>> Dr. Lanham: Good Morning. I am Alan Lanham, Dean of Library Services and it's a pleasure to welcome you here, not only to our building, but also to the continuation of the Symposium on Ancient Greece, that we are hosting in conjunction with College of Business and Applied Sciences. So we are happy to see you here. We want to draw your attention to the program that you picked up at the door. There are various opportunities remaining for you to be involved in the symposium today, one of your fellow students will follow this session, and this afternoon there is a session, and tomorrow it's almost all day. And then things continue into next week. So please consult your program for disciplines that you might find allied to what you are interested in, or areas that you might want to become interested in. So this is a good opportunity and fine way for you to immerse yourself into various disciplines, which I think in a philosophy class you have to do anyway. So make sure that you study the program a little bit after this session, not probably during, but to introduce our speaker, I will ask Dr. Wahby from the School of Technology to do so. >> Dr. Wahby: Thank you very much for coming to this session of ancient Greece as a part of the Futuristic Look into Through Ancient Lenses. That's what we are trying to do in this symposium. Last year we looked into ancient Egypt but we started with Egypt because it is old and ancient, and then the natural progression was to go to Greece. And this era of theology, and technology and philosophy. I would introduce our distinguished speaker today with four words. The first is Philo, second is [unclear dialogue] and third is Grant, and the fourth is you guessed it Sterling. The first time when I was a child, when I didn't know this word, it just captured my heart, and my imagination, to love wisdom, actually you studied this in classes, and you are experts in this, and we will have after today, a love for wisdom to our distinguished students. I think Grant is one of the most important activities that many people have to do in their careers, to survive and thrive. So I think a successful Grant is very important. I am not sure if this was intended by the name Grant or what, but you have a wonderful successful Grant today. [Unclear dialogue] and is the strongest in the world and we then [unclear dialogue] So we had it all, we have it all today. Grant Sterling. >> Dr. Sterling: Thank you Wafeek. Dean Lanham. When Wafeek asked me to give a talk in this series, at first I was puzzled as to what topic I should choose. The ancient Greeks, that's an enormous topic connected with the modern world, that's another enormous topic, so I thought first of all I should try to narrow things down. I eventually decided all right, well, since I do philosophy, I ought to talk about ancient Greek Philosophers. Well that was still a little bit too broad. Several of you are students right now in my ancient Greek philosophy class, and I spend a whole semester talking about ancient Greek philosophy, and I can only scratch the surface in a whole semester, so I couldn't possibly do anything in one hour that would be adequate. I can't even do the influence of ancient Greek philosophy on contemporary philosophy, because everything in contemporary philosophy derives from the ancient Greeks, except for a few really bad ideas that the moderns came up with on their own, so that's still too broad of a topic, so I thought well, why not do ancient Greek philosophers when they were doing what would now be considered science. As many of you know, for the ancient Greeks there was no distinction between what we call philosophy today and what we call science today. Anyone engaged in the pursuit of knowledge was a philosopher. So I thought well, it's fair game then for me to talk about ancient Greek science as compared to the modern world. But that's still way too broad. If I were to talk about that topic, I would have to for example, discuss for example Aristotle, perhaps the most wide-ranging intellect in the entire history of the world. Aristotle wrote numerous books on meteorology, physics, biology, etc., etc., etc. That's way, way too much for one discussion. All right, well then I thought I’d do the so-called pre-Socratics. The pre-Socratics are the philosophers who came along before the first sort of intellectual giant of the ancient world, Socrates, so that's why they got called pre-Socratics. The pre-Socratics also wrote numerous books about numerous topics. But here, at least we have the advantage from the point of view of my topic, or disadvantage from the point of view of knowledge, that almost all of the writings have been lost. All that survives are a few fragments, so I thought if all that survives are a few fragments, surely I can shorten that up, to get it into a one-hour presentation. But I quickly discovered that even just doing the pre-Socratics, and just doing their scientific ideas, that was way too much, too. The pre-Socratics, for example, have long discussions about the principle of conservation of matter, they have, they brought up ideas such as the notion that the earth was roughly