 On Friday, I was reading this article on The Guardian. I don't know if some of you might have read it about this nuclear scientist, or actually, it was not a nuclear scientist. It was just a scientist who sent in a, what do you call it, a submission to a conference about nuclear science completely made up of autocomplete function of the iOS mobile phone system. So it was an abstract of complete gibberish called atomic energy will have been made available to a single source. And it was accepted. And I think that really reveals something about the crisis that we see in modern science, that in spite of the fact that modern science has come a great traveled far and we are capable of things that no human being would have imagined even a few decades ago, nevertheless, there is a deep crisis in modern science. And it also reveals that the role of philosophy in science and society is far from exhausted. For centuries, the development of modern science put mysticism and idealism and obscure ideas on a back footing. Modern science was kind of the main weapon to fight against idealist thoughts and religion. But today, these kind of ideas are finding the way back, supported by the capitalist system and the capitalist class, which is a senile decay. Now, the bourgeoisie initially came to power on a wave of radical materialism. But today, they're falling into the most conservative idealism to justify the rule and the grip over society. We have ideas such as postmodernism and neocontianism, which are arguing that nothing really matters. Everything is completely subjective. And your most basic primitive desires are the measure to judge society and nature. History is a pile of random events. And class struggle is a childish mirage. The field of philosophy itself has been swamped with obscure ideas, which have no relationship to the real world. And of course, the idea that all ideas are valid is very interesting. As long as you don't apply it to anything concrete, as long as you don't apply it to anything in the real world, it can be an interesting thought experiment. But as soon as you want to actually achieve something by it and affect the world that we're living in, it's completely useless. Now, this is not how philosophy came to be. And that's what I'm trying to focus this lead off about. All men, all human beings, have a philosophy, whether they have it consciously or an unconscious one, which is the reflection of the philosophy of the ruling class within society. And in fact, angles went so far as to say that dialectical thought is one of the main traits which distinguishes human beings from animals. And by dialectical thought, it means the ability to be able to take an object or a phenomena and strip away all the accidental peculiarities and see the real essence, the universal, the general aspect of it and put that to use. So yes, and this is an ability which allows human being to dominate and manipulate nature far beyond our immediate reach. That's the strength of human beings. Now, the beginnings of real philosophy, of the field of philosophy came about with the development of productive forces which at a certain stage led to development of class society and agricultural society and slave society. Now, for the first time, a tiny, a small part of the human population could actually stop working and dedicate their lives to speculation, to thinking, to inventing, to developing ideas and culture and art. In Greece, for instance, in ancient Athens in the period we're talking about, which is about 700 to 300 BC, you had the population of 300,000, of which only 80,000 were Athenian citizens. And of those, a minority, again, were aristocrats and basically the ruling class, which meant that this minority was leaning on on the labor of hundreds of thousands of people who were dispossessed one way or another. And this is a similar thing we saw in many of the ancient civilizations in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley where you saw, along with the rise of class society, also the rise of philosophy and speculative thought, you can say. But the first steps of these, the first signs of this type of thinking was always in the form of, was always mixed with myth. So we had the development of religions and mythical stories trying to explain nature and the laws of nature. In ancient Greece, the same was the case, in the Homeric myths and also in the words of Hesiod, you find lots of interesting points and interesting ideas trying to find the general laws which rule our universe and the society that we live in. But nevertheless, these were always mixed up with some type of religious and mythical thinking. But the first philosophers in Greece would make them stand out from all other layers, from all other such groups in society, was that they decided to explain nature without the use of religion, explain nature by nature itself. And the first of these were the Mylesian schools, which was based in a city-state called Mylesias. And these were the philosophers called Thales, Anaxamanda, and Anaxagoras. Now we don't know much about Thales, except that he existed, he was apparently a, he lived, yes. And he was apparently an engineer and he also did work with geometry and he could possibly have been involved in some kind of shipping or sailing and so