of universal ethical principles
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Transcript
Philosophers and Persian Expansion
00:00:02
Speaker
In the last lesson, we looked at the thought of Xenophanes and Heraclitus, and these are two philosophers who were greatly affected by the advance of the Persian Empire into Greek territories. In fact, if you recall, Xenophanes actually had to leave his hometown of Caliphon, which is in modern-day Turkey, and ended up in southern Italy.
Parmenides' Philosophy
00:00:32
Speaker
The philosopher we're going to begin with today, Parmenides, was also from southern Italy. In fact, he was born in southern Italy. He was not an exile like Xenophanes, and perhaps this is a good time to remind you that there were Greek colonies all around the Mediterranean Sea. I think we often just think of the Greeks as being, you know, in Greece, but they had settlements in Spain, in modern-day France, in Egypt,
00:01:05
Speaker
That's all in the West. And in the East, they were in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Turkey. Of course, none of these were political entities yet. Everything was fragmented because of the collapse of the Bronze Age. But there were settlements all over the place. So when you think of the Greeks, you really can't confine them to the Greek mainland. They were all over the place. And so Greeks were being born everywhere, including, of course, southern Italy. And and that's where Parmenides is from.
00:01:42
Speaker
Parmenides is a very, well, I'll just say it bluntly, sort of unbelievable philosopher. That is to say that it is really hard to accept what he says because it goes so contrary to our everyday experiences, or at least that's the case for me. So I'll be upfront with you about that.
00:02:06
Speaker
However, he is crucial to understanding later philosophers. It just turned out to be the case that many of the philosophers that we will cover from here on out will have in some way some response to Parmenides, right? And that begins with the two other philosophy people will cover in this very lesson. So I want to begin by giving you a little bit of context about what Parmenides was all about, and then we'll go ahead and look at the main philosophers we'll be covering for the day.
00:02:36
Speaker
The first thing we should say perhaps is that Parmenides was as much shaman and mystic as he was a philosopher. So he will have some philosophical positions to advance and he will even have students who defend his views.
00:02:54
Speaker
But that's only part of his overall persona. He really is a mystic who tries to find ways to communicate with the divine.
Zeno's Paradoxes and Monism
00:03:04
Speaker
And that seems to be a big part of who he is. Apparently, he would lock himself in in a cave to attempt to communicate with the divine. And if you ask me, that's pretty shamanistic.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so it is actually quite difficult to disentangle his shamanistic views about communicating with the divine from his philosophy, but we'll try to do so and just focus on the philosophical aspects that he's trying to advance.
00:03:34
Speaker
When I present Parmenides' views, I'm going to go ahead and immediately make use of some of the arguments that we have for his overall picture of things that are provided by a student, Zeno. You have probably heard of Zeno's paradoxes, so those would be included along with my explanation of Parmenides.
00:03:56
Speaker
And I'm doing this because Parmenides' view is so utterly counterintuitive that it's difficult to you know actually go step by step and tell you what he believes without immediately providing you with some argument for that. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to start with his conclusion and then I'll sort of fill in the gaps you know afterward. But there is something so, and so weird about Parmenides' views. And and again, I have a hard time actually accepting it.
00:04:28
Speaker
Parmenides overall conclusion is that everything that you see in your everyday experiences is actually an illusion.
00:04:40
Speaker
the way that you conceive of the world where there's lots of different objects and they're moving around and you can you know divide them and they're changing, right? You grow old, you die, people are born. All of this is illusory. There is, in fact, actually only one thing in existence.
00:05:05
Speaker
There is just this one singularity. There are not many things, but just one thing. And they're not changing, they're unchanging. They're not moving. There actually is no way for anything to move, because there's only one thing.
00:05:21
Speaker
all is one, right? The name for this view is called Monism, that's the philosophical label, and I think it might be helpful to sort of juxtapose it with the Milesian worldview so you can see where Parmenides fits in.
00:05:40
Speaker
Remember, the Milesians were having this debate between being and becoming. They thought that the world that we see of our everyday experiences, that's the world of becoming. Things are moving, things are growing, things are dying, things are changing, you divide things, you put things together. That's the world of becoming, according to the Milesians, and that's all ultimately rooted in or comes from being.
00:06:08
Speaker
And the Milesians would disagree as to what this ultimate principle is, what being with a capital B is. Thales famously said it was water. ah Some other view is that it's air instead. But there's this basic distinction between being and becoming.
00:06:27
Speaker
Now, one way to understand Parmenides is to say, well, you know, you're having this trouble trying to figure out what's the relationship between being and becoming. You're saying, okay, well, maybe water is where everything derives from, maybe it's air.
00:06:44
Speaker
He says, I can get rid of that whole problem that you're having. Just get rid of the realm of becoming. Just forget about this idea that there are many things in existence and that they divide and you know become compounds and change and move. Just get rid of all of that. Everything is actually one. To put it in the Milesian jargon that we've been using, there is only being with a capital B.
00:07:14
Speaker
Now, how is it in the world that you can possibly defend this kind of view? Well, this is where Zeno's paradoxes might come in handy. Zeno was a student of Parmenides and he sought to defend his teacher's views. And he had actually many, many paradoxes. We don't seem to have all of them. We have a couple of though. And there's one that's very, very famous. It's about a tortoise and Achilles engaging in a foot race.
00:07:43
Speaker
And let me give you the basic gist of that and we'll talk about how it is supposed to be a defense of Parmenides views. So you have the tortoise and you have Achilles and they're going to do, you know, they're going to race. Let's see who wins. Obviously, Achilles is a mythic hero. He's very, very fast. If you're going to put money on this, you're probably going to bet on Achilles. But the tortoise has a head start.
00:08:12
Speaker
So the tortoise gets going, and after a predetermined amount of time, that's when Achilles will you know launch into his sprint. But here is what Zeno tells us. In order to catch up and overtake the tortoise, before reaching the tortoise, Achilles has to get halfway to the tortoise.
00:08:39
Speaker
And then once he's reached that point, he has to get halfway to the tortoise again. And then once he's reached that second halfway point, he has to get to the next middle distance between himself and the tortoise.
00:08:57
Speaker
And this, Zeno tells us, goes on indefinitely. Whenever he tries to finally overtake the tortoise, he first has to get halfway to the tortoise, and then halfway again, and then halfway again, such that he never actually reaches the tortoise. He can only grow incrementally closer to it, but never actually overtake it.
