The Dialectic of Pre-Socratic Philosophy and its Basis in the Civilization of Antiquity

Abstract

Pre-Socratic philosophy is really quite remarkable. It furnished us with the first theory of a heliocentric universe, the first theory of evolution and the first form of atomic theory. All this in a time before microscopes or telescopes! It was during this epoch too that the mode and form of philosophy attained a clear and definite character. From within the miasma of religious feeling and thought, certain coherent and explicitly rational notions begin to emerge. Being, nothingness, becoming, quantity, quality: in pre-Socratic philosophy the most fundamental categories of existence, those which underwrite all things, were brought into a conscious and sober interrelation. It was a single precious flashpoint in time where myth mutated into science, where naturalism superseded religion and philosophy experienced its first glorious dawn. A comprehension of pre-Socratic philosophy is essential to the dialectician. Over two thousand years later, Hegel was to comment on the pre-Socratic Heraclitus—‘there is not a proposition of [his] I have not adopted in my Logic’. Marx's doctoral dissertation was written on the difference between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophies of nature. More importantly still, the dialectic which runs through pre-Socratic philosophy in many ways anticipates the course of classical German philosophy over two thousand years later. The author seeks to trace this dialectic, and to show how it was grounded in the forms and structures of social existence of the Greek city state more broadly.