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Why did philosophers (starting from pre-Socratic f.e. Tales) take on the concept of 'being'? I see a chair and ... nothing. I do understand why they started to observe nature but why did they need to find the answer for 'how exists what exists' so it developed into 'ontology'?

Lil'Lobster
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    Possible hints: do numbers exists ? does beauty exist ? do elfs exist ? does God exist ? – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Jan 14 '16 at 19:50
  • @MauroALLEGRANZA I think I get it, so far. But it may turn out that my getting-it is not so stable :) – Lil'Lobster Jan 14 '16 at 20:27
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    @Lili Please name one pre-Socratic and one of his fragments which relates to your ontological question. Otherwise I cannot assign the question How exists what exists? – Jo Wehler Jan 14 '16 at 22:10
  • Thales and Democritus. – Lil'Lobster Jan 15 '16 at 10:53
  • Your question makes it sound like you've been reading Heidegger. This may not be the best way to figure out what the pre-Socratics believed themselves to be doing. – virmaior Jan 17 '16 at 02:12
  • @virmaior Actually I have not read any of Heidegger works. I just became being interested in philosophy, so figured out, that the best way is to start from the very beginning. I'm like 20 ages before Heidegger right now :-) – Lil'Lobster Jan 17 '16 at 07:16
  • Who wrote the text (compilation, textbook, etc) you're working with? The wording choice does not sound like the pre-socractics themselves. – virmaior Jan 17 '16 at 07:59
  • I'm Polish @virmaior so I reached for a book in philosophy in Polish:) The author is a late Władysław Tatarkiewicz - however you can check on english wikipedia. He is considered to have been a good philosopher. At least for psychologists and mathematicians :-) – Lil'Lobster Jan 17 '16 at 08:42
  • I almost forgot to add - if there is any book in philosophy for beginners not trained in such mode of thinking, I'd be grateful. My book is written in thirties of last century in a cute but old-fashioned style. – Lil'Lobster Jan 17 '16 at 09:18

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Thales and other pre-Socratics knew from simple observation that chairs are not so simple.

Clearly, they are not exactly the same as "sensing" the chair or "remembering" the chair. If no one is "sensing" the chair does it still... exist? If so, as we assume, then we do not explain its "existence" simply by saying we sense it, much less by invoking something we cannot even sense, such as a "neuronal state."

Worse, chairs do not remain chairs. You toss a chair into the fire and it is no longer a chair, though your "memory of the chair" is unchanged. Was the chair turned into fire? Or, since so many different things can turn into fire, was it perhaps fire that had temporarily turned into a chair, as Hericlitus conjectured? If chairs can change just like that, is your unchanging "memory of the chair" somehow more real? As Pythagoras conjectured.

So the pre-Socratics, the physicists in particular, simply sought that underlying, irreducible substance that chairs and all other things are made of or "have in common." What we today might call, even less plausibly perhaps, "particles" or "energy" or "strings." Pure concepts. What is it that everything can turn into... or that can turn into anything? Is it fire, water, atoms...?

Now, if we go even beyond "fire" or "atoms," what about chairs and the memory or "idea of a chair"? How are they related? What do they share in common? What do all the things that we sense or can imagine or remember or infer all have in common? We might say they all "exist." Or "they are" or "it is." But what do we mean by this? What does it mean simply "to be"?

We use the word "is" all the time. But what does it stand for? Is it something distinct from those "beings" that instantiate it? Is it a property of things? And how can we also imagine its opposite... not being? To be or not to be. Or being and nothingness. It doesn't get you far to say, they are "just words." Or they are "just neuronal states." Those too can fall into the same problems as chairs.

Many philosophers from some pre-Socratics on have suggested that "being" itself is superfluous, a verbal confusion. But it isn't so obvious. And often, as Heidegger suggested, it is only when the chair breaks or your theory of light no longer works that you are forced to wonder about the nature of its so-called existence, its being.

Nelson Alexander
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  • Your answer sounds plausible. How far is it backed by the text. e.g., your statements about the conjectures of Heraclitus and Pythagoras?

