Philosophy of Science — Neheh and Djet: Ancient Egyptian Metaconstancy as a Problem and Foundation of Ancient Greek Philosophy and Beyond

A philosophical and scientific schema of concepts, traditionally ascribed to the early Greek, so-called “pre-Socratic” philosophers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, was already present in ancient Egyptian thought.

The concept of absolute constancy or eternity, on the one hand, and the constancy of change, on the other, were also ideas of great importance to Plato and Aristotle, as well as for current theoretical philosophy and science.

For example, Ernst Cassirer wrote: “We may dispute concerning the results of science or its first principles, but its general function seems to be unquestionable. It is science that gives us the assurance of a constant world. . . . In a changing universe scientific thought fixes the points of rest, the unmovable poles.”

Or Karl Popper: “…Heraclitus’ greatness lies in the fact that he discovered the central problem of the physical sciences and of cosmology: the problem of change.”

On Parmenides, Popper wrote: “…the search for invariants is…one of the most important of all scientific tasks.”

The Egyptians did it differently from the Greeks, and that way was actually more like the way we do metaconstancy in today’s philosophy and science: a more balanced and less judgmental approach to constant change along with unchangeable constancy or constant in every possible world.

Thus, this research involves a great deal of egyptology. But it is also much more than just Egyptological research. We will look at the roles of constants and variables, especially at the role of metaconstancy in physics, the ways in which permanence and invariance are constructed by the child in Piagetian developmental psychology, and also touch upon the scientific aspects of metachange, how change changes and how it may change.