school, especially in science classes.
If she had grown up in this garden without knowing anything at all about nature, how would she feel about the spring?
Would she try to invent some kind of explanation for why it suddenly started to rain one day? Would she work out some fantasy to explain where the snow went and why the sun rose in the morning?
Yes, she definitely would. She began to make up a story:
Winter held the land in its icy grip because the evil Muriat had imprisoned the beautiful Princess Sikita in a cold prison. But one morning the brave Prince Bravato came and rescued her. Sikita was so happy that she began to dance over the meadows, singing a song she had composed inside the dank prison. The earth and the trees were so moved that all the snow turned into tears. But then the sun came out and dried all the tears away. The birds imitated Sikita’s song, and when the beautiful princess let down her golden tresses, a few locks of her hair fell onto the earth and turned into the lilies of the field ...
Sophie liked her beautiful story. If she had not known any other explanation for the changing seasons, she felt sure she would have come to believe her own story in the end.
She understood that people had always felt a need to explain the processes of nature. Perhaps they could not live without such explanations. And that they made up all those myths in the time before there was anything called science.
The Natural Philosophers
… nothing can come from nothing …
When her mother got home from work that afternoon Sophie was sitting in the glider, pondering the possible connection between the philosophy course and Hilde Moller Knag, who would not be getting a birthday card from her father.
Her mother called from the other end of the garden, “Sophie! There’s a letter for you!”
She caught her breath. She had already emptied the mailbox, so the letter had to be from the philosopher. What on earth would she say to her mother?
“There’s no stamp on it. It’s probably a love letter!”
Sophie took the letter.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
She had to find an excuse.
“Have you ever heard of anyone opening a love letter with her mother looking over her shoulder?”
Let her mother think it was a love letter. Although it was embarrassing enough, it would be even worse if her mother found out that she was doing a correspondence course with a complete stranger, a philosopher who was playing hide-and-seek with her.
It was one of the little white envelopes. When Sophie got upstairs to her room, she found three new questions:
Sophie found the questions pretty stupid, but nevertheless they kept buzzing around in her head all evening. She was still thinking about them at school the next day, examining them one by one.
Could there be a “basic substance” that everything was made of? If there was some such substance, how could it suddenly turn into a flower or an elephant?
The same objection applied to the question of whether water could turn into wine. Sophie knew the parable of how Jesus turned water into wine, but she had never taken it literally. And if Jesus really had turned water into wine, it was because it was a miracle, something that could not be done normally. Sophie knew there was a lot of water, not only in wine but in all other growing things. But even if a cucumber was 95 percent water, there must be something else in it as well, because a cucumber was a cucumber, not water.
And then there was the question about the frog. Her philosophy teacher had this really weird thing about frogs.
Sophie could possibly accept that a frog consisted of earth and water, in which case the earth must consist of more than one kind of substance. If the earth consisted of a lot of different substances, it was obviously possible that earth and water together could produce a frog. That is, if the earth and the water went via frog spawn and tadpoles. Because a frog could not just grow out of a cabbage patch, however much you watered it.
When she got home from school that day there was a fat envelope waiting for her in the mailbox. Sophie hid in the den just as she had done the other days.
THE PHILOSOPHERS’ PROJECT
Here we are again! We’ll go directly to today’s lesson without detours around white rabbits and the like.
I’ll outline very broadly the way people have thought about philosophy, from the ancient Greeks right up to our own day. But we’ll take things in their correct order.
Since some philosophers lived in a different age—and perhaps in a completely different culture from ours—it is a good idea to try and see what each philosopher’s project is. By this I mean that we must try to grasp precisely what it is that each particular philosopher is especially concerned with finding out. One philosopher might want to know how plants and animals came into being. Another might want to know whether there is a God or whether man has an immortal soul.
Once we have determined what a particular philosopher’s project is, it is easier to follow his line of thought, since no one philosopher concerns himself with the whole of philosophy.
I said his line of thought—referring to the philosopher, because this is also a story of men. Women of the past were subjugated both as females and as thinking beings, which is sad because a great deal of very important experience was lost as a result. It was not until this century that women really made their mark on the history of philosophy.
I do not intend to give you any homework—no difficult math questions, or anything like that, and conjugating English verbs is outside my sphere of interest. However, from time to time I’ll give you a short assignment.
If you accept these conditions, we’ll begin.
THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS
The earliest Greek philosophers are sometimes called natural philosophers because they were mainly concerned with the natural world and its processes.
We have already asked ourselves where everything comes from. Nowadays a lot of people imagine that at some time something must have come from nothing. This idea was not so widespread among the Greeks. For one reason or another, they assumed that “something” had always existed.
How everything could come from nothing was therefore not the all-important question. On the other hand the Greeks marveled at how live fish could come from water, and huge trees and brilliantly colored flowers could come from the dead earth. Not to mention how a baby could come from its mother’s womb!
The philosophers observed with their own eyes that nature was in a constant state of transformation. But how could such transformations occur?
How could something change from being substance to being a living thing, for example?
All the earliest philosophers shared the belief that there had to be a certain basic substance at the root of all change. How they arrived at this idea is hard to say. We only know that the notion gradually evolved that there must be a basic substance that was the hidden cause of all changes in nature. There had to be “something” that all things came from and returned to.
For us, the most interesting part is actually not what solutions these earliest philosophers arrived at, but which questions they asked and what type of answer they were looking for. We are more interested in how they thought than in exactly what they thought.
We know that they posed questions relating to the transformations they could observe in the physical world.
