The Corona pandemic has caused great damage in all countries of the world, in the economy, in society and for many people also in their personal lives. However, as in every crisis, positive effects were also seen during this period.
Particularly striking is the discovery of the “home office”: the possibility of carrying out all professional activities requiring some form of communication from home via the Internet. For many this was new to this extent and they learned that it works surprisingly well. This digital form of communication has received a big boost and will find an important place in our lives in the future.
A second important effect of the pandemic is not so obvious: to fight the pandemic, the expertise of virologists and epidemiologists had to be called in every country to help. But even for them, the situation was new in its scope and intensity. The most important transmission routes in a globalised world as well as in a highly differentiated local society had to be identified and a vaccine against the virus had to be found. The work of the scientific community was now publicly observed and discussed.
Here it became clear what the public’s ideas about how science works are. Even in ancient times, a distinction was made between two ways of gaining knowledge: in one path, knowledge is revealed to chosen people through a higher instance or “an awakening”. With the other path, people assume a state of knowledge and then “always look for something better”. The first path was taken by the religions, the second by the sciences. Over 2,000 years after a first attempt at science, the first path prevailed. It was not until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that the second path was taken up again, and over the following centuries it became the motor of development in all fields.
However, the minds of people who never experienced the second way are mostly still dominated by the first way. They think that there are definitive scientific truths, just as religions claim to have them. One does not know that statements of the sciences can be assured in very diverse grades, nor do they know the difference between statements of a single scientist and statements of the whole of his science. A single scientist may be in error or may present a too daring thesis. Only when his or her statement has been extensively discussed by colleagues and is considered to fit into the whole network of statements of the relevant science, can it be considered as the result of that science. Doing science is always a difficult matter.
The discussion about the possibilities of containing the pandemic has brought this very nature of science a little to the public’s attention. It is to be hoped that something of this will remain and that the debate will not be dominated by those who take the easy way out by inventing simple stories to explain everything, today mainly in the form of conspiracy myths. An educated civil society has to raise its voice against it with determination.
Now that I have described how modern physics was founded by Galileo Galilei as a new science, I will follow the path of physics in the following and show how the legacy of the pre-Socratics and ancient mathematicians has borne fruit. After a decline of the ancient culture one could, after about 2000 years, revive it and reach new heights of knowledge. The fact that it took so long may has many reasons – if one can speak of reasons at all in history. However, I do not wish to take part in such considerations.
First, I want to
give an overview of the theories that have been developed and established in
physics over the course of time. The fact that they always had to prove
themselves in competition with other theories than the “better ones”
in each case was explained, for example, in (Honerkamp, 2017, p. 111ff). In the
next chapters I will show what role the questions raised by the pre-Socratics
have played in the development of these theories. In particular, I will discuss
the development of the theories and their relationships to each other. Especially
I will pursue the path along which there have always been mergers or
unifications of theories. Thus, today we are only talking about two great
theories and are out to recognize these two as parts of a single “theory
for everything”. This would answer the most noble question of the
pre-Socratics, the question of a “One”, albeit in a completely
different way than one could imagine at that time.
The development
and establishment of a physical theory always involved the explanation of
phenomena of a certain type. We have already seen that the phenomenon of
“motion” was the first theme that interested people in antiquity and
again in the Renaissance. It is the most original and probably also the most
general phenomenon that we know.
We encounter the phenomenon of “light” in a similarly direct way. So, it is no wonder that at the beginning of modern physics not only the phenomenon of motion was dealt with, but also experiments with light were carried out, as we know them from Isaac Newton, for example. A century later, people began to study other, seemingly quite different phenomena, electrical or magnetic. Finally, at the turn of the 20th century, they discovered sorts of radiation which obviously differed greatly from light rays, and among these new rays there were also different types.
The space of phenomena
In short, the
history of physical theories is a history of discoveries in a “space of
phenomena” where there have always been certain objects in play. In this
space, one can identify large areas in which there are phenomena that seem to
be so similar to each other that one might be tempted to invoke the same reason
for their explanation. Thus, over time, the idea of fundamental forces acting
between planets and the sun, electrons and other found or discovered objects
emerged. Over time, four such interactions were distinguished: Gravitational,
electromagnetic, strong and weak interaction. This distinction is still very
helpful for an overview of the set of the theories developed in the 400 years
since Galileo.
There are,
however, two other categories in respect of which one should distinguish the
theories. It is not only the interaction or the force that can be decisive for
a phenomenon. This can also be the range on a length scale. Thus, phenomena can
be distinguished according to the scale of length on which the phenomenon
appears, whether in the world of the smallest dimensions, the largest
dimensions or the middle dimensions.
Finally, an aspect will become important that has to do with our cognitive abilities, namely the question of whether we must describe the phenomenon as a complex one, namely as one in which it is not sufficient for an understanding to consider only a few objects with few important properties. Many or very many objects can represent a system that has new properties that are not inherent to the individual objects themselves, but only “emerge” through the interaction of the objects. Water, for example, has the property of being liquid. However, this does not apply to its components, the H2O molecules.
With these two characteristics, spatial size and complexity, we can already consider aspects that allow us to have an overview in the form of a landscape of phenomena. If one enters the characteristic length of some objects, which play a role in physical theories, into a coordinate system, in which this size is plotted against the complexity of the objects, then one obtains e.g. Fig.4.2.
Fig.4.2: Rough classification of certain objects according to size and complexity. Objects like planets can appear at different places, depending on how much of their properties you want to consider (R stands for order of magnitude, N for number of degrees of freedom or complexity resp.).
On this figure we can show how far we have explored the space of natural phenomena today with our physical theories. It also makes it clear that in addition to the physics of fundamental interactions, there is also a very large area of complex systems for which areas of physics such as thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, solid state physics, etc. are responsible. This should be kept in mind, even if we do not deal with it here and we mainly consider the wide range of spatial scales in the area of “simple” systems – from 10-15 to 1020 m.
The world of the middle dimensions in the range of about 10-4 to 1010 m is most accessible to us intellectually, because we ourselves, as participants of this world, can have direct experiences with it. Thus, the phenomena of this world are also the subject of the earliest physical theories; they are also called classical theories. The exploration of the space of phenomena thus started in the world of the middle dimension.
At the beginning of the 20th century, phenomena of the world’s smallest dimensions were discovered. One had to state that the concepts of the world of the middle dimensions are no longer suitable here. A completely different concept, a “quantum”, replaced the concept of a material object and gave physics on this scale the name “quantum physics”. At the same time a modern cosmology and astrophysics began to emerge. Today we hear of particularly spectacular discoveries in this field of the largest dimensions.
Classical
physics, quantum physics and cosmology: this is a classification that can also
be described as physics of medium, smallest and largest dimensions. Cosmology
today has not yet required its own conceptual apparatus, as quantum physics
does, which is why it is also added to classical physics, if one wants to
emphasize the methodological aspect.
With a
distinction regarding the spatial size alone one has of course not yet
exhausted the space of phenomena. There are other quantities which, measured by
the conditions of our world of daily experiences, can be small or large.
Particularly prominent in this context is speed; but the strength of
fundamental forces, in particular of gravity, will also be significant for the
nature of physical theories. The landscape sketched in Fig.4.2 must therefore
only be imagined as a slice from the whole space of phenomena.
The exploration
of this space of phenomena resembles the exploration of our earth in the time
of the great discoveries in the 16th century. One spoke thereby of the
discovery of the “world”, although it were only new ranges of the
planet earth, which one discovered at that time gradually. Today one knows
almost every corner of the earth and “reaches for the stars”.
Thus, one also
knows all laws of nature in the world of the middle dimensions, but only on the
fundamental level. The more complex the systems are in these dimensions, the
less familiar they are to us today. But the more we limit ourselves to the
fundamental side, the further we have advanced into the world of the smallest
and also the largest dimensions.
Even if it were
possible in several years or decades to establish a theory for all fundamental
interactions, physics would not be at its end. In the direction of complex
systems there are still many questions waiting for an answer. The transition to
chemistry, biology and cognitive science will be fluent. Also, in the
exploration of life and consciousness one will not be able to ignore physical
conditions.
The theories of classical
physics
Classical
physics is dominated by three large phenomenon areas: the phenomenon of motion
and the two areas in which we encounter the fundamental forces of gravity and
electromagnetism, respectively.
Phenomena from
these areas have been known since ancient times. “Nothing is older than
motion,” we may quote Galileo once again. For the pre-Socratics, motion or
non-motion always played a role, Aristotle distinguished different types of
motion and formulated a first kind of theory of motion. Even in the Middle Ages
there were always natural philosophers who wanted to trace the nature of
motion.
Gravity was also
an everyday phenomenon. With Aristotle it was a quality that made all bodies of
the sublunar world strive for the centre of the world. Also, the sphericity of
the earth was later explained by such a “natural striving”.
We read less
about magnetic and electrical forces in early sources, but magnetic and
electrical phenomena were already known in ancient times. If you rubbed an
amber, it would attract dust or shreds of wool. Iron was attracted by a
magnetis stone and it was discovered that splinters of such stones always
rotate in a north-south direction.
The physical
theories, which today explain all basic phenomena from these three phenomenon
areas, are
– for motion: Newton’s and Einstein’s theory of motion,
– for gravitation: Newton’s and Einstein’s theory of gravitation,
– for electrical and magnetic phenomena: Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism.
Normally,
Newton’s theory of motion and gravitation is subsumed under the name classical
mechanics. Newton’s theory of gravity essentially consists of a law for the
forces between two material bodies. Newton was able to use this law to explain
the motion of the planets within the framework of his theory of gravity.
Einstein’s theory of motion is the special theory of relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity is the general theory of relativity. Both represent extensions of the corresponding Newtonian theories to a larger range of phenomena: for motions to “higher” velocities, for gravitation to “higher” velocities and to “stronger” gravitational forces. It will still be necessary to make precise what the terms “higher” or “larger” mean in each case.
Maxwell’s theory
of electromagnetism serves to explain all electrical and all magnetic phenomena
as well as those phenomena in which electrical and magnetic effects are
mutually dependent. It is the result of a unification of two earlier theories,
one for electricity and one for magnetism.
Gravity and electromagnetic forces act over long distances. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have felt it all the time. They are therefore called long-range, in contrast to the short-range forces that were only discovered in the world of the smallest dimensions. They hold the world “together at its innermost” and their reach does not go beyond that. Of course, the long-range forces can affect even at short distances, electromagnetic forces are even quite important for understanding structure of atoms. However, gravitational forces at the level of atoms have not yet been registered. The masses of the building blocks of the atoms are obviously much too small.
The theories of quantum
physics
The
establishment of Maxwell’s theory, in particular by the discovery of
electromagnetic waves in 1886, increasingly drew physicists to the question of
how an electric current and how electromagnetic radiation can be generated in
matter. In the end, the question of the structure of matter stood in the center
of attention.
From a
pre-Socratic Leukipp and his follower Democritus one knew the concept of an
atom, a smallest indivisible particle (άτομος gr. indivisible). The chemists
used this idea in the 19th century with great profit for the explanation of the
laws in the reactions of different chemical elements. But there were also
vehement opponents, because one had not yet “really seen” an atom and
the idea of indivisibility only raised new questions.
But other
questions also came to mind. In the “golden years of physics” from
1895 to 1898 further rays were discovered, such as X-rays, cathode rays, α-, β-
or γ-rays. Finally, there were the heat rays, a phenomenon that had been known
for some time: All bodies become red, light red and finally white-yellow with
constant heating; and one feels that heat emanates from them.
The origin and
nature of these rays had to be understood. It was a very fruitful time for
physics, and during this time the idea of atoms should establish itself as
building blocks of matter, but only as a milestone on the way to ever smaller
building blocks. One could then obtain an explanation for all these rays and
thereby gain a consistent picture of the structure of matter and the atom.
In an attempt to
develop this picture into a consistent theory success was only achieved after
daring to describe the discovered relationships between the experimental
results with a completely different mathematical conceptual apparatus.
A test case for
each approach of a theory for the structure of an atom was the calculation of
the possible energy states of a hydrogen atom. The success or failure of a
mathematical calculation thus now decided on the success of a theory in this
world of the smallest dimensions. The building blocks of an atom such as
electrons, protons or neutrons could then no longer be regarded as particles in
the sense of classical physics and the living world. They were soon called
“quanta”, like the energy packages Max Planck had talked about in a
lecture on 14 December 1900 when he gave an explanation of thermal radiation.
By the way, the date of this lecture is regarded today as the birthday of
quantum physics.
The quantum
theories responsible for all the fundamental phenomena of the world’s smallest
dimensions are first of all
– quantum
mechanics, to a certain extent the replacement for classical mechanics
– quantum
electrodynamics, the continuation of electrodynamics on the atomic level.
An explanation
of the origin and nature of α- and β-rays could only be achieved by introducing
two completely new types of forces, the “strong” force, which is
responsible for the binding of the building blocks of the atomic nucleus, and
the “weak” force, which can cause the transformation of a neutron
into a proton, but also serves to describe the decays of other later discovered
“particles”. Thus
– theories of
weak and of strong interaction
were created.
These two theories were constructed according to the model of quantum
electrodynamics. This soon led to the desire to describe these three
interactions within a unified theory. As an intermediate step the
– theory of
electroweak interaction,
a unification of
the electromagnetic and weak interaction was found, and finally
– the unified
theory of electrical, weak and strong interaction, the so-called standard
model.
Today, this
model is regarded as the basic quantum theory. Quantum mechanics now plays the
role of a theory for a limited range of phenomena in which relativistic effects
do not have to be taken into account and in which there is no decay and no
generation of particles.
Figure 4.3 shows the development of the individual theories over the course of time.
Fig.4.3: Timetable for the emergence of physical theories of fundamental interactions
The notion of a concluding rule was the dominant theme of the second part of this blog. Aristotle had already recognized such rules as decisive tool of thought for dialogues and discourses. A conclusion, according to him, is “a discourse in which some things are presupposed and then something different […] results from it”. He also realised that the rules themselves and the nature of the assumptions were important. Thus, he distinguished between the logical conclusion and the dialectical conclusion.
The logical conclusion was at the centre of his teaching on such tools of thought. Here one could already give clear concluding rules at that time. Even today, any introduction to logic begins with an examination of these concluding rules. The further development of Aristotelian logic in the form of propositional logic is the basis for all further studies of human cognitive abilities.
The realization
that in a sea of mysticism and dialectic there is the possibility at all to
transfer the truth of statements to another statement, has driven me very much
in my youth, when I had become so properly aware of this.
What’s the use
of all this? One could establish such a kind of logical order between
statements, in which it becomes clear which true statements follow from which
other true statements. One could start
from true statements and build a whole thought building on them, which consists
only of true statements.
But – what
statements can you start with? That was the big question.
The mathematicians and logicians of antiquity had already demonstrated how this question about a beginning of true knowledge can be answered. Aristotle had shown, as already mentioned in an earlier chapter, that from the syllogisms of the 1st form all other syllogisms can be derived . He had thus solved the problem of how to arrive at true statements at all in such a way that he regarded the syllogisms of the 1st form as true propositions. These were immediately evident for him.
A few decades later, Euclid of Alexandria had then logically ordered the knowledge of geometric areas and bodies and thus created the first larger axiomatic-deductive thought structure. Here, too, he had to regard a few sentences as true at the beginning. They seemed evident from intuition.
So, at
term-logic and at geometry already was demonstrated, how knowledge of secure
transport of truth can be extended to an axiomatic-deductive system. Throughout
the centuries, mathematics has remained an unsurpassed model for such an
organization of secure knowledge.
There had been
attempts to introduce a similar rigour of argumentation in philosophy and
ethics. Such approaches, however, all ran into the sand (see Wikipedia:
Mathesis universalis). Had they been the wrong areas for a rigor of thought
according to the mode of mathematization?
Perhaps axioms
did not necessarily have to be immediately obvious, but it was more important
to find a source of true knowledge at all. Just as Euclid could refer to a
large number of mathematical proofs and arranged this material according to
logical points of view and, if necessary, supplemented it, a “small”
axiomatic deductive construct of thought may also emerge after knowledge of
some true statements by clarifying the logical relationship between them.
Gradually one could then combine these “small buildings” into larger
ones.
Galileo Galilei
was the first to recognise that nature was the source of true knowledge, as
well as the importance of mathematics for the formulation of such knowledge. He
was the first to describe a result of a physical experiment in the language of
mathematics.
He certainly saw
the implications of this combination of mathematics and experiment. It was
immediately clear to him what a revolution a mathematisation represented for
the understanding of science at that time. Thus, he spoke of a “new
science”, which he had founded. His sentence “The Book of Nature is
written in the language of mathematics” bears witness to this, as does the
passage of his letter to the Tuscan Secretary of State Vinta in 1610:
“Therefore, I take the liberty of calling this a new science discovered by
me from its foundations”.
Galileo thus took up the Pythagorean idea again, but in a completely new way. He probably also saw that there is an order, that is, regularities in nature, which can be expressed in mathematical relations, and he had also become acquainted with the rigour of mathematical conclusions through his study of Euclidean geometry. But he also recognized that one must “question” nature through experiments in order to discover this order of nature, to make true statements out of it in mathematical language and to bring these into a logical order. Not empiricism alone, not mathematics alone, but experiment and mathematics are the pillars of his new, strict science.
We all know the
consequences of this discovery, without which our world today would be a
completely different one. At some point, however, this “new science”
had to be discovered; nature and mathematics – or rather nature and logic – are
too close to each other.
When is an implication true?
Why does
empiricism play such an important role, why do ” inquiries ” of
nature in the form of experiments play such an important role, if one wishes a
theory after the model of Euclidean geometry, thus as axiomatic-deductive
system? So let’s look again at the modus
ponens as a prototype of a logical conclusion:
A, A → B ⊨ B.
In order to
deduce a statement that is incontestably true, premises A and A → B must be
true. There is one statement, namely A, which occurs in both premises. The implication forms the bridge to a new
statement, namely B, which is then deduced. There must be such
“bridges” in every concluding rule, because nothing can be inferred
from statements that are completely independent of each other. Also, the
syllogisms each have a middle term, which occurs in both premises.
A true
implication A → B means that A is sufficient for B: Always if A, then B. Where
is that the case?
We can find true
implications by questioning nature. We then receive the following answers:
“If I throw a ball into the air, it falls to the earth” or “If
an electric current flows in a wire, there is a magnetic field in its
environment”. The experimental physicists are therefore suppliers of true
implications, which we then also call laws of nature.
True
implications can also be found if we transform the statement “All Greeks are
human beings”, for example, into “If x is Greek, then x is
human.”
Here we have
formed the terms “Greeks” and “humans” in such a way that
the implication is true. The statement thus becomes true by the fact that we
form the concepts accordingly.
