p By Tonic philosophy is meant a group of specific philosophical teachings that came into being in Ionia, a region on the West Coast of Asia Minor inhabited by Greek tribes. In the seventh-sixth centuries B.C. Ionia was the richest and most advanced region of the Greek world in terms of culture and socio-economic relations. Mild climate and fertile soil created excellent conditions for the development of agriculture, whereas the geographic position of the country situated on the great land and sea routes stimulated the growth of commerce and handicrafts. -The proximity to ancient civilisations of the Near East, too, was an important factor in the rapid intellectual advancement of talented Greek population. -The general cultural atmosphere in Ionia proved highly conducive to the development of not only heroic epos, lyrical poetry (Archilochus, Mimnermus, Callinus, Hipponax, Anacreon) and the prose of "logographs," but also of philosophy. The Ionian thinkers did not confine their activity to Ionia alone: Xenophanes of Colophon was travelling over Greece, Italy and Sicily; Pythagoras of Samos founded his school at Croton, in Magna Graecia; Archelaus of Miletus and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae became famous in Athens... However, the Ionian school proper is traditionally associated with the three philosophers of Miletus—Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, Heraclitus of Ephesus, and the latejonians—Hipponax of Regia, Idaeus of Himera and Diogenes of Apollonia.

p Ionic philosophy was born in a difficult and troubled period of the country’s history. Torn by internal contradictions and acute struggle between aristocracy and democracy with its constant tendency towards tyranny, Ionian society was simultaneously threatened with foreign invasion. 35 This threat came first from Lydia, and then from Persia which conquered Lydia in 546 B.C. -The subsequent conquest of Ionian cities by Persia undermined to a considerable extent their commerce and handicrafts, since mediatory trade was almost completely monopolised by the Phoenicians who enjoyed Persia’s patronage, and the Greeks’ own trade with Egypt and their economic links with cities on the Black Sea coast were weakened. The popular uprising against Persia which broke out in 499 ended in failure after a few years of bitter struggle: the insurgents were defeated by Persia’s superior forces. In 494 B.C. Miletus fell and was destroyed, its inhabitants were partly killed and partly driven into slavery. By the summer of 493 B.C. the Persians had seized the last insurgent cities. Ionia’s prosperity came to an end and, though the country was later liberated as a result of the Greco-Persian wars (500-449 B.C.), it could not recover its previous position and never again played an important”political or cultural role in the Greek world.

p ^l(!’

p It was the turbulent sixth century that marked the rise of Ionic philosophy. The Ionian thinkers went down in history under the name of physici or physiologi, i.e. people who wrote "of nature" (peri physeos). According to Aristotle, "of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist, the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved (the ’substance remaining, but changing in its modifications) this they say is the element and this the principle of things, and therefore they think nothing is either generated or destroyed..."  [35•1  Of course, it would be rash to infer from this that these early philosophers professed materialism: first, in characterising their views Aristotle uses his own terminology and his concept of matter has a peculiar “Aristotelian” meaning; second, the views of Aristotle’s predecessors from Thales to Anaxagoras and Empedocles were not identical and underwent essential transformations from one thinker to another. Yet in the main Aristotle was right: the “principle” of all things with the early philosophers was not a deity, nor was a deity derived from it. Moreover, their approach was 36 fundamentally different from the mythological mode of thought: the beings that came from Chaos did not “consist” of it and, naturally enough, did not “resolve” into it upon completion of their cycle. Gaia, Tartaros and Eros, the descendants of Gaia and Uranus and other immortals could not be conceived as coming from, consisting of and resolving into Chaos. •The very understanding of gods by the earliest philosophers shows a radical departure from the traditional mythological views: the gods are regarded in the naturalistic terms, associated with the physical world and are, in fact, relegated to a secondary plan. Moreover, in contrast to the mythologist who speaks on behalf of the gods and pretends to divine wisdom and absolute truth, the philosopher speaks of the love of wisdom and quest for knowledge. As distinct from utilitarian knowledge aimed at achieving direct results such- as human welfare or personal fame, philosophy was believed to spring from curiosity and represent disinterested knowledge untarnished by any practical considerations. Illusory as it was, this view reflected the objective position of a thinker in a_: society where mental work had just started singling out as an independent kind of human activity opposed to other forms of socially useful labour. Having come into existence, philosophy began to develop its own methods—“dialectics” as the art of dispute and debate aimed at establishing the truth, and “theory” (theoria) as disinterested contemplation of the truth leading to "contemplative life" (bios theoretikos) which purportedly distinguished a philosopher from ordinary people.

p As has been pointed out, the earliest philosophers’ interest focused on “nature” (physis). Coming from the verb phyo which means to produce, to grow, and the like, this word and its derivatives, as well as the expressions in which they are used have a dual meaning, denoting both a process (birth, generation) and its results (properties, external appearance, “breed”). Thus in Homer, Theognis and Pindar the words phya and phye denote noble appearance, stature and beauty usually associated with noble birth. •This meaning of physis reflects the mythological mode of thinking. By contrast, in those fields of concrete knowledge which, unlike ancient speculative physiology, gravitate to observation and experimental investigation by physis is usually meant the structure or composition of a body as the observable result of its genesis.

p As regards philosophy, physis as the object of philosophical investigation was conceived in antiquity as a unity of two approaches: the investigation into the origin of things, their ultimate substance, inducing the philosopher to go beyond the bounds of observable objects, and the investigation of phenomena accessible to senses. The first philosophers viewing physis in terms of the "nature of things" had to overstep the bounds of these things. Under the conditions of undivided sway of mythological and religious ideology in ancient society it was tantamount to an appeal to the “divine” properties of nature, to the "eternal and everlasting" in it. Yet the very nature of philosophy relying on human reason for explanation of the visible world demanded that it should abandon mythological solutions and effect a logical transition, if only in principle, from the universal to the particular and the individual, providing an “empirical” explication of the general world view principle.

p •This accounts for the fact that the concept of physis or nature was bound to become an arena of acute ideological struggle. The first philosophers regarded nature as a universal dynamic self-moving whole spontaneously producing its component parts or individual things. The idea of “matter” as the ultimate substance of all things is organically united in this concept with the idea of genesis, development. For the Greek philosophers, matter was therefore a living self-sufficient entity, causa sui, which did not need any external forces for its explanation. It was, according to Engels, a "primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world”.  [37•1  However, being the result of direct contemplation, this spontaneous, intuitive outlook on the world was obviously inadequate for explaining particulars as was clearly revealed in the course of subsequent philosophical development.

p This inadequacy of the general world outlook contained in embryo the possibility of philosophy’s splitting into opposite trends. Analysing the teachings of his predecessors, Plato wrote that the exponents of their views considered fire, water, earth and air to be the cause of all things and called them nature (Leges, X, p. 891). These elements were not simply the “material” of things, but also 38 the active creative forces, the cause of their emergence and dissolution. To this concept Plato counterposed the concept of the primacy of soul (ibid., p. 892). Hence, it was Plato who clearly denned the world outlook of the early philosophers as materialistic and ranked them with the trend that considered material substance, matter to be the primary cause of the world.

The analysis of the ancient concept of “nature” thus brings us to the fundamental problem of philosophy. The direct result of its evolution was the emergence of two schools associated with the names of Democritus and Plato and representing, for the first time in the history of philosophy, materialism and idealism as such. As regards nascent philosophy which was making but its first steps, we can only speak of tendencies which could be predominantly materialist or idealist. With the “physicists” who regarded “nature” as a living and self-developing whole generating and destroying its own component parts the materialist tendency was undoubtedly prevalent.