If you have ever raised children, one of the fascinating experiences is watching them learn to think, watching the mind develop. There is the period of the baby to the school child when they absorb all the attitudes around them. Then school takes over and formalizes the learning process.
We take so much for granted of this development. It takes training to be able to see, to view something. It is a wonder how all the cultures of the world do this, yet do it somewhat differently based on their history and experiences. Viva la difference! Life is interesting, even if conflicting and contradictory.
Going to the issue of what we take for granted. In his unpublished work on the philosophy of metaphysics, DK Toteras points out that prior to preSocratics, who actually were the first to develop the formal art of argument, there was at least 3000 years of civilization. Starting with the agricultural revolution mankind has math, is looking for causatives, develops a clock and recognizes seasons. "Regularity" was a world-wide view. Predictability. Then in Greece from 1000 to 700 BC, "deterministic thought" developed. This was the point where the preSocratics began to look for (THEOLOGIS), "first cause."
(Source: Here I am presenting what I understand of an interpretation of the preSocratics by DK Toteras, a Greek who studied their fragments in the ancient Greek language.)
How did we get here? Where did it all come from? The preSocratics raised these questions because they had gone beyond a hand to mouth existence, and the abundance in their lives gave them the luxury of entertaining such thoughts. Only in abundance do you have the issue of choice, to choose this or to choose that, which creates an new need, how do you decide what to chose? Choose their gods or reject them for another view called first cause?
Perception -- choice. This was an activity that the preSocratics developed. Another way to view their world.
There were plenty of traditions at this point, explanations or views of what is the cause of our existence. They were mostly polytheistic. In polytheism the gods were unified with nature, they were part of all things, each god represented a part of the whole. The 17th-century philosopher Spinoza develops a similar thought in the modern context.
But things change, and not in neat linear packages either. The realities mix and coexist as they morph. The thought of sequential did not even exist in antiquity as it does today.
In response to the inadequacies of the prevailing view for the needs of the time, the preSocratics began to question their traditions. They formally developed the QUESTION. The ability to question is 2500 years old, but it is modern. The definitive terms of ABSTRACTION developed by the preSocratics to question are still active. They are used today.
When we look at the preSocratics we are actually witness to the birth of thinking. The birth of "modern." Primitive thinking becomes systematic or systematized thinking.
The preSocratics might be called the first formal rebels. They questioned their traditions, and they kicked out their gods. They bring to mind the bumper stickers of the late 20th Century, "Question Authority." They made a METHODOLOGY out of it, they ARGUED the question.
However they were not professional thinkers. There was no such thing, yet. They were seekers of a truth of sorts, they called it ALETHIA, an activity of uncovering, unmasking, exposing. Seeing the world around them with a new eye, consciously making descriptions of it, which was the practical side of this activity. Looking at the stars for purposes of navigation on the seas, for example. But alethia is the basic activity of philosophy, it points to new observations that are not necessarily comfortable or popular.
Alethia is not a fixed state, it is a moving process, a verb. That is the beauty of the argument, the method. As opposed to truth as a noun, a conclusion.
They were looking for the first cause of Nature, PHYSIS in Greek, the origin of the terms physics and physical. It is the thought of first cause that carries polytheism to monotheism, to a God which manipulates nature as opposed to gods which reside in all things.
It is subtle what they are doing, looking at the world descriptively, to define it, and thinking about it as an abstraction, a thought, making a method to think.
What IS it? Identify it, a plate is round, it contains... This is the distinctively Greek verb "to be," the IS of Identity coming forward. The abstraction is metaphysical, beyond the physical.
The verb "to be" also carries them to another thought, the thought of Being, (ta on) or (ta onta) (τὰ ὄν τα) in Greek, the root word of ontology, the study of metaphysics. In his manuscript Toteras uses (a on' ta) for Being.
Metaphysics is not epistemology, the study of knowledge. Epistemology is a system of knowing that develops with Plato, based on "the form" or idea and its particular. Plato's dualism, the general and the particular is not like Being, which includes everything. It also includes what is coming into being, becoming apparent from non-being. So paradoxically it also includes non-being. It is not dualistic. It does not cut everything into fragments like the academic disciplines do.
What is the methodology of metaphysics? What is its nature? That is the misunderstood question of ontology that we want to take up.
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