Then we’re
already at the end of our rope. For all other implications the dialectical
conclusion is probably responsible, i.e. here an implication belongs to the
category of sentences about which Aristotle said:
Sentences are
credible if they are recognized by all, or by most, or by wise men, the latter
by all, or by most, or by the most experienced and credible.
We can add: And
what is recognized by “wise men” also depends on time. Let us only
think of the laws of legal science, e.g. the law §1356 of the German Civil Code
(BGB), which until 1977 still read: “The woman manages the household on
her own responsibility. It shall be entitled to be economically active to the
extent compatible with its matrimonial and family responsibilities.”
When it comes to
regulations for human coexistence, morals, customs and traditions, yes,
everything that nature does not tell us, there can be no generally acceptable
true implications. We are referred to the dialectical conclusion and thus to a
negotiation about which implications are to be set as true. So here we can only
“set” truth, not find it.
The consequence
of this is that the statements of the natural sciences are universally valid,
but there are countless religions and legal systems. In the natural sciences
there is also a change over time. However, as we will see in the next chapters,
this is a kind of evolution, a “finding of the ever better” basic
assumptions based on ever new discoveries about nature’s behaviour.
For some time, it was believed that rules for human coexistence could also be read from human nature. Such a doctrine of natural law can be used for the most diverse ideologies. Ultimately, it is always the “wise men” who generally decree the sentences, which actually only seem credible to some, to be true. The Catholic Church still adheres to this doctrine today. For centuries, however, one has been talking of a “naturalistic fallacy” when one infers “ought” from “is”. An implication that links statements about “is” with statements about “ought” be cannot be read from nature. We owe the first explicit formulation of this insight to the philosopher David Hume (1711 to 1776).
The new science of Galileo Galilei
The “hot” topic of nature research at the time of Galileo was motion. In his work “Discorsi” he says: “Nothing is older than motion, and about it there are neither few nor few writings of philosophers. Nevertheless, I have experienced their peculiarities in great quantity, and among them very worth knowing”. The motion had already been an issue for the pre-Socratics. Aristotle had distinguished different classes of motions and had found a special explanation for each. Motion is the phenomenon that we encounter most immediately, but which can also be observed in the sky as the course of the stars. If you wanted to learn anything at all from nature, you first had to “understand” the motion.
What was the experiment Galileo used to study motion, and what form of mathematics did he use to describe the results? How Galileo approached the problem is remarkable and symptomatic of the course of modern science. He did not focus on “the whole” as the pre-Socratics did, nor did he try to create a general overview like Aristotle. Instead of this he started it “on a small scale”. He let a small, smoothly polished ball roll down an inclined plane, i.e. an inclined narrow wooden board into which he had a channel buried – a child’s play in modern times.
This turn of the
view alone demonstrates the independence of his thinking, as it is
characteristic of a genius. Even in Goethe’s day, philosophers had to think
about “what holds the world together at its innermost”, and Faust has
only mockery for Mephistopheles when he fights for people: “You can do
nothing on a large scale, and now you can begin it on a small scale. Religions only know this question about
“the whole”.
Actually, Galileo has taken up the trail of Xenophanes again. If one trusts that it will be possible to “search for the better”, one appreciates also “small successes” in the search for knowledge; one looks for a template on which one can build. This is how modern science, modern technology works. That is why there is research and also development.
Galileo now had to measure times and distances for each roll of the sphere. How he could determine in particular a time unit in which he used his feeling for an even measure in a song is described in detail in (Fölsing, 1983, p. 177ff). In his notes, he reports: “… with probably a hundred times repetition, we always found that the distances behaved like the squares of time, and this for every inclination of the plane, that is, the channel in which the sphere ran. (Discorsi, after (Fölsing, 1983, p. 174)).
Galileo formulated the result in the form of proportions, ratios, as was customary at the time and as had not yet been learned in any other way. Time periods and distances were variables of different physical dimensions, and one had not yet understood how such variables could be directly related. Therefore, he wrote down his result not in the form in which the distance proportional to the square of the time required is given, but as equality of the ratios of two distances and two squares of corresponding times. In a graph, in which the times are plotted against the distances, this presents itself as a semiparabola, as is indeed found in the Dialogo Quarto of Discorsi Galileis in the discussion of thrown bodies (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Semi-parabola as drawn by Galileo during the discussion of tossed bodies ( (Galileo, 2015, p. 276) after (Simonyi, 1990, p. 200).
Here one must say something about the state of mathematical knowledge of Galileo’s time. This could not have been higher than what one knew from late antiquity and how it was probably also taught at the universities of the time in the faculties of the artists, the faculties of the “artes liberales”, the “free arts”. Thus, in mathematics one thought predominantly in geometrical terms, since geometry had always been dominant in antiquity. It was only about a generation after Galileo that René Descartes (1596 to 1650) was to develop an “Analytical Geometry” in which geometric relations could be expressed as arithmetic relationships. Geometric problems could thus be analysed within the framework of arithmetic. Afterwards mathematics became essentially arithmetic and algebra, the doctrine of transforming arithmetic relations. But the fact that the relationship between times and distances in the case on the inclined plane could now be represented by a parable fitted well into the world in which mathematics consisted for the most part of geometry.
Galileo had also been initiated into the beauty and stringency of Euclid’s geometry by an engineer and geometer Ostilio Ricci. He was already “infected” by the idea of having to logically arrange his experimental statements. He was therefore also looking for a principle from which all these statements could be derived. However, he was caught on the wrong track. Four years later he was able to correct this error (Fölsing, 1983, p. 175ff). Such a “theory” for a falling movement would soon have been obsolete anyway. He could not have imagined that at the end of his century a theory would emerge that could explain all motions in the sky and on earth from a few axioms. His falling motion became a small special case in it.
The English
physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton stood on Galileo’s shoulders during
the development of this theory. The first axiom in this theory was based on
Galileo’s hypothesis, on which he had been guided in his falling experiments. It was the hypothesis that, on a horizontal
plane, the motion of the rolling sphere “would continue forever at a
uniform speed” if it were not affected by unevenness of the ground
(Galilei, 1982, p. 30).
For Aristotle, a motion that gradually comes to rest through friction is the natural, actual motion. So this is a process for him, only with “force” the motion can be maintained. The rest is then a very special state, “essentially” different from a motion.
With Galilei, on the other hand, the uniform motion is the natural one, and this is a state. Through external circumstances such as friction it can come to rest, but this is only a special state of this kind. This insight stands at the beginning of modern physics.
With which
statements can one begin with the formulation of an axiomatic-deductive system
for a theory of motion? The answer to this question was obvious for Newton:
Galileo’s insight, which was later formulated as the law of inertia, must have
been at the beginning of a theory of motion.
Let us take a
closer look at which statements have been put at the start in this theory, but
also in other physical theories. We will see that this happened in very
different ways. But let us first get an overview of these theories in the next
chapter.
In addition to the considerations presented in the last chapter, some important extensions of the propositional logic must be mentioned here in any case, in order not to let the reader believe that he or she has already become acquainted with a large part of the logic through propositional logic. The possibility of expression of the propositional logic is still very limited and an extension in this or that direction will soon be desired, if one is occupied longer with it. However, the knowledge I have provided so far about the origin and meaning of the concluding rules is sufficient to understand the further considerations in this book.
Predicate Logic
With the
propositional logic one can find rules of inference that lead from true
statements necessarily to true statements. The modus ponens here is the
prototype of such a concluding rule. But
we know from Aristotelian logic also other conclusions which necessarily lead
from true to true, e.g. the two sentences “All men are mortal” and
“Socrates is a man” lead to “Socrates is mortal”.
Here in the proposition
“All men are mortal” the word “All” appears. One could continue to consider the
proposition as a whole and its truth value and thus stick to the propositional
logic. But you can also look into the “inside” of the sentence and
notice that here the number of elements of a set comes into play. This is not
always the case, but with a view to expressing oneself in as much detail as
possible, this possibility should also be taken into account in a formal
language. This has led to the extension of the propositional logic to the
so-called predicate logic, in which a special structure is now provided for the
propositions, namely a quantification with “quantifiers” such as
“all” or “none”.
The decisive
factor for such an extension was that one learned to give a more general
meaning to the term “predicate”, which we know from the grammar of a
natural language. In logic, a predicate is everything that can be meaningfully
attributed to an object, i.e. “predicated”. So, in the sentence
“Socrates thinks”, “thinks” is the predicate. Thus, in
addition to properties, these can also be verbs. But also multi-digit relations,
e.g. R(x,y) can be predicates; here now two objects x and y are assigned to a
relation R.
The best
translation of such sentences into character strings has proven to be, for
example, that a one-digit predicate is seen as a function of a variable and the
object to which the predicate is assigned is seen as an argument. The function
s(x) then means that to the object “x” the predicate s≔ “is mortal” is predicted, i.e. assigned. One can then easily
formulate that the predicate belongs to several or all objects from a given set
or to none. This therefore gives the possibility of quantification.
This function
s(…) has as function value the truth value of this statement; s(x) is
therefore 1 or true, if x is mortal. If we now define the function M(x) with
M(…):= “is a human being”, we can now formulate:
For all x
applies: If x is a human being, then x is mortal, or
∀x (M(x) → s(x)).
where we have
introduced the symbol ∀x for “For all x”. The symbol “∀” is called a quantor. Of course, you have to determine beforehand
to which quantity “all” refers.
Useful is also
the symbol “∃x” for “There is an
x”. In principle, however, the symbol “∀x” alone can be used for all quantifications.
The predicate
logic therefore includes the propositional logic. Additional concluding rules
in predicate logic are first:
∀x M(x) ∧ (x = c) ⊨ M(c),
i.e. “If a
predicate M is assigned to all x from a given set, then also to a single
element c of this set”, and second:
M(c) ⊨ ∃x M(x),
i.e. if an
object c has the property M, then there exists an object x that has the
property s.
After all, it
does not work without the mode ponens, e.g. in the form
M(c), ∀x (M(x) → s(x)) ⊨ s(c),
where
“c” stands for a specific element x from a predetermined set.
All syllogisms
of Aristotelian logic can also be formulated in predicate logic. The syllogism “Barbara”
reads here for example:
where
“G” stands for the predicate “is Greek”. Here a concluding
rule is applied which can be derived from the modus ponens. But it can also be
derived directly from the tautology
(A → B) ∧ (B → C) → (A → C).
So far,
quantification has always extended to object x, an element from a given set.
One speaks here of a first-order logic. You can also introduce a second-order
logic by extending the quantification to the predicates as well.
We want to study
this from a famous example: Let us first consider the statement
P(x) → P(S(x)),
i.e. if the
predicate is assigned to object x, then also to object S(x). This makes sense,
for example, if x is a number and S(x) = x + 1, the successor of x. If, for
example, an equation for x is fulfilled, then it should also be fulfilled for x
+ 1.
This one can be
required for all natural numbers, and one gets
∀x (P(x) → P(S(x))).
This is one of
the prerequisites for a particularly prominent concluding rule in number
theory, the “mathematical induction”. One should not confuse the word
“induction” with the logical induction. The danger of confusing it
with physical induction is probably less. In order to arrive at a conclusion,
there must still be an induction start, e.g. P(0), i.e. the property P is
assigned to the number 0. Then, with the above implication we may conclude: ∀x P(x), i.e. the property P applies to all natural numbers x.
If, on the other
hand, one wants to demand this statement ∀x (P(x) → P(S(x))) for
all predicates P, then one writes:
∀P [∀x (P(x) → P(S(x))].
So, this is a
statement in the language of second-order logic; the quantifier operates also
on a predicate P.
You can also
continue predicting, i.e. assigning a property, by assigning properties, i.e.
predicates, to properties again. If F designates a property that can be
assigned to a predicate P, you can, for example, first formulate:
F(P) → P(x),
That means: If a
predicate P has the property F, then x has this predicate P. If you require
this for all predicates P of a certain set, you can, for example, formulate:
∃x ∀P(F(P) → P(x))
i.e. for all predicates
P applies: If they have the property F, then there is also an object x, which has
this predicate P.
If the property
F means “is good”, whatever that is, then the proposition says:
“There is an object x that has all good properties.” Of course, this
does not say anything about whether this statement is true or can be derived
from any axioms. One can only formulate it.
About the
differences of the first- and second-order logics with regard to their means of
expression there are deeply rooted propositions in mathematical logic to which
one can gain access only through intensive study. Here it can only be shown how
to extend the language of propositional logic. It should be noted that the
concluding rules of first-order logic are “sufficient as building blocks
for all mathematical modes of argumentation” (Ebbinghaus & Thomas,
2018, p. 62).
Modal and Deontic Logic
In the
propositional and predicate logic, one always restricts oneself to a certain type
of proposition, namely to those that can either be true or false. The law of
the excluded third applies here, i.e. A ∨ ¬A is a
tautology.
But often we do not know for sure whether the statement A about a fact is really true. We now also want to consider that it is only possible that a proposition p is true. (In the following we describe propositions with small letters p, q, …, so that the notation remains clear later.) However, for statements p, which we have derived from accepted assumptions according to logically correct concluding rules, we would then say that the proposition is necessarily true.
Finally, we also
know the situation in which we can only say about a fact that it can be
possible but does not have to be necessary, that it is therefore
“contingent”. If the language of predicate logic is extended by
characters for such terms, one speaks of modal logic.
Analogously, another extension of the language of propositional logic can be developed, which deals with duties such as obligations or prohibitions. You then get a deontic logic (δέῖ, δέῖ gr. = you have to). But you can’t make proposition in this area, but you can make actions: The symbol “p” then stands for an action instead of a proposition. And one can also allow actions, i.e. neither forbid nor command them.
Here we see parallels between the terms “necessary, impossible, contingent” and ” obligatory, forbidden, permitted”. Fig. 1 also shows them clearly.
Fig.1 The three basic modal and deontological terms
It turns out
that the modal terms “necessary”, “impossible” and
“contingent” are disjunctive to the other two terms: What is not
necessary can be impossible, but also contingent. What is not impossible may be
contingent, but even necessary, and what is not contingent is either necessary
or impossible. The same applies to deontological terms: What is not obligatory
may be forbidden, but also permitted, etc.
With these three
terms one must now expand the formal language of propositional logic by
introducing new symbols. Actually, you only need a symbol for one term, because
it shows that you can express all the others with the help of negations through
this one symbol.
This new symbol
shall be the sign “N” in modal logic, which can also be interpreted
as an operator, which acts on a proposition p: “Np” shall mean:
“It is necessary, that p is true”.
In modal logic
we introduce the operator “O”, “Op” now means: “It is
obligatory that the action p is performed”.
All in all, you
get this:
Np: It is necessary that p is true, i.e. it is impossible that p is false, ¬Np: It is not necessary for p to be true, i.e. it is not impossible for p to be false, N¬p: It is necessary that p is false, i.e. it is impossible that p is true, ¬N¬p: It is not necessary for p to be false, i.e. it is not impossible for p to be true, ¬Np ∧ ¬N¬p: The statement p is contingent true because it is not necessary and not impossible to be true.
One can
formulate accordingly:
Op: It is obligatory to perform the action p, ¬Op: It is not obligatory to perform the action p, O¬p: It is obligatory not to perform the action p, i.e. it is forbidden to perform the action p, ¬O¬p: It is not obligatory not to perform the action p. So, it is allowed to perform the action p. ¬Op ∧ ¬O¬p: It is neither obligatory nor forbidden to perform p.
A distinction
must be made here between norms that are to be set with a law and propositions
about norms. The norms are brought into effect by setting, the propositions
about norms can be true or false.
Fig. 2 shows the different operators in the so-called modal or deontic hexagon. With these terms and their symbols, which are comprehensible for everyone, all specifications can be clearly represented.
Fig.2: The modal and deontic hexagon (after (Joerden, 2010), (Honerkamp, 2015)). The arrows indicate an implication (what is obligatory is also permitted), ” >-<” a contravalence or contradictory opposition (e.g. what is not forbidden is permitted), “—-“an exclusion or contrary opposition (e.g. being obligatory and being forbidden are mutually exclusive) and “…”” a disjunction or subcontrary opposition (e.g. contravalence >-< to “permitted” and to “not obligatory”).
Further
explanations such as the discussion of possible axioms and a calculus in
connection with the calculus of propositional logic go beyond the scope of this
book.
Outlook
However, the
list of extensions to the propositional logic has not yet been completed in any
way. There are also so-called non-classical logics in which, for example, the
law of the excluded third does not apply. One then does not assume that
propositions are only either true or false. In modal logic we have assumed
this, only considering the possibility that one does not know it exactly. Here
now it is to be renounced that there is “ontologically” only this
alternative. It will no longer be adequate to map the Boolean association of
statements to a binary Boolean association. There is a wealth of approaches to
such multi-valued logics, and “intuitionist logic” is a prominent
example of this.
The so-called
fuzzy logic must also be mentioned here. It still permits nuances of the
predicates such as “very” or “rather”, however treats them
quantitatively again. It plays an important role in many control engineering
applications.
But the most
elaborated approach is “dealing with uncertain knowledge”, which is
based on mathematical probability theory. Here a proposition is assigned a
measure of the probability that it is true. This can also be seen as a measure
of the credibility of a statement.
Thus, we can
pick up the theme of Aristotle, which he hinted at in the classification of
conclusions, when he spoke of a dialectical conclusion. Here already questions
arose, which could not be answered at that time: What can be said about a
conclusion in dialectical inferences? Can one even develop a calculus for propositions
that are merely credible? How could conclusions be drawn as strictly as
possible in such a calculus? What would “strict” even mean here?
These questions will be addressed later.
In the excursus on formal languages in the last blog post, we already got to know the signs and more general expressions of propositional logic. We have seen that there are special character strings, so-called tautologies, which are always true, i.e. independent of the truth values of the individual characters. We had also already introduced such a tautology, namely (A ∧ (A → B)) → B.
Here we will show how logically correct reasoning rules can be formulated with the help of tautologies. But let’s first ask which simple tautologies still exist and how to generate tautologies in general. Interesting in this context are also character strings, which are always false, because from their negation one can also gain a tautology.
Tautologies
Let us first introduce prominent tautologies:
A ∨¬A is in any case true,
because either A is true or ¬A. There is no such thing as a third according to our requirements. This statement is called the statement on the excluded third.
On the other hand, A ∧ ¬A is wrong in any case, because the statement A and the statement ¬A cannot be true at the same time. For example, it cannot be that it is raining and not raining at the same time. A and ¬A contradict each other. One generally calls a compound expression, which is false regardless of the truth values of the individual statements, a contradiction. Then, the following applies to the negation:
¬(A ∧ ¬A) is true in any case.
