Just a Thought

Philosophy as we know it began in Greece about 2,500 years ago. No one else anywhere on Earth had done anything like that before.

That really blew my mind at first. Because philosophy consists of things which are really familiar to us: thinking about the nature of reality, of perception, etc etc.

But then I had this thought: perhaps people had always thought about such things, and had always talked about such things, but before Greece, ca 500 BC, it had simply never occurred to anyone to write it down.

So for example, in Babylon in 2500 BC, two temple scribes could be taking a break and talking, speculating about how far away the moon was, and whether matter was composed of one substance or four substances or many substances; and then it was like, "Okay, break's over. I wish we could keep talking about these interesting things, but we have to get back to work, and think of three dozen more things to compare the king to."

Socrates, not the first philosopher but within 100 years of the first philosopher, and the most influential of all of them so far, never wrote any philosophy. He talked to people. That was his full-time job. And then after he was executed, his pupil Plato wrote down those conversations. That's what all of Plato's works are: conversations starring Socrates.

So maybe the explanation of why there isn't any earlier philosophy is staring us right in the face in the form of the best-known philosophy of all time, of some of the oldest: there was earlier philosophy, but it was all just conversations, so it never got recorded, never got organized, just blew away like dead leaves in the wind.