00:09:21
Speaker
Okay, what does this mean? Well, he's saying that even though it looks like the world has movement and change, it's actually an illusion. You think that eventually Achilles will move past the turtle, but that's an illusion. That's actually physically impossible, right? Because of the paradox that he just provided for you.
00:09:49
Speaker
You think there will be a change regarding who's ahead in the foot race, but that's also impossible because of the paradox he just gave you. So there's one example as to how it is that movement and change are impossible. And it also causes the problem for you know location and space and time and all kinds of different counterintuitive conclusions. What Zeno is trying to push you into accepting is that rather than accepting what our senses tell us, a world of different things with time and space and change and division, it's actually all just one thing. Another part of Parmenides' overall thought that's important is his distinction between what is and what is not. So if you want to think of these as, you know,
00:10:48
Speaker
What is is the set of all things that exist, and what is not is the set of all things that don't exist. That might be helpful, although Parmenides didn't strictly speaking mean it this way, but let's just go for it for now. Let's start with what is not, the set of all things that do not exist. Is that an empty set? Is there anything actually in that set?
00:11:15
Speaker
Well, the short answer is no, because try to think about what would go inside of that set. Well, it doesn't exist because it is what is not, right? So these things don't exist. They can't possibly be a part of a set because they're not a thing. All right, so what is not, that is non-existent by definition, basically. So that's not a thing. All that there is then is what is, the set of all things that exist.
00:11:45
Speaker
Where does this set of all things that exist come from? Well, it can't come from itself. That would be weird. Everything that already is in existence is already inside of the set. So the set can't come from itself.
00:12:03
Speaker
Moreover, Parmenides thinks that the set of all things that exist, that is the set of what is, was not created. So let's try to piece together why he thinks this. Obviously, it couldn't have come from what is not. We already talked about that. And obviously, it exists. That's, you know, fairly clear that things that exist exist. And it couldn't have come from itself.
00:12:33
Speaker
What's the only option left to us? Well, it must be the case that it has always existed, right? It didn't come from what is not. It didn't come from itself. It obviously exists. So it must have always existed.
00:12:50
Speaker
By the way, this is a good time to tell you that the Greeks kind of tended to think that something that is indivisible is eternal because divisibility, you know, being able to fall apart, that's what leads to things dying or disintegrating.
00:13:07
Speaker
So by definition, basically, something that is not divisible is necessarily eternal, right? So when Parmenides is coming to the conclusion that the set of everything that exists is eternal, that kind of just jives with Greek thought in general.
Anaxagoras and Scientific Inquiry
00:13:24
Speaker
Let me just give you an example here. Hopefully, it will help.
00:13:28
Speaker
As we all get older, you know, things just kind of start falling apart, you know, not only physically, but also mentally, right? We're not as sharp, we're a little more forgetful. We start to lose weight, we start thinning out, right? So the older you get, you just can't hold as much muscle anymore. And that's basically, you know, physical disintegration until you eventually die.
00:13:55
Speaker
The Greeks in general seem to associate then gradual disintegration with being finite, with being capable of you know ultimately not existing anymore. In other words, the cause of something to stop existing is the fact that it gradually falls apart.
00:14:17
Speaker
And so this association between you know things falling apart and things eventually dying leads to the implication that things that don't fall apart are eternal.
00:14:29
Speaker
And so once Parmenides is saying that the set of everything that exists is eternal, he's already suggesting that this thing, this what is, does not fall apart. That suggests that it is indivisible. That's what makes it eternal. on And it is unchanging because it has no parts. It can't change.
00:14:51
Speaker
can't move. And so that's where Zeno's paradoxes come in and explain that what seems like movement, what seems like change in our everyday experiences is actually an illusion.
00:15:04
Speaker
So again, Parmenides' overall conclusion is that reality is singular. It has no parts. It is unchanging. And this is a a view called monism. It just is the case that there's only one thing in existence. It's just being with a capital B. As I've already mentioned many times already, I find this view unappealing in general.
00:15:33
Speaker
But there are many arguments in the history of philosophy where we kind of know the conclusion is false, but we have a hard time figuring out where exactly the reasoning goes awry. So this is perhaps a philosophical puzzle that we have to begin to deal with. And I encourage you that whenever you see an argument where you just gutterily disagree with the conclusion, try to map out the argument for that conclusion and kind of think about where it is that the reasoning goes wrong. That's a ah worthwhile intellectual exercise to kind of, you know, sharpen your philosophical skills. In any case, Parmenides will be responded to many times after this. He is a major influence on later philosophers. And we will actually see the very first response to Parmenides in this very lesson.
00:16:54
Speaker
So now we move on to the work of Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras, like some of the people that we've already covered, is from modern-day Turkey. He is from a town called Klatsomenai. I'm almost positive that I've mispronounced that. But that is north of Ephesus and Caliphon, where Heraclitus and Xenophonies are from. And that is also under the control of the Persian Empire.
00:17:26
Speaker
What is notable about Enaxagoras is that he is the first person to move to Athens. Out of all the people we've covered so far, he saw Athens as a place that was perhaps the next great intellectual hub. And this is in no small part because of the Persian takeover of the colonies where the first philosophers were from.
00:17:53
Speaker
So after this point in time, Athens will become a more important center of philosophical creativity. What do we know about Anaxagoras? Well, he was the prototypical wise man, right? If you wanted to have sort of a stereotype of a wise man, it was probably this guy. He was also considered an atheistic figure, seemed to have been very skeptical about the existence of the gods.
00:18:22
Speaker
And he seemed to have been preoccupied with observations of the natural world. He thought it was important to observe and make theories about nature, and that's what he spent his time doing. We also get some stories about how composed he was. He seemed to be imperturbable to a certain degree. Even when his son died, he kept his composure. He thought it was important to be strong for his family and for himself. And even when there were astounding astronomical events like an eclipse, he seemed to also have stayed calm, right? It was part of his mechanical worldview.
00:19:04
Speaker
So he said, well, this is not really that surprising. So he seems to be always pretty zen about whatever was happening. Here is his major philosophical contribution, the idea of the original mixture. So Anaxagoras definitely rejected Parmenides' view about a singularity that is indivisible and unchanging.
00:19:31
Speaker
Remember, he spent a lot of time studying the natural world and the natural world is just a world of change, of birth, of death, transformation. So he definitely rejected the view that Parmenides was trying to advance. And so what he does is he provides an alternative view. Anaxagoras suggested that the way the world got to how it is right now is through an original mixture.