on. But what Thales began by asserting was trying, what all these group of philosophers tried to do was to find one element, one, how do you say, one element which could, was a building block of the universe, one principle which was the main principle of the universe. And this is not, again, not an idealist principle as a great idea or such, but a materialist one. And for Thales, this was water. And this might seem very primitive to us, but in fact, it was a huge step forward as no one else has tried to explain nature by nature as Thales was beginning to. And also water is in fact a very important element in the, on our planet, which for the most part consists of water. For the Greeks, of course, for whom water was a lifeline, that this was the sea trade was there, was the basis of their civilization. And also in everything living and everything, yes, in everything living, water is a key element. Now, following him, Anax Amanda put forward the idea that it wasn't water, but the infinite, this infinite material from which everything come to come to be and to which everything come to pass. And this was, again, another step forward from Thales because Anax Agrius was trying to define a general universal, basically word for matter, you can say. And again, this was another step forward that he developed this general concept of matter. And again, following them was Anax Amanda, which again took the whole school one further step forward by saying that the main element was this thing called air or mist. And it wasn't as the air that we explained it today, but some kind of concrete element of which nature is composed. And it's the condensation and the rarefication of this element, the qualitative pressure and depressurizing of this element, which then forms all the elements that we know. And one of the 20th century philosophers actually said, well, if he was talking about hydrogen, he wouldn't have been too far off the mark. Of course, this is all speculation, but it reveals that the immense steps forward that these people were taking and the extremely advanced conclusions they were coming to based merely on speculation without any of the advanced tools and accumulated knowledge that we have today. Now, parallel to these, you had the development of a school of Pythagoreans. Probably everyone here knows Pythagoras, some of his equations from school. The Pythagoreans were like a kind of a cult, really a semi-cult and semi-philosophical brotherhood. And what they thought was that everything is numbers. Everything can be quantified, ergo everything is in numbers. And they found these magical numbers, one, two, three, four. They were very powerful numbers because put together they would make 10. And they had all these weird and wonderful ways of explaining the magical forces of numbers, which were the building blocks of all that we see all of nature and society. And in fact, it's not too far off from many of the semi-mystical mathematical conclusions that mathematicians come to this century, which is actually a regression. And although we can forgive the Pythagoreans from living in such a simple and backward society, we can't forgive the modern day mathematicians for making these same mistakes. But the point of the Pythagoreans was that for the first time, it was clearly, they clearly tried to expose a world view based on ideas. So basically the Pythagoreans brought forward the birth of idealism as we know it because in reality, obviously, there is no such thing as numbers. Numbers is a way that we try to generalize quantitative measuring of nature. And it's obviously a very powerful tool, but it doesn't exist outside of nature. It's merely a approximation, a generalization of our view of nature. But for them, they turned this idea that human beings have come to into reality itself. So they made the idea dominate society and society and nature being a reflection merely of this idea. Although it should also be said that besides the birth of idealism, they also did provide, they did give lots of very important, they brought forward lots of very important new ideas, especially in the field of mathematics, of course, but also in a quantitative view of viewing the world of the relationship between quantity and quality in nature and society. Again, slightly after these from 535 until 475 BC, we had a philosopher called Heraclitus, whom we know actually very little about because very little has remained. We know about his ideas from other philosophers and from a few fragments which have come down to us. So I think in total there's about 130 statements that he made. But Heraclitus, who wrote in a very poetical manner and he was actually called the dark and the obscure by his contemporaries, had some extremely profound ideas which all, how do you say, which all were about change and motion and the fact that that's the main principle in nature, that nature is in a constant flux of changing, coming into being and going out of being. And even more, probably more fundamental to his ideas were the fact that contradictions are an inherent part of nature. And in fact, without contradictions, there wouldn't be any movement and there wouldn't be any nature. In fact, he says of the Iliadics who tried to prove that there was no contradictions. He says, well, they're trying to, in