    Heraclitus in A16 does not conjecture that coal becomes fire (noun). Instead he says that coal becomes fervid (Adjective diapyros). It makes a big difference whether a given substance changes into an other substance or whether the original substance only changes some of ist properties.

    Ad Pythagoras: To which fragment do you refer the conjecture about the unchanging "memory of the chair"?

     – Jo Wehler Jan 17 '16 at 18:46
  • Can you give some precise references which pre-Socratics have suggested that "being" itself is superfluous, a verbal confusion? I remember at most Heraklitus and Parmenides as philosophers who have dealt with being as an ontological issue. – Jo Wehler Jan 17 '16 at 18:46
  • My comments are hardly defensible as scholarship. Since we have mere fragments of most pre-Socratics, many common interpretations come from Aristotle, I believe. Fire is generally held to be the irreducible "substance" in Heraclitus (can't find my copy of his fragments) out of which water and earth and then everything are formed. But this is controversial, since he is so elusive. It could even be a refutation of "substance." I recall there were some ancient "nominalists," but would have to hunt. And I believe that Plato's anamnesis is Pythagorean, hence "memory of" per "idea of." – Nelson Alexander Jan 17 '16 at 21:07
  • Gorgias, Protagoras, and other sophists might qualify as pre-Socratic "nominalists," but again fragments are filtered through Plato, and I don't know what they actually said about substance or ousia. My understanding is that they mostly just turned away from Milesian "physics." I'd be interested to know what Heidegger said of them, but not sure where to look. – Nelson Alexander Jan 17 '16 at 21:23
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Fortunately we have a history of pre-Socratic and Platonic philosophy written shortly after their time by an eminent philosopher himself: Aristotle: Metaphysics, Book 1.

In that text Aristotle makes a systematic study about what knowledge and sciences are. He develops his theory of four causes (in Latin: causa materialis, causa formalis, causa efficiend, causa finalis), which together serve to explain all phenomena. Aristotle equalizes causa formalis with the Greek term ousia, which translates to the term essence. Note, both terms derive from the verb to be.

Aristotle reviews his precursors on this field, who where the pre-Scoratics and Plato, under the central question to which degree each of them considers the four different causes.

Aristotle explicitly deals with Thales (983b20), Anaximenes and Diogenes (984a5), Hippasos and Heraklitos (984a7), Anaxagoras (984a11), Hermotimos (984b19), Hesiod (984b23), Parmenides (984b25), Empedokles (985a5), Leukippos (985b4), Demokritos (985b5), School of Pythagoras (985b23), Alkmaion from Kroton (986a27), Xenophanes (986b21), and Plato (987a29) – I give always the first reference from Metaphysics, Book 1.

Jo Wehler
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For the case of whether the chair is there or not, it's obvious.

But it quickly gets complicated:

  • When you say a chair is there, what makes it a chair?
  • Does the "thing-that-makes-it-a-chair" (i.e., the form of a chair) exist as an entity?
  • What about abstract ideas? Do they "really" exist or not? For example, are "justice" and "natural rights" really things that exist in some sense similar to the chair? Or are they just made up conventions?
  • Does the chair exist necessarily, or accidentally? What chain of causes brought the chair into existence? Is there an ultimate cause, or does that cause go on infinitely?

One could continue for a while, but hopefully some of these questions show that "being" can quickly get thorny.

James Kingsbery
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  • To me, all those things are arousal or excitation in neuronal sites... but I think that the crux is that the thinkers a really long time ago had not known about brain structures, I guess? – Lil'Lobster Jan 14 '16 at 20:01
  • That is certainly one point of view, but even today many (myself included!) disagree that you can just reduce everything to neurons. And there were many even in ancient times that would say something similar to what you suggest (all that is, is made of matter). – James Kingsbery Jan 14 '16 at 20:10
  • So the question then arises: why not (reducing to neurons)? It seems to me to be the most simple thinking. Actually, the 'being' concept bugs me for a few days, but as I wrote before, I'm a newbie, so probably there are points in my thinking that're missing :( – Lil'Lobster Jan 14 '16 at 20:25