00:20:01
Speaker
This original mixture was composed of various small particles,
00:20:09
Speaker
various small particles. You can already see that this is an important step forward in the overall history of our scientific worldview. These little small particles were actually too small to be seen by the naked eye,
00:20:31
Speaker
But they were what made everything up. In other words, every single thing in existence is just a compound that is made out of these tiny little particles. He believed that this original mixture was originally all bound up together, all really condensed in a way.
00:20:55
Speaker
and that there were many, many, many different types of particles inside of this brew. In fact, there was an infinite amount of types of particles inside this brew. And they were probably of many different sizes. So it's not too close to the modern view where there's a finite amount of fundamental particles. He thought it was an infinite number of things inside this brew.
00:21:24
Speaker
But what is similar to our modern view is that this original mixture was at one point all condensed, all together, and eventually it spread and everything that now exists is a product of this spread. In other words, everything that we see today is just some combination of all those different things that were a part of the original mixture.
00:21:52
Speaker
Now, I'm gonna tell you the two ideas that were absolutely shocking for the time period, but let me show you first how this is a response to Parmenides more directly before you forget what Parmenides was all about. Anaxagoras agrees with Parmenides that what is not can't exist, right? The set of all things that don't exist is an empty set. There's nothing in there, granted.
00:22:22
Speaker
But he also believed that you can divide things. In other words, when Parmenides says division and change and motion are an illusion, and Exagoras, through all his study of the natural world, says, no, you're absolutely wrong about that. It's pretty obvious that things change and decay and transform, et cetera, et cetera.
00:22:49
Speaker
So Anaxagoras tried to come up with a solution to this puzzle. And to do that, he had to solve Zeno's paradox. So Anaxagoras, like many of the thinkers we've covered before, was looking at the philosophers before his time and taking some of what they said, that which he accepted, and then rejecting some of it and putting in his own views in there.
00:23:15
Speaker
And so what he directly is going to respond to is Zeno's paradoxes. So I only covered one of those paradoxes, so we'll focus on that one. The way that the thought experiment with Achilles and the tortoise works is assuming that you can divide the distance between the tortoise and Achilles indefinitely, right? So every time that Achilles is running towards the tortoise, you have to get halfway there, and then halfway again, and then halfway again. And you can divide the the ground between them indefinitely. And so if you allow that, then it is the case, sure, that Achilles will never catch up to the tortoise.
00:24:02
Speaker
But what Anaxagoras says is that you actually can't divide the ground indefinitely. Because if you even try to do that, if you continuously divide and divide and divide, eventually you're going to create what is not. You're going to create something that is non-existent. And using Parmenides' own ideas against them, what is non-existent does not exist.
00:24:31
Speaker
And so an exact solution to the paradox is to say you can't divide things indefinitely. You can only divide until it is no longer perceivable. There's a limit, in other words, to how much you can divide something, whether it be the ground or time or distance or whatever.
00:24:55
Speaker
And now that he has this idea of dividing something until you can't see it anymore, that's where his original mixture comes back into the picture. All of the little particles, the tiny little particles that the original mixture is composed of, well, those are things you can't divide any further.
00:25:15
Speaker
So this brew of an infinite amount of particles essentially is a result of going with a lot of what Parmenides says, but rejecting some key aspects of it. In particular, this idea that division is impossible. And Exaggerate says, you can divide things. And then there's a stopping point. There's a limit to how far you can divide things.
00:25:41
Speaker
So that's how Anaxagoras' thought is a response to Parmenides. Now, let me harp on two of the main implications of his overall worldview and just how shocking they were for the time. To be honest, some people still reject at least one of these. And so you can only imagine how discombobulating this theory was in the ancient world.
00:26:11
Speaker
But here's one thing that Anaxagoras says that just probably blew the minds of people who heard it. Everything in the world, including humans, including humans, were made from this original mixture. In other words, humans were not handcrafted by the gods. They're not special. They're made out of the exact same stuff that everything else is made out of.
00:26:41
Speaker
Once you hear this idea expressed in the way that I just expressed it, you can see why Anaxagoras was considered an atheist. He essentially gave no role to the gods. Everything that we see is simply a product of the original mixture and just random chance. Okay, and here's another shocking idea for the time.
00:27:08
Speaker
there is no reason to believe there's not other worlds. In other words, once this original mixture started to disperse and things started to mix up and move around, eventually the world was made sure, but who's to say that other worlds weren't made? Other worlds with other intelligent life.
00:27:32
Speaker
And so Anaxagoras here is suggesting that we think we're the center of the universe, we're so very special, but there's probably other planets just like ours with people perhaps pondering these very same questions that we're pondering now. I should mention that Anaxagoras has some interesting ways for defending his views. My favorite one that we have and in a fragment by Anaxagoras is basically explaining how it is that digestion works. So recall that he's trying to convince you that everything you see is made out of the exact same stuff, and that includes you. And all this stuff came from the original mixture. So now consider eating bread. When you eat bread, it nourishes you.
00:28:26
Speaker
the nutrients inside of that bread become you know flesh or fortify your bones or whatever. I actually know very little about the physiology behind digestion, but let's move on here. Here's what Anaxagoras is saying.
00:28:44
Speaker
The reason that bread can nourish humans is because they're both made fundamentally out of the very same stuff. Sure, it's different combinations and proportions of this stuff, but it's at bottom the same kind of little tiny particles.
00:29:05
Speaker
And so when you need to put on some more muscle and you eat this bread, the bread disintegrates into the tiny particles of the original mixture and the right particles go to the right places to create your muscle.
00:29:22
Speaker
Now, on the one hand, this is an extremely primitive theory of how a digestion works, but notice how much better this is than Parmenides' view. If you accept Parmenides' view, you basically can't explain any digestion processes. It's all just an illusion, right? There is no such thing as change or division or whatever. So there is no explanation of digestion.
00:29:52
Speaker
But Anaxagoras is giving us something that begins to approach an explanation as to how it is a digestion works. And so that is support for his view that all of us ultimately come from some combination of little tiny particles that were all originally put together in the original mixture.
00:30:16
Speaker
Before we leave Anaxagoras, there are two other things I should mention about his views that we know about. The first has to do with mind. Mind here has a capital M, and Anaxagoras says that mind is responsible for the principles of movement of all the particles from the original mixture.
