1 Possibility Before Ontology: Mythos and Logos in Early Greece

Western philosophy begins not with ontology but with construal. Before the systematic categories of being, before the partitions of actuality and potentiality, there was the movement from mythos to logos — a reorganisation of how possibility could be spoken, narrated, and thought.

Mythic tradition construed the world through narrative alignment: gods, forces, and primordial powers were woven into a symbolic order that explained and oriented human life. Possibility was not abstract but embodied in stories, enacted through ritual, and bound to cycles of fate. The horizon of potential was given in mythic terms — events were explained by divine will, and transformation occurred through the intervention of powers beyond human ordering.

The pre-Socratics mark a decisive shift. Figures such as Thales, Heraclitus, and Anaximander sought not simply to retell myth in new guises but to restructure possibility itself. In place of divine genealogy, they posited elemental principles — water, fire, apeiron — as the grounds of emergence. Heraclitus’ flux and Logos, Anaximander’s boundless, Parmenides’ Being: these were not just theories but construal strategies, cutting the fabric of potential into systematic concepts.

What mattered was not the replacement of gods with elements but the invention of a new order of construal. Myth oriented possibility toward divine narrative; logos oriented it toward principle and relation. With this shift, the world became thinkable as an order susceptible to reasoned inquiry, argument, and conceptual distinction.

The pre-Socratic turn was therefore not yet ontology in the later sense but the preparation for it. It opened a horizon in which possibility could be construed abstractly rather than narratively, through concepts rather than gods, through systematic relation rather than mythic fate. In this movement, possibility itself was reconfigured: no longer only the play of divine powers but a field open to rational construal.

Thus, before ontology proper, we find the first great re-cut of construal — the moment when mythos yielded to logos, and possibility began to be thought as a horizon of reason.