fact, they're trying to destroy the world and trying to destroy the universe. You might know him because he said things such as, you never step into the same river twice. I think that's the most famous of his ideas. But also one of the ones I found most interesting is the question he says, there is harmony in strife, like the, what is that? It's like the bow and the liar. So that's how he explains nature of the harmony, of coming together of opposite tendencies, propelling movement and development and change forward. And he was also a monist. So he, as opposed to the dualist view of nature that the Pythagoreans had, i.e. that there's one world of ideas and then there's one real world, Heraclitus was a monist saying there's only one principle and that was for him fire. Now that's not the same fire as the elements, the very primitive notion of fire. I think what he really meant was energy, in fact, was the consuming and the changing, constantly changing nature of matter through, which is completely connected with energy. Now, in contrast to Heraclitus, you have the Iliadic school, which was by Xenophans, Paraminides and Xeno. Those are the main teachers of that school. Now they try to contrast Heraclitus by saying, well, if you want to have movement, if you want to have change, that means you have to go from being to not being. Things go from being something to not being something. And in fact, they can both be and not be at the same time. But they say, no, no, not being does not exist. Not being cannot exist. Therefore, they can only be, we can only have one whole unity of being, which is never changing and never developing. Now that sounds like a very, very nice idea. A very consistent philosophy. But of course, it had no relationship whatsoever again to the reality that we live in. Nevertheless, they did make some very, very profound, they had very profound ideas. And probably the most significant one of them, Xeno, brought this philosophy and this school to its logical conclusion, which is dialectically its opposite. Because he actually put this into practice by having these paradoxes of Xeno, which you might know I've learned in school by saying, you know, you can never reach, if you shoot an arrow, and it halves the distance towards its aim every time constantly, it will never reach its goal. It will never reach the end of the room. And the other one, which is also very famous, is Achilles and the turtle, I think. And there's obviously Achilles is running much faster than the turtle, but every time the turtle moves one meter, the Achilles moves 100, and then and so on and so on, and they will never ever reach, and Achilles will never overtake the turtle. Now, this is a very interesting concrete example of the idea that not being, it cannot be, because the only way to solve this paradox is in fact, not by putting up time and space into individual points that you can stop and say this is where the arrow is at, because you can never do that. In fact, any time you try to pinpoint anything, and say this is where this specific element is at the moment, it has already passed it. Everything is in constant change, and that goes down to infinite depth, you can say. And things move by being, in fact, one place and another, by being and not being at the same time, and that is the whole basis of change. So Zeno, by driving this form of idea to its logical conclusion, in fact, came to the opposite conclusion, the dialectics, the unity of opposites and constant change is in fact the mode of existence of our universe and of nature. Now, following these, there was another school, the Adamists, who were preceded by a philosopher called Ana Xagoras. And what these guys did was basically pulling together all the progressive elements within the schools of the Pythagoreans, the Iliadics, the early naturalists, materialists, the Malaysians, and Heraclitus, basically a synthesis of all previous philosophy. Now, Ana Xagoras was an incredible philosopher. He, first of all, was the first person to assert that the sun was one giant, burning element and that the stars were similar to the sun, only that they were further away. He also explained that what we see, the light on the moon is actually a reflection of the light coming from the sun. And he made many, many incredible astronomical discoveries which were then forgotten for thousands of years and only rediscovered recently. But the main thing, the main point of his philosophy was that everything is infinitely divisible and matter of made of particles, an infinite variety of particles which form, which how to say, organizes itself in certain ways and becomes the world that we see today. Now, this created the bridge to the first atomists, which was a guy called Lusipus, which we don't know much about, and Democritus, who was his pupil, who took this idea of the particles and said that, well, the universe actually exists of two things. One is atoms, which means undivisible of these particles, which he called atoms, and then the void, which is a absolute vacuum, which is nothing, which is basically atoms are the only thing which remains in the end. And it's the interaction of atoms. Now, this is the general idea of the school, although it developed throughout time, but what they say is that it's the ever-changing