Kathryn Rombs

Anaxagoras, also born near Miletus but then living in Athens for a time, agrees with Empedocles, his contemporary, that Parmenides was right about change: all that we call change is just a re-arranging. But nothing actually comes out of nothing or passes into nothing, for no-thing does not exist and so this is impossible. For …READ MORE

Next we look at Empedocles, who is influenced by his predecessors the Milesians, Pythagoras, Heraclitus as well as Parmenides. Empedocles holds that the soul is immoral, trapped in an earthly body of decay (think Pythagoras). The soul may purify itself and rise to higher and higher ranks of perfection. As for the material world, it …READ MORE

If Heraclitus asked the question of the one and the many, Parmenides gives us a rigid answer. He breaks with the method of the Milesians who began with observations from nature, and begins instead with a logical argument, prescinding from the senses. Reason tells us that what is, is one. And thus it cannot also …READ MORE

Heraclitus lived in Ephesus, not far from Miletus, around 500 B.C. Heraclitus is not so much interested to know the causes of many things—the causes of thunder, lightning, and earthquakes—but to know the one thing that underlies all these things. This, to him, is wisdom. For him, not only does he see what Anaximenes described …READ MORE

Mathematics is fundamental to the Pythagorean view. First, geometry originated in Egypt but was transformed in Greece. The Egyptians were flooded each year by the Nile, and so geometry (the study of land, as the name implies), was developed to help them retain their land boundaries. But when geometry was passed to the Greeks, who …READ MORE

One of my all-time favorites, Pythagoras is in my personal view the key to understanding the metaphysical tradition of ancient Greece. While I don’t think I would have been one of his followers if I had known him (he was an ascetic and required performing all sorts of purification rituals to detach us from this …READ MORE