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Greek philosophers .. from prehistoric chemist to chemical philosopher

Greek philosophers

The interpretations of the visible world were not new, of course. They were and still are the spirit of religion. However, these new thinkers did not cite gods in their interpretations, that is, they tried to maintain their rational interpretations (based on reason in contrast to mysticism based on intuition and faith only). Just as contemplating the nature of the world was not new, rational thought was not new. The Babylonians developed complex mathematics and by 1600 BC were concerned with rational thinking. In Africa, Egyptian mathematical knowledge, represented in the division of lands and surveying and the construction of pyramids, was certainly based on rational thought.

The ancient Indian philosopher Kapila believed that philosophical questions could be solved without resorting to mystical interpretations. The Indian Nyaya Sutra, probably written sometime between the third century BC and the first century AD, lists the principles of discussion, arguments and common misconceptions. But we must pay special attention to the Greeks, for reasons more political than philosophical. We will briefly discuss this. It was the Greeks who were destined to explain the philosophy of nature and the nature of philosophy, which had the greatest influence on the future of chemical events.

Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Anaxagoras

In modern chemistry we rely on about a hundred elements as the basic building blocks of which all matter is composed. There is no justification for claiming that this was the first assumption, since the philosophical effort was initially concerned with discovering the one basic essence of nature - the basic substance, that from which everything else is composed. This effort began for the Greeks about 600 BC on the shores of the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor in the independent Ionian city of Miletus at the hands of the first Ionian philosopher - Thales.

Little is known about Thales' life. He was born into a privileged family and we do not know why he chose a life of teaching and philosophy, but he did. Thales believed that the basic raw material in nature must be a single substance.

He taught his students that this basic substance is water and he was probably influenced by Babylonian religious teachings. Thales did not cite religious evidence to support his theory, but instead relied on observations where water turned into air (evaporation) or solid (freezing) and thus formed all things. This trend gave the basis for the Greek schools of thought in the future, which is to explain natural phenomena on the basis of rational inference based on observation without supernatural revelation. Thales was followed by his student Anaximander (in the mid-1500s BC) in assuming that the basic substance in everything is called "aperon". Anaximander did not have an accurate description of this substance. But he said that the worlds were formed and disappeared like bubbles in this apeeron. He put forward a theory that the solar system came into existence when a mass of apeeron separated from an infinite time in a circular motion that caused the heavy matter in the center to solidify, while the edges condensed in the form of celestial bodies. This theory can be compared to the modern cosmological theory (19). It gives the impression of the accuracy of the intuition related to the sensible world. On the other hand, Anaximenes saw the earth as a flattened cylinder. He believed that animals were created from inanimate matter while man was created from fish, which reminds us of the speculative nature of these theories. Anaximenes lived around 550 BC. He was probably a student of Anaximenes, but he said that air was the first substance. According to Anaximenes, rarefied air becomes rare, while condensed air becomes everything else (water, earth, stones). In support of his theory, Anaximenes said that air blown from closed lips becomes cold, while air blown from an open mouth is hot: that is, compressed air condenses, while expanded air turns into fire.

I. Xagoras, the last of the distinguished Ionian philosophers, lived about 400 BC, and although he was born of wealthy parents, he seems to have spent his inheritance in the practice of natural philosophy. I. Xagoras threw aside the tradition of searching for a single primary substance, and hypothesized how hair could come from what was not hair and flesh from what was not flesh (20). He assumed that there were seeds of infinitely small parts of everything that existed in the visible world. These seeds did not begin to exist or perish, but formed all matter. New substances were formed from them when they mixed or separated. In contrast to later atomic theories, I. Xagoras believed that all matter was infinitely divisible, and that the small parts resulting from division contained parts of every other substance. It is important to pause here to note the course of development: the dispute was about what the first substance or substances were, but all the debaters seemed to rest contentedly on the assumption that whatever this basic element (or elements) was, it must be present in small parts in all substances. This was the assumption that the chemists labored for the next two thousand years. One reason for this insistence was the succession of axioms in the proofs presented by the philosophers and supported by everyday observations, but another reason was the social upheavals that spread the Greek philosophers throughout the Mediterranean like the seeds of Anaxagoras.

These upheavals began when the Persians invaded Miletus and the Ionian philosophers migrated to other parts of Greece. Anaxagoras traveled to Athens, where he is said to have given an accurate explanation of eclipses. He was eventually tried for heresy when he asserted that the sun was nothing more than a glowing stone slightly larger than the Peloponnese. Despite the unexpected reaction of the citizens of Athens, Athens itself was destined to become the most important center of philosophy.