Mythology

Some of the earliest known philosophies on the creation of the Earth come from the works of Hesiod. In his Theogony he attempts to explain the creation of the Earth, and all that surrounds him, using myth. In the myth Hesiod anthropomorphizes the cosmos. He tells of "Chaos" being the first to come into being, then he goes on to describe how each of the gods of the cosmos comes in to being. The gods of the cosmos are all related to some characteristic of our universe. They can be physical parts or concepts (similar to Plato's idea of the forms). For example the line, "Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods."(Theogony, 126) describes both the act of birth, which is a human characteristic, and physical parts of the universe being gods (Heaven meaning the stars, and the Earth). He also has gods, such as Eros, which represents the concept of Love. Two main issues the come up during discussions of cosmology are how the universe was created and out of what was the universe created. In the Theogony, Hesiod has the world created out of gods that are human by nature and to create this universe the gods reproduced. Hesiod's theories of the universe can clearly be classified as myth, since there is no scientific background for it. The philosophers to follow Hesiod moved slightly away from this. The Pre-Socratics begin to de-anthropomorphize the universe. Even later, in the works of Socrates and Plato, the universe is completely de-anthropomorphized. The Pre-Socratics focus more on what the universe was made of than how it was created. They typically chose a single element that everything consisted of and tried to explain the world according to that element. Sometimes these elements were one of the basic four elements; earth, fire, air, and water. Sometimes they were more abstract such as Anaximander's theory.