spherical, the idea that the sun and the stars are bodies of burning gasses, they were among the first people to attempt to make an accurate map of the known world, etc., etc., etc., so that was too much as well. So finally, what I decided on was this. I would talk about a handful of ideas, in the pre-Socratic philosopher's with regard to physics and biology, with physics only the sort of general cosmological theories of physics, and so, with the topic suitably narrowed, that's what you are going to get today. A very, very short talk on a very, very narrow discussion of a handful of people that you've never heard of. I should note also by the way the ancient, the pre-Socratics, may have even anticipated the so-called many worlds hypothesis of modern physics. I am not going to talk about that today, since it is still up in the air, whether we have good reason to suppose that it's true or not. If good reason comes along, to suppose that the many worlds hypothesis is correct, I will then give another paper in which I show conclusively that the pre-Socratics invented it first. On the other hand, if it is discredited, I will give a paper in which I show that the fragments that could be interpreted as suggesting such an idea are clearly mistaken. All right, so a handful of passages on physics and biology now as I have already suggested, our knowledge of the pre-Socratics is highly limited. All we have again are mostly quotations in other people saying 'Oh yes, Heraclitus believed such and so', or 'Anaximander said this or that', so, giving any talk on the pre-Socratics involves a certain amount of interpretation. So, I acknowledge to begin with that what we are doing today is interpretation. I've given you a handout; I hope you all got a copy. The handout contains some of the passages that I am going to be discussing today. All of these passages have been edited in order to make the point that I wish to make. And I use as my excuse for this, the fragmentary nature of the evidence, and so on and so on. But I did give you the reference from which the passages are taken, and you are welcome to look them up in that source or in other similar sources and evaluate for yourselves whether or not I have accurately portrayed their ideas. All right. So, before I go any further, I should note, all of the pre-Socratics were materialists. All of the pre-Socratic held that the only things that really exist are physical things. I don't think there are any exceptions to that. There are some philosophers that think there were rare exceptions, but I think there are no exceptions to that principle. All the pre-Socratic were also at least broadly speaking empiricists with the exception of my personal favorite pre-Socratic Parmenides. When I say that they were broadly empiricists, I mean that many of them had no sort of conclusive theory of knowledge, and it's origins, but all of them were concerned to try to come up with scientific hypothesis that would be consistent with our observations of the physical world. Parmenides, as I say, is an exception, since Parmenides argued that our senses are fundamentally mistaken and that therefore the true nature of reality is utterly and completely different from anything at all that appears to us. But with only that exception broadly speaking the pre-Socratic are imperial philosophers. All right, so on your handout then, let us turn to the first general topic. Under the heading of Physics, from the philosopher Heraclitus, the dates here by the way are in all cases approximate, depending on what source you look up, depending on various people, may be in fact substantially different. But I used one particular source that I think is as good as any. So, I am just trying to give you an approximate idea of when these people where around. From the philosopher Heraclitus, we have the idea that all things are influx. All physical objects, even if they appear to be stationary, are in fact moving. They in fact, have small elements that are in imperceptible motion. Nevertheless, even though all things are in the state of change, all events occur due to fixed underlying laws. There are from Heraclitus's view, what we would today call laws of physics. These laws can be discovered. Heraclitus thinks that the vast majority of human beings are stupid, and they have no interest in discovering such things, and so they sort of wander through their lives with no real purpose, but really smart people, like Heraclitus can discover these laws, and can use them to understand the events around them. Again, I have three short passages here, all clipped from longer passages, but I think representative. Heraclitus holds all things are in process, or in flux, all things are in motion all the time, even though this escapes our perception. In all things happened according to what he called the logos. So the logos for Heraclitus are the underlying structure of reality. Again the underlying laws which dictate everything that must occur. The logos is knowable, we are capable of understanding it, even if we see only a fraction of it, and even if, as I suggested on Heraclitus's view, most of the people are too dumb to