This statement is called the principle of contradiction.
Here we should now also list the tautology from the last blog post again.
(A ∧ (A → B)) → B is in any case true.
How do we find further tautologies in order to be able to form further rules of inference?
It can be shown that the propositional logic can be regarded as an axiomatic-deductive system. Axioms can be all tautologies of the form (by Kutschera & Breitkopf, Alfred, 2007, p. 69).
A → (B → A),
(A → (B → C)) →
((A → B) → (A → C)),
(¬A → ¬B) → (B → A)
and as a rule of inference or concluding rule the modus ponens, which we already mentioned in an earlier blog post. In a moment, we will really introduce this concluding rule by deriving it from a tautology.
All logical expressions, that can now be derived from these axioms using the modus ponens, are tautologies again. So you can set up as many concluding rules as you want. Only a few will be needed.
Now we understand why Wittgenstein says: The propositions of logic are tautologies. So the propositions of logic say nothing (Wittgenstein, 2006, pp. No. 6.1, 6.11).
From Tautologies to Concluding Rules
Let’s have a look at the truth table for the tautology (A ∧ (A → B)) → B again:
A
B
A → B
A ∧ ( A → B)
(A ∧ (A → B)) → B
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
1
0
0
1
0
1
Let us first consider the first line, in which both premises A and A → B are true. From the second column of this first row we then infer that B is true. The statement B must therefore necessarily be true if both A and A → B is true. Only in this way can the character of tautology be respected.
This is now a conclusion that results from inspection of the truth table of a tautology. No reasoning can be more elementary. This is also the conclusion with which all other concluding rules can be won. So here we have the origin of logical reasoning before us, the “mother” of all reasoning rules.
You write, with the sign “⊨” for a logical conclusion:
A ∧ (A → B) ⊨ B,
but frequently also in a form in which the individual premises are separated only by a comma:
A, (A → B) ⊨ B.
The symbol “⊨” is not a sign of propositional logic, but an abbreviation for the phrase “follows logically from this” in colloquial language. Otherwise we should be able to count with this symbol like with “∧” or “∨”. It only expresses the relationship between the statements A ∧ (A → B) and B in the meta language, our colloquial language: In the case that the statement A is true, and in the case that the statement B follows from A, then B is true.
You may be confused at first and ask why all the effort. They knew that a long time ago. It is indeed trivial, in the truest sense of the word, because in the Middle Ages the word “trivial” was coined from insights gained in trivium, the lowest level of education in a monastic school. This trivium, in turn, was named in ancient times for a place to which three paths lead, and where many who share the same opinion can gather.
Here, however, in a formal language, what Aristotle has already defined is very concretely realized: “A conclusion is thus a speech in which, with certain assumptions, something other than the presupposed follows with necessity on the basis of the presupposed”. (after Schupp, I, p.267). The emphasis is on “necessity”.
This is the modus ponens. It is the most prominent logical conclusion, was already known in ancient times by the philosophers of the Stoa and subject of many discussions in the Middle Ages (see “the Logic of the Stoics”).
We still want to investigate what this conclusion tells us if one of the premises or both are wrong. In any case, the entire premise is then wrong, because the individual premises are linked by a “∧”. We extract the two relevant columns from the table above and arrange them somewhat differently:
A ∧ (A → B)
B
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
0
So, if the total premise is false (2nd to 4th line), B can be true, but also false, i.e. nothing can be said about the truth value of B. Everything can be deduced from a false premise. At first this is surprising, and in the history of logic it has been discussed for a long time. But if one can derive both B and ¬B, then the conclusion is meaningless.
From the derivation of the modus ponens we can learn how to create a general final rule: From every tautology that can be found in the form
M → B, you can use the final rule
M ⊨ B
because then it follows immediately from the truth table for “M → B” that under the condition that M is true, also B must be true, because this implication M → B is a tautology after assumption and therefore true.
This is a statement on the meta level, not in the calculation of the syntactic level. However, we know that because M → B is a tautology, we can go from the character string M to the character (string) B on the syntactic level without leaving the realm of true statements on the semantic level. We write this in the form of
M ⊢ B,
and call this operation a derivation at the syntactic level. That what is a conclusion on the semantic level is called a derivation on the syntactic level.
At the syntactic level, we can therefore pass from the character string M to the character or character string B without leaving the realm of true statements at the semantic level.
But now one knows how to “calculate” on the syntactic level, namely according to the rules for the formation of character strings and according to the concluding rules, by which one may transform certain character strings into others, which are also usually shorter. Such a system of calculation rules is called a “calculus”.
The calculus of propositional logic therefore has nothing to do with any meaning of the statements in terms of content. To a certain extent, it only provides the tracks on which truth of statements can be safely transported from premises to conclusion. Wrong statements on such tracks lead to arbitrariness. Without the truth of the premises “everything is nothing”. That’ll still occupy us.
Two remarks are in place here:
Let us consider the premises:
A: = „2 + 2 = 4“,
B: ≔ “Freiburg is located in the south of Germany”.
The statements A and B are true, thus also the implication A → B, i.e. if 2 + 2 = 4, then Freiburg lies in the south of Germany”. Thus, the expression A → B is well formed, but futile. Then the logical conclusion
A, A → B ⊨ B
is also meaningless. That doesn’t have to be irritating. Even in our colloquial language we can form grammatically correct sentences that are meaningless: “The moon babbles red suit.” The tracks are not responsible for what goes on them. Incorrectly formed sentences or not well formulated expressions are senseless anyway.
You often hear people say: “It’s logical, isn’t it?” and the speaker means that the conclusion immediately makes sense to him. This feeling, however, probably does not refer to the concluding rule, but to the implication, which is of course true for the speaker. The speaker thus confuses the logical conclusion with his assumption that his premise is true. He should say, “It’s a plausible assumption for the modus ponens, isn’t it?” He would be met with venerable understanding.
Important Concluding Rules in Applications
The modus ponens is probably the most prominent concluding rule, even in generalized form, which reads:
(A1 ∨ A2 ∨ … ∨ An ∨ A) ∧ (¬A ∨ B1 ∨ B2 ∨ … ∨ Bm)
⊨ A1 ∨ A2 ∨ … ∨ An ∨ B1 ∨ B2 ∨ … ∨ Bm.
The underlined portion of the premise represents exactly the simple modus ponens. This term then also appears accordingly as B1 in the conclusion.
The premise here is based on a character string in normal or standard form, into which each character string can be brought by a systematic transformation process. In general, this is the normal form:
(A1 ∨ A2 ∨ … ∨ An) ∧ (B1 ∨ B2 ∨ … ∨ Bm).
Such procedures and applications of inference rules as the generalized modus ponens are implemented in so-called resolution algorithms. The length of the character string can be successively reduced. Within the “Prolog” program, for example, such an algorithm can be processed on a computer.
A particularly popular inference rule in mathematics, already known in ancient times, is proof by contradiction:
If one wants to prove that a statement A implies another statement B, one first assumes for the proof that besides a premise A also ¬B is true premise. If then one can deduce a contradiction from it, ¬B cannot be true. So B must be true, because there’s no such thing as a third. Here it is shown that the negation of an assumption can be reduced to a contradiction. In the Middle Ages this form of proof was therefore also called “reductio ad adsurdum”.
The contradiction can show itself e.g. in the fact that one can deduce from A ∧ ¬B a statement C, and in addition, the statement ¬C. In order to show that this strategy can also be represented as a concluding rule, one only needs to find the corresponding form M → B. This is
((A ∧ ¬B) → C) ∧ ((A ∧ ¬B) → ¬C) → (A → B).
This is indeed a tautology and therefore the concluding rule:
((A ∧ ¬B) → C) ∧ ((A ∧ ¬B) → ¬C) ⊨ (A → B).
In a somewhat different form one uses the proof by contradiction if one wants to know whether a statement B is contained in a knowledge base W and thus also true. So, you’re asking whether
W ⊨ B
applies. This is the case if W → B, i.e. ¬W ∨ B is a tautology. Since ¬W ∨ B can be transformed into ¬(W ∧ ¬B), we must therefore ask whether ¬(W ∧ ¬B) is a tautology and thus W ∧ ¬B is a contradiction. So, we can see that a statement B can be deduced from a knowledge base W if
W ∧ ¬B
is a contradiction. That is also plausible: If the information of B is contained in W, the contradiction B ∧¬B must show up somehow with the evaluation of the expression W ∧ ¬B.
In order to now show that W ∧ ¬B leads to a contradiction, the expression W ∧ ¬B is transformed into the disjunctive normal form within the framework of the calculus and then the receiving expression is successively reduced with the help of the generalized modus ponens until an expression is shown that represents a contradiction – or not, depending on whether the statement B is contained in the knowledge base W or not.
The proof of the Pythagoreans that there are infinitely many prime numbers is e.g. of this form. The statement B is then: There are infinitely many prime numbers. The statement ¬B is: There are only finitely many prime numbers. The knowledge base consists of the rules of arithmetic for integers.
On this basis of ¬B and with the knowledge of W one shows then that one can always find a new prime number to every set of finitely many prime numbers, thus ¬B is false, in contradiction to the assumption that W ∧ ¬B is true.
After briefly introducing Aristotle’s syllogistics in the last blog post, I should now actually explain how it were received and elaborated in antiquity, the Middle Ages and into modern times. In particular, the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 to 1716), in which important approaches to modern logic can already be found, should be honoured. It would also be his great project to describe a “Scientia generalis” based on the model of mathematics, in order to “bring about in all scients what Cartesius and others did by algebra and analysis in Arithmetica et Geometria”. (All writings II,1. p.160, after Schupp III, p.238). For this purpose Leibniz wanted to develop a “lingua characteristica” with suitable characters (characteristica universalis). But this and other developments in this direction can be better assessed in retrospect. Therefore, I want to skip this and talk about modern logic.
The mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) founded modern logic with a book entitled “Begriffsschrift – Eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens” (“Conceptual writing – one of the arithmetic formula languages of pure thought”). The foreword says: In this “small script I have now tried a rapprochement with the Leibniz thought of a lingua characteristicistica”. Leibniz is thus the godfather of the modern formal logic (Wille, 2018, p. 96).
Gottlob Frege was a philosopher and mathematician, his father had written a New High German grammar (Wikipedia: Gottlob Frege). So Frege probably knew the power of a formal language; with such a language he then raised logic to a new level, on which one could lead proofs as in mathematics. He thus discovered a “new science” for logic, as Galileo had done for natural research. And again one can see how formalization leads to an accelerated development of a field of knowledge, then “emigrating” from philosophy.
The final form of a “propositional logic” was then created somewhat later by Alfred North Whitehead (1981 to 1947) and Bertrand Russell (1872 to 1970). The “term logic”, as the philosophers had always practiced until then, was soon replaced by this propositional logic; logic developed into a predominantly mathematical discipline. Its mathematical form made it possible to transfer logical reasoning rules to machines, which has led, among other things, to the now flourishing field of “artificial intelligence” research.
Since one experiences again and again, which shyness most contemporaries have at mathematical formulas, one has to exercise great caution with the representation of a formal language for the logic. The best thing to do is to look at the structure of a formal language in analogy to the structure of our mother tongue and to demonstrate the similarity of a formal language with our colloquial language. It’s just all so much easier, and so simple, that at first you feel yourself as a stranger. The language of mathematics may serve as an intermediate station between the formal language of logic and our colloquial language, because it is already formal and the contemporary has at least some experience with it.
Thus, we now look at three languages: logic, mathematics and our colloquial language. In all three languages there is a certain set of characters with which you can form strings. In colloquial language this set represents the usual alphabet, strings are words and several strings represent sentences. So you learn to write the letters first, then the words and then the sentences. Here the important difference between syntax and semantics has to be discussed. Syntax is what is called grammar in natural languages. It shows, for example, how words are declined or conjugated in a sentence regardless of their meaning, depending on their function and position, and in which order they can occur in a sentence. The syntax or grammar thus regulates the formal structure of a language. Semantics, on the other hand, deals with the meaning of words and sentences.
In formal languages, the distinction between syntax and semantics becomes even clearer. The syntax specifies exactly what should be allowed with regard to the formation of character strings. At the syntactic level, therefore, we are only dealing with strings of different complexity, without these having already been assigned a meaning.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics gives us an indication of the usefulness of a formal language. One can “calculate” in it, i.e. formally argue, in such a way that one does not have to know the meaning of the characters and character strings, which one changes, generates or removes there according to certain rules. The whole thing happens on the syntactic level and the rules are made in such a way that true statements are transformed into true statements – completely independent of the meaning of the signs and strings of signs. Only in this way is it understandable that we can transfer the calculating and logical closing to a machine, that we can develop algorithms to solve tasks that would require a certain intelligence from ourselves.
The syntax of the language for a propositional logic
In general, a construction of a formal language begins by first providing a character set, a certain set of symbols, i.e. defining an alphabet. In propositional logic, the alphabet consists of a stock of
– Variables A, B, …, i.e. capital letters of our everyday language. – the characters ‘¬’ and ‘→’, ‘∧’ and ‘∨’. – the sign “≡”, – the brackets “(“” and “)”; these should always be used, if you want to see a couple of strings as a unit, to keep an overview. Also, sometimes a space is used to increase the clarity, and finally – the constants “0” and “1”.
With the help of these characters or “letters” you can form character strings. We will see that in the formal language of propositional logic there is no need to distinguish between letters, words and sentences. You only know characters and strings, and these are uniformly called expressions. How character strings, i.e. more complex expressions, can be formed from the characters of the alphabet is regulated by certain laws, namely:
– If A is an expression, then ¬A is also an expression. – If A and B are expressions, so are A ∧ B and A ∨ B.
You can always create new expressions in this way, e.g. ¬A ∨ B or A ∧ (¬A ∨ B). The expression ¬A ∨ B will later play a major role, so we will introduce the abbreviation A → B for him. This is another sign at our disposal. Any expression of the form A → B will always be understood as ¬A ∨ B. With A and A → B and A ∧ (A → B) we can e.g. get also (A ∧ (A → B)) → B. We will deal with this expression later.
One calls expressions, which are formed according to these rules, well formed. So A → B and A ∧ B ∧ C C are well-formed, but ABA or AB→ are not.
Comments: Our natural languages also have an alphabet. We are most familiar e.g. with the alphabet of the German language. Other alphabets deviate more or less from it. These characters are also used to form strings, which we call words. These words are formed by the way people deal with the things of the environment. This is a historical process, and through the experience of always new things in this world, new words are always invented. Here there are hardly any rules, at most the condition that the word must be pronounceable. For example, the string mjk?a will not be regarded as a meaningful candidate for a word. So the word formation happens on the semantic level: “The thing must get a name”. A rule is then formed for how the accepted words must be written. Orthography is the teaching of “correct writing”, the correct representation of “accepted character strings”. Words are used to form sentences in colloquial language, which can then each represent a statement. The words are then modified, declined or conjugated depending on their position in the sentences.
In contrast, in a formal language “words” are formed at the syntactic level, and according to only a few rules. “Orthography” here means respecting the rules for the formation of strings. There’s no such thing as sentences.
– Mathematics is also a formal language. Here the character set usually consists of the set of symbols {0,1, … ,9}, i.e. the numbers from 0 to 9, and the characters {+, -, ∙, :, =}. Depending on the mathematical theory, further characters are added. Furthermore, you still need symbols as placeholders for numbers that are not further specified at first. Often one takes letters of the alphabet of the colloquial language. There are also clear rules here for the formation of “words” and “sentences”. “Words” are then such strings as x + 0 or 5-4, which are also called “terms”. “Sentences” are equations like x + 2 = 0, and they are also formulated according to certain rules.
Herewith we have described the syntax of three languages. It regulates which character strings may be formed on the basis of a character set.
The semantics respectively the evaluation
In semantics we must now say what we want to understand by the characters we have introduced in syntax, what meaning we want to give them.
In propositional logic, the variables A, B, … should stand for statements in our colloquial language that are either true or false. Note that this is not about the content of the statement and its meaning, but only about an evaluation: true or false. In this respect one should actually only talk about evaluation instead of semantics. But we don’t have to become that exact in our colloquial language, in which we construct the formal language and in which we later talk about it. The colloquial language we call the “meta language”, the language of the propositional logic is then here the “object language”. We have to be very specific in this one. But in our colloquial language, however, we may have enough vague terms.
This condition that we only want to consider statements that are either true or false is constitutive for the entire propositional logic. So it’s not about interrogative sentences or exclamations. We also disregard the fact that there may be statements where you can never decide whether they are true or false. The fact that this limitation is not self-evident for some mathematicians does not need to be discussed here.
Let’s look at some simple statements. Be, for example. A:= “It’s raining.” B:= “The road’s wet.” So e.g. A is true exactly when it rains. Truth is given when the statement is consistent with the facts.
In order to evaluate all the expressions that we can form with such statements according to the rules of syntax, we must now say what we intend to do with the other characters from the character set:
We interpret the “1” as true, the “0” as false.
The sign “¬” before a statement should negate it: ¬A = It is not the case that A, i.e. in our example: “It does not rain”. It’s the same: ¬1 = 0, “not true” means “false”, ¬0 = 1, “not wrong” means “true”.
The expression A ∧ B represents a combination of two statements, reminiscent of 5 + 4 or 5 – 4. We determine the meaning of the sign “∧ ” by saying when this expression should be true depending on the truth values A and B and when it should be false. In principle, we have 16 possibilities there. The default choice is shown in the following truth table:
A
B
A∧ B
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
This assignment is done in such a way that the symbol “∧” corresponds to the colloquial “and”. We’ll test this against our example: A ∧ B = “It’s raining” and “the road is wet”. We obviously perceive this statement as true exactly when both statements A and B are true, as it is also stated in the table.
We define the meaning of the sign “∨” in such a way that in the expression A ∨ B it resembles the colloquial “or”:
A
B
A∨ B
1
1
1
1
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
0
The expression A ∨ B only has the rating 0, i.e. is only false, if both statements A and B are false. So with this “or” the statement “A or B” is true, if either A or B are true, but also if both, A like B, are true. This corresponds to the inclusive “or”. When we use the “or” in colloquial language, we sometimes mean, however, the exclusive “or”, i.e. the “either-or”. This is a typical example of the ambiguity of our colloquial language.
These three rules are actually sufficient to construct arbitrary strings. The expression ¬A ∨ B with the truth tablet is particularly important and useful:
A
¬A
B
¬A ∨ B
1
0
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
0
1
0
1
The link ¬A ∨ B, also written as A → B, is called implication. This applies to this: If A, then B. The statement A is therefore a sufficient condition for B: Always, if A is true, B is also true. The implication is only false if B is false. If A is false, then the implication A → B according to the truth table is always true, no matter if B is true or false. That means: If the statement A is not sufficient, then one cannot say anything about the truth value of B in the case of a true implication.