00:30:41
Speaker
What exactly does this mean? Well, here's the short answer. We have no idea. What some scholars think is that you can see this as an early version of the laws of nature. Now, this idea of the laws of nature took generations, literally centuries, to come about, but we can see Anaxagoras as making one of the first steps towards this theory of universal laws of nature.
00:31:12
Speaker
And he thought that this mind, mind with a capital M, sort of organizes the movements of the tiny particles from the original mixture um once they are dispersed. And the last thing that I'll discuss about Anaxagoras is his naturalistic explanations for the phenomena of the world. right This is part of the reason why people considered him an atheist and accused him of atheism because he would explain things like earthquakes
00:31:46
Speaker
and why the Nile River floods just in terms of natural causes. He did not invoke supernatural explanations. The gods, in other words, had nothing to do with it. Now, these naturalistic explanations might have not been exactly on point. For example, his explanation of earthquakes has to do with something called ether, and it's wrong, and there's really no point in going over it.
00:32:15
Speaker
um I guess i I will say something about his theory for why the Nile River floods. He said it had something to do with the melting of the snow from the mountains in Ethiopia.
00:32:29
Speaker
Now, this turned out to be actually wrong, but it's not an unreasonable suggestion. So again, Anaxagoras is taking some important steps towards a scientific way of inquiring into how the world works. And for that alone, he deserves credit.
Empedocles' Cosmology and Ethics
00:33:12
Speaker
Let's move on now to Empedocles. Now, there are so many similarities between Anaxagoras Empedocles that I'm gonna go ahead and skip the biography of Empedocles and put it in a little bit later, just because I don't want you to lose track of the ideas that come from Anaxagoras and how Empedocles built on them. So like Anaxagoras,
00:33:39
Speaker
Empedocles believed that observation of the world is important, right? Don't forget, Anaxagoras was essentially a natural philosopher, a scientist, very interested in understanding of the natural world. And like Anaxagoras, Empedocles also believed in developing theories.
00:34:00
Speaker
about the natural world. So recall that Anaxagoras gave us his original mixture. And this idea implies that everything that we see today, all humans included, came from the little tiny particles of this original mixture. More like Parmenides, Empedocles was also a magician and a shaman, a mystic, right? So it's a little bit of a combination of the two other people we've covered today.
00:34:31
Speaker
The main difference with Anaxagoras in particular, though, is the following. Anaxagoras believed that the separation of the original mixture, what we might call you know a little anachronistically the Big Bang, was a unique event. Anaxagoras thought the original mixture was all one thing originally, all blended together in a small point.
00:35:00
Speaker
And eventually it spread and that only happened once. Empedocles thinks it's actually cyclical. It keeps happening. So everything is together and then it spreads and then it comes back together and then it spreads and it goes on like that forever.
00:35:25
Speaker
Another thing that Empedocles disagrees with Anaxagoras about is that Anaxagoras thought there was an infinite number of things in the original mixture. There's all kinds of little different sizes and types of particles in this brew that everything came from. But Empedocles actually limits the number of types of particles, we might now call them elements, to only four things.
00:35:55
Speaker
It's just earth, water, fire, and air. So these are the four traditional elements and it's Empedocles who first gives them to us, right? Throughout much of the ancient world and through the ancient era, these are what what are accepted as the four, let's call them fundamental particles of reality.
00:36:23
Speaker
This is related to Parmenides' ideas. It's actually in direct opposition to Parmenides, much like Anaxagoras responded to Parmenides, so it does Empedocles. Empedocles says that these four elements are equally fundamental, right? So Parmenides says there's only one thing. Empedocles says, well, there's actually four fundamental things, and they're all equally important.
00:36:53
Speaker
The philosophical label for Empedocles' view is material pluralism, or sometimes just pluralism. And this is in opposition to Parmenides' monism. There's only one thing, right? So pluralism versus monism. Okay, so let's dive into Empedocles' views. And his big contribution is this idea of love and strife.
00:37:23
Speaker
Now, I'm going to explain what love and strife are, and then I'll explain to you why it's a big deal. Basically, there's two fundamental forces, right and we already kind of saw this in the work of Anaxagoras.
00:37:39
Speaker
He was saying that there's mind with a capital M that governs the flow of all the particles. And I asked you to think about it as an early version of the laws of nature. Well, Empedocles is going to build upon that. Love is the power of attraction and strife is basically a repellent. It separates things.
00:38:04
Speaker
Now, if I want to be really precise about what Empedocles was saying, love causes dissimilar things to come together and strife causes similar things to come together. But for our purposes, for now, just think of love as being an attracting force and strife being a repellent force separating things.
00:38:28
Speaker
And so it turns out that love and strife each have their eras. When love is at its strongest, everything is unified once again into the original mixture and Empedocles calls this sphere. So during this time period, think about the time period before the original mixture dispersed, everything is all condensed.
00:38:53
Speaker
Then, of course, strife begins to act upon this original mixture, and things begin to separate. And over time, you see everything that we see today getting made. The planets are made first, and then life ah arises in these many different worlds. This is because Empedocles, like Anaxagoras, believe that there's probably many different worlds, and eventually you get to where we are.
00:39:23
Speaker
But of course, Strife continues on until the four elements are completely separated from each other. That's the other end of the spectrum. We begin with everything together, and then Strife has its ah it's effect on everything, and at the maximum stage of Strife, the different elements are all separated from each other.
00:39:47
Speaker
Water is in one quadrant, two air in another, fire in another, and earth in the fourth. So this is why we say that strife causes similar things to come together. Basically all the earth all across the universe is pulled apart from everything else and it just becomes segregated into just this section of earth. The same thing with air and fire and water.
00:40:14
Speaker
And that's the basically the other end of the spectrum, the stage of the cycle when everything is the most separated. And then of course, love begins to act on this quadrant of four separate elements. And basically you see the whole cycle go in reverse. Everything comes together and you see the planets and people and all that. And eventually you get back to the original mixture. Everything goes back to being condensed into one brew.
00:40:49
Speaker
So before you scoff, maybe you're thinking, love, strife, what is this? I actually want you to think it in very anachronistic terms. I mean, you really honestly shouldn't think about it this way, but I think it'll help you understand. So we'll use this as a crutch and then we'll let go of it when we need to. But these are a little bit, now now i'm I'm really kind of being intellectually mischievous here, but these are a little bit.
