Dave Robinson - Introducing Philosophy: A Graphic Guide

EVERYTHING IS MADE OF WATER. IT IS MADE OF AIR. THERE IS A SORT OF FUNDAMENTAL STUFF FROM WHICH EVERYTHING IS CREATED AND TO WHICH IT MUST EVENTUALLY RETURN.

Anaximander also thought that the earth was like a large stone column. Not much is known about any of these strange early philosopher-scientists, except that their science was almost wholly cerebral and not experimental. But they would never accept answers which relied merely on supernatural explanations.

Pythagoras (571496 B.C.) asked the same One Big Question, but emerged with a very different answer. He thought that the answer was mathematics. He lived on the island of Samos, before he emigrated with his disciples to Croton in southern Italy. He was a vegetarian who believed in reincarnation and declared that eating beans was sinful. He and his disciples worshipped numbers and thought that the world was made of them, a truth most obviously revealed by ratios, squares and right-angled triangles. Pythagoras big breakthrough was to recognize that mathematical truths had to be proved rather than just accepted. His number mysticism looks to us very odd. He declared that Justice was the number 4, because it was a square number. He was finally shocked by his discovery of irrational numbers like Pi and 2.

THE RATIO OF THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF A CIRCLE TO ITS DIAMETER IS APPROXIMATELY 3,141 APPROXIMATELY? THIS SUGGESTS THAT THE WORLD ISNT AT ALL MATHMEMATICALLY NEAT AND PERFECT.

HERACLITUS AND THE WORLD IN FLUX

Heraclitus, who lived circa 500 B.C., would have been more tolerant of an irrational universe. His nickname was The Rudder because he maintained that everything in the world is always changing and in a constant state of conflict. He illustrated this by a famous saying.