In this way, the truth value can always be determined for longer character strings. We would like to give an example here of what will still concern us in the future. We’re looking at the string:
(A ∧ (A → B)) → B.
For these one receives the following truth table:
A
B
A → B
A ∧ (A → B)
(A ∧ (A → B)) → B
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
1
0
0
1
0
1
So there are expressions in propositional logic that are true in every case, regardless of the truth value of the individual statements. Such expressions are called tautologies. We will see in the next blog post what important role such expressions play in the formation of conclusions.
In the last blog post, Aristotle presented the three types of conclusions: the logical conclusion, the dialectical conclusion and the false conclusion. Now we will have to deal with the logical conclusion, which derives a true conclusion from two true premises.
This is, of course, the most important conclusion, which ensures a safe “transport” of the truth of statements. That such a possibility exists is the good news, and you can’t overestimate it. The “bad news” would then be that truth is not gained in any way, it is only passed on. The premises must be true. The question as to how and where one can begin with true statements in practice will be of great concern to us later on.
With the logical conclusion one can distinguish now again several kinds. The individual proofs, as he also called them, differ in the nature of the premises and the conclusion, which then results from a “summation” of the premises. In the Greek “summation” means “συν-λογισμός” (syllogismos); thus, one also speaks of a syllogism, the doctrine of syllogisms is called syllogistics.
Let us first look at an example of syllogism:
All humans are mortal. All Greeks are humans. Therefore: All Greeks are mortal.
So, there are three statements, two propositions from which one proceeds, and a conclusion in which the propositions are “added together”.
The form of sentences and their representation
In this example, all sentences are of the form “All A are B”. The sentence “All A are B” can also be formulated as follows: “B applies to all A.” This formulation suggests that B is a predicate of all A: B is attributed to all A (predicated), e.g.: To be mortal applies to all human beings.
The formulation is also the one that comes closest to the Greek text, so it is the more original form. In scholasticism however, this was rewritten then as “All A are B”. All A has the predicate B: All humans are mortal.
The above syllogism is then in its original form:
To be mortal belongs to all human beings, To be a human being belongs to all Greeks. Therefore: To be mortal belongs to all Greeks.
Moreover, this formulation also suggests a method that was discovered much later to illustrate the relationship between two terms. One takes advantage of the fact that each term applies to a set of entities. “Human beings” can be Greeks but also Egyptians, Thracians or Asians or Europeans. If one represents the set of human beings by a circle or any closed curve (B), the set of Greeks as well (A), then the circle for the Greeks lies within the circle for the human beings.
Fig.1: The set of Greeks (A) is a subset of the set human beings (B). To be a human being (B) applies to all Greeks (A).
Such pictures are called Venn diagrams, after the mathematician John Venn (1834 to 1923), who introduced them following Leonard Euler (1707 to 1783). Actually, the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 to 1716) already used them. These Venn diagrams thus illustrate relationships between two sets in general, no matter of what kind the elements are. Within the framework of set theory, we would also write: A ⊂ B, i.e. A is a subset of B.
But this form of a sentence is not the only one at syllogisms. Aristotle obtained an overview of all possible forms of sentences and statements. This resulted in: (Prior Analytics, Book I, 1, see https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8pra/book1.html):
A premiss then is a sentence affirming or denying one thing of another. This is either universal or particular or indefinite. By universal I mean the statement that something belongs to all or none of something else; by particular that it belongs to some or not to some or not to all; by indefinite that it does or does not belong.
Thus, beside the general sentences like “All Greeks are human beings” or “To be human belongs to all Greeks” there is also the negation (no-compliance) and the particular statement. Altogether you get the following types of sentences:
B belongs to all A, (all A are B), B doesn’t belong to any A, (no A is B), B belongs to some A, (Some A are B), B doesn’t belong to some A, (some A are not B).
We can illustrate the other types of statements as follows:
Fig. 2: Left: B doesn’t belong to any A. Middle: B belongs to some A. Right: B doesn’t belong to some A.
In scholastic circles these forms are abbreviated as (A a B), (A e B), (A i B) and (A o B). The letters “a” and “i” should remind us of “affirmo”, “e” and “o” of “nego”.
The structure of syllogisms
Two such forms of statement then form the premises, one such the conclusion. Each conclusion can thus be characterized by three letters from the set {a,e,i,o} and by the position of the three letters, which stand for the concepts in the respective sentence.
One of these terms, the so-called middle term, must occur in both conditions, it can be in first or second place, or in one condition in first, in the other in second. This results in four different shapes or figures. The first figure is the following (see example above)
A – B
B – C
A – C.
Now Aristotle selects in all forms that combination of two forms of statement that necessarily lead to a conclusion. He simply sorts out the conclusions for which he finds a counterexample.
The valid conclusions can then each be represented by the form and a specific combination of the letters a,e,i,o. And in order to be able to remember such combinations better, one has integrated them into corresponding peculiar words, e.g. one remembers the combination a a a with the word “Barbara”, and knows in addition that here the 1st figure is present. This conclusion corresponds exactly to the above example.
Fig.3: The Barbara syllogism
Another important conclusion, also of the 1st figure, is called “Celarent” in this way:
Fig.4: The syllogism Celarent
Aristotle demonstrated in this way that one could systematically formulate a system of conclusions in which from the truth of the premises necessarily follows the truth of the conclusion.
With the systematics of Aristotle, one now has a complete overview of all possible conclusions. Previously however, in syllogistics, “the whole art of syllogistics had consisted in searching around with great effort of time and effort”. as Aristotle wrote in his work On Sophistical Refutations (after Schupp, I 275).
But here one already has a system of statements that is reminiscent of the formal predicate logic that will be introduced later. Like there, you can “quantify” using the predicates, i.e. you can operate with quantities such as “all”, “none” and “some” for the predicates.
Most importantly, Aristotle must select the valid conclusions “by hand” from the set of all possible combinations, simply by discarding those that he recognizes as invalid with the help of an example. This “recognition” is an intuitive one, one with “common sense”. One does not doubt the correctness of the conclusion, but for a strict science in today’s sense this kind of knowledge is not sufficient.
Even if one describes the relations of terms mentioned above with the help of set theory, and thus justifies the conclusions within the framework of set theory, the insight is a mathematical one. Thus, the conclusions would be only indirectly logically justified, because mathematics only uses, as we know today, the rules of inference that are ultimately gained in modern predicate logic. Only in this predicate logic can the conclusions be strictly justified by deriving them from tautologies. We’ll see about that in a later blog post. Only in this logic is the bottom reached on which one can incontestably win a true sentence again from true sentences.
We still would have to comment on Aristotle’s remark on the case that the conditions are only likely to be true or credible. Then the conclusion could also only probably be true. Saying more here was not possible at that time. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that a theory of probability was developed with which one can become more precise in this case. This will be explained in more detail in a later blog post on the topic “How to deal with insecure knowledge”.
Syllogisms in an axiomatic-deductive system
But Aristotle’s logic has not only shown us how safe knowledge can be passed on safely. He has also shown that “It is possible also to reduce all syllogisms to the universal syllogisms in the first figure.”, as he writes in the Prior Analytics, 1st book, 7th chapter (see https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8pra/book1.html).
Thus, we already have a concrete axiomatic-deductive system. This logical order of the statements in a field of knowledge represented for him the ideal of a science. In the Posterior Analytics, 1st book, 3rd chapter he writes:
On the other hand, I maintain that any science must be based on proofs, but that the knowledge of the unmediated principles is not provable. And it is clear that this must be necessary. For since a knowledge of the earlier propositions from which the proof is made is necessary, but one stops once at unmediated propositions, these must necessarily be unprovable. This is my view and I maintain that there are not only sciences, but also supreme principles of them through which we learn the concepts of conclusion. (Here I prefer the translation of a german version in http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Aristoteles/Organon/Zweite+Analytiken+oder+Lehre+vom+Erkennen/1.+Buch/3.+Kapitel).
The mathematician Euclid of Alexandria logically arranged the geometric knowledge of that time in this way in the time around -300. This organization of a scientific theory as an axiomatic-deductive system is still a model for any rigorous science today. One tried in all centuries to imitate this organization of a thought building, thus “more geometrico”, after kind of the Euclidean geometry, to arrange the knowledge of his science. In “Die Idee der Wissenschaft – Ihr Schicksal in Physik, Rechtswissenschaft und Theologie” I described how successful it has been to this day to realize this idea (Honerkamp, 2017).
Who first had this idea is not clear. The mathematical proof was already known to the Pythagoreans. If there are enough statements in an area, secured by proofs, one will probably at some point consider which statements could be regarded as axioms. This poses the question: Which statements do I need as a basis in order to be able to deduce all the others from them? Or also: How do I create a logical order?
Such specifications will then always be special statements, have special properties. They can be immediately insightful, i.e. “certain by themselves”, as in theories of mathematics, but also highly abstract and far from our idea, as in theories of physics.
If one examines the insights of the ancient thinkers as to whether they can still be regarded as generally valid today, one encounters Aristotelian logic, apart from many mathematical and some physical statements. Although at the end of the 19th century something “better” was found with modern logic, Aristotle’s statements on the laws of thought are still valid and will always remain so. It is highly admirable how clearly Aristotle saw the structure of an argumentation and how he worked out the decisive criteria for reliability.
The first step is a detailed analysis of a conclusion. In a sentence from Topics, Book 1, Chapter 1 of Aristotle:
The conclusion is now a discourse in which some things are presupposed and then something different from them results from it with necessity mediated by those propositions.
The point is here: “Some” is assumed and “some of it different” results. The extent to which this “with necessity” arises will still have to be discussed.
Let’s have a look at a classic example:
The “some” that we presuppose are the two sentences, also called antecedents:
One: “All human beings are mortal.”
Second: “Socrates is a human being.”
The “different” of it, the conclusion is the sentence:
“Socrates is mortal.”
So here we have three terms: “Socrates”, ” human being” and “mortal”. These are put into relation, “human being” is the generic term to “Socrates”, “mortal” to “human being”. If the relations of terms are correct, the antecedents are true. The conclusion then follows from this Dihairesis, i.e. a classification of terms.
The conclusion seems evident to us; to Aristotle it indeed follows “with necessity”. No one would deny that, everything else would be “unreasonable”. However, we still use our “common sense”, which is what we call reason.
We will leave it as it is and deal with this point again later. It should be noted, however, that the protagonists of this conclusion, i.e. those involved in the conclusion, are three terms, or to be more precise: two relationships for a total of three terms, in each case between two terms. For this reason, one speaks here of a term logic.
Logical inference, dialectical inference and false conclusion
However, something is also said about the sentences in which the terms appear, here e.g. that the antecedents are true. With regard to these, Aristotle now makes a decisive case discrimination (Aristotle, no date):
The conclusion provides a proof or a logical inference if it is derived from true and general superordinate sentences, or from such, which are based on true and superordinate sentences of the science concerned.
Dialectical, on the other hand, is the conclusion derived from credible sentences.
So, it depends on whether the first sentences are true or only “credible”. Often the Greek word translated here as “credible” is translated as “probable”. This suggests the idea that one could indicate here a degree of probability for whether the statement is true. However, only in the last century was it possible to develop a theory of probability in which one can calculate with different degrees of probabilities. These can be applied just as well if one assumes degrees of credibility. We will use that in later blog posts.
But in the case of a proof where one can speak of a logical inference, we are dealing with “certain knowledge”, whereas in the case of a dialectical inference we are dealing only with “uncertain knowledge”. In later blog posts we will deal in detail with what kind of knowledge can be gained from certain or uncertain knowledge respectively.
First it is important to distinguish between a “proof”, in which one must assume that the first sentences, the antecedents, are true, and a dialectical conclusion, in which one can only proceed from “credible” antecedents.
About the “true and general superordinate sentences” he says:
True and superordinate propositions are those which are not mediated by others but are certain by themselves. Because for the most fundamental principles of the sciences one must not demand a reason for them, but each of these principles must be certain by itself.
These are principles which were later called “axioms”. They play a major role in an axiomatic-deductive system by Euclid of Alexandria. However, we may assume that there are also sentences “certain by themselves” outside of special sciences, such as: “All human beings are mortal”.
He determines the “credibility” of sentences as follows (ibid.):
Sentences are credible if they are accepted by all, or by most, or by wise men, the latter by all, or by most, or by the most experienced and credible.
Here we are now “in the center of life”. It is almost always the case that we are dealing with sentences that we can only believe. Even as a scientist you will have to believe almost everything, e.g. the statements of the scientists of another subject – even those of your own subject, if you have not checked the statements yourself or cannot check them directly. “Credibility” is therefore a high good for a society. Today in particular, it is often not easy to decide who to believe.
Finally, Aristotle also deals with the fallacy:
A false conclusion is one which is derived from apparently credible sentences without them really being, or which is derived only apparently from credible sentences or from sentences that only seem so.
The error can therefore lie with the antecedents, that’s trivial. More interesting is the case that the rule of inference is not valid, that a inference is only “apparently”, not truly present.
One such false conclusion, which often remains hidden, is the “fallacy of four terms”. This is demonstrated particularly clearly in the following example (Wikipedia: Fehlschluss):
One: What’s got a beard can be shaved. Second: Keys have a beard. Conclusion: Keys can be shaved.
A shift in meaning has occurred here in the transition from the first to the second antecedent. A “beard” in the first sentence means something different than a “beard” in the second sentence. One should better speak of two terms “beard1” and “beard2”, and there would not be three, but four terms in the game – hence the name.
Since we constantly argue with unclear terms in our considerations and discussions, we are often undermined by such false conclusions.
The first major step in the analysis of an argumentation is thus taken: a discrimination between a rule of inference and the “presupposed”, a case discrimination between true and only credible antecedents as well as an investigation of the possibilities of a false conclusion. Here again the great systematist shines through. In the next blog post we will, again systematically, distinguish between different types of antecedents and rules of inference.
The Stoics’ logic
About 100 years later, a different approach to logic emerged in the philosophical school of the so-called Stoa. The philosopher Chrysippus (-276 to -204) of Soli (Cilicia) was probably the representative of this school who most successfully dealt with logic. According to Diogenes Laertius his extraordinarily numerous books were very famous at that time (Laertius, 2015, p. 415ff).
In the long run, however, Aristotle’s approach was far more effective. In all centuries up to the time of Gottlob Frege (1848 to 1925), who founded modern mathematical logic, logic was associated with the name Aristotle; stoic logic was almost forgotten in the Middle Ages, its significance was rediscovered only in 1950 by the American science theorist Benson Mattes. I think it is still underestimated.
The stoic logic was based on the findings that had already been gained by the Megarian school who referred to Euclid of Megara. Stiplon, Diodoros Kronos and Philon von Megara were the most prominent representatives of this group. Stoic logic was already a propositional logic in its approach, while Aristotelian logic, as already mentioned, was a term logic. Aristotle had grown up in the Platonic Academy and had therefore probably incorporated the Platonic terminology (Dihairesis). His logic thus became term logic. The Megarian school was free of such influence, and probably saw dialectics more directly as the problem of checking an argumentation for its conclusiveness. For them, the statements were thus in the foreground.
Aristotle had already seen that it depends on whether the antecedents were true, only credible or not. The rules of inference, however, had to be concerned with the relationships between terms. But now the rules of inference are focused on the “transport of truth” – from the antecedents to the conclusion. Then why shouldn’t the protagonists who are supposed to accomplish this be the sentences themselves? In a propositional logic then it must be only a matter of whether the antecedents are true or not. Terms no longer appear explicitly.
It is then also no longer of interest to “categorical judgements”, such as “All human beings are mortal”, in which a judgement is made about the categories, i.e. in which the category “human being” is set in relation to the category “mortal”, for example. Such a judgement, which corresponds to a division of terms, is to be distinguished from the “synthetic judgement”, which in today’s language corresponds to the connection “A and B” or “A or B” of two statements A and B respectively. So, here sentences A and B are connected in various ways.
A particularly important connection is the “implication”: If A, then B, e.g. “If it rains, then the road is wet”. Where A = “it rains”, B = “the road is wet”. So, if A is the case, then B is the case. An implication can also be true, credible or false. The Stoics were already familiar with this connection: “An implication is true, if the after-sentence is contained in the preceding sentence in the sense”. (Sextus Empiricus: Pyrronic Skepticism II,112. p.181, after Schupp, I, p. 346). With this statement they excluded the case that the implication makes no sense, as in the example: “If 2 + 2 = 4, then my friend has birthday today”. Such a case led to difficulties in formulating certain rules of inference.
The Stoics formulated five “unprovable rules of inference”, and there are also said to have been rules on how more general final formulas can be traced back to these fundamental “unprovable conclusions”. One of these conclusions is identical with the “modus ponens”, a rule of inference in which implication plays an important role. That conclusion is:
Be the statement A true, and be also true:
If A is true, then B is true.
Then follows: Statement B is true.
This can be seen immediately by everyone, and so it is not surprising that this rule already belongs to the “unprovable conclusions” of the Stoics.
But there were always great discussions about the “modus ponens”. One always discussed all logical conclusions only by given meaning of sentences or terms. However, the “modus ponens” contains the implication as an antecedent. Because this could now also be senseless as in the above example, “If 2 + 2 = 4, then my friend has birthday today”, the logicians always doubted the general correctness of this rule of inference.
The “unprovable conclusions” long belonged to the school knowledge of late antiquity; writings by Cicero (-106 to -43) or Isodor of Seville (560 to 630) bear witness to this.
The difference between Aristotelian and Stoic logic was not seen by many even in late antiquity, as can be seen from works by Cicero or Galen. However, the neo-Platonist Porphyrios (234 to 305) still compared the stoic with the Aristotelian logic in terms of terminology and objective. Boethius (477 to 524) could then only report on the stoic logic. When one spoke later of logic, one always meant the Aristotelian logic (Schupp, I, p.349) and one referred thereby predominantly to the writings of Boethius. What remained of stoic logic was the distinction between categorical and synthetic judgments and the knowledge of “modus ponens” as a rule of inference, without knowing stoic logic.
Stoic logic, by being an early form of propositional logic, was much closer to modern logic as formulated by Gottlob Frege at the end of the 19th century. What it lacked was a decisive step: the discovery that a formal language of its own is necessary for logic, just as it is for mathematics, so that the laws of logical thought can be formulated independently of the meaning of the statements. Then you can “compute” like in mathematics. The correctness of conclusions can then be defined and checked at this level. With such a strict separation of syntax and semantics, i.e. of grammar and meaning, the “meaning problem” of the implication described above becomes irrelevant.
