Study on the Significance of the Myth in the Development of the Presocratic Philosophy

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In general, it is said that the Presocratic philosophers evidently abandoned mythic formulations and gave a purely rational, logical and scientific account of the origin and nature of the universe. This estimation is the result of the application of the hypothesis to the field of Greek philosophy that the civilization of ancient Greece underwent a development from myth to reason or from Mythos to Logos. However the state of affairs is not so simple. It is true that the Presocratic philosophers threw out personification and anthropomorphic theistic explanation, but, when we seek the origin of philosophy not historically but a-historically or ontologically, even in the epic of Gilgamesh, we can find fully philosophical themes, e.g.the status of the mortals in the universe, the nature and possibility of their knowledge of the universe. On the other hand, the so-called first philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles also still employed the mytho-poetic forms of explanation. The mythic elements are thus often seen to play an important role in the very formulation of their thoughts, the arche(principle) they posit as an origin and a cause of the universe is far beyond our experience, but they try to assent it and to describe it in some way or other. And it is the mythic expression that enables them to represent it explicitly. The first philosophers are called physikoi by Aristotle, but, as long as they are natural theologians, they believe, it seems, that they can reconcile Mythos and Logos in a certain way.