interaction of these atoms coming together and going away, which forms the basis of the world as we know it today. And obviously, that was an amazing anticipation of the discoveries of modern science, considering the extremely low level of the productive forces and the tools and the science at the disposal of these people. It's incredible that they get to these conclusions. They said that eternity, the matter is infinite, and so is time, and it's in a state of infinite, continuous change coming together and coming to being and going out of being in different organizations or different formations. They also said that nothing can be created, so matter cannot be created or destroyed and neither can energy. Again, things which are relatively new to modern science, only about 100 years old. And even then, we still have scientists actually who doubt these things and who say that that's not the case. We'll get to that later on. They also said that the universe is infinite, and so is time. There's no origin, no beginning of time, and no end. Now, if we compare it to today, I think it really reveals the strength of systematic philosophical thought, of a conscious philosophical approach and a conscious approach to method in modern science and what the lack of such an approach can lead to because today we have the ideas which basically say that time just came to being 20 million years ago, and so did all matters, so did all the whole universe. And obviously the main question is then what was there before then, and there's no answer to that, but if they had a philosophical approach, a materialist method, they would probably much easier to get around these questions. Now, at the same time, you had, well Greece at this time was a society in extreme flux of wars, revolutions, counter-revolution, crisis, decay, and this is a time where, obviously, this is a time where ideas, new ideas come to the fore and reflect themselves in different ways. I think also this is one of the reasons the differences between Greece and similar societies in Egypt and in the Indus Valley, for instance, which were far more stable and therefore had a different philosophy coming out of them, but in this situation you had the rise of a group of people called the Sophists, who were a group of people, I think the most well-known of them are Protagoras and Gorgias, who would travel around to different cities and teach for a living, professional teachers, they would teach rhetoric or morals and other things. They were basically professional educators for hire, but they were also retoricians, is that how you say it? Retoricians? Retoricians for hire. They would be hired in the political discussions to put forward certain views of certain layers in society and their overall worldview could be described as doubt everything and also Protagoras, who was probably the most significant one of them, who said that man is the measure of all things. And now within this there are the two sizes, because on the one hand you have this extreme relativism, extreme subjectivism, that if you pursue it from a rigorous philosophical basis, it will lead to solipsism, it would mean that, well, you can't prove anything, you can't move out of this world, you can only prove that you exist, you can't even prove that you exist, really, you can only prove that you're thinking things and you're basically your thoughts that created the whole world around you. That's the extreme conclusion that solipsism leads to. But in this society, I think also that the Sophists, they had a revolutionary element to them and a very progressive one, which was the denunciation of all the, how do you say, the formal veneer of civilization, when everything was falling apart, the aristocracy was drowning itself in all kinds of degenerate actions. And the Sophists spoke the truth on the one hand, explained what was that there is no morals, that as you can see, every man in Athens does what he wants to. And at the same time, to challenge every notion, all the pre-existing notions that existed, which could then later on be questioned and put under a more methodic development, I would say, investigation by other philosophers. That was the role that they played. And I would also say that this also makes them completely different to their, how do you say, sisters and brothers today, which is the post-modernist, the neo-continent, is all these things that we see today, which is an extremely conservative thing. In fact, they don't challenge any existing idea. If you view modern post-modernism as mostly about challenging sexuality and well, which can be interesting, but which doesn't change anything of the fundamental basis of society and doesn't change anything and doesn't challenge the fundamental ideas which are put forward by the ruling class. But that's not how the first sophists reacted. They put everything under criticism. And they were a reaction, in fact, to the dissolution of the old society. Now, another reaction to the dissolution of old society came from Socrates and Plato, who lived between 469 and 348 BC. Now, they lived in a extreme period of extreme instability. There was a revolution, a counter-revolution. There was a war, a 30-year war with Sparta, and the whole of the Athenian aristocratic degeneration was visible for them to