Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy (review)

We can trace to archaic Greek times detailed accounts of the origins of the cosmos. Anaximander and Hesiod provide different kinds of narrative, but both assume that the cosmos as we find it now was not the way it was at the beginning, and seek to explain how things got this way. According to the conventional view provided by Aristotle in Metaphysics A, the Ionians proposed that everything is derived from a primordial substance and that, despite differences in the world we now experience, all these things reduce ultimately to just one basic stuff, whether it be Thales' water, Anaximander's boundless, or Anaximenes' air (MM, or Material Monism). But Graham thinks Aristotle has it wrong and proposes a different story: the Ionians held that in the beginning there was a primordial substance, but it gave rise in turn to other, new substances, the original stuff perishing in the process (GST, or Generating Substance Theory). Graham's book sets out to challenge MM and to champion instead GST. He aims to show that GST is historically appropriate, philosophically coherent, and dialectically relevant. Ultimately, this is not just to urge a revision of Ionian beginnings but also to trace out the implications of GST in order to produce a new narrative of Presocratic philosophy, one that sees these Ionian beginnings as a clear precursor to modern science.

On Graham's account, Anaximenes champions GST and supplies the cosmic mechanism—condensation and rarefaction—that turns cosmology into a rational theory. On the conventional view (MM), Heraclitus responds critically to the Ionian picture by insisting that there is no basic underlying stuff, only change and flow; Parmenides' aletheia responds to both, arguing for undifferentiated unity and the impossibility of change; Anaxagoras and Empedocles, trying to save "experience," affirm plurality and thus react in opposition to Parmenides' myopic vision. But what if Aristotle got it wrong? If, on the contrary, the Ionians championed GST and Heraclitus was reacting to that doctrine, he would then appear to be in agreement with it, urging a process philosophy since there is no enduring basic substance. Parmenides' aletheia and doxa also take on new roles: the aletheia directly challenges GST because all change is ruled out—alteration, locomotion, and genesis and phthora—and since the doxa makes talk of plurality possible, Anaxagoras and Empedocles emerge as intellectual allies of Parmenides, not critics, maintaining an Elemental Substance Theory (EST) where the elements do not reduce to one another. The atomists modified Parmenides' assumptions but continued to work within an Eleatic framework. Diogenes of Apollonia makes an appearance as the real inventor of MM. These are just some of the highlights of Graham's ambitious and fascinating narration.

Graham traces the identification of MM in Ionian philosophy to Aristotle, though it would have been illuminating to look at the more recent reception of Aristotle's pronouncements by Hegel and Schleiermacher, and then Zeller and Windelband. For it was in the nineteenth century that the significance of Aristotle's version of the history of philosophy assumed its modern form. That Aristotle got some things wrong is hardly news, of course. Cherniss's 1935 study brought Aristotle's contradictory assertions about Presocratic thinkers into focus, and classical scholars have since questioned Aristotle's reliability as a doxographer. But has Aristotle made a mistake on this issue, as Graham contends? One of the key figures in Graham's argument is Anaximenes, who describes the apparent diversity of things by the process of pilêsis or "felting." Graham's philological arguments call MM into question, pointing out that later commentators such as Hippolytus, Ps.-Plutarch, and Simplicius use terms that suggest Anaximenes believed that there really are new kinds generation inconsistent with the closed system of MM. But "felting" would seem to trump the implications Graham tries to draw from them. Felting is a process of matting wool or hair together into a stable fabric by a combination of pressure, warmth, and dampness. So in cosmic...