Talk:Pre-Socratic philosophy/Archive 1

Old text
First, I want to compliment the authors on a well written and interesting article! --Matt Stoker - should this be under "The Presocratics" or "Presocratics"? I know that the article is almost always part of the statement, but is it Wikipedia? I noticed this when the Protagoras entry didn't line up with anything. And is he *really* Heraclitus of Ephesus? I've never heard of another Heraclitus, and I was an undergraduate classics major.

I left it where it was, but created redirects from presocratic, and presocratics which should take care of the non-intuitive link problem. Though perhaps we should have a link from pre-socratic. I really don't want to clutter everything up with redirects, but I think it better to have these than to end up with redundant pages because people didn't know about the correct page name. MRC --- He was Heraclitus of Ephesus, but wasn't there in fact another Heraclitus - a poet?```

Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras is also one of the praesocratic philosophers. "Anaxagoras materiam infinitam, sed ex ea particulas similes inter se minutas", Acad. 11, 118

Demomotus
For anyone who knows more about this subject than I do, please check out Demomotus. As Sietse pointed out on Reference desk, it gets no Google hits that are not copies of the same article and the style of the article seems, er, a little on the creative side. older≠wiser 15:58, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

Graphical Relationship
I have just added a graphical relationship image for this article. I tried to do my best with a software that I was learning at the same time (Graphviz), but I hope it is at least ok. The source-code is at http://www.geocities.com/elolvido83/pre-socratic.txt but please use my "My Talk" page to notify about any changes - I will be glad to help. tresoldi 05:00, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

I added an improved version of the graph, with a time-line and more organized, but strangely Wikipedia only shows a thumbnail if its width is larger than 500px (which probably is too much): smaller thumbnails are showed in blank. Any idea? tresoldi 17:30, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That picture really doesn't explain what the difference between the red arrows and the black arrows are.Cereal box conspiracy 17:10, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

NOTE: There is no line between Democritus and Protagorus, whereas the text clearly says that Democritus mentored the latter. Might be worth fixing, but I will leave that to the original creator of the graph. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8801:1D87:A800:EC11:174C:7B8F:91A8 (talk) 18:15, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Pre-Socreatics?
I'm quite oriented to remove the Sophists from the list; in the books or chapters devoted to pre-socratic philosophy, the sophists are never considered pre-socratics, for obvious reasons (they are massively present in the Socratic dialogues and are strongly involved in moral and political, much more than natural, philosophy).--Aldux 00:07, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking about that when I built the graphical relationship exactly from this source. Even though, I don't think that considering the sophists pre-socratics is completely wrong: there seems to be a little of prejudice (coming from none less than Socrates himself), as the division between philosophers and sophists is not always that easy and the influence (at least in terms of opposition to the sophists) is unquestionable. For clarity and "tradition", however, I do agree that just a paragraph mentioning the sophists might do. tresoldi 21:47, 11 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't think whether or not a philosopher is present in Socratic dialogues or whether or not a philosopher was strongly invovled in moral philosophy have anything to do with whether a philosopher is a Presocratic. Whether or not one is Presocratic seems to have mostly to do with whether or not one's own philosophy was influenced by Socratic philosophy or the philosophy of Socrates' followers.  All of the Sophists had philosophical views of their own that were quite independent of Socrates' influence.  Plus most, if not all, of them were older than Socrates (for this, see Plato's Protagoras 314b, where Socrates tells Hippocrates that they had better consult their "elders" concerning the matters they have been discussing; Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus are clearly the "elders" to whom he refers).  (Of course being older than Socrates isn't a necessary condition for being a Presocratic; Democritus was actually younger, but he was uninfluenced by Socratic philosophy.)  Finally, there are well-respected texts that focus on the Presocratics and that do include discussion of the Sophists:  Hermann Diels' seminal work The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics, and Jonathan Barnes's The Presocratic Philosophers (1982).  Isokrates 16:48, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Was Einstein a pre-socratic? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.89.141.126 (talk) 15:52, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

most important contribution
The pre-socratics most important contribution is shifting cosmogony and ontology away from mythology. they were the first people to try to explain the world without using human terms. They tried to de-anthrocentrize the world.

Philolaus an Eleatic?
The image in this page (Image:Presocratic_graph.png) classifies him as an Eleatic, using the yellow color of the school. However, he is a Pythagorean (of which school the color is something like white-pink), and I can't find a mention that he is an Eleatic from either Philolaus or Eleatics page. So can someone change the color of Philolaus in the image? --Acepectif (talk) 05:06, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I modified the image today. (It was not so hard as much as I thought..) --Acepectif (talk) 04:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Definition
The definition as Greek philosophy before Socrates is obvious, but I find it confusing as Democritus was a younger contemporary, and his follower Metrodorus of Chios lived after Socrates, but both are regarded as pre-Socratic as they were not influenced by Socrates. Epicurus lived later still and was apparently influenced by Democritus but not by Socrates, so was he a pre-Socratic? I think the defintion needs fuller discussion as at 1. Dudley Miles (talk) 16:39, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Anacharsis
First known philosopher in Athens? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.89.141.126 (talk) 15:56, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Idea: edit Wikipedia to incorporate DK numbering about presocratics in general
This is a kind of "note to self", and suggestion to others, regarding wikipedia content about presocratic philosophers in general. In treatments of the presocratics, partial reference is made to Diels-Kranz numbering, or DK on a regular basis, yet in at least one instance (Waterfield), this is a only slight, partial listing. The scheme goes: every figure gets their own number. I come up with 90 such numbers, though there's more parsing to do.

This article, and probably other English wikipedia articles to do with the presocratics, could be meaningfully improved by identifying the DK number for each figure and consistently applying them throughout the encyclopedia. The first step would be to get a good, robust table on the "Diels Kranz Numbering" page of all 90 entries - the Spanish Wikipedia already has a very good table which should basically be mimiced in the English version: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Fragmente_der_Vorsokratiker

Using an Amazon link (I don't have the book handy), this Spanish material appears to concord very well with the table of contents of Freeman's "Ancilla to Pre-Socratic Philosophers", an English translation of Diels (the numbers match the partial listing given in Waterfield). The point here is that the modern scholarly standard about DK appears to be 90 numbers, which can be properly sourced and verfied once the grunt work is done. I've put this suggestion on the English "Diels-Kranz numbering" talk page and I'll post it on the general presocratic philosphers' page as well.

Removing the section of the lead that contains Aristotle, Adding information to two schools
I suggest removing the section on Aristotle in the lead and instead stating the names of some of the most influential pre-Socratic philosophers. In addition, the Ephesian school of thought has no sources so it should be rewritten with citable information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DanTheMan4488 (talk • contribs) 20:23, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Removing the section of the lead that contains Aristotle, Adding information to two schools
I suggest removing the section on Aristotle in the lead and instead stating the names of some of the most influential pre-Socratic philosophers. In addition, the Ephesian school of thought has no sources so it should be rewritten with citable information. DanTheMan4488 (talk) 20:33, 13 February 2019 (UTC)