Thus, we will have to deal first with formal languages, before the modern propositional logic can be introduced. But first we should study explicitly the rules of Aristotelian logic for the sake of completeness.
If I wanted to write a treatise on the pre-Socratics, I would now have to deal in this blog post with the so-called pluralists and atomists such as Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Leukipp and Democritus. But I do not want to give an outline of the philosophy of the pre-Socratics here. This has happened often enough elsewhere, and certainly after a much more detailed study of the literature of the past millennia than I can show. I am essentially interested in the thoughts of the pre-Socratics, in which one can discover the precursors of the way of thinking of modern physics, mathematics and logic. There it is without doubt the three basic ideas which have been expressed so aptly and so early in the history of ideas by the school of Miletus, by the Pythagoreans and by Xenophanes: In nature there is such a thing as a causal connection, the regularities in nature can be formulated in the language of mathematics, and knowledge can be attained by “finding the better by searching”. But there can be no ultimate knowledge. The first tentative steps of the pre-Socratics towards basic concepts such as ” motion ” are also remarkable. The long history of the clarification of this concept over the millennia clearly shows how much effort it takes to gradually move from the darkness of the first reflections to a clear idea with which one can argue reliably. If I now follow the development of the “logos” in the history of philosophy, I will be even more selective. I will concentrate on the highlights, i.e. the works where substantial progress has been made. Of course, one often recognizes these only by looking back from today’s standpoint. The focus will be on such developments in logic, mathematics and physics that have become significant for the present state of the art in terms of both methods and the formation of concepts. So, if one begins to look at the development in the time after the pre-Socratics, one must first speak of the three greats of Greek philosophy: Socrates (-469 to -399), Plato (-428 to -348) and Aristotle (-384 to -322). As already mentioned in the first blog post, Socrates introduced a new topic into philosophy: Ethics. But it was not only this new topic that led to a new era in philosophy. Anaxagoras from Kleizomenai ( Ionia ) had moved to Athens in the year -462 and had made the thoughts of the Milesians and other pre-Socratics known there. Where more people can come together, it is also more likely that people with the same interests will meet and talk about them. In addition to teacher-pupil relationships, communities can now also emerge in which discussions can take place on an equal footing. Dialectics came into fashion. Already Zenon of Elea had been her great friend, Aristotle had later even praised him as their inventor (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 361, No.4). Attic democracy flourished, it was an early type of democracy in which the “people of state” ruled, where the people of state consisted of the full male citizens of the city of Athens who had reached the age of 30. These full citizens could also turn to matters which were not directly necessary to daily life; for such work there were enough slaves, women or immigrants. Especially in political meetings and in court, eloquence and the art of dialectics were in demand, i.e. to find the right reasons for opinions and to spread those that could be applauded by listeners. Sophists taught for money to master this art, even to be able to skilfully involve the opponent in a contradiction in discussions. About Socrates we know some about Diogenes Laertius (Laertius, 2015, pp. 67-90), in particular he is supposed to have said: ” I know nothing except that I know nothing” (DL 83). And “the good is nothing small, but start with small things” (DL 83). But we don’t know any of his writings. Plato, however, puts a lot into his mouth in his works. These works always represent dialogues that Socrates conducts with a wide variety of dialogue partners and in which it is always a matter of clarifying a concept or a question.
Plato
After the death of Socrates, Plato, in his years of teaching and travel, first stayed with a follower of the philosophy of Parmenides, “travelled to Cyrene to the mathematician Theodoros and from there to Italy to the Pythagoreans Philolaos and Eurytos; from there to Egypt to the prophets” (Laertius, 2015, p. 141). Thus he collected various impressions and combined them to a grandiose mythical thought building, which is still effective today and continues to inspire many people. He must have been a great storyteller. In his works he described in the form of a dialogue the effort to find concepts and answers to the question of correct behaviour or a good life. Who first chose this literary form is controversial. “It is said that Zenon, the Eleate, was the first to write dialogues, but Aristotle names as such […] Alexamos from Styra […]. I, on the other hand, think that Plato, through his strict treatment and training […], has secured himself the right to first place […]”. Dialogue is “a question-and-answer execution of a philosophical or political theme”, but dialectics “is the art of persuasion, through which we prove something void or right on the basis of the question-and-answer procedure of the undermentioners” (all quotations: (Laertius, 2015, p. 159)). Diogenes Laertius says of Plato’s works: “TIMAIOS belongs to the field of physics, to the logic belongs POLITIKOS, KRATYLOS, PARMENIDES and SOPHISTES” (Laertius, 2015, p. 160). When he, as in TIMAIOS, came to talk about the ideas of the pre-Socratics about the cosmos, he did so in mythical form or tied to Pythagoras and saw the world built up from geometric forms. At that time, logic was still predominantly understood to mean the work on terms, i.e. the uncovering of the relationships between related terms, e.g. their classification as superordinate or subordinate terms. A clearer definition was expected from such a division of terms, called “dihairesis”. One could already see, however, that a definition often required definitions of the determinants, thus leading to an infinite regress. Aristotle grew up in the Academy with this method. Thus, in his logic, which he was soon to develop, the concepts were also at the centre. This thus became a so-called term logic. Modern logic, on the other hand, is a propositional logic. In the next blog post I will work out the difference exactly. Plato mainly used induction, i.e. the conclusion from special to general, for a demonstration of evidence, “which through some true cases opens up the same truth for other cases in an appropriate way”, as Laertius (Laertius, 2015, p. 161) says. For a long time this conclusion was considered “appropriate”, only David Hume stressed that this conclusion is not mandatory, thus not always “appropriate”. In modern logic there is no place for this conclusion either. Plato’s central theme, however, was the human soul and how it can express itself in language, ethics, art and politics. He adorns existing myths, redesigns them or invents completely new stories.
The Platonic Academy
For the development of the “logos” all this does not give much. It is interesting in this context, however, that he also promoted training in analytical subjects, probably motivated by the impression that Pythagorean mathematicians made on him. He was not only a great narrator, but also a good organizer and designer. He founded a school where young people were taught philosophy and science. For this he acquired, probably in -387, a plot of land near a grove called Akademeia, because it had been dedicated to the Heros Akademos. In addition to metaphysics, ethics, dialectics and the doctrine of the soul, physics and especially mathematics were studied there, which soon became part of the basic education of every student of a philosopher. The academy remained, with interruptions, over many centuries, it was closed only around 530. The Platonic Academy became a model: since Augustine (354 to 430) and Martianus Capella, a Roman encyclopedist from the 5th or 6th century, a canon of seven subjects had become established for the schools of late antiquity. This was divided into a trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic or logic) and a quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory). These subjects were called the seven liberal arts because they were “worthy of a free man,” and “free” was a man when he was free from the necessity of earning a living. In the Middle Ages this study of the liberal arts was regarded as preparation for scientific studies in theology, jurisprudence and medicine. In the universities, the liberal arts were soon taught within the framework of a separate faculty, the Facultas Artium. The “Liberal Arts”, which we know from the USA e.g. as “undergraduate studies” and which are introduced nowadays also e.g. in Germany, try to continue this tradition. However, dialectics is more in the foreground here than any of the mathematical disciplines.
Aristotle
Aristotle, a pupil of Plato’s, had particularly fertile ground for his rigorous training at the Platonic Academy. Born into an educated and wealthy family in Stageira (Chaldidike) in the year -384, he was sent to Plato’s Academy in Athens in the year -367 at the age of 17. The mathematician Eudoxos von Knidos (ca. -395 to ca. -350) played an important role there. Aristotle, on the one hand, loved to argue and discuss with dissenters. On the other hand, he showed – as with people who have not passed a mathematical education without consequences – a tendency to work systematically and to collect the doctrines of former philosophers such as Pythagoras or Democritus (Schupp, I 256). Aristotle became such a great systematist, attentive to the methodical in a thought process and vigilant for connections. He was the first of this kind, and he was also to establish a completely new kind of philosophy, which is no longer a poiesis, a “production” of doctrines in a poetic manner. Instead, the focus is on analysis and methods, reasons are required and the results are checked for conclusiveness. It is probably plausible that one feels the urge for such things when one has a large corpus of doctrines before one’s mind’s eye and at some point wonders why the respective philosophers can so firmly hold their views. But you also have to live in a stimulating environment and, above all, have the talent to make such a new start. So Aristotle soon went his own way in the academy. According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato is said to have said: “Aristotle beat me like young fillings do against their own mother” (Laertius, 2015, p. 225). In the list of Aristotle’s writings, Laertius lists 146 titles and speaks of a total of 445 270 lines. According to him, the work on logic is “very clearly marked as a tool for all sub-areas.” These writings were later combined into a collection of six books entitled “Organon” (gr. ὄργανον = tool).
The Organon
The titles of the six books in the Organon Collection are as follows: 1. the categories, 2. on the interpretation (peri hermeneias), 3. the doctrine of the logical conclusion (analytika protera, first analysis), 4. the study of evidence (analytika hystera, second analysis), 5. the topics and 6. the Sophist Refutations The books 3,4 and 5 are particularly important for the development of logical thinking, i.e. the doctrines of the logical conclusion and the proof as well as the topics. Here the so-called Aristotelian logic is developed. This is therefore the fruit of a time in which dialectics occupied a high position in society. Even in discussions about more fundamental questions such as those about a good life or “reasonable” morals, it was soon more a question of the power of the arguments than of authoritarian settlements, and finally it could not fail to be thought about directly which forms of argumentation possess such power that they are incontestable, i.e. must be accepted by every sensible person. The new era of philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectics, has therefore by no means allowed the idea of the logos to recede into the background or hindered its dissemination. On the contrary, dialectics was precisely the field in which this idea could prove to be a particularly useful and valuable tool for thinking. The idea took shape in Aristotelian logic, which was to become a model for a science that today plays a significant role within the framework of artificial intelligence. In the next blog post I will deal explicitly with Aristotelian logic.
Aristotle and the System of Sciences
Aristotle’s talent for analytical thinking and systematic work, as well as his passion for collecting the doctrines of earlier philosophers, showed other fruits. He establishes a systematics of all sciences known at that time. It divides the sciences into practical and ethical sciences, into poetic (manufacturing) sciences such as medicine or craftsmanship, and finally into theoretical sciences. In the latter he distinguished mathematics, natural science and “first philosophy”, to which he added theology, ontology and logic. Theology at that time consisted essentially in a study of the unchangeable “divine” stars. This division of Aristotle is, so to speak, the first “cashing down” of knowledge of a time and subsumes everything that creates knowledge under science. Probably he also counted the theoretical sciences of mathematics and natural science among philosophy, albeit not among the “first”. About 500 years later Diogenes writes of Laertius: As for the parts of philosophy, there are three: physics, ethics, and dialectics.(Laertius, 2015, p. 10), whereby dialectic here also stands for the doctrine of thought principles, i.e. for logic and more generally for epistemology. Ethics had thus immigrated into philosophy and mathematics had been eliminated. There could no longer be a thinker like Pythagoras, who practiced mathematics but also represented a certain world view with religious fervour. Important ancient mathematicians, such as Euclid of Alexandria or Archimedes of Syracuse, do not appear in the work of Diogenes Laertius on the lives and opinions of famous philosophers – except for Eudoxos of Knidos, who was a member of Plato’s Academy for a time. But physics, too, was to emigrate from philosophy, albeit only about 2,000 years later, when Galileo Galilei overcame the Aristotelian theory of motion. By demonstrating how to describe regularities in nature in the language of mathematics, he discovered a “new science”. Natural science became a modern physics. The consequences of this discovery will be discussed in detail. Finally, at the end of the 19th century, logic in the form of mathematical logic emigrated from philosophy. It is now a branch of mathematics and computer science. Nowadays it is even observed how epistemology is becoming an area of cognitive science that not only deals with our ability to think, but also with all conscious and unconscious processes in our brain such as perceiving, learning or remembering. Cosmology, the theme of the pre-Socratics and the first theme of philosophy ever, is today an area of modern physics. A history of cosmology from the pre-Socratics to Hawking would be highly interesting: the “question of the whole” has arisen in mythical thinking and in this form is still present in all religions, and the pre-Socratics already began to look for physical reasons for their ideas. But only for about 100 years has there been a physical cosmology in which the logos rule strictly. This cosmology is a reconstruction of the history of the universe with consistent consideration of physical theories. The development of the cosmos could only be convincingly told after the phenomena of nature had been understood on the grounds of reliable theories. Because this knowledge was just the necessary guidelines for a history of the universe, which no longer wants to be a mythical but a logical one.
A disciple of Parmenides, Zenon of Elea (around -490 to around -430) still attracts special attention today because of the paradoxes with which he annoyed his philosophically interested contemporaries. We now understand paradoxes to mean argumentations that lead to contradictions because an unclear or incorrect idea of a concept is at play. That was the case for both movement and infinity at the time. Today we have clear ideas about these terms and can resolve the paradoxes that have so unsettled his discussion partners.
Zenon wanted to support the theses of his teacher Parmenides with his considerations. At least this is how we read it in Plato’s dialogue PARMENIDES, in which he lets Zenon say: (after (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 365, No. 5):
In reality, my writing is something of a support for the Parmenides’ thesis, which is aimed at those who try to make him ridiculous.
His four movement paradoxes are particularly famous. We want to deal here with the third paradox, because it is based on an error, the enlightenment of which stood at the beginning of modern physics. This is about the apparent contradiction between the observation of a flying arrow and the Parmenides assertion that this movement of the arrow is only apparently present, since the being remains in absolute silence.
A flying arrow, Zenon argues, is at a given time in a certain place, which is always as big as the arrow itself. Since he was there in the “now”, he could not be in motion then. So, he is at rest in every moment, the arrow actually stands still. The motion we’re watching is a fake.
I don’t find that argument convincing. After all, Zenon already shows a scepticism towards our everyday perceptions, albeit in the most extreme form. In any case, Zenon seems to me to have the idea that in every “now” the state of an arrow is determined by a location alone, and he assumes that there is no motion. Aristotle says in contradiction: “In the “now” neither rest nor movement can take place” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 383, No. 23). So he already sees that Zenon only thinks of the most obvious when describing the state of a moving body. Zeno’s argument does not convince him either. But his counterargument does not go any further as well.
The arrow paradox dissolves when one knows that the state of a body in space is determined by a location and (!) by a velocity (or impulse) at any time, in any “now”.
This was Galilei’s discovery in the early 17th century. He studied the motion of a small ball as it rolls down an inclined long wooden channel. Not only did he find that the distance she travels on the wooden channel increases with the square of time. He also extended the channel beyond the inclined part and observed that the ball on the horizontal channel continues to run the longer the less its movement is affected by unevenness of the ground. He concluded that, with ideal ground, it would then have to continue to run forever. The motion remains as it is if there are no external influences on what is moving.
So movement is a state. In medieval “impetus theory” the movement was still a process: an “impetus” had to work constantly. This would be given to the body at the beginning, kept the movement upright, but was also slowly used up, so that it gradually came to a standstill. Galilei, on the other hand, attributed a slowing of a motion to external influences, e.g. friction. By refraining from external circumstances, he was able to discover a principle of nature that would prove extraordinarily fruitful for the further development of physics. I’ll come back to that soon. But first we have to look at how a velocity in the “now” can be grasped in concrete terms.
The instantaneous velocity
Galilei did not yet have the possibility to calculate an instantaneous velocity. In mathematics he was still at the level of the ancient Greeks, where geometry as a description of nature stood in the foreground. But his contemporary, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, discovered how geometric problems could be converted into arithmetic problems. An “Analytical Geometry” was created, which represented a great advance compared to ancient mathematics and which for the first time enabled one to go beyond the status of the ancient Greeks.
One now learned to describe the location of a point in a coordinate system and to see such points as locations of material bodies, if one abstracted from their expansion. One could also represent the place x(t) of the body in dependence on the time t in a coordinate system.
An average velocity in a time period dt was easy to calculate by forming the ratio dx/dt, where dx may be the distance covered in the time dt. But it became difficult if you wanted to extrapolate to the instantaneous velocity, i.e. if you had to determine the velocity in the “Now”. The time span dt should actually be zero, the distance dx thus also, and the ratio 0 to 0 makes no sense. One had to choose somehow a very small time span dt, which should be however arbitrarily small, but still unequal 0. Somehow these quantities had to have something to do with the “infinitely small”. They called them infinitesimal. It was not a clear idea, but they succeeded in consistently calculating the ratio dx/dt in the “now”, the “differential quotient”. This “infinitesimal calculus” was developed independently by two great thinkers of the time for general functions f(x): Isaac Newton needed this knowledge for his reflections on motion. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz regarded it as a purely mathematical problem which had to be solved if one wanted to determine the tangent in a point of the curve of a function in a diagram.
For some time such calculations were very popular; they inspired many new ideas and questions. At the end of the 18th century, mathematicians were no longer satisfied with the justification of such calculations with infinitesimals. The Italian mathematician Lagrange found a method for calculating the differential quotient without having to use the term infinitesimal. In the 1960s, a new type of number could finally be defined using hyperreal numbers in a so-called non-standard analysis. A clear definition of the infinitesimal was now possible: they were certain hyperreal numbers.
Mathematics is sometimes like physics and actually every science: New concepts are not always clearly defined at first. But you can already use them and when you notice that they are “good for something”, you start to take care of the conceptual basics at some point. But it often takes some time for satisfactory clarity to be achieved.
The Evolution of Motion Theory: One Finds “Seeking the Better”
Knowledge of how to calculate the instantaneous velocity from a time-dependent spatial coordinate was a prerequisite for a theory of motion in the language of mathematics. While Galilei had discovered a relationship between distance and time in free fall, one theory was now concerned with describing the position and velocity of a body as a function of time.
The physicists and mathematicians of that time knew their ancient models very well. Especially the ELEMENTS of Euclid of Alexandria, in which he brought the then known laws of geometry into a “logical order”. Euclid has thus set a benchmark for what a mathematical or physical theory should look like. At the beginning there are definitions, conventions and axioms. According to this, all statements of the theory must be logically deducible from the axioms according to mathematical rules.
Newton formulated his theory according to this model. Galileo’s idea that motion can be a state was the first axiom he incorporated into his theory of motion, which is now known as “Newtonian mechanics”: “A body remains at rest or in straight-line, uniform motion if no forces act on it.
Here, of course, something must have been said about space and time in the definitions beforehand, so that one knows what uniform motion means. So you have to know what a straight line is, and you have to say something about the course of time before you can speak of a uniform velocity, one that is constant in direction and size. Only then can one speak of this particular motion in the axiom and postulate that this motion remains if there is no external influence on the moving body.