00:41:17
Speaker
like the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. And basically in the Big Bang, everything is together. The Big Crunch is when after everything is spread to its you know maximum degree of spread, everything begins to come together once more. And you get back to something like what was the case before the Big Bang.
00:41:37
Speaker
Now, what I wanted to mention about that is, hey, that's not exactly what Empedically Just Saying, but think about the terms that we use here, big bang, big crunch. If you don't believe in the big crunch, you believe in the big freeze. That's when, basically, things get so separated that gravity can no longer act upon all the atoms of the universe. And basically, the universe just freezes to death.
00:42:02
Speaker
What I'm getting at here is that the labels being attached to these ideas are a little goofy, right? Big bang, big crunch, love, strife, but that doesn't diminish the ideas behind it. And what Empedocles was doing was you know very forward thinking. I mean, he was really trying to solve some of the problems that were around with regards to cosmogenesis and how the universe works and all that from all the people that came before him. And these are what seems like his honest attempt at trying to solve these paradoxes and problems and piece together all the loose strings of all the theories that have come before him. By the way, where are we in this process, this cycle between love and strife? Empedocles believes we are born in the era of increasing strife.
00:42:58
Speaker
That is, we are moving away from that stage where love was at its strongest and towards the stage where all the elements will be pulled apart. He also notes that this is a bad thing if you are born into this era. It's almost like a form of punishment.
00:43:20
Speaker
It's almost like you have some kind of sin, like an original sin almost, that you need to live through this era of strife to get some kind of atonement. He actually describes how we got to where we are. There was a period of utopia after the planets had been formed. There was basically perfect spirits roaming around, no bodies, like no pain, nothing like that.
00:43:46
Speaker
Plan is reformed, and something like God-like perfect spirits were the only inhabitants. But of course, strife continued to act upon the universe, continued to pull things apart. And so these spirits were reborn as humans now, and all that being human entails, that includes pain and death and all that. And that's us now.
00:44:12
Speaker
But of course, strife will continue to act upon the world, pulling the elements apart. And after some time, we're going to enter a period of what he calls the monsters and random disembodied limbs roaming around. I actually went and found the fragment where he says this, so you can get a ah feel for what he's trying to get at. Here is a quote from Empedocles. Here,
00:44:42
Speaker
Many heads sprang up without necks. Mere arms were wandering about without shoulders. And single eyes, lacking foreheads, roamed." Clearly, this is Empedocles in prophet mode telling us what's going to happen after our age. But the general idea here is that we are transitioning into an even worse period.
00:45:10
Speaker
And so, I don't know, sometimes when I think about this, you know, maybe Empedocles is onto something, it seems like things are getting worse. ah We are going to enter an age of strife. So, maybe you accept some of what Empedocles is prophesying here.
00:45:29
Speaker
Before we leave Empedocles' philosophical contributions, let me just reiterate a couple of things because they are very important for both Anaxagoras and Empedocles. So you can really kind of get a ah feel for their overall philosophical contributions.
00:45:49
Speaker
So both Anaxagoras and Empedocles believed that invisible entities, little particles, were the source of everything that we see.
00:46:00
Speaker
And they arrived at these views by wrestling with the arguments of Parmenides. There is just no way around this fact. It seems that they accepted some of what Parmenides says and rejected the other part. And out of that rejection, ah they developed these views that fit into their natural philosophy.
00:46:25
Speaker
What they are rejecting in particular, of course, is this view from Parmenides that division is an illusion, that it's actually impossible. And we talked about that with one of Zeno's paradoxes. A second thing that is important for understanding both Anaxagoras and Empedocles is that they really put forward front and center this idea that the creation of all things, including humans, right? Including humans, that's a massive deal, is made possible by these small little particles. And that the process behind all this is governed, at least in part, by chance. These are important ideas that only a generation later,
00:47:15
Speaker
are gonna make a major splash in Athens.
00:47:48
Speaker
Let's move now into the ethics portion of the lesson. And I want to do something a little bit different. It's definitely the case, by the way, that Empedocles has some very important ethical contributions that we can discuss.
00:48:06
Speaker
but there's something to be learned just from the context surrounding Empedocles' ideas. So I want to talk about this for a second, what we can learn from the situation in general. So I'm going to pull much of what I'm going to say right now from an important book by the sociologist Randall Collins, and the book is called Sociology of Philosophies. What I really like about Collins' book is that he's trying to figure out what are the social ingredients, the sociological factors that give rise to intellectual progress. And that is a fascinating area of inquiry. Basically, how do we make intellectual breakthroughs? that That's a cool thing to look into.
00:49:01
Speaker
And here's basically what Collins found. It turns out that intellectual progress happens when you stack up generations of debates between students and teachers, between rival schools, in other words. So what this means is you only get intellectual breakthroughs after a couple of generations of people arguing about the same idea. So a lot of us want to give credit to individual geniuses and say, well, you know, the breakthrough is all thanks to them. But Collins discovered that there are vertical connections across time between the people that make these breakthroughs and their teachers, and their teachers' teachers, and their teachers' teachers' teachers, right?
00:49:54
Speaker
So the way you get to something like Empedocles' ethical contributions is not by Empedocles alone, but by Empedocles wrestling with the ideas of Anaxagoras, and Anaxagoras wrestling with the ideas of Parmenides, and Parmenides wrestling with the ideas of the Milesians, right? It's these vertical stacks across time of thinkers that allow progress to happen.
00:50:22
Speaker
And so before I tell you what Empedocles contributed to the ethical conversation, let me tell you about all of the ethical notions that had already been developed by the time of Empedocles. So I have a list here, which I'm just gonna read off to you. The idea that the cosmos has some kind of intelligent governance, right? That the universe is intellectually or rationally organized.
00:50:49
Speaker
That actually, we do see it in Anaxagoras, but that can be found even in Anaximander, which is one of the Milesians. Here's another one, the idea that the governing principle of the cosmos can also be found in humans. This idea that the way that the universe is organized is the same way that our mind is organized. That goes back to Anaximenes, also one of the Milesians.
00:51:18
Speaker
The idea that the soul is made of the same stuff as the cosmos and engages in intelligent activity and the need for living well and contemplating. That idea goes back to Anaxagoras. So this idea that the stuff that makes up the universe is the same stuff that makes us, right? We just covered that in this lesson. That's from Anaxagoras.
