Ancient Greek philosophy answers the reality question, though the meaning question loomed. It raised doubts about the reality of gods and the existence of the perceptible empirical world, fascinating the few and appalling the many who wouldn’t shrink from condemning Socrates to death. Philosophers, too, felt obliged to distinguish between philosophical achievements and bullshit, trying to relieve the reality question of its weirdness. Most important among them was Aristotle. HisCategories reinforces a trend of ancient Greek philosophy to become what today we call science.

The Milesian school of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes probably introduced the concept of asubstrate of nature that stays the same in the changes of nature. Parmenides appealed to reason as the only reliable judge of what there is and concluded it must be perfect and unchangeable, as else, it wouldn’t be perfect. Hence anything perceptible, as it is ever-changing, is an illusion.

Plato follows Parmenides’ degradation of the perceptible but grants the perceptible the status of partaking in the unchangeable perfect being, which he conceives as unchangeable patterns of virtues and mathematical objects, calling themideas. Aristotle escapes the difficulties of Plato’s concept of partaking by conceiving being asbinary, that is, either existing or not existing, without the possibility that something exists only to a degree, and therefore lacking any value that things have in Plato’s view, depending on how far they partake in the perfection of ideas. Aristotle’s concept has become that of modern science.

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1. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

   Ulrich Steinvorth

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