Empiricism, Science And Early Greek Philosophy

ln this essay I will explore the Greek roots of the empirical tradition from a historical perspective, in order to establish the nature of the methodologies employed and the type of hypotheses maintained. The scientific study of the nature and structure of the cosmos (world) appears to begin with the Milesian school at the beginning of the 6th century B.C. Popper and Russell appear to disagree about whether the term "empirical" may usefully be applied to these sceptical lonians, but setting aside this question for the present, I will use the term to mean the formation of hypotheses about the cosmos and its building materials, in combination with a willingness to test these speculations by observation of actual phenomena. These tendencies are to be found in the work of Thales and Anaximander. ln the "History of Western Philosophy" Russell suggests that our respect for the former should be based on our view of him as a man of science, and further, that his hypothesis that "everything is made of water" is not as misguided as it first appears, given that at the beginning of the 20th century "the received view was that everything is made of hydrogen, which is two thirds of water." Thales may be seen as a possible link between the astronomical and geometrical endeavours of the ancient civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt, and the subsequent rise of Greek cosmology and geometry. His travels brought him into contact with a body of knowledge that included a method for predicting lunar eclipses, rudimentary trigonometrical calculations and the practice of dividing the circle into 360 degrees. Thales is often represented as d very practically-minded thinker, capable of applying his knowledge to solve problems that would today be classified as scientific. For example, when asked to find an estimate for the height of a pyramid he waited until the sun was at such a height in the sky that it caused the length of his shadow to be equal to his own known height. He then measured the length of the shadow cast by the pyramid, thus obtaining a reasonable approximation. Anaximander is said to be the first man who made a map; presumably as an aid to navigation at sea. This type of scientific curiosity appears to have driven his speculations on the nature of substance. ln opposition to Thales` hypothesis relating to water, he posits a single, primal substance which is infinite and ageless and is continually transformed into the type of substances with which we are familiar. There is, however, a more important aspect of this theory which may be viewed as a forerunner to the oxymoronic notion of "empirical law". Here the purely physical begins to overlap with a metaphysical concept of order and "eternally fixed bounds." Anaximander states that the base (but not primal) elements of fire, earth and water are perpetually at war, with each attempting to extend its dominion over the others, only being hampered from becoming sovereign by a law of necessity, which demands that the overall balance of power amongst these substances must be maintained equally. This has been related to the Greek conception of justice, whereby the fundamental harmony of the cosmos is answerable to a "supreme power, not itself personal." The genius of Anaximander is perhaps best seen in his attempt to translate this ethical principle into material terms, arriving at a primal substance which is itself neutral in the cosmic strife. His interest in cosmology led him to make a conjecture which Popper describes as "one of the boldest ..... ideas in the whole history of human thought" : namely, that "The earth is held up by nothing, but remains stationary owing to the fact that it is equally distant from all other things." Although relating to the physical world and its ground-plan, it is difficult to see how this view could have been arrived at through observation alone, as it appears almost counter-intuitive. Nevertheless it seems to anticipate "to some extent even Newton`s idea of immaterial and invisible gravitational forces" and must, therefore, belong to the empirical tradition. To summarise, Russell states that these speculations of the Milesian school are to be regarded as "scientific hypotheses as they seldom show any undue intrusion of anthropomorphic desires and moral ideas." At a more prosaic level, the science of mnemotechnics, which is the study of the rules of memory, seems to have been developed by a Greek poet called Simonides, who was roughly a contemporary of Pythagoras. Regarded as one of the areas of modern psychology most amenable to empirical study, the mechanisms of the retention and transmission of information were put to effective use by orators and rhetoricians, in public performances and debates. Simonides is said to have formalised these skills in his method of loci, which makes extensive use of visual and semantic association - the principal mechanism at work in memory formation as described in the later philosophy of Hume. Th,e aim of the method is to provide a collection of items which are merely contingent with a particular relational logic in order that this additional structure should give the mnemonist a ready-made frame-work, which will then improve subsequent recall. Commonly, a familiar environment, such as a house with a series of rooms, is needed in which to mentally "place" the items in an organised sequence. These can be later recalled by mentally walking through the house and the previously established visual associations will cause the memory of the required items to be triggered. The effectiveness of these techniques, known to Plato as "artificial memory", can easily be tested, as demonstrated by the work on the capacity of short-term memory, carried out by the 20th century psychologist Miller (1956). The methods described above illustrate the Greek tendency to systematise nature, and in particular, represent probably the first attempt to apply the empirical method to a facet of the human mind. For many modern physicists atomic theory begins with the work of Democritus, who flourished c. 420 B.C. His beliefs about the nature of matter, which are hard to disentangle from the earlier work of Leucippus, are as follows :- that all things, including the mind, consist of indivisible particles, called atoms, which are, and always have been, in motion. These atoms differ according to their size and shape and also in terms of velocity, where the smallest, smoothest and fastest are associated with mental substance and thus we have the first materialistic theory of cognition. Although based on no observable data, the existence of the particles described in this hypothesis is, in theory at least, open to the possibility of experimental verification and this fact alone must place Democritus in the centre of the Greek empirical tradition.

FOR THE FULL ESSAY (ANOTHER 5000 WORDS) CONTACT ME THROUGH THE WEBSITE