see. And also all of this was followed by the rule of the 30 tyrants, which was imposed on Athens by Sparta. And a lot of the ideas that Socrates and Plato tried to portray, of course, we don't know much about Socrates, came from, I think, a criticism or a reaction towards this society, and I'll explain why. Now, Socrates didn't write anything himself. He was against writing, because he said, if you write something, you write, or if you say something, you say it in a specific context, and you can never recreate that context in writing. There you go, you can't, you should never write anything. But other people have written about it, and more specifically, Plato uses Socrates as his main hero throughout his works and really raises the work of Socrates and in a thorough scientific manner, and it creates an exposition of it. Now, the main thing that Socrates did, if you read the Socratic dialogues, was what? First of all, he would sit around in the agora, in the marketplace, and he would go discuss with people. First of all, this indicates the level of the economic situation that a certain class of people could afford to do this, could actually not do anything than just think. But his method was extremely important in that he would go to different people and he would ask them simple question. What is the good? What is virtue? One of the main things that he deals with is virtue, that as in excellence, how a human being should act, how a human being should lead his life to fully fulfill it and to be in full harmony with the ideas, well, basically with society and nature. But he would ask, what is the good? And people would then answer him, and then he would go through a series of questions and answers, trying to uncover the different contradictions within this concept, and in the end, trying to get to the essence, the universal of the good, which in the end for him was a philosophical thought. Yes. Yes. Now, that's the classical dialectical form of discussion where you present a thesis and then there is an antithesis presented to that. And from the clash of these, you have in the end a synthesis that even if you don't reach an agreement, you go out with a far deeper understanding of what both parties initially started with. And Socrates saw this as his main task in life to make conscious the unconscious ideas which are in men, and in that respect, is not much different than Marxists, the way that we work towards the working class and as revolutionaries, is to make conscious the dormant, inherently inherent interests and ideas of the working class. And Socrates saw himself as a midwife of ideas. He tried to make people conscious, he tried to make people think. And the most, how do you say, the best way to do this was try to make them realize the inner essence and the universal and general, most general aspects of any given phenomena which is, yes, which is the method of induction and which is later become a very important part of science. Now this was in effect the birth of logic, of philosophical logic as we know it. And Plato, what he does, first of all, he canonizes this. He puts this, obviously, he makes an exposition of this, but he goes a bit further because Plato, he develops the idea that there are all these ideas, all these general, sorry, all these general essences of things such as a table or a circle. These things we can discuss and we will never find the perfect circle, a perfect table, but we can get to the idea that there is such a thing as a table. This is how we would define a table or a dog or human being or anything. And he said, well, in fact, the whole world that we see today is merely a bad copy of the real world which is these universal ideas. And that is the task of the philosopher, is get to see the real world, to understand what the real world is about and bring it to society. And this is the theory of the forms that he developed that the reality, in fact, all of this that we see today is non-existent, it's not real, it's just a bad imitation and the real world is in the world of ideas and forms, which he called them. Now, this is obviously reality stood on his head because as much as we can generalize, those generalizations are still within our minds and obviously they're very, very powerful. They tell us a lot about any given phenomenon, but nevertheless, they cannot exist outside of the world that we are investigating. And also I think the main thing is that what he was reflecting was the mindset of this extremely wealthy ruling aristocracy, this extremely wealthy layer of people who never really participated in any kind of practical work. At the same time, in this time of extreme crisis where they actually wanted to find a way outside of the world, everything that we saw is incomplete. Plato saw Athens as completely degenerate. You couldn't, it wasn't logical. People weren't following reason. They were doing, like Athenian started a new war when they were winning over Sparta. That's insane, that's stupid. They killed Socrates in 399 BC, the wisest Athenian. And all of Plato's work is in fact kind of a condemnation of this decaying society. And trying to say, well, in fact, the real world, the world that's worth living for is not in this world. It's somewhere else. And that's what we need to strive for. And in the