Philosophers

Ok, so these pre-socratics... How valuable were they? For example, could you explain how the following sentence makes any sense and what relevance it has to philosophy that has happened since Socrates? "He concludes as follows that nothig is: if something is, either what-is is or what-is-not is or both what-is and what-is-not are." (Sextus Empiricus, 'Against the Mathematicians' 7.65-86, on Gorgias)

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The sentence you quote is the first step in the most fully-stated version of Gorgias’ skeptical argument, designed to demonstrate that nothing exists or, at least, that the concept of existence is nonsense. It has a logical form something like this: 'If it is the case that A is a meaningful concept, then we must be able to say one of the following: either something is A, is not-A, or is both A and not-A.' This isn’t that far away from ‘If Chelsea play a football match, then either they will win, lose or draw’. If it can be shown that Chelsea neither won, nor lost, nor drew, then it can be concluded that they did not actually play a game at all. As such, the argument is a pretty straight-forward reductio ad absurdum.

The argument against each of the three possibilities is interesting, I think, mainly for the discussion of infinity and creation. These discussions were commonplace in Greek philosophy subsequently and, indeed, they are strikingly like the dialectical arguments Kant analyses in the Antinomies.

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