Fifty Major Philosophers - part 1

Mediations on the "Fifty Major Philosophers" by Diane Collinson.

What is the world in which we live? This question was raised by the earliest of historically great thinkers on many levels. For Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, Heraclitius (circa 650-500 BC) what the physical substance of the material world was of interest and each proposed it to be water, aperion, air, and fire, respectively. (Aperion being a indefinite, spatially infinite, all-encompasing substance producing balanced motion between all cosmic opposites like light and dark, hot and cold.)

Like a baby first discovering the world, life is first experienced through the physical world and so naturally the philosphers are remembered for humanities first baby step or question, asking "What is the world physically made of?". This is a question one arrives at first when searching for the answer to "What or 'who' am I?". Answer that, and questions like, "Why am I here? What is my purpose or destiny in life? Where did I come from and where am I going?" are more accurately answered.

Pythagoras, best known for his geometrical theorums, believed the principle behind all things was not a elemental substance but rather numbers, where both the cosmological matter and meaning were expressed. The essence of things being numeric is highly debatable, but understanding everything could be expressed in mathematical terms, I personally think, was one of the greatest monumental ideas human history. Today, so much transformation of our world is achieved through mathematics, and at hyper speeds through the use of computers, it useful to know how to define both physical or mental objects in a formal system for further learning.

With newly aquired knowledge, one risks misinterpretation or worse misapplication. In comes Zeno to capture these errors in a set of paradoxes that often appear between the passage of one's physical experiences and human reasoning. With the fact that the measurement of time is infinitely divisible and yet a segment of time is finite, Zeno wonders how motion is possible and he illustrates this paradox in the story of Achilles and the tortoise. Here, Zeno grapples between time, space and human perception. How can Achilles, known for speed, ever surpass the tortoise whose been given a head start if at all times during the race, the lapse of time between him and the tortoise can be divided infinitely. When the problem is only expressed in time, it appears at every point in time, the tortoise will always be ahead since there are an infinite number of time segements dividing them from each other. Of course you don't need differential calculus to understand the passage of distance during time, but with thoughts concerning more unfamiliar, transient, realms of knowledge about the external world in which we live, especially when related to eternal questions, our minds can easily leave us perplexed or worse misguided.