look for any more. So, it is this idea which is responsible for many later philosophers and scientists holding this general principle, that there is in fact, an underlying explanation for all things that occur. An explanation in the structure of the universe itself, and that it is the duty of intelligent people to try to discover as much of this as they can, and pass it on to others. From the philosopher Empedocles, perception occurs through tiny particles that strike our senses. Empedocles held that all physical objects are composed of tiny particles, particles too small for us to directly perceive as they are in those objects, but those particles when striking our sense organs give rise to perception. Empedocles held that there are different sorts of particles emitted by different objects. These particles differ in their size and shape, and so on. Our sense organs, he thought, contained passages or openings that allow these particles enter into us, and therefore give rise to perception. These passages are of different size and shape and so only certain particles could enter in certain passages. This is in Empedocles account for why it is for example that you can't see sounds. Why can't you see sounds? Well, because the particles that give rise to sound perceptions aren't the right size and shape to fit into your eye. They are the right size and shape to fit into your ears, so you can hear sounds, but you can see colors and shapes and so on. So, from Empedocles’s day, then we get this early account of the nature of perception. This led, that is at least the idea that objects are composed of tiny particles, to the only people on this list that any of you are likely to have ever heard of, Leucippus and Democritus, you have probably never heard of Leucippus and Democritus specifically, but they are knows as the Atomists, and they are known as the Atomists because they held that the fundamental structure of reality is atoms. All things that exist are physical and all physical things are composed of Atoms. Atoms again are tiny objects, tiny particles, and tiny elements of things too small for us to perceive in themselves. There are different kinds of atoms, and the different kinds of atoms that an object is composed of, give rise to the different physical and chemical properties of that object. Metal reacts differently than wood, because wood is composed of atoms of different size, and shape, and weight, and so on and so on and therefore they react differently in different conditions. Again a passage there Democritus thinks that atoms are so small as to elude our senses, but they have all sorts of forms of shapes and differences in size. They create by aggregation bulks that are perceptible to sight and the other senses. All things that you can actually see are simply gigantic masses composed of thousands and thousands or millions of atoms. The individual atoms are again, imperceptible, but once you get enough of them all clumped together, then you have an object. Leucippus and Democritus developed all kinds of theories about how and why it is that atoms clump together and in what combinations they can form and how that produces different sorts of results. They struggled with issues of determinism and free will, since they held that the motions of atoms are dictated by their nature, their physical nature, that includes the soul atoms, and yet at the same time, to some degree, they wanted to try to give some sort of account as to how humans can have free will, so they struggled with whether that was possible with the deterministic framework that they themselves created and so on. But in any case, it is probably Leucippus originated this doctrine, Democritus was the one who made it famous, who wrote it up, whose books were best known at the time, and therefore, he is the one who is often credited with the inventor of atomism. All right, enough of physics then. Let us turn to biology. I've chosen only a few passages for you from the biological theory of the pre-Socratic. So first of all we have an Anaximander. Anaximander believed that life came into existence from non-life when a primal soup of some sort was superheated, terrestrial life he held had its life through descent from fishes, including, as you will see below, human beings. Human beings descended, he held, from other species. So, Anaximander of Miletus conceived that there arose from heated water and earth with either fish or creatures very like fish. In the beginning man was born from creatures of another kind. So, according to Anaximander's view, the earth originally was a mixture of earth and water, two of the traditional Greek elements, there was no life, life did not come about as a results of the actions of the gods or anything like that. No, it's simply the case that at some point, this earth became heated and heated to such a degree that it spontaneously brought forth the first life. The first life was extremely primitive small creatures. From those small creatures living in the water, things like modern fish developed, and then ultimately human beings came from such fish. So, it is to Anaximander that should go the credit for inventing