In a second axiom, Newton then logically describes a procedure for formulating a mathematical equation for the case that an external force now acts on the body. With a suitable mathematical expression for the force, one can then calculate all motions in the sky and on earth from such an equation of motion, taking into account existing circumstances.
This Newtonian theory of motion, briefly outlined here, was regarded as the only ideal of a scientific theory for over 200 years from the end of the 17th century, and its structure as an axiomatic-deductive system represented a model for future sciences.
Here is an opportunity to speak of two other theories of movement: on the one hand a theory that Aristotle had formulated about 2,000 years earlier, and on the other a theory that Albert Einstein developed some 300 years later and was soon called “special relativity theory”. One can very beautifully demonstrate with these three theories how indeed in the course of time people found “seeking the better”. This story doesn’t describe a special case. One can find many such examples. But let us first characterize the other two theories:
Aristotle was a great systematist, and so he first of all distinguished the motions in the sky from the motions on earth. He divided the earthly motions again into movements of living beings, into natural and finally into forced motions. He gave a different reason for each type of movement. The motions in the sky showed the eternal order. In natural motions the “disturbed order” was restored, e.g. smoke rises to heaven and a stone falls to earth, because light has its place above and heavy has its place below. In a forced motion, a force must always act, otherwise the motion would come to a standstill.
This Aristotelian motion theory had more than 2,000 years of existence. It was still taught in the academies during Galilei’s lifetime, and Galilei had studied it intensively himself until he finally overcame it.
Newton’s theory finally completely replaced it, for it is obviously “better”. From the equations of motion of Newton’s theory, it was possible, with a certain expression for the force which a body exerts on another body due to its mass, to derive the three Kepler laws for the motion of the planets around the sun, even to accurately predict the return of a comet. So with fewer assumptions one can explain more phenomena. The theory also makes predictions that can be tested and indeed have been confirmed. To this day, it is indispensable for calculations in everyday motions.
The theory of motion developed by Albert Einstein, the special theory of relativity, is in turn better than Newton’s theory. The motivation for the development were problems with the idea that the whole universe is filled with a subtle substance, an “ether”, which has prevailed since ancient times. It should also be the carrier of the electromagnetic waves, which at that time had only been known for about two decades. Ether should also mark absolute rest and one wanted to measure motion of earth versus the ether. Whenever and however you did it, you couldn’t see such motion.
Einstein took the bull by the horns, so to speak. He made this negative result the principle of his new theory: “The speed of light in any inertial system is independent of the speed of the light source”. So, this means that no matter how I move relative to the light source, I always measure the same speed for the light.
This theory is also structured as an axiomatic-deductive system. As such, it is even particularly “elegant”, because it is based only on this principle, as on a “principle of relativity” already known from Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic phenomena. A wealth of phenomena could then be predicted; some of them differ strikingly from our everyday experiences, but in the mean time they have all been proven experimentally.
The hypothesis that there should be something like an ether was dropped. He was no longer needed. There is no absolute rest, but instead an absolute speed: the speed of light as measured in a vacuum. It is an upper limit for the transmission of effects.
When comparing these two theories, one finds that the special theory of relativity is an extension of Newton’s mechanics, in the sense that the smaller the speeds to be considered are in relation to the speed of light, the better the agreement between the statements of both theories. For velocities close to the speed of light, however, the astonishing phenomena already mentioned above are predicted, which have all been confirmed in the meantime.
A useful yardstick for the “goodness” of a theory is its scope of validity. Newton’s theory already had a very large validity range, because with it one can explain all motions which are “non-relativistic”, i.e. sufficiently small compared to the speed of light of approx. 300,000 km/sec. Here one could also try the theory of relativity. That wouldn’t be necessary, it’d just be harder. If one now considers increasingly higher speeds, the statements of the two theories will differ more and more. One leaves the scope of Newton’s theory but remains within the scope of the special theory of relativity. In this sense it is therefore an extension of Newton’s mechanics and thus the better theory.
If we look at the image of an evolution of theory, then we can say that the Aristotelian theory survived 2,000 years because there was no other theory that could become dangerous to it. But Newton’s theory was such a dominant competitor that Aristotle’s theory became extinct. The special theory of relativity is then a further development of Newton’s theory, so that there are now two theories that both have their own habitats. Where these overlap any theory can come into its own.
Aristotle – Newton – Einstein: Aristotle has submitted, Newton and Einstein “found seeking the better”. Who knows when someone will come and find something better, and what further insights we will gain about motion and thus about space and time. Only one thing seems clear to me after 2,500 years: The way of Xenophanes to find “seeking the better” is also the better way to knowledge.
The search for the “One” led the philosophers of the School of Miletus and the Pythagoreans to various principles and basic statements. The specific answers they gave are not so important to us today. It is much more interesting that they departed one step from mythological thinking and began to formulate rationales for their statements. Authorities didn’t have to be respected, doubts were allowed. What is even more interesting, however, is that in this effort they have already come across a number of problem areas that should prove to be fundamental for future sciences. These fields can be described by the concepts of “infinity” and “motion”.
The “Eleates”, those philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries BC who lived in a Greek settlement Elea on the west coast of southern Italy, were to raise awareness of a third problem area of such importance. It was the question: How can we obtain reliable knowledge?
Thus, three fundamental questions are already under discussion in such an early period of our intellectual history. And each of these questions or problem areas stood for an area of philosophy at that time: “infinity” for mathematics, “motion” for physics and the question of reliable knowledge for what we call today epistemology. We know it by now: When you tackle big tasks, other big tasks also come into focus. And even if the original task cannot be mastered, there is usually fruitful insight in the treatment of the subsequent problems. In the technological field today, this is called “spin-off”. I will always keep an eye on these fundamental questions in the course of the later blog posts.
Who were the Eleates and how did they answer the question of reliable knowledge? Their most important representatives were Xenophanes (about -570 to about -470), Parmenides (about -515 to about -455) and Zenon of Elea (-490 to about -430). Let us take a look, which possibilities of knowledge they saw and how the concept of motion came to the fore again, and in the wake of it the concept of infinity.
Xenophanes
Xenophanes was at first probably a Rhapsode, someone who recited Epen Hesiods and Homers, but also appreciated and recited elegies or mocking poems. He only settled in Elea after a long life in which he had got to know many a foreign culture.
Xenophanes takes a completely new view on the question of the possibilities of knowledge. In a fragment (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 229, No.32) it says:
The gods did not reveal everything to man at the very beginning, but in the course of time they seek and find what is better.
That is now strikingly topical. Here, already 2,500 years before our time, the knowledge of modern science theory is formulated that knowledge grows in a kind of evolution. We see this particularly clearly in the development of modern physics: the theories are adapted to the ever-increasing number of observations and experimental results. The range of validity of a theory thus becomes ever larger; it becomes “better”. A theory that does not work well enough in such a process of adaptation will at most become a topic in the history of physics. Using the example of motion, we will soon see clearly how such better theories will look in the course of the development of physics.
Xenophanes thus formulates a path to knowledge in which people search and find something “better”, quite in contrast to mythological thinking, which “seeks nothing, always speaks apodictically and claims to be simply true” (Schupp, 2003a, p. 87).
But there is no mention of the possibility of once being in a definitive possession of the truth. On the contrary – according to Sextus Empiricus (160 to 210) Xenophanes (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 231, No.39) says it:
Of course, no man has seen the clear, and there will be no man who has seen it with regard to the gods and all the things I declare. For even if one had succeeded to an extraordinary degree in saying perfection, he would still not be aware of it: In all things, there is only assumption.
The sentence “In all things there is only assumption” even presupposes that all our reliable knowledge of the world of all things, even if it exists in the form of physical theories, is ultimately based on certain basic thoughts, principles or equations.
Xenophanes therefore only calls our findings “opinions”, whereby this term does not mean arbitrariness, but the idea that our findings can still be outbid by a better opinion. The opinion could, however, be regarded as “similar to truth”, since it was as well founded as possible in each case. Xenophanes does not believe in the possibility of a revelation of a final truth, as Parmenides later accepts it.
One can thus call Xenophanes the first decided metaphysical agnostic. There is nothing definitive to say about a God and the world as a whole. The theses of the Ionian philosophers may have seemed too ambitious to him, too far removed from empiricism, which he regarded as more important than the embellishment of myths.
Thus, he contrasted the idea of the Greeks that the goddess Iris appears in a rainbow with a natural explanation: “What they call Iris is also a cloud, one that looks purple, light red and yellow-green (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 223, No. 21). He also relied more on common sense: “For all is of earth, and all ends as earth” (ibid. No. 4) and “The sea is the source of water, the source of wind” (ibid. No. 23a).
Xenophanes also discovered that every culture formed its gods in its image: “The Ethiopians claim that their gods are blunt-nosed and black, the Thracians blue-eyed and redheaded” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 227, No. 28) and “But if the oxen and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and works, as men do, the horses would paint like horses, the oxen like oxen like gods” (ibid. No. 30).
He, on the other hand, sets a “single God, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form similar to mortals nor in thought” (ibid. No. 35).
Here we also see in ancient Greece the idea of a single god appearing. Whether we have a separate root of monotheism in front of us here is probably difficult to decide. In other fragments, however, we read how he also speaks of “gods”. The development of monotheism in the early religions is a highly exciting topic, but we do not want to address it here. We are more interested here in how Xenophanes imagines the only God (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 231, No. 37):
He always stays in the same place, without any motion.
So, the only God distinguishes a place and represents absolute rest. Also, Anaximander had already spoken of an absolute state of rest, but it was the Earth that stood in perfect rest in the centre of the world. So here it is the only God.
Parmenides
Parmenides from Elea is regarded by some as a pupil of Xenophane, but in any case he is said to have known his works. He is probably regarded as the most prominent philosopher from the time before Socrates. Relatively many fragments of his writing ABOUT NATURE (Περι φύσεωζ = Peri Physeos) have been preserved. But his speeches are considered “dark” by all. This has earned him a special prominence among the pre-Socratics, for his work invites a wide variety of interpretations. There has also been much discussion about the right interpretation of the fragments.
I don’t want to get involved. On the one hand one should have penetrated deeply into the language of that time, on the other hand it does not seem so important to me to know the thoughts of a thinker as exactly as possible. It is much more interesting to know which new thoughts a thinker has brought into the discussion with which motives and how important these are for the treatment of important questions. Parmenides is also primarily concerned with the question of how to acquire knowledge, and his merit is at least that he makes an alternative quite clear with regard to this question. He speaks of two very different ways of knowledge.
The first way is like a revelation. In this way the knowledge of the being is given to one. For Parmenides, it is a goddess who leads a human being to an absolute certainty about what exists by means of a “destiny”. He dresses these thoughts in the story of a journey to the goddess Dike. In a fragment we read (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 321, No.4):
So, the goddess, […] received me confidently and spoke the following words: “Young man, […]. It is not an evil destiny that has led you away through this path to reach your goal […], but divine providence and justice. So, it is appropriate that you experience everything: on the one hand the unshakable heart of the well-rounded truth, ….
To the well-rounded truth belong then the statements about the “being”: This is timeless, there is no origin and decay. It is “because unborn also imperishable”, it is “present together in the present as a whole, one, connected”. It is also an indivisible continuous, because “… it is not divisible, because it is quite similar. And there is not a stronger being here or there that could hinder its connection, nor a lesser one. […] That’s why it’s quite coherent, because being is close to being.” And:
As the same and persisting in the same and on itself it is, and in this manner remains firmly in the same place. (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 327, No.11).
Here again we encounter the topos “absolute rest”, i.e. no motion, no change of place. The extraordinary, the imperishable and the comprehensive had to have a motion which is exceptional compared to other motion. According to the view of the world at that time, such a motion could only be rest. Even today it seems to us humans that this is often the case. However, we are not always aware that motion is not a property, but a two-digit relation, i.e. a motion in relation to another object, in everyday life. This unconscious and erroneous assumption that there is absolute rest should allow Zenon of Elea his so-called movement paradoxes, with which we want to deal in the next blog post.
But let us first consider this first path of the Parmenides to true knowledge. While according to Xenophanes the knowledge about the “perfect”, about the “gods and all things” is denied to us, according to Parmenides man can only attain this knowledge if it is revealed to him.
This is now water to the mills of mythical thought. Here an unshakable truth is promised. There is no uncertainty from possible criticism and constant changes in knowledge, as was the case with the Milesians and the Pythagoreans.
Now, every human being will probably never get along completely without a mythical component in his world view, also he may stand firmly to his convictions of such a kind. But a person who believes that the deepest secrets of the world are revealed to him personally as reliable knowledge easily risks seeing this knowledge as obligatory for all other people. It does not always have to be a goddess or a god, one can also feel a strong sense of the evidence of one’s ideas, which one may regard as a profound unshakable truth.
But now we know that different people can also experience very different revelations and feelings of evidence. When power and mission are added to an unshakeable conviction, even from a single source of revelation, different faith communities can gradually develop that divide society. Intolerance, contempt, oppression and annihilation of dissenters was indeed often the result. Violence has been perpetrated in every form.
So, what is the second way to knowledge for Parmenides? According to the above fragment, the young man, on the other hand, should also experience: the opinions of mortals who do not possess true reliability.
The second way is thus the way of the usual mortals, who can only arrive at “opinions”. According to Parmenides, however, this knowledge is at most truth-like and uncertain when measured against the abundance of the existing. Here the influence of Xenophanes shines through: We mortals have insights that can only be regarded as “opinions” in view of our knowledge of what exists. We only find “names” for what we explore:
Therefore, all the name that mortals have set is in trust that it is true. Emergence and decay, being and non-being, changing place and changing the bright colour. (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 329, No. 11).
To give something a “name” does not yet mean to recognize it: Thus, according to Parmenides, the existing is in reality motionless. But we see motion. They’re just “names,” they just seem to exist. On our own, we can only develop delusions that cannot be reliable. This thesis has of course attracted a lot of attention, as it has the charm of the extraordinary, the anti-intuitive.
Both paths to knowledge were taken in the following millennia. In an effort to understand the world in which we live, the thinkers have, more or less consciously, adopted one side or the other, with sometimes dramatic consequences for the living together of people and the further development of humanity.
With concern to the reliability of the acquired knowledge, the thoughts of Parmenides about the two ways of knowledge are in stark contrast to what has been shown in the course of time. The “opinions” about nature proved to be highly reliable, because their fundamentals were directly inquired by nature – through observations and experiments. The fact that we can use this knowledge in the form of the development of technical devices is evidence of this. But the situation with revelations is quite different. There can be no question of reliability here.
After having studied the mathematics of the Pythagoreans and other Greek philosophers of the time in the last blog post, we now have to deal with the conclusions the Pythagoreans drew from the results of their studies. For this we must first have a look at the Pythagorean community in order to understand the fate of Pythagorean philosophy.
The Pythagorean Community
The group around Pythagoras consisted by no means of predominantly unworldly philosophers who enjoyed mathematical problems alone. From later ancient sources (Iamblichos, 3./4. century) one learns that the Pythagoreans later had two groups: “’Mathematicians’ were called those who had been taught more in the special teaching of his science, cultivated with regard to accuracy, ‘acousmatics’, those who had heard only the brief regulations without exact justification”. (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 137, No.20).
This has already shown how social divisions arise: For the acousmatics (ἄκουσμα = Akousma = auditory perception) the mathematicians were not real Pythagoreans at all. On the other hand, the mathematicians saw themselves as a kind of “higher” Pythagoreans. Franz Schupp mentions in this context that later there had been a similar distinction between Gnostics and early Christians: There were “Pistiker”, the simple believers, and “Gnostics”, who have a higher insight or only claim such (Schupp, 2003a, p. 67). In our time they are in the religions the “common people” and on the other side the group of priests and theologians.
But the comparison does not fit in all aspects. For one could not call it unreasonable if Pistikers or believers were to cast doubt on the teachings of the Gnostics or fall away completely from the faith. They then only turn away from the decisions of certain authorities. It would, however, be unreasonable, i.e. acting against reason, if acousmatics experts would not recognize mathematical proofs in principle. They could be informed only to the extent that they would be able to verify the accuracy of the evidence.
Both ways of thinking, the ones close to the myth and the one close to the Logos, existed in the community and of course also in individual minds. And for later purposes it is advisable to make another distinction in the myth, namely in a “purely philosophical” direction, which saw a similarity between structures of nature and the structure of mathematical concepts, that is, between the “principles of mathematics and the principles of things in existence”, and in a strongly religious direction, which interpreted this view of the world to such an extent that one believed one could deduce from it strict rules for life and coexistence. To this religious direction I also want to count the doctrine of the soul, the assignment of numbers to any virtues as well as all the rules for life, which one finds e.g. in the list of “Akusmata” of Iamblichos (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 193, No.102).
What I have said about the doctrine of the soul should, of course, apply generally to the religious direction of Pythagorean thought. This is not meant to play a role here.
The Principles of Mathematics and the Principles of Being Things
If one wants to get an overview of the mathematics of the early Greeks, then one must take the trouble to study the “Elements” of Euclid of Alexandria. Euclid must have written this textbook in the years around -300, and according to Proklos Diadochos (412 to 485) he “used much of Eudoxos, brought to a close much of Theaitetos’ treated, and what was represented by earlier only superficially, he supported by incontestable evidence”. We don’t know if that’s a fair judgement.
In any case, we must note that among the mathematicians who later appear in any lists of early Greek mathematicians, there have not been too many Pythagoreans. From the Pythagorean communities, however, we know two groups whose leaders Philolaos (-470 to -399) and Architas of Taranto (-428 to -347) were famous mathematicians, and whose mathematical results are still remarkable today.
From Philolaos we know about the collector of ancient philosophical writings of Stobaios (5th century), which world view the Pythagoreans derived from their mathematical studies. In one of the fragments that we have of him:
“And it is truly all that can be recognized, number, for it is not possible to understand or recognize anything without it” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. p. 147, No.28).
The concept of number is therefore the basis of every knowledge. If you want to recognize something, it must be possible to formulate it quantitatively. And in the more quantitative knowledge one discovers the order and harmony of the world. Another fragment says:
“However, it would be impossible that one of the things recognized by those who exist and by us humans would have come into being if it had not already existed the essence of the things from which the world is composed: the essence of the limiting and unlimited. But since these principles […] are not equal, […] it must necessarily be united by such harmony if it is to be contained in the world order.” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 145, 27).
With the concept of the number also the unlimited comes into view. From the fact that there are being things, one must therefore conclude that this Unlimited exists in harmony with the Limited. It is obvious that it was especially the discovery of the rational frequency ratios of the strings, e.g. of the tetrachord, which suggested the connection of numbers with a harmony. (Aristotle, no date) says:
“Since they became aware of the fact that the relationships and laws of musical harmony can be represented in numbers, and since all other phenomena also showed a natural relationship to numbers, but numbers are the first in all nature, they came to the conclusion that the elements of numbers are the elements of everything that exists and the entire universe is a harmony and a number.
