Ionian School

Map of ancient Ionia, on the eastern side of the Aegean Sea.

The Ionian School of pre-Socratic philosophy was based in Miletus, Ionia, in the 6th century BC. Miletus and its environs were a thriving melting pot of current ideas of the time. The Ionian School included thinkers such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Archelaus. The collective membership of this group was first recognised by Aristotle, who called them physiologoi (φυσιολόγοι), meaning "those who speak about nature". The classification goes back to the second-century philosophical historian Sotion. Century. Sometimes they are also called cosmologists, as they were largely physicalists who tried to explain the nature of matter.

„First of all, Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC), Anaximander (611-550 BC), Anaximenes (who had his heyday between 585 and 52 BC) and Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC at Ephesus) are usually mentioned. Whoever acknowledges the preceding remarks will be able to approve a portrayal of these personalities which must deviate from that customary in historical accounts of philosophy. These accounts are always based on the unspoken assumption that these personalities arrived at the assertions they handed down through an imperfect observation of nature: Thales that the basic and original essence of all things is to be sought in "water", Anaximander in the "unlimited", Anaximenes in "air", Heraclitus in "fire".

It is not taken into account that these personalities are still living in the process of the formation of the ideal worldview; that although they feel the independence of the human soul to a greater degree than Pherekydes, they have not yet completed the completely strict separation of the soul's life from the workings of nature. For example, one will certainly wrongly conceive of Thales if one thinks that he, as a merchant, mathematician and astronomer, thought about natural processes and then, in an imperfect way, but like a modern researcher, summarised his findings in the sentence: "Everything comes from water". To be a mathematician, astronomer, etc., in those ancient times meant to deal practically with the corresponding things, quite in the manner of the craftsman, who relied on artifice, not on intellectual-scientific cognition.

On the other hand, it must be assumed for a man like Thales that he experienced the outer processes of nature in a similar way to the inner processes of the soul. What presented itself to him as natural processes in the processes with and at the water - the liquid, mud-like, earthy-image-like - was the same to him as what he experienced inwardly in his soul and body. To a lesser degree than the people of prehistoric times, he experienced - but nevertheless he experienced in this way - the effect of water in himself and in nature, and both were an expression of power to him. It may be pointed out that even in later times the external effects of nature were thought to be related to the internal processes, so that there was no question of a "soul" in the present sense, which exists separately from the body. In the view of the temperaments this point of view is still held in a reverberation into the times of the intellectual world view. The melancholic temperament was called earthy, the phlegmatic watery, the sanguine airy, the choleric fiery. These are not mere allegories. One did not feel a completely separate soul; one experienced in oneself the soul and body as a unity, and in this unity the stream of forces which, for example, pass through a phlegmatic soul, just as the same forces pass through the water effects outside in nature. And one saw these external water effects as the same as what one experienced in the soul when one was in a phlegmatic mood. The present habits of thought must adapt themselves to the old ways of imagining if they wish to penetrate into the soul-life of earlier times.“ (Lit.:GA 18, p. 51ff)

While some of these scholars belong to the Milesian school of philosophy, others are more difficult to categorise.

Most cosmologists held that while matter can change from one form to another, all matter has something in common that does not change. They disagreed about what all things had in common and did not conduct experiments to find out, but used abstract reasoning rather than religion or mythology to explain themselves, thus becoming the first philosophers of the Western tradition.

Later philosophers extended their studies to other areas of thought. The Eleatic philosophers, for example, also dealt with epistemology, i.e. the question of how people come to their knowledge. The Ionians, however, were the first group of philosophers we know of and are therefore of historical importance.

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Die Rätsel der Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte als Umriß dargestellt, GA 18 (1985), ISBN 3-7274-0180-X; Tb 610/11, ISBN 978-3-7274-6105-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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