ANTI-DAEDALUS

The title is a riddle of sorts. Daedalus was the mythical builder of the Labyrinth of Minos on the island of Crete. Projecting the metaphor on the rest of this section, its organization is rather convoluted and requires an Organization and Structure entry, just like the Labyrinth of Minos required Ariadne’s thread. So, here it is, designed purely for facilitating the reader’s walk through the maze, sort of defeating its insurmountable complications. Hence, Anti-Daedalus.

We are finally down to the standard sequence of pre-Socratic philosophers, and, not surprisingly Thales, the first philosopher, opens the list. Breaking up the chronological sequence (which we will have to be doing all the time), we shall stay with the Milesian school, with Thales followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes (as is customarily done, and there is no need for us to compound the complications by breaking up our triad of Miletus). At this point we go back to Thales’s time with Epimenides, and Pherecydes. Next, we are to find the Pythagorean cluster stretching over a couple of centuries with Pythagoras, Alcmaeon, Philolaus, Xenophiles, and Archytas. Xenophanes comes next by himself (I am not counting him as an Eleatic, which is customary in standard philosophical classifications), next followed by Heraclitus and his pupil Cratylus, which ought not to diminish Heraclitus’s uniqueness. Next come the Eleatics, headed by Parmenides, and followed by Zeno of Elea and Melissus.

Now is the turn of Empedocles, by himself; next comes Anaxagoras and his pupil Archelaus. The Atomists, that is, Leucippus and Democritus, are followed by Diogenes of Apollonia, and then by a long succession of sophists, namely, by Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Antiphon. (The standard list of the sophists usually includes Cratylus, who is already featured as a Heraclitus follower in an earlier sequence, plus a certain Lycophron, a potentially interesting, but too obscure a character, quoted by Aristotle in his Politics 1280b10, as saying that “Law is only a convention, a surety to another of justice.” I am sure that this quote is important enough by itself to be discussed in one of the entries on the meaning of law, but it alone does not warrant a special entry on Lycophron.)

The section closes with what I call Socrates the Pre-Socratic, which is a fancy way to say Socrates outside his portrayal by Plato, where the latter occasionally ascribes his own ideas to his teacher, which, of course, belong in our next section The Magnificent Shadows.

This concludes our guide to the rest of PreSocratica Sempervirens, and, with it, the present Anti-Daedalus entry.