"The Presocratics" book cover by Author Phillip Wheelwright
Throughout it’s history, one of the great themes of philosophy has been the distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction was central to the thought of the earliest philosophers, called the Presocratics, because they lived in the time before Socrates (469-399 BC).
The Presoctaics believed that the ultimate nature of reality was vastly different from the way it ordinarily appeared to them. For instance, one philosopher named Thales held that appearances notwithstanding, all reality was ultimately composed of water; Heraclitus thought the world was built from fire. Further, Heraclitus maintained that everything was constantly in motion. Another thinker, Parmenides, insisted that nothing actually moved and that all apparent motion was an illusion.
The Presocratics took seriously the possibility that all of reality was ultimately made up of some more fundamental substance. And they suspected that uncritical, everyday observation tends to present us with a misleading picture of the world. For those reasons, their thinking is often considered a precursor to modern science as well as philosophy.
Many later philosophers — including Plato, Spinoza and Leibniz — followed in this tradition and presented alternative models of reality, which they claimed were closer to the truth than ordinary, commonsense views of the world.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- The distinction between appearance and reality is also central to the venerable philosophical tradition known as skepticism.
- Immanuel Kent also addressed the difference between appearance and reality. He distinguished between things we experience and what he called a “thing-in-itself.”
