Cosmological Explanation:

1. Cosmos: "everything"; the ordering and arrangement of everything
2. Cosmology: the study of the origins and arrangement of everything

Theogony (ca. 725 B.C.) Hesiod

Greek deities were not utilized to explain the origins of everything but rather to expound and reflect how society and human emotions worked. The departure from religious explanations entailed the dawn of Greek philosophy.

Three Basic Questions/Inquiries

1. What is the world made of?
2. How can we know? Epistemology: the science of knowing; wisdom and knowledge
3. What should we do?

Thales (Ionian, 6th Century, B.C.)

• Water is behind everything, presumably intuitively. (p.s. Laocoon in the background)

Parmenides (ca. 450 B.C.)

• Being must be one, motionless, uniform, and eternal; change is illusionary; a response to Heraclitus

Heraclitus (ca. 540 - ca. 480 B.C.)

• Panta Rhei: "Everything flows"; "you cannot step into the same water twice"; the mutable is the immutable; moved beyond "materialism" and became conceptual.

Anaxagoras (ca. 500 - 428 B.C.)

• Mind (how thought works)is crucial; things exist to the degree and only to the degree that they are perceived; moved to the territory of "idealism"

Being: the state of existence

Four Questions on Knowing

1. What does it mean to know?
2. Can we actually know anything?
3. What means are available to us for knowing?
4. How is world constituted, and how am I constituted so that I can know something about the world out there?

Pythagoras (fl. late 6the Century, B.C.) Sicily

• Came upon the mathematical relationships among sounds (musical intervals)
• "Pythagoras" theorem: a squared plus b squared equals c squared.

Sophists (sophistry): Teachers who, for a fee, would teach you how to speak elegantly and persuasively, utilizing rhetoric.

Sophistic ethics: The Sophists drew a distinction between nomos (law) and physics (nature). The aim is to prevail but not to know the truth. Everything is relative to me.

Socrates wanted to vindicate reality, our capacity to know and our capacity to communicate what we know.