Once one has conceived such a thought, one also associates the beauty of the regular polyhedra with the numerical proportions readable there.
But the Pythagoreans went further. Aristotle mocks it: “What could only somehow be found in agreement between the numbers and harmonies on the one hand and the processes and parts of the vault of heaven and the entire structure of the world on the other hand, they collected and sought to establish a connection; but where they missed the opportunity to do so, they were not afraid of artificial assumptions, only to make their systematic procedure appear as strictly uniformly carried out.
He gave an example of this:
“Since they consider the ten to be the perfect number, and believe that these is concerned with the entire nature of numbers within itself, they make the assertion that even the bodies which turn in the sky are ten in number, and since we know only nine in real experience, they invent a tenth body in the form of the opposing earth.
Philolaos had invented this opposing earth. One also had an argument ready for the fact that one could never see these: It should always be right behind the sun when seen from Earth.
One remembers involuntarily some hypotheses of physics, e.g. the assumption of Wolfgang Pauli that there must be a certain particle, that a certain energy carries with it at the decay of a neutron, so that the preservation of the energy could also be confirmed here. But the difference is quite substantial: In Pauli’s day, the hypothesis was a mandate to examine, in Philolaos it was unthinkable to verify. So, it was pure metaphysics.
The crisis: Incommensurable variables instead of numbers
But not from these and other unverifiable statements did the Pythagoreans threaten disaster with their philosophy. This came with a discovery that at its core shook her philosophy. To understand that, you need to make a little extra effort:
The Pythagoreans knew the natural numbers {1,2,3,…} and the positive rational numbers, i.e. ratios of natural numbers like 3/4 or 2/5. Since these numbers should reflect the condition of the world, also all things had to have a measure which can be expressed by these numbers. The length of a route, for example, had to be expressed by a multiple of a unit length and for two routes there had to always be a common unit length. Expressed in numbers: there had to be a common divisor g for two numbers, so that the two numbers m and n could be represented as integer multiples of g. The largest of these divisors is then called the “largest common divisor”. For the Pythagoreans, therefore, the length of all routes had to be “commensurable” in this sense, yes, all things in the world had to be commensurable, i.e. have a common measure. For numbers rule the nature of the world.
The ancient Greeks had even found an algorithm with which they could easily calculate the greatest common divisor of two natural numbers. This is demonstrated in Fig. 1:
Fig. 1: The algorithm of alternating removal to determine the largest common divisor of 44 and 12: One subtracts from the larger number, here 44, so often the smaller number, (here 12), until the remainder is smaller than 12. Then 12 is the larger number and you repeat the game – until you get zero. The last number to be subtracted for this, here 4, is the largest common divisor or common measure. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Euklidischer_Algorithm.png
This procedure is found in Euclid’s “Elements”; but already the Pythagoreans are said to have known this algorithm.
But now the Greeks, and even the Pythagoreans, knew the so-called Pythagorean theorem. In a square of side length 1, the diagonal has a length whose square equals 12 + 12 = 2 according to this theorem. But they didn’t know a number with a square equal to 2. Side length and diagonal can therefore not be commensurable.
If someone is still looking for any way out, one can convince him with a strict proof:
Let us call the quantity whose square equals 2 already √2, as we do today, and make the assertion that this quantity can be represented as a number in the sense of the ancient Greeks, i.e. as a ratio of natural numbers. So then
√2 = m/n.
The numbers m and n can be chosen without loss of generality in such a way that the statement
A:= “m and n are relatively prime”
is true. Squaring the equation results in
2 = m2/n2, therefore also m2 = 2∙n2
It follows that m is an even number, so that m = 2∙k can be written, so m2 = 4∙k2. Thus, with the help of the previous equation 4∙k2 = 2∙n2 is also valid, i.e. n2 = 2∙k2, which finally means that n like n2 is divisible by 2. So: m and n are divisible by 2.
Altogether we conclude that m and n are not relatively prime, i.e. statement A is false, although it was assumed to be true. Then A can’t be true. Because one can never logically conclude from a true statement that it is wrong. That’s plausible. In a later blog post I will show this logical conclusion strictly formal within the framework of a so-called propositional logic.
The ratio √2:1 can therefore not be represented as a ratio of natural numbers m/n. So, a natural number and a quantity like √2 have no common measure, they are incommensurable.
The quantity √2 was not accepted as a number until modern times. Such non-rational, irrational numbers were seen at most as “impossible” or “imaginary” numbers. You could count with them, their square was equal to 2, but you could never write down these quantities completely, as it was “appropriate for a number”. Only at the end of the 19th century did people learn to define the concept of numbers in such a way that even irrational quantities could be accepted as a special class of numbers.
This discovery that in nature there can be distances whose length cannot be represented as a rational number has greatly shaken the Pythagoreans. It was believed that this knowledge must remain secret. Iamblichos (245 to 325), in his book On Pythagorean Life, tells the story that someone is said to have divulged this discovery. He was then excluded from the common circle and later even perished in the sea (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 171, No.61,62). Like all anecdotes from this time, you can sprinkle them in for entertainment. You don’t have to believe them.
The legacy of the Pythagoreans
The ancient Greeks were the first to turn the mathematical knowledge, handed down to them by earlier peoples, into a science. They not only found interesting relationships between several numbers and between numbers and geometric figures, bodies and sounds. Even more significant is the fact that they discovered an argumentation that is incontestable, that is, what we call mathematical proof today.
Euclid of Alexandria collected this knowledge and brought it into a logical order. In this order definitions and axioms are placed at the beginning, and all knowledge is derived from them in the form of mathematical proofs. An “axiomatic deductive system” was thus created. Thus, the idea of a strict science was not only born in the time around the year -300, but was also already realized once. This idea still inspires everyone who thinks about what a science actually is. In Die Idee einer Wissenschaft – Ihr Schicksal in Physik, Rechtwissenschaft und Theologie (The Idea of a Science – Your Fate in Physics, Jurisprudence and Theology) I have elaborated on this further (Honerkamp, 2017).
Also, in the years after Euclid the mathematics of the Greeks progressed further. With Archimedes (ca. -287 to -212) it has reached a temporary climax. Historians of science, however, speak of the first signs of the disappearance of creative forces in the coming centuries (Russo, 2005).
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans gave in ancient Greece the impulse to this first bloom of a science. Though, with their doctrine of harmony they exaggerated it, their religious zeal including their rules for the way of life today seems to us highly strange, sometimes bizarre. They failed with their idea of numbers as a basic pattern for nature.
Yet they were on the right track. It was not until the second attempt, 2,000 years later, that a combination of mathematics and natural science was to emerge, which then led to an understanding of nature from which people could develop machines rich in both blessings and horrors.
At the time when Anaximenes in Miletus represented the tradition of the Ionic school, Pythagoras was active in another part of the Greek culture (ca. -570 to -490). Born and raised on the island of Samos, he is said to have spent his youth in Babylon and Egypt. There he got to know the religious beliefs and also the mathematical knowledge of these cultures. Around -530 he settled in Kroton, a town rich through trade in a southern Italian Greek settlement, and he founded a school there. This became a conspired community; he himself became an unquestioned authority for his pupils. He must also have been a charismatic speaker, and he must have impressed them greatly with the ideas he took up in Babylon and Egypt. With the sentence “He said it himself”, the Pythagoreans are said not to have even had any discussions (Schupp I, p.63). So today we see strong religious traits in this school.
Much has been written about Pythagoras, much attributed to him. None of this is considered certain today. There are no writings by him, not even by his pupils, the Pythagoreans. From the ancient sources such as those of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aristotle and from the late antiquity of Diogenes Laertios or Jamblichos we learn contradictions and highly different assessments.
Two themes were at the forefront of Pythagoras and his pupils, the Pythagoreans, but in any case: the transmigration of souls and mathematics. Pythagoras was probably inspired by his travels on both topics.
I will not go into the ideas that the Pythagoreans had of a “soul” and a “transmigration of souls”. The Pythagorean theory of the soul had a great effect and influenced later philosophers like Plato in particular. It was the dominant theme of Neuplatonism in the first centuries AD and has also flowed into Christianity through this philosophical current. However, this doctrine did not contribute to the strengthening of the Logos in people’s thinking.
The situation was quite different in this respect, however, with the study of mathematical problems. A wealth of mathematical insights was obtained. A completely new field for philosophical considerations was discovered. Aristotle reports in his Metaphysics:
“At the same time as those philosophers [Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leukipp, Democritus] were active, but even before that, those called “Pythagoreans” began to pursue mathematical studies. They were the first to advance these studies; and when they were educated in them, they were convinced that the constitutive principles of mathematics were also the constitutive principles of things being. (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 147, No.31).
The Pythagoreans were, after Aristotle, the first to increase mathematical knowledge, and Pythagoras had given the impetus. This was the second great impetus in the history of ideas. The first impetus was given by the Ionic philosophers when they began to explain the world from within, namely with arguments based on regularity in nature. Here now, in the second step, a language was discovered in which one can note regularities. But not only this; in this language one could also provide arguments that are undeniable. And for the relationship between the “constitutive principles of mathematics” and the “constitutive principles of things in existence”, the Pythagoreans, according to Aristotle, provided a first answer. We will see in the next blog post how they felt about it. Later, the question of such a relationship will become very topical.
But let us first have a look at the studies that the Pythagoreans and other philosophers, infected by them, have carried out:
Arithmetic
Most people associate the name Pythagoras with the SATZ OF PYTHAGORAS via the relationship between the squares of the sides of a right-angled triangle: If one designates the cathets of such a triangle with a and b, the hypotenuse with c, then a2 + b2 = c2 applies. The Babylonians already knew this relationship and Egyptians and Pythagoras, like Thales, had brought such knowledge from his travels. Legend has it that Pythagoras was inspired to prove this theorem by looking at an Egyptian tile (Fig.1).
Fig. 1: Left: Illustration of the theorem of Pythagoras: right: The tile could have looked like this (but with the same strokes everywhere), from which Pythagoras was inspired, according to the legend, to prove the proposition. The squares above the hypotenuse are marked by dash dots. The squares above a, b, c contain two or four triangles of equal size. (from Honerkamp, 2018).
Here we are dealing with a geometric figure from which we can derive a statement about the relation of three numbers, i.e. an arithmetic relation. This is probably the first connection between geometry and arithmetic. About 2,000 years later Descartes was to strengthen this connection with “Analytical Geometry” to such an extent that arithmetic became the focus of mathematics from then on.
The Greeks represented their numbers at that time still by letters, i.e. there were prominent numbers, i.e. those, which we today 1, 2, …, 9, 10, 100,… any other number was seen as the sum of these celebrities, and the summands were then noted in size in the form of letters. We still know such an addition system from the Roman numbers.
In the context of such a number writing, calculating is very difficult. This may have led Pythagoras to invent a geometric number representation in which each number is seen as a sum of ones. For each one a point is noted, whereby the points are arranged to a certain geometrical figure (fig.2). For example, there are squares, triangles, cubes, etc.
Fig.2: A square number (16=42), a triangle number (10 = 1+2+3+4) and a cube number (8= 23).
From such figures one can already read many other relationships between different numbers, e.g. the statement that the sum of successive odd numbers, if it begins with 1, is always a square number (Fig.3).
Fig. 3: A deduction from square numbers (from Schupp,2000a, p.74)
If you still write the last line on the right side of this illustration as :
one obtains a so-called Pythagorean number triple, i.e. three numbers, where the square of the largest can be represented as the sum of the squares of the two smaller numbers. In this way one discovers how easy it is to form such number triplets: Each sum of such odd numbers ending with a square number yields a triple. So take only an odd square number, say 25 = 52, and form
The Babylonians already knew such triplets of numbers, and since a large number of such triples were found on their cuneiform tablets, methods for the formation of such triples must have been known for much longer. Even in the megalithic culture of southern England the knowledge of such triples is said to have been used for constructions (van der Waerden, 1983, p. 9).
Inspired by such experiences, the Pythagoreans discovered many relationships between two, three or four numbers, e.g. the arithmetic and geometric mean, including the harmonic mean. Probably they already knew the “golden ratio”. Today one would book such studies under the title “number theory”.
Geometry
Geometry has not been neglected in all these studies of ratios of numbers. Especially in Egypt, Thales and Pythagoras learned a lot about geometry. After Nile floods the Egyptians often had to reconstruct their fields. It was very useful to know how to construct rectangles and, above all, how to calculate the area of a field.
Not only right angles and rectangles were important. Also circles, triangles and other polygons wanted to be constructed, in practice – and with the Greeks then also on the papyrus with compass and ruler, completely without regard to a use. And one also wanted to be able to calculate the area contents of such areas.
A notorious problem for the Babylonians and Egyptians had been the calculation of the area F of a circle. It was well known that F must be proportional to the square of the radius, but the proportional constant, which we call today π, could not be determined exactly. The Babylonians had used the value 3 for this constant, the Egyptians (16/9)2 = 3.1604… . The Pythagorean antiphon of the Sophist (5th century B.C.) took advantage of the fact that one already knew how to determine the area of regular polygons, approached the circle by such polygons, and thus obtained an approximate value, which is the better the more corners this polygon has. This method was to become the norm. Bryson of Herakleia (-450 to -390) looked not only at regular polygons inscribed in the circle, but also at polygons circumscribing the circle. He thus received two approximations, one smaller and one larger than the value he was looking for. Archimedes was then to drive the method to a perfection that can only be admired today (Honerkamp, 2018, p. 82ff).
Not only surfaces, but also three-dimensional bodies in space were studied, besides the sphere the polyhedrons (polyhedron, after ἔδρα gr. = seat, καδ-έδρα gr. = catheter) were of particular interest. These are bodies that are bounded by several regular surfaces. There is a tetrahedron (quadhedron), the cube is a hexahedron, there is an octahedron (octahedron), a dodecahedron (dodecahedron) and an ikosahedron (twentyhedron) (see Fig. 4).
Fig.4: The five platonic bodies: tetrader, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, ikosahedron.
As the mathematician Theaitetos (-415 to -369) was able to show, they all have a certain point inside, which is equally far away from all corners, so that all these polyhedrons can be inscribed in a sphere. He also proved that there can be no other polyhedra of this kind. The regularity of these bodies and their uniqueness caused Plato later to assign tetrahedra, hexahedron, octahedron and ikosahedron to the elements fire, earth, air and water, in the sense of the Pythagoreans, who see everything in nature dominated by numbers. Plato thus gave these bodies a mythical shine; this led to the fact that they were later called “Platonic bodies”.
The French historian of science André Pichot lists in his work THE BIRTH OF SCIENCE twenty-one Greek mathematicians of the 6th and 5th centuries BC (Pichot, 2000, p. 371ff). Many mathematical theorems in geometry and arithmetic have been found by these. Also textbooks, called “elements”, must have existed in pre-Socratic times to introduce newcomers to mathematics. None of them has been handed down to us. Only from the time around -300 such a textbook is available to us. But it is probably the most complete and mature work from which we can take the state of mathematics at that time. They are the “elements” of Euclid of Alexandria. This work consists of three chapters (“books”) on arithmetic and 10 chapters on geometry. It has had a hardly surpassable influence in the intellectual history of the western world, above all because it could represent geometry in the form of an axiomatic deductive system and thus made the logical order of the knowledge represented transparent. I will come back to this at the appropriate time.
Music
There was another, even more concrete, field where the Pythagoreans discovered that relations in space can be mapped to relations between numbers. This field was the music they played on the lyre, and here you could even experience relationships between nature and numbers with your senses.
The “tetrachord” had four strings, which could be plucked, struck or beaten to produce a certain tone, depending on length and tension. If one plucked two strings at the same time, one could hear a sound which one felt to be harmonious if the lengths of the two strings were in an integer ratio such as 1:2, 2:3, 3:4. Especially with a ratio of 2:1, the sound sounded almost like a single note. Let us consider here the simplest form of a tetrachord (Fig.5, see also Wikipedia: Tetrachord).
Fig. 5: The strings of a tetrachord and the ratios of the lengths of adjacent strings (after (Pichot, 2000)). Attention: Here the tones get lower from left to right!
Be the first string on the far left the shortest. The second, third and fourth string may then be 4/3, 3/2 or 2/1 times the length of the first. We then call the notes C’, G, F and C, the frequency of the notes G, F, C are 3/4, 2/3 and 1/2 times the frequency of the note C’ of the left string. The Pythagorean Philolaos gave the intervals certain names, later they were called fourth (from C’ to G), fifth (from C to F) and octave (from C’ to C) (fig.6)
Fig.6: The strings of an octochord and the ratios of the frequencies of neighbouring strings in the Pythagorean tuning (according to Pichot,200, p.385).
For an “octochord” with eight strings a finer subdivision was needed. Philolaos first introduced a “second” as the distance between fourth and fifth (from G to F, from Mese to Paramese). For this, the ratio of the frequencies is (3/4):(2/3) = 9/8. With two consecutive seconds (whole tones), the lowest note C (nete) can be used to reach the note F (paramese), but not yet. The remaining “distance” is (4/3):(9/8)2= 256/243. This interval is called a “semitone”, the Greeks called it Diёsis (from δί-ειμι, gr. = pass through).
The interval from G to C’, from the mese to the hypate, is also a fourth, and the result is the same as from C to F.
So, such a “semitone” is an interval consisting of two tones with a frequency ratio of 256/243. But it is not really something like half the interval of a whole tone. If you put two such intervals on top of each other, you get an interval with a frequency ratio of (256/243)2, which is not equal to 9/8. A very small interval with frequency ratio is still missing.
(9/8) : (256/243)2 = 531441/524288.
This interval was today called the Pythagorean comma (from gr. κόπτειν->κόμμα = something like “section”). One would have to call the “semitone” more exactly a small semitone, and then there is also a large semitone, an interval that is larger by the Pythagorean comma.
As long as you play on the octochord, and everyone who plays at the same time uses the same fundamental C, this Pythagorean comma does not matter.
This determination of a stock of six tones between the two tones of an octave for a given fundamental leads to the so-called Pythagorean tuning. It is therefore realized with such an octochord.
The six tones (now starting from “below”: D, E, F, G, A, H) can also be determined in this way: From a given tone you can find the pure fifth (frequency ratio 3/2). If this results in a tone above the interval under consideration, set the tone an octave lower, i.e. halve the frequency. So if you start from C, you get one tone at a time: G, D’->D, A, E’->E, H. Now the F is still missing. Then you should start from F, so now you get: F, C, G, D, A, E, H.