the ascent of man. Xenophanes often is not considered a pre-Socratic philosopher. He is often considered simply a poet. Again just as there is no real distinction among the ancient Greek between scientists and philosophers, there really is no distinction between philosophers and poets. Xenophanes held that the earth, all current lands were originally covered by sea, those seas dried up, that the result of the seas drying up are fossil remains of earlier creatures who died and were covered by the mud that resulted as the seas dried. This was a strictly observational discovery. Xenophanes was aware of the existence of fossils in places that were in his time mountainous, and he drew the conclusions that if there are fossils of fish in areas that are now mountainous, then those mountainous areas must have at some point in the past have been covered by water and so this is the account that he gives and there is a discussion of various examples of fossils that he had observed in various regions. I cut the details out, so that the handout would fit on a single page, but certainly Xenophanes was aware of these and draws a deduction. Finally, the last philosopher on the list, Empedocles, again, it is the same Empedocles that is up there in the perception section. It is Empedocles that invented the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution as Darwin conceives it, has two main principles. We need variation in order for evolution to take place, and variation is supplied on Darwin's view from random mutation. And then we need some process by which the variation can be weeded out to produce change and that of course is taken care of by natural selection. I did not give you the passages from Empedocles on the subject because there is in fact, as you can see here, a long string of passages. There are 8 or 9 fragments from Empedocles that deal with different elements of his theory of random mutation and natural selection. They wouldn't all fit on the handout. I gave you the numbers there again if you want to look them up in Kirk and Raven, the source that I used. But I will at least give you the broad outline of that idea here. Now, so Empedocles develops this idea of random mutation natural selection. Now, I must admit, in Empedocles’s version of this theory, it's a little bit different from Darwin, actually it's quite a lot different from Darwin. Which is another reason why I didn't put it on the handout, because we actually see the passages then it doesn't look quite as impressive as if I'd just summarized them. Empedocles believed that the fundamental principle of change in the universe, well, principles of change, were love and strife. Love, Empedocles thought, brings all things together, and strife tears them apart. In the history of the universe from Empedocles’s view, is the cyclical history. That is to say, that they universe become dominated by love, all things are brought together, unfortunately this has the consequence that all things are brought together by smashing them into a tiny ball, which results in the extermination of all life, and then strife begins pulling them apart, ultimately strife takes over, and has complete control. Unfortunately this has the results that all things are completely scattered, and so again, there is no life, but during the transitional stages when the ball of love is being pulled apart, and in the stage in which strife has started to lose the battle again and love is pulling things back together, objects such as the ones we observe, can exist. So, there is the cyclical history. Everything smashes together into a ball, pulls out, into scattered fragments, smashes back together into a ball, and so on and so on. Now he held that during the period in which the ball of love has started to be pulled together, so that we have physical objects, what happens in the case of life, it is that various living beings come forward but they come forward in purely random form. That is to say, that you might for example have disembodied heads and arms. So, strife is pulling the ball apart, it pulls it apart in such a way that organs are created, but those organs unfortunately don't happen to be attached to the other organs. You get things, you get monsters, during this period, you know, bodies of humans with heads of animals, and so on and so on and so on. So, this is truly a random mutation, a random process by which various combinations of organs are produced. Now, the natural selection part is fairly straightforward. A disembodied arm can't live, so that dies off. Animals with six heads don't survive very well, those die off, and so as time goes by, the malformed combinations of creatures die and we are left with the species that we observe today. Now, of course again, this is temporary. The species that exist today can only exist as long as there is equilibrium between love and strife, one strife takes over completely, then of course, all of our limbs would be severed, and all life will cease to exist once again, or perhaps we are going the other direction and we'll all be smashed together. But in any case, during the transitional phase, Empedocles held, when by