Encyclopedia
Classical
Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry. In many ways it paved the way both to modern
science and to modern
philosophy. Clear unbroken lines of influence lead from early Greek philosophers to
the Renaissance,
the Enlightenment, and the secular sciences of the modern day.
Pre-Socratic philosophers
The history of philosophy in the
West begins with the
Greeks, and particularly with a group of philosophers commonly called the
pre-Socratics. The
pre-Socratics were often known as naturalists or cosmologists. The first Greek philosopher was called Thales, of
Miletus. Of course, this is not to deny the occurrence of other pre-philosophical rumblings in
Egyptian and Babylonian cultures. Certainly great thinkers and writers existed in each of these cultures, and we have evidence that some of the earliest Greek philosophers may have had contact with at least some of the products of Egyptian and Babylonian thought. However, the early Greek thinkers add at least one element which differentiates their thought from all those who came before them. For the first time in history, we discover in their writings something more than dogmatic assertions about the ordering of the world -- we find reasoned arguments for various beliefs about the world.
It is now believed that decision making through oral debate in the polis would have developed rational thought to carefully construct arguments for and against an action, and these debates would have required calling on abstract principles such as justice, without invoking the notion of a god.
As it turns out, nearly all of the various cosmologies proposed by the early Greek philosophers are profoundly and demonstrably false, and this was often due to their speculations running far ahead of what their senses could cope with, but this does not diminish their importance. For even if later philosophers summarily rejected the answers they provided, they could not escape their questions:
- What is life?
- From where does everything come?
- Of what does it really consist?
- How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
- And why can we describe them with a singular mathematics?
And the method the Greek philosophers followed in forming and transmitting their answers became just as important as the questions they asked. The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. In other words they depended on reason and observation to illuminate the true nature of the world around them, and they used rational argument to advance their views to others. And though philosophers have argued at length about the relative weights that reason and observation should have, for two and a half millennia they have basically united in the use of the very method first used by the pre-Socratics.
Difficulties often arise in pinning down the ideas of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and in determining the actual line of argument they used in supporting their particular views. This problem arises not from some defect in the men themselves or in their ideas, but simply from their separation from us in history. While most of these men produced significant texts, we have no complete versions of any of those texts. We have only quotations by later philosophers and historians, along with the occasional textual fragment.
ThalesAnaximanderPythagorasHeraclitus of Ephesus Heraclitus is an excellent example of the Pre-Socratic philosopher. All of his existing fragments can be written in 45 small pages as poetry. Although he wrote twenty-five hundred years ago and very little of his work still exists, it is very appealing. Some of his lines remain among our common sayings today. For example, "You can never step into the same river twice" Brooks translates the original as follows:
- The river
- where you set
- your foot just now
- is gone-
- those waters giving way to this,
- now this.
Heraclitus had a unique view of the world. For him change was the most important fact about the world, as the lines quoted illustrate.
Brooks in his Introduction and brief Notes points out that it is very difficult to translate such ancient writing into contemporary English. The changes in the culture, the figures of speech, the chasm between the background of the contemporary reader and that of a Greek of twenty-five hundred years ago as relates to our understanding of the world, and so forth, makes literal translation pointless and freer translation subject to question. It is a point to keep in mind when considering any of these Pre-Socratics.
Heraclitus also illustrates the point that these early philosophers do have important things to tell us about the world.
Xenophanes
Parmenides and the other Eleatic philosophers
Leucippus,
Democritus and the other
AtomistsProtagoras and the Sophists
EmpedoclesSocrates
Socrates, an Athenian philosopher, believed that a person should always try to do good. He claimed that one has an obligation to disobey a bad command. He made his most important contribution to Western thought through his method of inquiry. In addition, he also taught many famous Greek philosophers. His most famous pupil was Plato. However, since Socrates discussed ideas that upset many people , he was sentenced to death by drinking the poison hemlock. The ironic thing about this is that during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants he was often threatened, but survived despite his continued protests for democracy. When democracy came, he was executed for corrupting their young. Most of what we know about Socrates came from Plato as Socrates wrote nothing down.
Plato and Aristotle
Aristotle, known as
Aristoteles in most languages other than English , has, along with
Plato, the reputation of one of the two most influential philosophers in Western thought.
Their works, although connected in many fundamental ways, differ considerably in both style and substance. Plato wrote several dozen philosophical dialogues—arguments in the form of conversations, usually with Socrates as a participant—and a few letters. Though the early dialogues deal mainly with methods of acquiring knowledge, and most of the last ones with justice and practical ethics, his most famous works expressed a synoptic view of ethics,
metaphysics, reason,
knowledge, and human life. Predominant ideas include the notion that knowledge gained through the senses always remains confused and impure, and that the contemplative soul that turns away from the world can acquire "true" knowledge. The soul alone can have knowledge of the Forms, the real essences of things, of which the world we see is but an imperfect copy. Such knowledge has ethical as well as scientific import. One can view Plato, with qualification, as an idealist and a rationalist.
Aristotle was one of Plato's students, but placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses, and would correspondingly better earn the modern label of
empiricist. Thus Aristotle set the stage for what would eventually develop into the
scientific method centuries later. The works of Aristotle that still exist today appear in treatise form, mostly unpublished by their author. The most important include
Physics,
Metaphysics,
Ethics,
Politics,
De Anima ,
Poetics, and many others.
Aristotle was a great thinker and philosopher, and was called 'the master' by Avicenna in the following centuries. His views and approaches dominated early Western science for almost 2000 years. As well as philosophy, Aristotle was a formidable inventor, and is credited with many significant inventions and observations. Robert M. Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, makes the observation that Aristotle both helped create the analytic approach which forms the backbone of the
scientific method and much of philosophy, but that against this, he also took great pride in categorizing nature into lists and taxonomic schemes, which in some cases led to subjects such as
rhetoric evolving over time from rich art forms, into recipe-like rules.
Schools of thought in the Hellenistic period
In the
Hellenistic period, many different schools of thought developed in the Greek world and often attracted Romans who contributed to the development of these Greek philosophies. The most notable schools were:
- Neo-Platonism: Ammonius Saccas, Porphyry, Plotinus , Iamblichus, Proclus
- Academic Skepticism: Arcesilaus, Carneades
- Pyrrhonian Skepticism: Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus
- Cynicism: Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes
- Stoicism: Zeno of Citium, Crates of Mallus , Seneca , Epictetus , Marcus Aurelius
- Epicureanism: Epicurus and Lucretius
- Eclecticism: Cicero
The spread of
Christianity through the Roman world ushered in the end of the Hellenistic philosophy and the beginnings of
Medieval Philosophy.
See also
...
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- a book which inter alia examines the nature of Greek philosophy and its early development.
References
- John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 1930.
- William Keith Chambers Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 1, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, 1962.
- Martin Litchfield West, Early Greek philosophy and the Orient, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971.
- Martin Litchfield West, The East Face of Helicon: west Asiatic elements in Greek poetry and myth, Oxford [England] ; New York: Clarendon Press, 1997.
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