I think most people’s knowledge of Presocratic Philosophers, mine included before I read this book, was limited to Pythagoras and the absurd paradoxes of Zeno including the well known example of Achilles and the tortoise.

This Very Short Introduction to Presocratic Philosophy increased my understanding of the world of Greek philosophy starting with Thales of Miletus from the 7th / 6th Century BC via Heraclitus and Democritus, to Protagoras and the other Sophists who lived just before the time of Socrates in the 5th Century BC.

Even though philosophers of this time wrote down very little and little of what was written down actually survived, the sparse snippets of their words show a keen interest in the nature of reality, time, and space. These philosophers were the ones who set Western philosophy on the course it’s still on today.

Empedocles was a native of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily, now called Agrigento between 492 and 432 BC. Empedocles’ philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements.

Heraclitus famously wrote “Into the same rivers we step in and we don’t step in, we are and we are not”. The idea we can’t step into the same River twice might be linked to the idea that the river is always on the move and so the water into which you step is not the same water. Is the river a body of moving water? If so, you step in again in the same place but into something different from what was there before. Or is the river something that remains even though the water changes? Heraclitus prompts us to wonder.

Anaxagoras (500 – 428BC) and Democritus (460 – 370BC) both suggested that reality was hidden because it involved components too small for us to see. Democritus called these components atoms, meaning uncuttable and believed we could explain the behaviour of ordinary things by the movement of these atoms. The most original aspect of Anaxagoras’s system was his doctrine of nous (“mind” or “reason”). The cosmos was formed by mind in two stages: first, by a revolving and mixing process that still continues; and, second, by the development of living things.

Protagoras was famous for saying: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are so, and of things which are not, that they are not.” Man means human and not a male person specifically. He probably meant that we humans are the yardstick for deciding what counts and what doesn’t count as real. The world is as we make it out to be.