Name: The Presocratics: Crash Course History of Science #2
Uploaded: 2018-10-31T00:17:59.000Z
Duration: 12 min 32 s
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Adverbs of manner

Long ago, some philosophers worked very hard
to separate myths from what they actually

Basic passive voice

Thales theorized that everything in the world
is made of water.

Pythagoras was a mathematical-mystical vegetarian.

And Democritus, we all know and love as the
Atom Guy…

The Presocratics were named for their leader, Presocrates.

They were several different philosophers who
lived before Socrates.

Since people have systematically made knowledge
about the world for millennia, there's no

But a convenient place to get our footing
is ancient Greece.

These Greeks were the cornerstone of scientific
inquiry in western Europe.

Can you imagine coming up with a question
about nature that puzzles people for more

I can't even decide what to have for breakfast.

A more practical reason to put on our thinking
togas is that the ancient Greeks left behind

Writing stuff down makes history possible
and here's a Pro tip: if you want to be remembered

Also, get super famous so that your students
make plenty of copies.

Not all of the people we think of as “ancient

Their culture stretched across a prosperous
region called called Ionia.

And they weren't as ancient as some even
ancient-er Greeks.

We typically date ancient Greece as starting
around 800 BCE, after the fall of the Mycenaeans.

Those are the dudes who burned
down troy because one of them got dumped.

“Ancient” Greece ends with the Roman conquest
in 146 BCE.

We're focusing on a science-dense period
from aroud 600 to 400 BCE.

These Greeks live in small towns and are very
comfy out at sea.

They trade and fight with each other a lot,
and they sometimes have to deal with invading

They worship nature, but their land is deforested
and eroded.

They love setting up new colonies all along
the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

There is no public support for anything like
modern science.

There aren't even schools in which to study
science…

The Greeks practiced natural philosophy, meaning

“self-conscious inquiry into nature.”

A lot of their philosophies were about answering
our first running question: What is stuff?

If you watched our first episode you'll
know that we can divide “science” into

both a “body of knowledge” and a “set
of methods.”

When you examine the work of these Presocratic
philosophers, you can see two important things:

first, they weren't scientists in a modern
sense.

They didn't make detailed, accurate knowledge
of nature based on observation.

But they did come up with theories that tried
to account for why stuff is the way it is.

In their wonky-sounding theories, we still
find many of the themes that would drive centuries

of further inquiry: the divide between the
abstract and the material, or identifying

Second, as these natural philosophers tried
their best to separate Myth from Truth, they

developed first drafts of many of the methods
we still use and value today.

Natural philosophy became a quest for abstract
knowledge.

This is important because it means the Presocratics
started making general claims about the real

world—laws that would apply in every situation,
not only specific instances.

The Presocratics also developed “schools”
of thought that spread their ideas around

These weren't physical schools, but groups
of teachers and students who thought about

One of the reasons we know about these schools,
is because they operated as individuals, who

took credit for their ideas and whose names
were passed down.

This practice differed from many other cultures
of inquiry, and became a foundation for how

Europeans later systematically made knowledge.

But the big method, and the one we're going
to focus on, was rational debate.

Between all those schools and individuals
and abstract theories there was a lot of disagreement.

To convince people they were right: a natural
philosopher had to use reason, logic, and

observation to attack the wrong-seeming theories
of others and bolster his own awesomeness.

In fact, some historians argue there's a
link between rational debate about political

constitutionality, or how humans should govern
themselves, and rational debate about the

constitution of nature, or how the world governs
itself.

There are more Presocratics than we could
possibly mention, so here are some highlights:

this is our rogue's gallery of natural philosophers,
who all had their own theories, and argued...

they  rationally debated—themselves into
the history of science.

The first European natural philosopher whose
ideas survived down to the present was Thales,

the first individual known to have proved
a mathematical theorem—Thales's theorem.

In fact, early historians attributed lots
of firsts to Thales, making it hard to tell

Regardless, being the first at a whole way
of doing thought is pretty unusual.

Thales set the natural world off as separate
from the divine.

For him, the world was something comprehensible
by the powers of the human intellect: it became

For example, Thales held that wind, not a
god, caused the Nile to flood.

This was a general, natural explanation for
a phenomenon.

He believed that all things have a god, or
soul, within them.

Thales was also the founder of the first European
“school” of philosophy, ---

The Milesian school was known for its theory
of matter; theory of stuff.

This theory held that water was the primary
substrate, or the most basic element.

Earthquakes happen when the water rocks back
and forth.

The soul of things may not have been material,
but their stuffness was water.

We'll come back to this essential dualism
of soul versus matter in future episodes.

Later, Plato and Aristotle were dismissive
of Thales, and part of their argument was

that Thales once predicted an upcoming harvest
to corner the market on olive oil, using his