Part one:
Roots
1.
Grains
The Milesians understand that by shrewdly using observation and reason, rather than searching for answers in
fantasy, ancient myths, or religion – and above all by using critical thought
in a discriminating way – it is possible to repeatedly correct our world view and to discover new aspects of
reality that are hidden to the common view. It is possible to discover the
new.
The decisive discovery is that of a different
style of thinking where the disciple is no longer obliged to respect and
share the ideas of the master but is free to build on those ideas without being
afraid to discard or criticize the part that can be improved. This is a novel
middle way, placed between full adherence to a school and generic deprecation
of ideas.
Anaximander understand that Earth floats in the sky and the sky continues
beneath Earth; that rainwater comes from the evaporation of water on Earth;
that the variety of substances in the world must be susceptible to being
understood in terms of a single, unitary,
and simple constituent, which he calls apeiron,
the indistinct: that animals and plants evolve and adapt to changes in the environment,
and that man must have evolved from other animals.
For the first time men doubt that only the gods are capable of accounting
for the mysteries of the world.
Atoms have no qualities at all, apart from their shape. They have no weight,
no color, no taste. “Sweetness is opinion, bitterness is opinion; heat, cold and
color are opinion; in reality only
atoms. And vacuum”
Nature continues to experiment with forms and structures; and we, like the
animals, are the products of a selection that is random and accidental, over
the course of eons of time. Our life is a combination of atoms, our thoughts
are made up of thin atoms, our dreams are the products of atoms; our hopes and
our emotions are written in a language formed by combinations of atoms; the
light that we see is composed of atoms, which brings us images.
The thought that thus emerges is a kind of intense humanism rationalist and
materialist.
Plato and Aristotle understand the world in finalistic terms → everything that
happens has a purpose, a way of thinking that would reveal itself to be very misleading
for understanding the ways of nature. He wanted to know what good it was for
Earth to be round
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