Their thunder was no longer the growling of a minatory Zeus.” - Again, the Presocratics have kindred spirits in the science departments at modern universities. But their theology had little to do with religion, and they removed most of the traditional functions of the gods. The Presocratics were not atheists: they allowed the god into their brave new world, and some of them attempted to produce an improved and rationalized theology in place of the anthropomorphic divinities of the Olympian pantheon. “Nor was the world a series of events determined by the will or the caprice of the gods. The world was not a random collection of bits, its history was not an arbitrary jumble of events.” - This is central to their spirit of inquiry, an approach compatible with a modern physicist or chemist. They saw the world as something ordered and intelligible, its history following an explicable course and its different parts arranged in a comprehensible system. They hit upon that special way of looking at the world which is the scientific and rational way. “First and most simply, the Presocratics invented the very idea of science and philosophy. Below are a few quotes from Jonathan Barnes’s excellent 40 page introduction along with my brief comments: I couldn’t imagine a better introductory book then this one on the subject. The early Greek philosophers, thinkers like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, Leucippus, are foundational for the Western intellectual tradition.

Early greek philosophy jonathan barnes