random mutation you happen to get the right limbs attached in the right order, the creatures can survive, and then they reproduce and that accounts for the species that we currently have. So, again, it's not exactly Darwin, but it's not altogether so far off, either. Now, why did I choose these particular ideas to talk about, among the many scientific or quasi-scientific ideas invented by the pre-Socratics? I chose them because in every case, these ideas were lost. None of the ideas were at least directly the origin of the corresponding ideas in modern science. I entitled my paper that you know, Darwin Plagiarized Empedocles, but of course that is not literally true. I am quite certain that Darwin had never heard of Empedocles or Anaximander and had absolutely no idea of their theories. All of these interesting scientific speculations disappeared. None of them gave rise to an ongoing tradition. This is certainly not true of all of the pre-Socratics. For example, one of the most influential pre-Socratics was Pythagoras. Pythagoras made numerous contributions to the study of mathematics. The Pythagorean theorem for example. Those contributions were preserved and carried on in the mathematical community by Pythagoras’s followers and by others. Other ideas from the ancient Greek, invented first by the pre-Socratics were taken up by Plato, or by Aristotle, transmitted from them through the medieval period into the modern period. So, why it is then since, some pre-Socratic ideas were preserved, why were all of these ideas lost? I want to suggest two reasons. Two reasons for the unfortunate demise of the pre-Socratics. Interestingly enough, neither of these reasons have anything to do with the fragmentary notion of our own awareness of what the pre-Socratics had to say, because the later Greeks were aware of them. Many of the books of the pre-Socratics survived the time of Plato and Aristotle and so on. They were familiar with their ideas. Most of our fragments from the pre-Socratics in fact come from Aristotle, who is as I suggested before, was interested in everything, and so liked to record the ideas of other people, even when he disagreed with them. It's actually sort of the other way around. Our knowledge of the pre-Socratics is fragmentary because their ideas were discarded. It's not that their ideas were discarded because we lost our knowledge of what they had had to say. So, why were these ideas lost? First of all, ironically the pre-Socratic period was I think too creative. There were simply too many new ideas being thrown out by various people. I mentioned before that the pre-Socratics suggested that the earth is at least roughly spherical. Well, yes, some of them did. But, we also have pre-Socratics who suggest that the earth is a cylinder, that the earth is a cube, that the earth is a flat disk, or that the earth is sort of a lid-like dome, sort of curved disk if you will. Each of these ideas had backing from various figures in the pre-Socratic period, but none of them was considered to be sort of the dominant theory. There was no great pre-Socratic on the level of Plato or Aristotle where everybody would respect that person’s ideas, just because they were recognized as the leading intellectual of the period. And so you get all sorts of speculations. Yeah, the atomists said that the physical objects are composed of atoms. But other pre-Socratics said that the physical objects are entirely solid and can have no parts of all at any kind, others said that they are made of the kind of seed, others said they are built of the Greek elements. Some pre-Socratics holding that all objects are ultimately composed of water, some holds that they are ultimately composed of air, some ultimately composed of fire. Interestingly enough, the Greek element of earth gets no backer. None of the pre-Socratics said that ever physical object is composed of earth, for some strange reason. Sure, Empedocles may say that species arose by love and strife, but other people said that they were created by the gods, they are descended from the gods, or that they spun off out of a cosmic sphere that was rotating or any of a number of other hypothesis. So, one problem with transmitting the ideas that I selected for you on the handout is that they are in fact selected. Pre-Socratics were coming up with ideas about just about every topic in an amazing variety for a relatively short period of time that begins with Thale's in roughly 625BC and ends with Socrates in roughly 470, so a period of only about 150 years. So that's one reason so many new ideas were being thrown out, that nobody knew which ones to hold on to, and which ones to discard. Why they couldn't sort them out, and fix on any of them, and as a result, they all came to be equally discarded. The second reason connected with the first, the ancient Greeks, though they engaged in scientific speculation did not have the idea of experimental testing. That's not quite right either. They did have the idea of experimental testing, but there was no sort of organized cohesive body of science. That is, there were no process by which it was expected that the ideas of one