In the 6th Century BC, before the time of Socrates, lived the first philosophers in history. Like Socrates, they also resided in Ancient Greece, it being the most civilized people group at the time. They are not notable because of the answers they gave to philosophical questions, but because of the questions themselves. Asking these queries would let later philosophers give the answers. The Pre-Socratic philosophers were not as interested in moral questions as the later Greek philosophers but were intrigued with scientific inquiry.
Many of these philosophers lived in an area of Asia Minor called Ionia, which is why they are sometimes referred to as the Ionians. They believed that the entire world was composed of a single substance. Since all humans, animals, and plants need water to survive an Ionian named Thales stated that the substance was water. Anaximander had the notion that the world was only made up of an “unbounded or limitless Being.”
There was a different group known as the Pythagareons who asserted that the fundamental element to the universe was “number” which actually makes sense due to the fact that they considered math to be divine because of it always being unchanging and continually true. Some Presocratics called the Eleatics denounced the poetic depictions of the gods such as in “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”, which portrayed them as like humans with rivalries and fighting between themselves. Instead, the Eleatics decreed that the divine was perfect and entirely unlike human beings.
Obviously, many philosophers had completely different views from each other. Another example is the philosopher named Zeno of Elea, who said that change and motion were impossible, and that everything stayed exactly the same. This sounds preposterous, but Zeno argued that if your senses indicated that something was changing, you were being deceived. Heraclitcus observed the exact opposite when he stated that everything is changing all the time and “nothing is.” A group called the Sophists would later be discouraged by Socrates because of their belief that whatever an individual thought to be true could be their truth and that you couldn’t tell them otherwise. Socrates thought this teaching would corrupt the youth of Athens into being immoral and only doing actions that benefited themselves.
