Why start intro to philosophy with the Presocratics?

There's an awful lot that needs to be put into a very small amount of time and the presocractics are both difficult and fragmentary. Anyone who goes to really get anything out of a introduction to philosophy course won't have developed the skills necessary to get much out of them.

Since my Greek skills are negligible, I don't have the skills necessary to get much out of them let alone teach them. Sure I've read some secondary sources, such as Heidegger's Early Greek Thinking, but I literally have no way to evaluate the claims that are made in that book. For this reason the following isn't meant to be a scholarly investigation of the presocratic thinkers, this is my thinking about how to begin teaching introduction to philosophy.

There are some accessible translations and commentaries are available. I used The Presocratic Philosophers and the presocratic sections of Copleston's A History of Philosophy were what I used when I was studying for my comprehensive exams.

The difficult and fragmentary nature of the presocratics does have some advantages though. I can't really expect beginning students to read the presocratics and I can't really expect beginning students to have read anything on the first day of class. A fortuitus coincidence. What's more, I do expect them to have read at least a little of Plato's Meno by the second class. Plato can, or at least should, be pretty intimidating.

In reading Plato, its important to be able to identify the argument that motivates each position he considers. The dialog form does not make this very easy. Before the beginner can get around to finding the argument, they first have to find out something about the form. The most obvious thing about the dialogs are all of these characters, these personalities that interact to drive both the story and the argument. Unlike so many philosophers who use a dialog format to make a point, these characters aren't simple stand-ins for abstract positions or concepts (such as theism v. atheism or beauty and justice), they're full blown characters with motivations, desires and individual characteristics. Plato can pull this off because Meno and Anytus and any number of other characters were real people know by Plato and, presumably, used as models for the characters in the dialogs. Plato knew, or at least knew of, these flesh and blood people before he wrote about them.

The novice student of philosophy can easily get stuck on the question of "who is Plato?", before they even get to the questions about "what were Plato's arguments?". Thoughtful students will in particular have this sort of difficulty. In order to address, however briefly, who Plato is, it helps to get some idea of the Greek thinkers who created the intellectual enviroment in which he operated.

There's a third reason for discussing the Presocratics, however briefly. That is that they present an easy way at getting at the philosophical impulse. There is a difference between appearence and reality. Application of reason can reveal the reality of the situation. We can account for the behaviour of the stick and the water together.

Begin with wonder at the bent stick experiment. Place a ruler into water and it appears to bend. The appearence of the stick conflicts with its reality. Yet, the appearence is not random or even misleading. To the modern high school graduate, there's nothing new here. The American college freshman is actually quite adept at looking at a table as a collection of dense points of matter floating in a void and of consider everything as made up of a collection of elements that, in their pure states at least, don't seem to share any properties with the things they make up. Plato writes a person who sees some difficulties in develioping these sorts of theories and tries to construct more nuanced theories about what the appropriate sorts of explanation are possible. Before we can get at that, we need to get at the early impulse to try to make sense out of the world and to take responsibility for how we make sense out of the world.
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