Republic, he created such a world in his thoughts, you can say, with the philosopher king who's supposed to rule society and society's supposed to work only for the philosopher king, was the only person who actually knew the real world. Obviously, what he couldn't explain was how could this real world of forms and ideas, how could this have any kind of connection with the reality that we see today? That has always been the problem for idealists and especially dualists. How can you unite these two worlds of ideas and matter? In spite of this, I would say that Plato was an incredible thinker. And one of the things, one of the main lessons from Plato, although there are many, is that he was an extremely consistent person and he despised eclecticism. The first thing that you see in a Platonic, Socratic dialogue is that Socrates takes out and reveals all the contradictions of the statements that the opposite side has to say. So, well, if you say this here, what would you do in this situation? And that's very significant for Plato that throughout his work is the extreme amount of consistency and being true to finding the truth as opposed to having a fixed idea that you try to impose and find out. He built his method and literally built the whole world from that method and took it to its logical conclusion, which is something that, again, modern philosophy could learn a lot from. Be extremely eclectic and using one method, one argument in one place, which they possibly could not. In another, for instance, we have these graphs over the economy which says, well, this year we have one dollar, next year we have two. So, obviously, third year we would have three. On the one hand, putting a very rigid schematic outline of the development of the economy, and on the other hand, they place immense amount of emphasis on the dynamic effects of having, of stimulating the economy, which are completely coming out of nowhere and having no basis in reality at all. Yes, but nevertheless, Platonic thought developed idealism to the fullest and became, in fact, the core basis of idealism and especially the Christian religion over the next 2000 years. Now, after Plato, we have Aristotle, which was the pupil of Plato for 20 years. And Aristotle lived from 384 to 322. And he was, he in fact, wasn't Greek originally. He was from, he wasn't from the Greek city-states. He was a Macedonian. His father worked as a physician for the Macedonian court. And his whole approach to philosophy and science was far more materialist. In fact, he loved experiments. He loved observing nature as it is. And that's where he thought that real knowledge comes from. That knowledge is, first of all, observing via sense perception. So he thought, this is the real world that we can sense. But obviously, he wasn't satisfied with that only because he said, obviously, then you have to process and analyze what you see and draw out and generalize it and draw out the main lessons. He was an extremely encyclopedic mind. He wrote about logic, rhetoric, politics, economy, biology, geography. I mean, there's probably all the major sciences were somehow either founded or at least for the first time laid out and treated in a systematic way by Aristotle. In fact, you can say he's the founder of modern science in many ways. But he broke sharply with Plato, exactly, because he said, how can you explain this idea, this perfect, unchanging, unmoving, ideal world leads to this extremely, extreme world and extreme flux and change? Because that's nonsense, you cannot explain that. And therefore, he set out the idea that the world, as it is, that is what exists and that's what we have to get our ideas from and that's what we have to look at and analyze. Yes. So one of the things that Aristotle is known for is that he put down the basis for formal logics, which is still the basis for the formal logic, which is being taught in many universities today, which is essentially the idea of that A is equals A. That is the main underlying idea in his logics is that when you have a statement, when you try to discuss or analyze something, looking at it, that is that this bottle is a bottle, A is equal A. And that is obviously a very powerful thing when you try systematically analyze things, categorize things and get an initial understanding of a certain phenomena. But as soon as you try to go a bit deeper and a bit closer to that phenomenon, obviously A is not equals A. No two As are alike if you go really close and look at it. No two bottles of water are exactly the like. Not only are they not alike, but they're constantly changing and they're moving even further away or closer towards being alike and then further away again. There's a constant change in flux in society. And so therefore this idea of A is equal A cannot really explain a deep, give us a deep understanding of the complex processes of the world. Although in real life, in normal daily life, it is actually an important thing to know that when I'm taking five pounds out of my pocket to pay something, it's actually five pounds. And no one's gonna see how is it fluctuating, how is the pound fluctuating in the world markets in this tiny second and how is this pound, five pound node degrading that wouldn't make much sense. So obviously it's a powerful thing, but it has its