pre-Socratic would be tested or checked out by somebody else, and then tried integrated into some whole. And they did not generally use their experimental methods when they had them on their sort of grand speculative theories. They tested specific ideas, they tested, for example, whether you could tell the distance of a ship out to sea by using various triangulation techniques and so on. They tried it out, and found out that it worked, so it's not that they were completely ignorant of the idea that you theories could be tested, but it's just that they didn't apply them to the big theories like this. No one ever thought to say, well, let's see, what evidence could we gather to try to figure out whether there really were disjointed limbs that then you know, by natural selection were weeded out into the current species. So, this I suggest, is the reason that although all sorts of interesting ideas that later become part of modern science, were thrown out by various pre-Socratics by and large, this is not the result of transmission from the ancient Greeks to the modern world. Again, I've selected some ideas that weren't transmitted for the purposes of this talk, again in mathematics and in other fields, they were. So, there's my conclusion, the pre-Socratics were too clever and not clever enough. Too clever in that they came up with far too many ideas, for all of the to be true, and all of them to be held on to, and all of them to be transmitted, and not clever enough to figure out a way to sort them out into the ones that were truly worthy and the ones that were not. That's all I have. Thank you. >> Dr. Wahby: Well, thank you Grant. That was a successful totally grand. Any questions? I have a couple, but I wouldn't start until somebody starts for me please. Any questions? I see many eyes talking. Yes, I see eyes talking. >> Attendee: You mentioned an observation; I guess it was Empedocles, or Xenophanes, that fossils were found high in mountains, and fossils of sea creatures. To what extent do we have any idea that this observation could have given rise to the idea of worldwide flood, and Noah's ark, and so on? >> Dr. Sterling: Yeah, not in the pre-Socratics. It's, there are certainly speculations that in various cultures that other people made similar observations. I mean, Xenophanes is reporting observations that he is aware of, not that he wasn't sort of an explorer, but you know said, wow look, I've come upon these things that no one else has seen. He's reporting things perhaps he has seen but not things he claims to have discovered. So, certainly there was an awareness among the intellectual community of the early Greeks that such things were out there. Xenophanes was the only recorded instance among the ancient Greeks of somebody who tried to draw deductions from that, alright, who says, wow, this is interesting. How could this have happened? His hypothesis of course is not a flood, but a sort of universal period in which land was covered by earth, and then he mixes that in with some much more complicated ideas about how earth ultimately absorbed the water, and all this other stuff. But at least among the pre-Socratics and the Greeks, these are the only records we have of somebody trying to explain how this could occur. But there is good reason to suppose that other cultures were aware of fossil remnants in areas that were then covered by land. And so, no, that were covered by land at the time, but fossil remnants of sea creatures, so it's quite possible that there is some connection, but again, it wasn't drawn, the connections wasn't, that connection wasn't drawn by the ancient Greeks. I don't know, it's, I know that there is some controversy over the exact, but similar ideas exist in the Babylonians, for example, long before this period. Sumerians I think. I know the Babylonians for sure, had a similar idea, but I think Samarians, so it's a very old idea. >> Dr. Wahby: You hear about Chinese, the Persians, some people take this as a positive or negative regarding the biblical story for example. You see that some people who are against the bible will say hey, every culture they have this love, this thing, and adaptation, those theologian or bible say ok it was the story that started [unclear dialogue] and when people went everybody got his one story [unclear dialogue] so it confirms that it happened, so you can boil it both ways. Any other questions? I am intrigued with the idea of the atom thing. I mean, back then for 3, 4, 5,000 back then, however many thousand, they come up with the idea of small things, small things, without a microscope or something. How would you in the 21st century look at the idea that starts over, now we look at atomic theory and the bomb and so forth, and we can ok that's, but for these people to start from scratch and say that there's some small thing that people can't see by eyes? >> Dr. Sterling: Yeah, in the handout I think I mentioned the passages that I give are from Leucippus and Democritus, because they are known as the Atomists, and so it's sort of their theory, so I thought well, I ought to give them credit for it, but, yes, yeah, they coined the name Atoms for