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One way to begin to understand philosophy is to look at its history. The historical origins of philosophical thinking and exploration vary around the globe. The earliest philosophers were not known as philosophers but as sages. The figure of the sage, the individual found in early societies around the world who mediated between the everyday and the transcendent realms, is an important precursor to philosophy. In most societies, this figure predates the recognition of the philosopher as the individual seeker of wisdom by many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Some scholars argue that philosophical thought requires abstract thinking of the sort required for the bureaucratic administration of society and that many societies developed philosophical traditions out of these practices of abstract reasoning. These traditions furnished shared beliefs about ethics, metaphysics, and other realms of philosophical inquiry.
Sages are sometimes associated with mathematical and scientific discoveries and at other times with their political impact. What unites these figures is that they demonstrate a willingness to be skeptical of traditions, a curiosity about the natural world and our place in it, and a commitment to applying reason to understand nature, human nature, and society better.
The use of writing to record human thought marks the transition from prehistory to history. The first recorded texts include genealogies, accounts of heroic and everyday actions by human beings, and legal codes. These earliest writings offer a glimpse into early human systems of government and everyday life. Writing expressing philosophical questions came later, primarily in the form of religious and mythological stories, and this is where we begin. There is concrete evidence that at this turning point in human history, people:
In classical Indian philosophy and religion, sages play a central role in both religious mythology and in the practice of passing down teaching and instruction through generations. The Seven Sages, or Saptarishi, play an important role in sanatana dharma, the eternal duties that have come to be identified with Hinduism but that predate the establishment of the religion. The Seven Sages are partially considered wise men and are said to be the authors of the ancient Indian texts known as the Vedas. But they are partly mythic figures as well, who are said to have descended from the gods and whose reincarnation marks the passing of each age of man or epoch of humanity. The Seven Sages tended to live monastic lives, and together, they are thought of as the spiritual and practical forerunners of Indian gurus or teachers, even up to today. The stories of the rishis are part of the teachings that constitute spiritual and philosophical practice in contemporary Hinduism.
In similar fashion to the Indian tradition, the sage tradition is important for Chinese philosophy. Confucius, one of the greatest Chinese writers, often refers to ancient sages, emphasizing their importance for their discovery of technical skills essential to human civilization, for their role as rulers and wise leaders, and for their wisdom. This emphasis is in alignment with the Confucian appeal to a well-ordered state under the guidance of a “philosopher king.” This point of view can be seen in early sage figures identified by one of the greatest classical authors in the Chinese tradition as the “Nest Builder” and “Fire Maker” or, in another case, the “Flood Controller.” These names identify wise individuals with early technological discoveries. The Book of Changes, a classical Chinese text, identifies the Five Emperors as sages who are said to have built canoes and oars, attached carts to oxen, built double gates for defense, and fashioned bows and arrows.
These figures are praised not only for their political wisdom and long rule but also for their filial piety and devotion to work. In these ways, the Chinese philosophical traditions, such as Confucianism and Mohism, associate the key values of their philosophical enterprises with the great sages of their history. Whether the sages were, in fact, actual people or, as many scholars have concluded, mythical forebearers, they possessed the essential human virtue of listening and responding to divine voices. This attribute can be inferred from the Chinese script for sheng, which bears the symbol of an ear as a prominent feature. So, the sage is one who listens to insight from the heavens and then is capable of sharing that wisdom or acting upon it for the benefit of his society.
Prominent folk sages in African tribal history developed complex philosophical ideas. Scholars interviewed tribal Africans identified by their communities as sages and recorded their sayings and ideas. There is a tension in what made these sages philosophically interesting: they articulated the received wisdom of their tradition and culture while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from that culture, seeking a rational justification for the beliefs held by the culture.
The ancient Greeks identify seven sages. The best-known account is provided by Diogenes Laërtius, whose text Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a canonical resource on early Greek philosophy. The first and most important sage is Thales of Miletus. While there is some dispute over how much Thales wrote, he was credited throughout early Greek philosophy with substantial claims and examinations. Thales traveled to Egypt to study with the Egyptian priests, where he became one of the first Greeks to learn astronomy. He is known for bringing knowledge of the calendar back to Greece, dividing the year into 365 days, tracking the progress of the sun from solstice to solstice, and predicting a solar eclipse in 585 BCE. In addition, he is said to have calculated the height of the pyramids using the basic geometry of similar triangles and measuring shadows at a certain time of day. He is also reported to have predicted a particularly good year for olives: he bought up all the olive presses and then made a fortune selling those presses to farmers wanting to turn their olives into oil.
In his Politics, Aristotle uses the story of Thales of Miletus to show that philosophers can make money, if they want to do so. Thales’ crop prediction demonstrates "that it is easy for philosophers to be rich, if they wish, but it is not in this that they are interested."
Together, these scientific and technical achievements suggest that at least part of Thales’s wisdom can be attributed to a very practical, scientific, and mathematical knowledge of the natural world. If that were all Thales was known for, he might have been called the first scientist or engineer. But he also made more basic claims about the nature and composition of the universe; for instance, he claimed that all matter was fundamentally made up of water. He also argued that everything that moved on its own possessed a soul and that the soul itself was immortal. Both Plato in Laws and Aristotle in De Anima quote Thales as holding that all living things are “full of gods.” These claims demonstrate a concern about the fundamental nature of reality.
The sage tradition is a largely prehistoric tradition that provides a narrative about how intellect, wisdom, piety, and virtue led to the innovations central to the flourishing of ancient civilizations. Particularly in Greece, the sage tradition blends into a period of natural philosophy, where ancient scientists or philosophers try to explain nature using rational methods. The term “natural philosophy” was used to categorize all sciences into the 19th century.
Several of the early Greek schools of philosophy were centered on their respective views of nature. Followers of Thales, known as the Milesians, were particularly interested in the underlying causes of natural change:
EXAMPLE
Xenophanes explained rainbows, the sun, the moon, and St. Elmo’s fire (luminous, electrical discharges) as apparitions of the clouds. This form of explanation, describing some apparent phenomenon as the result of an underlying mechanism, is paradigmatic of scientific explanation even today.Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, used logic to conclude that whatever fundamentally exists must be unchanging because if it ever did change, then at least some aspect of it would cease to exist. But that would imply that what exists could not exist, which seems to defy logic. Parmenides does not say that there is no change, but that the changes we observe are a kind of illusion.
Indeed, this point of view was highly influential not only for Plato and Aristotle but also for the early atomists like Democritus, who held that all perceived qualities are merely human conventions. Underlying all these appearances, Democritus reasoned, are only atomic, unchanging bits of matter flowing through a void. While this ancient Greek view of atoms is quite different from the modern model of atoms, the very idea that every observable phenomenon has a basis in underlying pieces of matter in various configurations clearly connects modern science to the earliest Greek philosophers.
Source: This tutorial has been adapted from OpenStax “Introduction to Philosophy.” Access for free at OpenStax. License: Creative commons attribution 4.0 international.
