1 The First Task of the Philosophy

1 The First Task of the Philosophy of Nature 3

so-called technical language of philosophy is the initial condition of precision in inquiry, and the evolution of philosophical doctrines consists to a great extent in the evolution of concepts. A doctrine or a philosophical system cannot arise, if it does not have available the proper concepts. The evolution of con- cepts leads to new questions. Without the right language, the questions remain invisible.
2. Method, or “a systematically applied means.” Without method, there is acci- dental discovery, but there is no authentic research. Method counts no less than results because a good method contains in itself the promise of further results. Sometimes the new method can itself be a result. It is an important result because it usually opens up new areas of research. The result obtained by the Ionian philosophers of nature was the establishment of two research methods: (a) analysis—decomposition (usually only in thought) into simpler components, in order finally to reach the elementary components (the search for arche); (b) induction—transition from individual observations to general conclu- sions (plants and animals need water for life and therefore water is the arche of nature). It is not necessary to emphasize that this is only the first use of induction and is still obscured by hasty generalization.

And what did the first Greek thinkers give to the philosophy of nature in return? First, the awareness that nature demands intellectual explanation. It cannot be taken as undiscussed data, but one must search for reasons explaining the structure
of nature and even of (more generally) nature itself.
Second, the conviction that nature can be explained by reducing it to elementary principles. These principles do not have to be physical parts of a whole, like, for example, water or atoms; they can be metaphysical or logical elements, like for example apeiron or number.
Third, at the foundation of all those achievements lies hidden the tacit assumption that natural reality (and later all of reality in general) can be explained; that there are certain fundamental reasons thanks to which nature (reality) exists. Inquiry into such reasons is the raison d’être of philosophy (the so-called problem of the ratio- nality of nature). That tacit assumption would become fully clear to philosophers only in the Middle Ages, when one of the most discussed topics would be the so- called intelligibilitas entis, or the fundamental intelligibility of being. The modern counterpart of that problem is the evermore discussed question of why nature can be described mathematically? Sometimes that question is called the problem of the mathematicality of nature.
European philosophy of nature began its history from the well-formulated prob- lem of elementarity: what is the arche of the world? That problem created in researchers into nature an instinct for understanding through reduction to elemen- tary principles. That very method of understanding continues to function in modern science. Is there ever any other way to understand something? Even holistic under- standing relies on placement into wholes of once distinct parts. Besides, the category of wholeness can also be treated as an elementary principle. In that broad kind of understanding, the problem of elementarity becomes a case of the problem of the rationality of nature.