these particles, but as I mentioned, you can find a prior version of that view in Empedocles, and in other pre-Socratics as well. So, what they are trying to do, the earliest pre-Socratic tried to give an account of the nature of the physical world in terms of the four Greek elements. The air, earth, fire, and water. Again, the earth for some reason doesn't have an advocate, but the others all do. It's Parmenides, the anti-empiricist who comes along and argues on philosophical grounds that the universe can't really be composed of these sorts of things. It can't really be air, earth, fire, and water and then Zeno his famous pupil, defends this by means of various paradoxes, and tries to say well, you now, if you try to believe in motion and change, and objects having parts, and multiple things and so on, you are led into these impossible contradictions, and so you ought to simply abandon your belief in these things and admit that our perceptions are just fundamentally wrong. In the universe is one single entity unchanging, no time, no space, and so on, and so on. There's a reaction against Parmenides. Nobody thinks Parmenides is right among the pre-Socratics that follow him. But, at the same time, they were uncomfortable with the idea of the kind of philosophy that had gone on before Parmenides. .0In other words, they sort of thought Parmenides had offered them a challenge and they couldn't go back to the way things were before Parmenides, but they didn't want to accept that there's no time and so on. And so, it was in the process of struggling to come up with an account of this that they started to develop their theories. So for example, Empedocles and Anaxagoras were both influenced by Parmenides’s idea that there couldn't be change. Well, they rejected the notion that there couldn't be change, but they did accept the notion that change couldn't take place between substances. In other words, they thought well, earth can't really change into air for example, or water, and so that gave them a problem because there are instances where it appears that things change into other substances. And so they tried to account for this, by arguing that well, objects are really composed of parts of different kinds of things. So, I didn't include this for example, but we have an attempt to account for how it is when you eat something, it nourishes your body, because how it is that if I eat bread, it can turn into skin and bones and so on, that requires transformation of the bread into something else, and while they weren't comfortable with that idea, so, they hypothesized, well, the bread must really have little bits of flesh and bone in it. But they obviously must be so small that we can't see them, so then when we eat the bread, our body processes it by extracting the flesh and bone, and attaching it to our body, and then getting rid of the rest of it. Well, again, that requires the notion that there are within the objects we perceive tiny little particles of other kinds that we can't perceive. And this ultimately led to them to postulate and Anaxagoras is not on your list, but Anaxagoras holds that there are little seeds he calls them of every kind of thing, so there are iron seeds, and wood seeds, and flesh seeds, and so on and so on and all of these seeds are too small to perceive and physical objects are determined by whatever seed predominates. Ok, so this looks like wood, and reacts like wood, because it's mostly wood seeds, but there are all kinds of other seeds as well. And so then it's the Atomists who essentially take these ideas, call these things Atoms, and start trying to put together a theory, a purely physical theory of how they interact with one another, and how they compose the objects they perceive and so forth. >> Dr. Wahby: It was interesting also for me to hear that the explanation for not seeing the sound, because the particles of the atoms can be seen quote, unquote by our ears while we can't see them with our eyes. So it's kind of interesting way out of >> Dr. Sterling: Yeah, and that is an idea by the way Empedocles that is certainly still known in later period Plato, for example makes reference to it in one of his dialogues. Of course, you know, Empedocles theory of Effluvia, and so in conversation, it appears that well, obviously any educated Greek would have at least know of this theory, whether they would have agreed with it or not. So, apparently that theory of perception was well known enough that it could be taken for granted in conversation that other people would be familiar with it. >> Dr. Wahby: I think we have a couple minutes for other couple of questions if you'd like. Anybody questions? The microphone is not for the sound, as much as it is for taping. >> Attendee: Just a comment on the senses and the shapes and sizes of particles. Geometry played such a big role for the Greeks and at least starting with Pythagoras, I think from my reading the discovery that there was a very small number of regular polyhedrons was striking and I think it carries down through the Greeks I may be wrong, but I think five regular solids, the sphere with one side and the cube with six sides