Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

The chapter sketches a broad picture of some ideas, antecedent to Aristotle’s work, about the origin and development of living beings. Against the background of the new cosmological and metaphysical framework of Aristotle’s biological enterprise, it emphasizes what distinguishes Aristotle from the Presocratics and Plato: his rejection of a shared causal story that would account for both the origin of the universe and the birth of animals and plants. This shift helps to make intelligible Aristotle’s rejection of hylozoism and of the opposite view that life arises, mysteriously, from inanimate material ingredients. To demonstrate that Aristotle discusses the biological views of his predecessors without directly using them to build his own theory, the chapter first turns to Presocratic fragments, mostly of Anaximander and Empedocles, which connect biological matters and cosmogony. Second, the chapter takes a fresh look at how Plato reshapes this connection in his Timaeus, offering a new account of the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings. This account then enables us to evaluate, in the chapter’s final section, the changes that Aristotle brings to the study of living beings, including his rejection of the notion of the latter’s progressive formation.

The focus of this chapter is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It focuses on Heidegger’s changing attitude toward Presocratic philosophy in works surrounding his involvement with the National Socialists during the Second World War. It is particularly concerned with the shifting temporalities of Presocratic philosophy in Heidegger’s thinking: from representing a rupturous, revolutionary force in his ‘Rektoratsrede’ of 1933, it becomes a long-lost, cyclical mode of thinking in his 1946 essay ‘The Saying of Anaximander’. The chapter examines the links between Heidegger’s articulations of this particular archaic era of philosophy and a contemporary discourse of responding to the National Socialists by means of the Presocratics both positively, in the work of critics like Antony M. Ludovici, and negatively, in the writings of Georges Bataille. Furthermore, it connects Heidegger’s attitude towards the significance of the Presocratics to Nietzsche’s writings about Greek philosophy both in The Birth of Tragedy and in other works of the same time, such as his unpublished tract Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.