00:51:41
Speaker
An idea that we have not yet covered because it comes from Pythagoras, ah but that is already around at the time of Empedocles, is this. The idea is that excellence comes by way of the virtues of organization and self-control. So according to Pythagoras and anyone that's a member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood,
00:52:03
Speaker
You need to engage in a certain aesthetic lifestyle. You need to exert self-control throughout your day and organize your life in the right way. And that's how you achieve excellence. That idea was already around by the time Pedicles came about.
00:52:20
Speaker
And here's one more that I found. The idea that the soul can be in a good or a bad condition, and that this impacts our way of thinking. That, of course, comes from Heraclitus, who believed that the best condition of the soul is when it's dry, so you shouldn't drink alcohol, you shouldn't engage in too much indulgence, you should try to control your passions, etc.
00:52:46
Speaker
So the fact that these ideas were around and the fact that Empedocles was familiar with them We might assume that's why we get the views that we get from Empedocles, which by the way, I still have it said, right? I will say them in a second. But I want you to understand this idea from the sociologist Randall Collins that it is through these vertical stacks of thinkers all connected to each other that we get breakthroughs. So I think just from that alone, we're already learning something.
00:53:19
Speaker
There's almost like a lesson from Empedocles' career that even before we hear anything he has to say about ethics, there's something already there to be learned. If we want progress, we have to perpetuate these, you know, intellectual vertical stacks, these chains of student-teacher relationships. That's not exactly the way school is organized right now.
00:53:48
Speaker
And maybe that's a problem. Maybe we would get more integration and more progress and more um breakthroughs and even more individual benefit and growth from education if we organize it in this way instead. So, you know, I wrote down a couple of things that I thought, does this imply that we should do this? In other words,
00:54:11
Speaker
Here are maybe some ideas that perhaps are a good thing to bring about given what we learned from Empedocles and all his precursors, right? So here's the first one. Should we have free education for everyone? Because if we have something like that, we can make sure that these chains will have many possible links onto the next generation.
00:54:35
Speaker
Right now, if people maybe are dissuaded from going into higher education because they don't want to incur all this debt, well, in that case, we're actually missing opportunities for possible links onto the next generation. So maybe we can increase our chances for having these nice, big, robust vertical stacks of thinkers by letting education be free for everyone.
00:55:01
Speaker
Perhaps we can make teaching and learning more lucrative, more demanding, more rational, right? So maybe we can reorganize how it is that we do classes so that we try to reinforce these vertical stacks of of learning and thinking and debates and all that. Here are some other ideas that might help us create vertical stacks of learning.
00:55:25
Speaker
Maybe we should do our best to expand the catchnet of human talent. In other words, right now, in society, not everyone is in the conditions who has to be able to maximally contribute to their society. For many people, even in rich countries like the United States,
00:55:44
Speaker
They are still plagued with things like neurotoxins, right? and Environmental pollution is actually reducing their IQ levels or their capacity to do well in school. Some students go to school without a nutritious breakfast, and we should not allow that to happen because without a good breakfast, you can't really learn.
00:56:07
Speaker
Maybe, now this is even more controversial, but maybe we should give students something called nootropics. Nootropics are different chemical compounds that perhaps might improve your capacity for thinking and your intelligence in general.
00:56:24
Speaker
So everything that I'm throwing out here, this is, you know, very controversial. I'm not saying it it will work for sure, but if intellectual progress is something that matters to us, then it seems like if we're going to take the example of Empedocles seriously and all the work that the Randall Collins has done,
00:56:46
Speaker
It seems like maybe reorganizing the way that we do education might be a good idea, at least to look into it a little bit, right? These ideas that I threw out there, these are just, you know, me shooting from the hip. I'm not sure if the sociology points to these actually do working out, but I'm throwing ideas out there because it seems to be the case that there is room for improvement in the way of redoing education.
00:57:15
Speaker
Okay, now that we got my two cents out of the way, let's look at Empedocles' ethical contributions. Two important ideas that are key to understanding why his ethical notions are kind of groundbreaking are the following.
00:57:32
Speaker
One, the soul is immortal. It's not the case that everyone believed this at the time, but certainly Empedocles seems to have believed it. And it has to do with his account of how the universe works in a cyclical fashion, going from an era of love to an era of strife and back again. Okay, so that's one thing. The second thing is that the soul undergoes what is sometimes called metempsychosis.
00:58:01
Speaker
Another way of saying this is reincarnation. So Empedocles believes that you are reborn time and time again as some different living thing. And the story that we told before, there is an era of utopia where everyone exists as a spirit.
00:58:21
Speaker
And then Strife continues to act upon us that we are reborn, right reincarnated as a human, and eventually we're going to be reincarnated as a monster because Strife will continue to act upon the world.
00:58:37
Speaker
Just as a quick sidebar, this idea of reincarnation is a radical break from the way that Homer thought about souls. If you recall, for Homer, when you die, you just sort of lose your life force. And this life force, what he called a suka, soul, goes to Hades and it still sort of exists.
00:59:00
Speaker
but its existence is as a shade. That's the word that is used, shade. So it's much weaker than it used to be. In any case, not only is this a radical departure from Homeric myth, but also believing in reincarnation is very, very rare. We can only find it in pre-Buddhist India at this point in time, and also in the Pythagorean Brotherhood.
00:59:31
Speaker
All right, that's the end of the sidebar. But finally, from these two ideas, Empedocles comes to a groundbreaking realization. So he says, you're not allowed to kill other creatures. And this is a universal law because these are very likely reincarnated human beings.
00:59:54
Speaker
Now you might be thinking to yourself, yeah, a lot of people say that killing is wrong, but in Empedocles' overall theory, killing any living thing is wrong. And this has the force of universal law.
01:00:11
Speaker
because of his way that he saw the cycles of the world, he realized that any living thing might at any point have been previously a human. And so killing creatures in general is wrong. This implies, of course, no murder. That's an obvious one, but also it implies that you should be a vegetarian, that you shouldn't eat living animals.
01:00:39
Speaker
And so, by endorsing this idea that killing other creatures is a universal law, that it is a consequence of the way that the universe works, Empedocles deserves credit here for essentially conceiving of the prohibition on killing as having the force of a universal ethical principle. And the reason why that's important is that right around this time period and a little bit afterwards,
01:01:10
Speaker
some people were pushing for something called relativism. And that's this idea that things aren't objectively right or wrong. It's only right or wrong from some particular point of view. In other words, morality is kind of a human construct and you can construct it in different ways. Perhaps it might be the case that murder isn't wrong for some people.