limitations. Unfortunately, and I would say that Aristotle realizes, Aristotle did discuss change and matter coming into being, going out of being. In fact, he saw it as a very essential element in matter to be in constant motion. But he saw this as two ways of thinking, of looking at things. And two ways of looking at the world, which he could use in different circumstances. Yes. Yes. Although I would say also that there is some inconsistencies in Aristotle because although he had a very scientific method of dealing with things, in some points he was very inconsistent and moved towards some kind of idealism. So for instance, he says on the one hand, he says time is infinite, space is infinite. But at the same time he says, well, all movement, if you trace them back further and further and further back, you find this unmoved mover, which gave the first move to the universe and then everything started moving. And obviously this leads straight back to the ideas that Plato was bringing about. Whereas if this unmoved mover exists, if this thing, which is not like anything else in nature exists, then first of all, who caused it? And how does it interact with the rest of nature? Which cannot be explained. And he had other things such as the question of the soul. For instance, he said that well, all living beings have a soul. And for him, soul was not a soul as we would know it. It was a vital force, basically the coming together of the whole of the body using up energy and releasing it again in an organic way as we know it. That's what he called the soul. Now that is very close to, that is at least a very good attempt of grasping how a body works. He said, well, a body is perfectly shaped and this soul is embedded in every single part of this body, the physical parts of this body. This is how they work together, coming together. They create this whole, which is greater than the sum of its parts. That's very good. But then he went even further and then said, well, sometimes this soul can leave the body, especially if it's, especially the type of the soul which is in the mind. And obviously there he goes towards this kind of idealist thoughts. And you see this in different places of his works where he starts from a materialist position and then in the last bit he's inconsistent. It doesn't follow through. But that's not really what Aristotle is about. Aristotle was about, he didn't really care about it. He didn't really discuss that so much. It wasn't important for him whether what was the first unmoved mover or what this mind soul was and where it came from. He didn't talk about it. He talked about the body, the human body, the biology of animals and the constant changing nature of nature and try to unravel that and try to, for the first time, give a scientific exposition of all of these, trying to categorize different entities and the way that they interact with each other. And that was the strength of Aristotle. Now after Aristotle, that he was the apex of Greek philosophy, although after him many interesting Greek philosophers came about, but in general the tendencies went into a decline and the main thing is this, because in spite of all the extremely profound ideas which came out of this movement and of this process, at the same time the level of the means of production were not advanced enough to actually carry these things out and verify them in a proper way. What was needed was first of all, hundreds of years of categorization of nature, of looking and dismembering basically, looking at all the different aspects of nature. Before, later on, people could start getting a grand overview again and taking society and taking science forward. Now, why is all of this important today? I would say that the main thing is that even though we've had all this development of science, but as I also tried to explain in the beginning, at the same time we still live in a class society which means that the ruling class is clinging more and more to idealist and obscure ideas to try to justify as rule. And we see the creeping in of idealist ideas into every single field of science, of art, culture, politics and knowledge of society. For us, philosophy is an extremely important thing, not just to, because it's interesting, which it is, but in order to understand how the world works and in order to change the world basically. And in fact, in Greek philosophy, I think what we can see is the potential of humanity because here we had a tiny taste of what we are capable of. In fact, these philosophers by power of induction basically went far, far beyond the capabilities of their time. Now, today we have the development of science and technology and industry to unheard level, which means that not only a tiny group of people can be freed up from labor to put their time to the use of development of science, technology and philosophy, but we can free up all of humanity, in fact. The potential there exists for in a very short period of time in a socialist society to free up immense resources, which will mean that these ideas and these people we see today will be recreated on a far, far higher scale, on a far, far higher level that the process that we saw taking place in ancient Greece is only a taste of what we can actually achieve in a socialist society. Thank you very much.