A Student's History of Philosophy Author:Arthur Kenyon Rogers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: presupposed in the intellectual formulation of these processes, and with the logical and metaphysical implications of such ideas. These ideas, it is true, ar... more »e not yet fully abstracted from their physical embodiment, and looked at wholly apart from the physical processes which imply them; but the interest is in the ideas, nevertheless. And the centre about which the controversy turns is the concept of change, a concept which involves one of the most fundamental problems with which metaphysics has to deal. The Milesians had assumed the fact of change as something self-evident, and they had assumed, too, that there must be an underlying unity to this changing world. But here are two ideas which are sure to make trouble as soon as they are distinctly recognized. The reality which changes must all the time be one and the same reality at bottom, or there is no meaning in the statement that it changes. Nothing changes, except as it becomes different from what it was before; and there is no "it," no "something which changes," unless there is an identity, or sameness, which persists through the successive moments of change. And yet if it changes, it must be different from itself, and so not one reality, but more than one; it must at once persist, and pass away. How are these seemingly very opposite notions -- the one and the many, sameness and difference, permanence and change -- to be reconciled and combined ? The next step in Greek philosophy, was to bring about a clear recognition of this problem. In Her- acleitus, and in Parmenides, the two opposing factors receive each a formulation, one-sided, indeed, but for that reason all the more impressive and influential. Later on, in the mediating schools which succeeded, the attempt is made to bring about a reconciliation. § 4. Her...« less