01:01:35
Speaker
And Empedocles here is already preempting a response. He's saying, no, killing living creatures is always wrong. And he gives a whole account of how the universe works to back that up. Equally interesting from Empedocles,
01:01:57
Speaker
is this idea that now there's a rationale for good behavior. Because he believes that humans were, at least earlier, closer to the era of love, actually spirits, more like gods, in other words, and Pentacles believes that we can actually get back to being a god. In other words, through good behavior, through a behavior that might be called loving behavior, right?
01:02:25
Speaker
we can ascend up the ladder of creation so that we can come back to being a divine spirit. So now there is a rationale for good behavior. Why should you be good? Because it's good for you. It's the route to happiness. Of course, there is a process of purification We've already mentioned vegetarianism, but you should also abstain from blood sacrifice, right? No animal sacrifices. You should exercise sexual self-restraint. So don't be unnecessarily indulgent, right? If you have to have sex for procreation, that's fine. But in general, do not treat sex as a sport. It's not something that you do for fun.
01:03:16
Speaker
You should be very pious and have knowledge of the gods and engage in worship of the gods. And you should strive for having a clear understanding of the universe, basically the one that he's endorsing, right? He's saying, our theories of the universe, my theory of the universe, that is the right way of understanding how everything works. So you can see that his ethics and his views on how the universe works are intertwined But in a nutshell, to come back to Empedocles' second great contribution to ethics, good behavior is good for you. but You can ascend up the ladder of existence, go back to being a god.
01:04:00
Speaker
So to recap, Empedocles' two main ethical contributions is some moral rules seem to have universal legislation, that is, they are applicable everywhere at all times, and there is a perfectly good rationale for being good. Being good is good for you.
01:04:24
Speaker
Before I leave the topic of Empedocles' ethical contributions, it dawned on me that someone might say, well, I still don't believe in universally legislative moral principles. In other words, I don't believe that some rules apply everywhere and because I don't believe in Empedocles' views about the universe.
01:04:48
Speaker
Well, that's okay. Remember, if you want to get a little more abstract here, what Empedically is saying is, based on how nature works, there are some rules that ought to be always followed. So if you don't believe Empedically's views about Cosmogenesis,
01:05:08
Speaker
That's cool. Do you believe in biology? Because some people believe that the way that humans are made, the way that we are built by nature makes it so that certain rules always are applicable. In other words, you can build systems about how it is that you should behave based on human biology, human psychology. right So this idea that you might be able to get rules that always apply based off of nature is still a resounding breakthrough coming from Empedocles.
01:05:45
Speaker
The same thing goes for this idea that being good is good for you. Empedically says that it's because you can go back to being a God. Okay, well maybe you don't believe that. That's okay once more. Do you believe in biology? And now we have some excellent psychological evidence that people that are generally antisocial are less happy.
01:06:12
Speaker
and people that are pro-social, right, the opposite of antisocial, are generally happier. If you want a pretty easy, basic introduction to this kind of psychological science, I do remember this book I picked up by Jack Lewis. It's called The Science of Sin. And basically, he's going to tell you why sinning is a bad idea. And what he means by that is why antisocial behavior is bad for us.
01:06:42
Speaker
So again, if you look at a more abstract general lesson from Empedocles' ethical ideas, you see that by grounding our ethical views in nature, Empedocles is taking a giant step forward towards justifying good behavior.
01:07:01
Speaker
Okay, so I promised you a biography of Empedocles, and here it is. Like Permanides, Empedocles was not just a philosopher. He also engaged in, what else can we call it? Magic. He was a miracle worker. He said he was divine, and apparently some people believed it.
01:07:23
Speaker
And in fact, he even promised someone, a guy named Pausanias, that he would teach him how to bring back people from the dead. So, Empedocles is, there's no other way to put it, a religious fanatic. And if you need more evidence of this, I got something for you. Apparently, this is how Empedocles died.
01:07:48
Speaker
He wanted to confirm the rumors about him. People were saying that he had become a god. Remember he taught this, right? So they were saying he became a god. So what did he do to show that he was a god? Well, we can say maybe he tried to walk on lava, but another way to say this is that he threw himself into an active volcano. It was Mount Edna.
01:08:18
Speaker
And predictably, the magma simply consumed him. All that was left apparently was one of his sandals. I think that even in his death, Empedocles has something to teach us. And it's another one of these meta lessons, right? It's not what he said, but it's the context of his career in general.
01:08:46
Speaker
In Empedocles, we see a clear religious fanatic. I mean, who jumps into an active volcano, right? And at the same time, he had very forward thinking ideas about how it is that nature worked and about ethics.
01:09:02
Speaker
How do we square this circle, right? There is a tendency, I will be completely honest, that I have to when someone is a religious fanatic, then they kinda just write them off. Okay, well, you're gonna say those things and I don't really believe in that. So I don't wanna really pay attention to you. This is, I'm admitting to you, intellectual misbehavior. What people like Empedocles show us is that You can't just write people off. Sometimes there is a system of thought where there is one part of it that is very good and another part that is less defensible, let's say. And this is exactly what all the philosophers we've been talking about so far teach us.
01:09:54
Speaker
You ought not to just reject everything wholesale from someone if you don't like part of what they say. You have to look for what's good about what they're saying and correct what's bad about what they're saying because you just simply never know, right?
Greek Conflicts and the Peloponnesian War
01:10:14
Speaker
Sometimes there's little nuggets of gold hidden where you least expect it.
01:10:23
Speaker
In any case, Empedocles essentially kills himself, perhaps accidentally, right around 434 BCE. And this is important because it sets us up for essentially the rest of the unit. 434 BCE is very close to a conflict that will consume the entirety of the Greek world for essentially the rest of the century.
01:10:54
Speaker
I'm talking about the Peloponnesian War. This conflict is traditionally dated to having officially begun in 431 BCE. And here's a little bit of the background behind it. Recall that the Persians had attempted to invade mainland Greece in 480 and they were repelled in 479 BCE.