If you now want to increase the stock of notes, you can continue to use the fifth rule for this, so you get notes that we could call F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, because their frequencies are one Diёsis higher than F, C, … in each case. The next note would then be ice, and that would have to be F again. But that’s not true, because there are two small semitones (H-C and E-F) between H and the F sharp of this construction, instead of just one like the other such intervals. So the interval H-F sharp is too small, not a pure fifth, a “wolf’s fifth” (because it “howls like a wolf”). So, if you want to strictly follow the rule, you have to increase the frequency of the F sharp by the Pythagorean comma and so do all following notes. The frequency of the ice finally reached would thus be higher by this decimal point than F. This can also be seen if this construction is computed. It is
(3/2)12: 27 = 531441/524288.
If one were to construct the notes B, E flat and A flat from F “downwards” to the same extent, one would obtain the circle of fifths in the usual form. Then the notes G#/As show that the “circle” does not close completely. The tone G sharp is higher by the Pythagorean comma than the As.
The Pythagorean tuning system was fashionable until the 16th century. After a long period of experimentation, the equal tuning was introduced in the 16th/17th century. In this the octave is divided into twelve intervals of equal frequency ratios f. So it must be f12 = 2, hence f = 1.05946…. > 1,05349… = (256/243).
The city of Miletus, situated on the coast of a Greek settlement of the landscape of Ionia (Asia Minor), gained economic importance in the 6th century B.C. through extensive trade relations. A social class developed for which “just about everything was available for comfort and a higher standard of living”.
The cultural milieu was marked by Orphic or Dionysian cults, stories of Homer and epics of Hesiod (born before -700); influences from Mesopotamia and Egypt, Phoenicians and Chaldeans must have been noticeable as well. But time and leisure also brought with them the attempt “to escape ignorance without expecting any benefit beyond knowledge” (Aristotle, after (Schupp, 2003a, p. 43)). Philosophy can be born in such an atmosphere.
Thales
Thales lived in this town from about -625 to -547. At first he was a merchant and must have been around a lot in the world at that time. He is said to have brought geometrical and astronomical knowledge from Egypt. In his later years he also interfered in politics. But we only know of all this from later sources, whose credibility is not always given.
What is certain, however, is that he must have lived around 585 BC. He had predicted an eclipse of the sun, which according to modern astronomical calculations took place just in 585 BC. Babylonian astronomers already knew the cycles with which solar and lunar eclipses were repeated. Sun eclipses are not visible from every place equally well; but one knew thus when one could count on such at all. Thales had probably benefited from this knowledge, either through his earlier travels or through more recent cultural contacts. But he was also someone himself who studied the stars. Diogenes Laertius knew that Thales was said to have written two writings about solstices and equinoxes. Because of his knowledge he was also admired by later philosophers (Laertius, 2015, p. 13).
Many of us can surely remember that in school they learned the SATZ OF THALES in mathematics lessons. We do not know whether Thales himself discovered this sentence. Diogenes Laertius writes only 800 years later: “In geometry, a pupil of the Egyptians, he first entered the right-angled triangle into the semicircle, as Pamphile reports. (Laertius, 2015, p. 13). There it is also mentioned that Thales in Egypt should have measured the height of the pyramids, “giving their shadow, which he measured exactly at the time when our shadow and our body have the same length” (Laertius, 2015, p. 13). (Laertius, 2015, p. 15). Thales must have been highly intelligent in any case and he knew how to use his new knowledge independently.
The philosophers regard Thales of Miletus as the first of their guild. We do not know how Thales came to such thoughts, which today are called philosophical thoughts. The processes “emergence and decay” were in the foreground in the mythical narratives and on his travels Thales will not only have taken up geometrical and astronomical knowledge, but also become acquainted with the most diverse of such narratives. Since one constantly observes changes in nature, including emergence and decay, the question may arise as to whether there must not be something lasting and eternal “behind” all this. This must then be something causal and “underlying”, something like a “primordial principle” or a “primordial substance”, that is, something that could also be called “the One”.
Aristotle later wrote about the ideas Thales had developed for this:
“Thales, the first representative of this direction of philosophical investigation, describes water as such a principle. He therefore taught that the land, too, rests on water. The reason for this view was probably the observation that the food of all beings is moist, that the heat itself arises from it and lives from it. But what everything becomes of, that is the principle of everything. If this was one of the reasons for his opinion, then another was probably the fact that the seeds of all beings are of moist nature, but that water constitutes the principle for the nature of wetness.
It was not far-fetched that water should be the primordial cause of all things, for the Sumerians and Egyptians also spoke of an “primordial sea”, and in Homer’s case the inhabited world was surrounded by the Okeanos, a mighty river, which was also considered the father of the gods and the origin of the world.
It is important, however, that Thales argues this way here and elsewhere: Water causes moisture, food needs water, otherwise it dries up and becomes inedible. Water can form fog and clouds, and in the last instance even air (water vapour) and fire were formed from it. Sedimentation on the coast shows how land can be removed from the water.
Anaximander
Thales brought a whole new way of thinking into the world. Anaximander (ca. -610 to -546), who also lived in Miletus and is regarded by many as a pupil of Thales, took up this way of thinking, but immediately showed that one can come to a different conclusion in it. For him, water was perhaps too concrete as primordial matter, and he concentrated more on one particular aspect: the One which should be a primordial reason had to be unlimited, an apeiron (from Greek ἀπέραντος=aperantos, unlimited, infinite). The Greeks had the same word for “unlimited” and “infinite”, but could not yet imagine a curved space. Today we know spaces of different dimensions; a vivid example for an unlimited, but not infinite space is the surface of a sphere, a two-dimensional curved space.
This is where the term “infinity” came into play, a term which subsequently occupied almost all philosophers and mathematicians and which was only learned to be dealt with consistently and formally at the end of the 19th century within the framework of the Cantor set theory. According to Anaximander, what people do not know nor what they can imagine, should apply to the Apeiron: “The Apeiron is without age” and the “Apeiron is without death and decay” (according to Schupp, 2003a, p. 53).
These were qualities that were granted only to the gods. The One was thus placed on the same level with the gods. Thus Anaximander came suspiciously close to the world of myth, but he answered the question of how the One would create multiplicity, more like a physicist: He spoke of opposing elemental forces, dry hot fire and humid cold steam, that could lie in battle with each other.
In this way he had an idea of what the sun, moon and stars were made of, and even knew how to explain how solar or lunar eclipses occur. According to him, the earth was at the centre of the circles on which the celestial bodies were moving, and it was in perfect equilibrium with all the stars. In the shape of a cylinder it was similar to a “stone column segment”. Humans lived on the top of the cylinder; according to the geographer Agathemeros, Anaximander even “dared to be the first to draw the map of the inhabited world” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 65, No.2). The distances of the celestial bodies from the earth were in certain proportions to each other. Thus, Hyppolyt of Rome reports in the 3rd century that according to Anaximander the circle of the moon and the sun is 19 and 27 times the diameter of the earth cylinder, respectively (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 75, No.20).
Even a weakening of the struggle between the hot and the humid a passing of the “existing” as well as a new creation from the Apeiron was planned. For Anaximander the Apeiron is therefore not only infinite; it can also create infinite many worlds and let them pass away again. One inevitably thinks of the quantum vacuum in Stephen Hawking’s M-theory and of the constant emergence of new universes from it through quantum fluctuations.
For the interaction between the opposing pairs he had an answer, which again fits more to the myth and the heaven of gods: “From which things the things in existence have their origin, in these also their decay takes place, as it must be, because they do each other justice and punishment for the injustice, according to the temporal order” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 71,Nr.15).
The whole picture already contains astonishingly many modern aspects such as the description of spatial relations in quantitative form and the concept of infinity.
Anaximenes
At Anaximenes (approx. -586 to -527) the primary substance is now something you know from everyday life: the air. Instead of an abstract, it is now something concrete again. From the Doxographen Aёtios from the 1. century we experience: “Anaximenes set as principle of the being things the air, because from this everything develops and into this everything dissolves again. Just as our soul, which is air, holds us together through its power, so also the whole cosmos includes “breath and air”. (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 87,Nr.3).
Anaximenes presumably took the air as the primary substance because he observed opposite properties in the air; it could be warm or cold, compressed or diluted. From the observation of a breath he believed he could deduce a relationship between these pairs of opposites: “For when the breath is compressed and solidified by the lips, it becomes cold, while when the mouth is open it escapes, it becomes warm through dilution”. (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, pp. 89, No.5).
So he saw compression or dilution as the basic principle for the difference in things: Clouds consist of weakly compressed air, rain of more compressed air and ice like earth of even more compressed air. The solidification of matter generally has its origin in the cold air, the thinness and looseness in the warm air. Wind was moving air. The primordial matter was now something that could also produce multiplicity. Thus, he had an idea of how the One could become the Many. The air was a primordial substance which, as a breath of life, absorbed all living beings into the unity of all things.
So here we find the connection between breath and life, a thought that one encounters again and again in the intellectual history – e.g. also in the idea of Christianity that the Holy Spirit originated from the Father and Son through breathing (see Wikipedia: Hauchung).
In this earliest school of the pre-Socratics, the Ionian school or the school of Miletus, the concept of “being” or “One” as a primordial substance or principle is in focus. In later schools also the “existing” or the “Many” will become more strongly in the view and the question about which possibilities of the knowledge we can have about the being like the existing.
Paradigm shift
With the Ionic School, a world view was created that was derived from observations of nature and not from stories about interventions from a “supernatural”. This was a big step for mankind. But it was only a first step in a new direction. Of course, there were no clear answers. The reasons for such statements as “Everything is water” or “Everything is air” were only more or less plausible, necessarily not at all. Later Empedocles (-490 to -430) should still claim that “everything is fire” applies. Generally one spoke of the four basic elements water, air, earth and fire.
It was to take more than 2,000 years before a second step was taken in natural science, from which followed what we now call modern physics. Two new thoughts had to emerge:
First: One does not immediately try to understand the world as a whole, but one has to “begin it in the small”, thus with a simple and most clear phenomenon.
Secondly, one should try to understand the phenomenon not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively, so that an as exact as possible examination of the reasoning becomes possible. This requires sufficiently developed mathematics.
Galileo Galilei was the one to whom these thoughts came in the early 17th century and who was fully aware that he had founded a “new science” with a demonstration of the fertility of such thoughts. If one loves the term “paradigm shift”, which was so unnecessarily strained by Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn, 1973), then one can say that Galileo caused a paradigm shift. It would be the second – after the first paradigm shift by Thales and the Ionian school. Perhaps today we are experiencing a third paradigm shift in artificial intelligence with data-driven machine learning.
I will come back to all this in later blog posts. First of all, we must follow the path that has created all the conditions for this second and perhaps third paradigm shift. This includes, in particular, mathematics in which one learns quantitative and truth-preserving reasoning. Pythagoras (ca. -570 to after -510) is at the beginning of such a mathematics. In the next two blog posts we have to deal with him and his students.
“The greatness of the pre-Socratics […] lies not only in the fact that philosophy began with them. For this can be argued about and has actually been argued about. Rather, it lies in the fact that many essential questions, themes and conditions of science and philosophy are to be found for the first time in the statements of these pioneers that we have received.” (Mansfeld & Primavesi, 2011, p. 9).
With these sentences, Mansfeld and Primavesi introduce their reworking of a collection of texts handed down to us by the Pre-Socratics themselves and the most important secondary testimonies of their doctrines and work. And in a somewhat later sentence, they characterize these questions and themes as follows:
“If there is an exemplariness of the pre-Socratics, it is above all founded in a critical and rational attitude, which should not be a mere cultural-historical fact, but which today hardly has to be achieved less than at that time”.
The pre-Socratics showed this new attitude in dealing with questions about the origin and nature of the world. Instead of inventing or embellishing stories with supernatural actors, they used observations of nature to find answers to their questions. In doing so, they relied on regularities of nature and used analogies and generalizations. To a certain extent, they invented rational reasoning, discovered logos as a tool of thought in the search for the truth about the constitution and order of nature. Equipped with today’s knowledge, we recognize here the first beginnings of our scientific age.
Things in common
One will first ask oneself why it is precisely those philosophers who worked before Socrates that are grouped together. In particular, this question arises when one notices that Zenon (-490 to -430) and Democritus (-440 to -370), for example, can already be regarded as contemporaries of Socrates (-469 to -399).
It is probably decisive that with Socrates a completely new topic arose in this so young philosophy. The philosophers before Socrates were natural philosophers, they were concerned about the order in the world and its beginning, about the “physis” – they were, so to speak, the first physicists. Socrates, on the other hand, “was the first to call philosophy from heaven to earth”, as Cicero (-106 to -34) said in his conversations in Tusculum (Cicero, 2008, pp. V, 10-11), and Diogenes of Laertius learned through several intermediaries that Socrates had recognized that natural philosophy was no good for “us” [by which he probably meant himself and his discussion partners]. So, he turned to the moral doctrine (Laertius, 2015, p. 77). Ethics became the new topic, questions about the best rules for the togetherness of people and for a “good” and happy life. One speaks of a Socratic turning point: Away from physics – towards ethics. This marked the beginning of a new era in philosophy.
Legacy and life data
Only a few fragments of the works of most pre-Socratics have survived. Our knowledge of their doctrines is often based on equally fragmentary works by Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastos and many later doxographers.
Much has been written and puzzled about the pre-Socratics. I found the books by Schupp (Schupp, 2003a) and Pichot (Pichot, 2000) particularly illuminating, in addition to the Mansfeld and Primavesi collections. The work “Lives and opinions of famous philosophers” by Diogenes Laertius, written around 220, is also worth reading, alone because of the many anecdotes. One gets an impression of how much fantasy must have been involved in such reports.
Fig.1 shows the life data of prominent pre-Socratics. With the ellipses the philosophers are grouped together who are assigned to a certain school.
Thales of Miletus created the earliest of these schools, the School of Miletus. The Pythagorean school around Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans played as influential a role as the school of Elea, whose most important representatives are Xenophanes and Parmenides. Elea was a coastal city of an Greek settlement in southern Italy. The philosopher Heraclitus, who is also listed here, cannot actually be assigned to any school. The philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno of Elea, Empedocles and Democritus are the most prominent representatives of the pluralists and atomists. These were mainly active in Athens.
Areas of activity
As can be seen in Fig.2, most of the important philosophers and mathematicians of Greek antiquity did not live and worked in the Greek motherland, but in the coastal cities of Greek settlements, whether in southern Italy, Sicily, present-day Turkey or Egypt. It was not until Anaxagoras that Athens became the center of Greek philosophy.
Fig.2: Areas of activity of ancient Greek philosophers (after (Symonyi, 1990, p. 59)).
You can understand that. The basis of every civilization was already at that time trade, administration and building activity. Trade, in particular, attracted people who were courageous enough to take on the dangers of a journey and who could also get used to the conventions and customs of other countries. From the coastal towns there must have also been a lively cultural exchange with the respective hinterland, e.g. with Babylonia or Egypt. All this may cause a certain alertness and open-mindedness and favor unconventional thoughts. Moreover, the coastal cities had become rich precisely because of trade and allowed lifestyle that even nonconformists could endure or even appreciate.
This was an atmosphere in which philosophical thoughts could flourish and which attracted philosophers. Thus, we know from some pre-Socratics that in their young years they had travelled the world a lot, whether as traders, as refugees from political persecution or in search of a teacher. Here you can also see that cultural exchange can bear fruit in the long run. The ascent of an overseas settlement of Europeans in the 16/17th century comes to mind at this point: The United States of America soon attracted many intellectuals from Europe and has been culturally and economically dominant since the early 20th century to the present day.
The cultural situation of the time
The pre-Socratics could not know that the questions of the origin and nature of the world as a whole were also being discussed in other important cultural areas of the world at that time. There had probably always been a lively exchange of ideas about gods between all the cultures around the Mediterranean. But independently of this, Confucius (ca. -551 to -479) appeared in China and taught that the world had an order and that man’s highest goal was to live in harmony with this order. In India, between -800 and -600, a collection of philosophical writings, the Upanishads, was created. In our context the Vaisheshika is particularly interesting, a system of a natural philosophy in which five basic elements are mentioned; besides the four, which were also named by the Greeks, there was also the ether here. In Persia, Zoroastrianism spread from -800 to -300, and in Palestine the biblical prophets worked. The philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) therefore coined the term “Achsenzeit” (axis time) for the period from -800 to -200. In the meantime, however, many historians see this as not particularly meaningful.
There was a parallel development not only in the field of myth and a beginning natural philosophy. People learned to carry out elementary calculations with numbers and to find solutions for simple mathematical tasks independently of practical problems. The Dutch mathematician B.L. van der Waerden studied the early mathematics of the Chinese and Babylonians and found astonishing parallels in problems and proposed solutions. Likewise, strong similarities with the mathematics of the Hindus were noticeable. Since the knowledge about Pythagorean triangles was also used in the construction of the megalithic monuments in southern England (Stonehedge) (cf. a later blog post), van der Warden sees the source of all this knowledge in a megalithic culture of the period from -3,000 to -2,500, and thus assumes a very early cultural exchange in the field of mathematics (van der Waerden, 1983, p. XI).
But I rather believe that humans were always roughly at the same evolutionary stage and therefore had to solve the same problems in their world. Trade, administration and construction require planning and therefore some skills in arithmetic and geometry. This phenomenon of parallel development shows at most the universality of mathematical thinking.
Be that as it may. The fact is that the ancient Greeks decisively developed the mathematics they received from the Babylonians and Egyptians and made it into a first science. In a blog post about the Pythagorean school I will address this. With this step, which was initiated by this school, the Logos has thus become “alive”, for mathematics acquires its rigor and infallibility by using only logical rules of inference in its deductions (cf. a later blog post). The Greeks discovered the mathematical proof. This is the uniqueness of ancient Greek culture.
With the rediscovery of this culture at the time of the Renaissance in Western Europe, it was possible to build on it and thus set in motion a development that for a certain time led to the cultural and economic dominance of the Western world. However, this soon seems to be a matter of the past.
Cicero, 2008. Tusculanae disputationes/Gespräche in Tusculum. Lateinisch/Deutsch. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Laertius, D., 2015. Leben und Meinungen berühmter Philosophen. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Mansfeld, J. & Primavesi, O., 2011. Die Vorsokratiker. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun..
Pichot, A., 2000. Die Geburt der Wissenschaft – Vone den Babyloniern zu den frühen Griechen. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Hrsg. Frankfurt, New York: Campus.
Schupp, F., 2003a. Geschichte der Philosophie im Überblick – Bd.1 Antike. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Symonyi, K., 1990. Kulturgeschichte der Physik. Thun: Harri Deutsch.
van der Waerden, B., 1983. Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations. Berlin: Springer.