Empedocles
Human beings haven't always been into philosophy. Our thoughts tend to be limited to the most pressing need at the time, and way, way back before the era of recorded history, mankind was too busy running away from Tyrannosauruses and dodging exploding volcanos to sit down and ponder the mysteries of the world.
But there were a few curious individuals who started wondering just what the heck it's all about, what all this stuff around them actually was, what Tyrannosauruses were made of and why volcanos burned so much.
Thales, the first philosopher ever, thought that the entire universe was made of water. He had his reasons, but a lot of people disagreed, including Heraclitus, who thought everything was made of fire, and Anaximenes, who thought everything was made of air.
These simplistic accounts left a lot to be desired, and that's where Empedocles came in, after examining the ideas of his predecessors he concluded that the universe was made entirely of what is known as the classical elements, air, water, fire, and earth.
From these four things, Empedocles thought he had a pretty good idea of how the world worked, theorising that objects moved according to what they were mostly made of, for example, fire always goes up and earth always goes down.
This was pretty convenient for working out simple calculations like what a rock will do when you drop it into some water, but quickly became insufficient for more complicated scenarios such as what a rock will do when it passes the event horizon of a black hole.
Later attempts to improve the theory by shoehorning other elements into it quickly proved completely insane, but it's important to note that what Empedocles was doing became the primordial origin of the theory of atoms, and not only did he compile the first periodic table of elements, such as it was, he was also heading in the right direction with his theory of forces.
Though today we know about four fundamental forces, Empedocles identified two, and he called them love and strife. Love was the force that brought people and objects together, and strife was the force that drove them apart.
But Empedocles didn't stop there, in fact he continued to speculate on proto-scientific theories that wouldn't be proven correct for over two thousand years, to an extent that it's actually kind of creepy.
For example, Empedocles postulated that the universe was once condensed in a tight, unmoving sphere by the force of love, and later exploded with strife into an expanding mass of stuff, which is fairly consistent with current knowledge about the big bang and the expanding universe.
Weirder still is Empedocles' rudimentary theory of evolution. In his account, life first emerged as a bunch of dissassociated body parts. The world was thus composed of crawling arms, legs walking around aimlessly, bouncing eyeballs and disembodied butts.
As time went on, these parts came together and attached to one another creating fantastic creatures with random configurations. Some of these monsters had ten arms, thirty eyes and butts for heads, but those who were more suited to survival, with more sensible combinations like two arms, two legs, and one butt, outcompeted all the Lovecraftian monstrosities.
It's not exactly the way Darwin saw it, but every theory has to start somewhere.
Besides his metaphysical accomplishments, not very much is known about Empedocles beyond what has been written about him after the fact, and that's difficult to believe considering that these sources also claim that Empedocles threw himself into a volcano and was carried into the heavens by a volcanic eruption and he lives to this day on the moon.
Nevertheless, Empedocles wound up putting together the first vestiges of sound scientific theory about what's really going on in the world, which is pretty good for a guy who thought the Earth went around the sun and that his underpants were made out of fire.
But there were a few curious individuals who started wondering just what the heck it's all about, what all this stuff around them actually was, what Tyrannosauruses were made of and why volcanos burned so much.
Thales, the first philosopher ever, thought that the entire universe was made of water. He had his reasons, but a lot of people disagreed, including Heraclitus, who thought everything was made of fire, and Anaximenes, who thought everything was made of air.
These simplistic accounts left a lot to be desired, and that's where Empedocles came in, after examining the ideas of his predecessors he concluded that the universe was made entirely of what is known as the classical elements, air, water, fire, and earth.
From these four things, Empedocles thought he had a pretty good idea of how the world worked, theorising that objects moved according to what they were mostly made of, for example, fire always goes up and earth always goes down.
This was pretty convenient for working out simple calculations like what a rock will do when you drop it into some water, but quickly became insufficient for more complicated scenarios such as what a rock will do when it passes the event horizon of a black hole.
Later attempts to improve the theory by shoehorning other elements into it quickly proved completely insane, but it's important to note that what Empedocles was doing became the primordial origin of the theory of atoms, and not only did he compile the first periodic table of elements, such as it was, he was also heading in the right direction with his theory of forces.
Though today we know about four fundamental forces, Empedocles identified two, and he called them love and strife. Love was the force that brought people and objects together, and strife was the force that drove them apart.
But Empedocles didn't stop there, in fact he continued to speculate on proto-scientific theories that wouldn't be proven correct for over two thousand years, to an extent that it's actually kind of creepy.
For example, Empedocles postulated that the universe was once condensed in a tight, unmoving sphere by the force of love, and later exploded with strife into an expanding mass of stuff, which is fairly consistent with current knowledge about the big bang and the expanding universe.
Weirder still is Empedocles' rudimentary theory of evolution. In his account, life first emerged as a bunch of dissassociated body parts. The world was thus composed of crawling arms, legs walking around aimlessly, bouncing eyeballs and disembodied butts.
As time went on, these parts came together and attached to one another creating fantastic creatures with random configurations. Some of these monsters had ten arms, thirty eyes and butts for heads, but those who were more suited to survival, with more sensible combinations like two arms, two legs, and one butt, outcompeted all the Lovecraftian monstrosities.
It's not exactly the way Darwin saw it, but every theory has to start somewhere.
Besides his metaphysical accomplishments, not very much is known about Empedocles beyond what has been written about him after the fact, and that's difficult to believe considering that these sources also claim that Empedocles threw himself into a volcano and was carried into the heavens by a volcanic eruption and he lives to this day on the moon.
Nevertheless, Empedocles wound up putting together the first vestiges of sound scientific theory about what's really going on in the world, which is pretty good for a guy who thought the Earth went around the sun and that his underpants were made out of fire.