01:11:24
Speaker
But the Greeks and the Persians actually kept fighting sporadically, basically every decade after that. In other words, if the Persians were sent away limping with their tail between their legs in 479 BCE, it's still the case that in the 460s and the 450s, the Persians and the Greeks kept fighting in different places, right? There was not a big invasion of mainland Greece again, but there were other places of contact and in these places of contact,
01:11:59
Speaker
the conflict between the Persians and and the Greeks would flare up again. So in order to keep the pressure up against Persia, the Greek city-states essentially had to come up with ah some sort of alliance so that collectively they would be able to fend off Persia. And this was led by Athens. It was called the Delian League or the Delian League.
01:12:26
Speaker
And initially, everything was honky-dory, right? All the different Greek city-states would contribute to either soldiers or money or both to the central fund. And collectively, they would all organize themselves in order to stand up against Persia. But in 453 BCE, the Athenians were getting a little uppity they unilaterally moved the treasury of this alliance to Athens. And essentially they were getting so powerful that they were able to bully all the smaller city-states.
01:13:10
Speaker
In fact, if you go visit Athens today, you can actually still see some of the you know marvels of engineering that they made. And how do they pay for this stuff? Stuff like the Acropolis, which is still standing today. They used money from the treasury of the alliance. So this alliance, which was supposed to be to fight off Persia, the Athenians were using it as their personal piggy bank.
01:13:41
Speaker
Another thing that's important to talk about is that this was a period of political experimentation in Athens. In fact, this is when the word democratia is invented, is coined. And of course, this means that The Greeks were toying with direct democracy. The Athenians, I should say, were experimenting with direct democracy. What that means is that Athenians would vote
01:14:12
Speaker
on, well, I wanted to say everything, but very important things. They would vote on who the generals were going to be. They would vote on strategy. They would vote on what the war aims were. I mean, think about how different this is from our Democratic Republic today here in the United States.
01:14:33
Speaker
You don't get to vote on who the general is, right? You don't get to vote on who to invade next, how the war should be run. These are not things that we do. If we do vote, and many Americans don't vote, by the way, but if they do, every two to four years, they basically choose an executive and a couple of legislators and sometimes some judges at the local levels.
01:15:02
Speaker
And then they decide what the policy will be. But in this time period in Athens, they were literally choosing, oh, I think I want this general because he wants to be more aggressive against Sparta, so that's who I want. And I think what we should do is drag Sparta into a long, exhausting war that will bankrupt them and that way we can beat them. These are the things that Athenians are voting on.
01:15:32
Speaker
And so everything that Athens was doing was directly influenced by the demos, the people. This includes all their imperial ambitions, their bullying of other city-states, their desire for more colonies. All of this was being democratically voted on. And yes, the populace had imperial ambitions.
01:16:01
Speaker
So to match the growing power of Athens, the Spartans had to make up their own alliance, and this is called the Peloponnesian League. Tensions continued to mount on both sides, and eventually in 431 BCE, the Greek world goes to war with itself.
01:16:29
Speaker
the conflict lasted 27 years, longer than any of the wars that they had against the Persians. And because the Greeks were in so many different places around the Mediterranean, from Spain to Ukraine, this was essentially the equivalent of a world war. The historian Roderick Beaton puts it that way,
01:16:59
Speaker
The general summary of the war could be that Sparta typically had the upper hand on land and Athens typically had the upper hand when the battle was a naval battle, but this was not always the case. Sometimes Athens would beat Spartans in land, for example, and what would be upset victories and The Spartans kind of had to go through a real-cost benefit analysis before deciding to go to a particular battle. because Remember, the Spartans had a whole lot of slaves. right They were called the helots. They were about 87% of the population. and so The Spartans were always afraid that if they were gone too long on campaign,
01:17:50
Speaker
or if word came out that they had just suffered a serious loss, that these helots might revolt and an insurrection might take hold and they might overthrow the Spartan kings. And so even though the Spartans had the best military out of the two leagues, they didn't always want to go to battle.
01:18:16
Speaker
the war went on for so long that eventually both sides were growing fiscally insolvent. And they even asked the Persians for help. Now, how crazy is that, right? The only reason why one of these alliances existed was to put up pressure against the Persians. And now that they're fighting against each other, the Greeks are actually asking for the King of Kings for help.
Socrates and His Era
01:18:47
Speaker
oh, how the tables have turned. One last thing I can mention here about the Peloponnesian War is that from early on, both sides committed real atrocities. The slaughter of entire populations, enslaving women and children, it was horrific.
01:19:09
Speaker
But the reason why this war ties into our history at this point is because in that war, in the infantry, apparently sometimes being called on to discuss tactics and training was a man that was already kind of famous. But after the war, and especially after he died, he would become a legend.
01:19:38
Speaker
He fought in the 430s and 420s, in other words, in the first decade of the war. He was in his 40s at the time. And you can be a part of the infantry up until you're 50, right? So he seems to have fought throughout his 40s until he was no longer eligible. We have some reports about what he looked like in general.
01:20:04
Speaker
And here is what we know. He was bald. He was reported to be ugly. He apparently had an abusive wife. We have one story where apparently she dumped some bowl of urine on his head, but he kept himself composed. He didn't lash out.
01:20:32
Speaker
With regard to his behavior on the battlefield, we know that he was incredibly brave. He seems to have been indifferent to heat or cold. He was able to handle large fluctuations in the temperature.
01:20:48
Speaker
He was resilient, he was inspirational, which is really what you want in the infantry. If you don't know how ancient warfare worked, when you're a part of the infantry, you fought very close together such that you are protecting not only yourself, but the person right next to you. And so what you want in these cases is someone to keep their cool and to inspire everyone else to keep their cool.
01:21:17
Speaker
Because if one man breaks off from the pack, the whole pack becomes more vulnerable. So you definitely wanted someone like this man in the infantry. He was so famous that he was actually a character in plays during his lifetime. He was already being portrayed on the stage and he was able to attend those plays. By the way, these plays were not always very charitable to him.
01:21:49
Speaker
And it seems in general that he was most famous for, well, going up to people and asking them questions. He would do this in the marketplace, but also outside of bathhouses and the courts. And it seemed to be the case, at least if you believe some of his students, that he focused primarily on questions.
01:22:19
Speaker
but it was a sort of questioning method that betrayed a profound wisdom. In other words, this wasn't just asking questions for the sake of asking questions. You learned something from the way he would ask questions. Now, it's probably the case that you know exactly who I'm talking about. But just in case you're not sure, it's true.
01:22:50
Speaker
We have finally gotten to the era of Socrates.