for example, and I think what five senses, five regular solids and perhaps they put them together that way. So you've got one shape that only works, goes in the ear. >> Dr. Sterling: Yeah, I don't know. What we have oddly, apparently as I said before, the theory was widely known. Even it wasn't necessarily held by everybody, but it was widely enough known, as I say, that Socrates is in a conversation could assume that the person he is talking to would be aware of it, but what we have of the theory now is extremely fragmentary. We only have I think two passages that even refer to this theory, and neither passage says very much about it, other than there are different passages in the senses and different effluvia he calls them, that strike us. So, it's not known. According to one of the passages, it specifically says it is true for all of the senses. It's not, I'm not sure that Empedocles actually held that it was true in the case of touch. Perhaps I should have said, all of the ancient Greeks hold a view held by at least many modern physicists that there is no such thing as action at a distance. All cause and effect much occur by contact. And so that is why Empedocles had to have something physically travelling from the object to your sense organ in order for sensation to take place. But of course in the case of touch, we don't need that, we don’t' need something flying off the object, hitting my sense organ, since I am directly in contact with it, so I am not sure whether Empedocles thought that touch actually functions in that way, but it's possible that he did. Because he might very well have held that we can only have sensory perceptions if the object that we are touching has the right form. So, it may be that even there, although we don't have things flying off the object, it may be that the object has to be composed in the right shape for us to feel it. >> Dr. Wahby: Any other questions or comments. Yes. >> Bill: My name is Bill. I was just wondering if, Dr. Sterling, do any of the ideas go back farther than the ancient Greeks? Are they influenced by any other people? Especially like these that were on the list. >> Dr. Sterling: There are no cases where we can trace their origin beyond in some cases that I just suggested that earlier pre-Socratics, so again the Atomists, you can find at least the root of their theory in Empedocles and Anaxagoras and so on, but there is no case in at least with regard to any sort of the major theories that I've been discussing here where we can say, with any good reason, you now, so and so got this idea from somebody outside the tradition of the pre-Socratics. It certainly not the case as far as Greek thought altogether, Athens for example as a major port city and so there was contact with the Phoenicians and through the Phoenicians contact with Egypt and possibly India, and lots of other places as well, so it's not that the Greeks were unaware of the world beyond them, but as best we can tell, by and large, at least their speculation is internal. To the tradition. That's why Thales', the first pre-Socratic, was sometimes considered to be the first philosopher. >> Dr. Wahby: Any other questions or comments? Without making or taking sides or creating any enemies, just scientifically looking at things, just take yourself outside, why is it over history it was more appealing to the human mind that things started by itself, magically quote, unquote, by itself and we ended up with this sophistication and design that you see everywhere. More than that, there's a person if God, a bible, or whatever creator, somebody who did that intentionally and design it. Why is it more appealing to be random and natural selection, rather than somebody who [unclear dialogue] this way? >> Dr. Sterling: Yeah, for the ancient Greeks, for whatever reason, none of the ancient Greeks suggests that the physical universe was created. But most of them thought that the physical universe was formed by the gods. So, in a way, you know, Empedocles' theory and some of the other pre-Socratics are actually swimming upstream, as far as Greek thought as a whole is concerned. So, the idea of a creator again is foreign to the Greeks by and large. The idea though that matter is sort of you now formless, chaotic, disorganized stuff, and that if you are going to make anything of it, you have to do something. Right? You have to have some intelligent force putting it that way. That idea actually is the dominant one among the ancient Greeks. Not the only one, but at least the dominant theory that the gods look upon and you know formless and chaotic matter and the gods or the titans sometimes and you know they think well, we've got to make something out of this, and so the world as we perceive it is a result of divine activity, but not originally creative activity so much as formative activity. >> Dr. Wahby: Well, I see our time is running, and I assume, and gather that all of you are philosophers because you love philosophy and thank you very much for coming. If you have any other questions, I take your permission to send emails. >> Dr. Sterling: Yes, yes, by all means. >> Dr. Wahby: Thank you. See you.