Pre-Socratic philosophy

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Pre-Socratic philosophy

The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers

Greek philosophy

Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry. Many philosophers today concede that Greek philosophy has shaped the entire Western thought since its inception....
were active before Socrates

Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
or contemporaneously, but expounding knowledge developed earlier. The popularity of the term originates with Hermann Diels' work Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics, 1903). Major analyses of Pre-Socratic thought have been made by Gregory Vlastos

Gregory Vlastos

Gregory Vlastos was a scholar of ancient philosophy, and author of several works on Plato and Socrates. He was also a Christian believer and has written on Christian faith as well....
, Jonathan Barnes

Jonathan Barnes

Jonathan Barnes is a United Kingdom philosopher, translator and historian of ancient philosophy. He taught for 25 years at Oxford University before moving to the University of Geneva....
, Gordon Clark

Gordon Clark

Gordon Haddon Clark was an United States philosopher and Calvinist theology. He was a primary advocate for the idea of presuppositional apologetics and was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Butler University for 28 years....
, and Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Encyclopedia

The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers

Greek philosophy

Socrates

Gregory Vlastos

Jonathan Barnes

Gordon Clark

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th century philosophy Germans philosophy and classical philology. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor and aphorism....
in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is a publication of an incomplete book by Friedrich Nietzsche. He had a clean copy made from his notes with the intention of publication....
.

It is sometimes difficult to determine the actual line of argument some pre-Socratics used in supporting their particular views. While most of them produced significant texts, none of the texts have survived in complete form. All we have are quotations by later philosophers and historians, and the occasional textual fragment.

The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. Many of them asked:

From where does everything come?
From what is everything created?
How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
How might we describe nature mathematically?

Others concentrated on defining problems and paradoxes that became the basis for later mathematical, scientific and philosophic study. Of course, the cosmologies

Cosmology

Cosmology is study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity's place in it. Though the word cosmology is recent , study of the Universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism, and religion....
proposed by the early Greek philosophers have been updated by views based on modern science. Later philosophers rejected many of the answers they provided, but continued to place importance on their questions.

List of philosophers and schools

The traditional cursus of pre-socratic philosophers and movements (there are minor variations) is shown below:

* Milesian school

Milesian school

The Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the 6th Century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus....

Thales of Miletus (624-546 BCE)

Anaximander

Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Ancient Greece philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales....
(610-546 BCE)

Anaximenes of Miletus

Anaximenes of Miletus was a Greece Pre-Socratic philosopher from the latter half of the 6th century BC, probably a younger contemporary of Anaximander, whose pupil or friend he is said to have been....
(585-525 BCE)

Pythagorean Schools
Pythagoreanism

Pythagoreanism is a term used for the esoteric and metaphysics beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were much influenced by mathematics and probably a very inspirational source for Plato and Platonism....

Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos was an Ionians Ancient Greeks mathematician and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. He is often revered as a great mathematician, mysticism and scientist; however some have questioned the scope of his contributions to mathematics and natural philosophy....
(582-496 BCE)

Philolaus

Philolaus was a Greeks Pythagoreanism and Presocratic. He argued that all matter is composed of limited and unlimited things, and that the universe is determined by numbers....
(470-380 BCE)

Alcmaeon of Croton

Alcmaeon of Crotone was one of the most eminent natural philosophers and medical theorists of antiquity. His father's name was Pirithus, and he is said by some to have been a pupil of Pythagoras, and must therefore have lived in the latter half of the 6th century BC....

Archytas

Archytas was an Ancient Greece philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and military strategy. He was a scientist of the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics, as well as a good friend of Plato....
(428-347 BCE)

Heraclitus
Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus was a Pre-Socratic philosophy Greeks philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor.Heraclitus is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and that the Logos is the fundamental order of all....
(535-475 BCE)
Eleatic School
Eleatics

The Eleatics were a school of Pre-Socratic philosophy philosophy at Elea, a Greek colony in Campania, Italy. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by Parmenides....

Xenophanes

of Colophon was a Greece philosopher, poet, and social and religious critic. Our knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers....
(570-470 BCE)

Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy....
(510-440 BCE)

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Velia was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic....
(490-430 BCE)

Melissus of Samos

Melissus of Samos Island is the third and last member of the ancient school of Eleatics, whose other members include Zeno of Elea and Parmenides, the most important of the Pre-Socratic Philosophy....
(C.470 BCE-Unknown)

Pluralist School
Pluralist School

The Pluralist School was a school of pre-Socratic philosophers who attempted to reconcile Parmenides' rejection of change with the apparently changing world of sense experience....

Empedocles

Empedocles was a Hellenic civilization pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek colony in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the origin of the cosmogenesis theory of the four classical elements....
(490-430 BCE)

Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic philosophy Greek philosophy famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous , the ordering force....
(500-428 BCE)

Atomist School
Atomism

In natural philosophy, atomism is the philosophical theses that was theoryzed by Leucippus in the fifth century BC. For it all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, indestructible building blocks ? atoms ....

Leucippus

Leucippus or Leukippos was the first to develop the theory of atomism ? the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms ? which was elaborated in far greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus....
(5th century BCE, dates unknown)

Democritus

Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera in the north of Greece. He was the most prolific, and ultimately the most influential, of the pre-Socratic philosophers; his atomic theory may be regarded as the culmination of early Greek thought....
(460-370 BCE)

Sophism
Sophism

Sophism can mean two very different things: In the modern definition, a sophism is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone....

Protagoras

Protagoras was a Pre-Socratic philosophy Ancient Greeks philosopher and is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras , Plato credits him with having invented the role of the professional sophist or teacher of virtue....
(490-420 BCE)

Gorgias

Gorgias , "the Nihilist", Greece sophist, pre-socratic philosophy and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophism....
(487-376 BCE)

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a sophist of Ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic ....

Callicles

Callicles is a character in Plato?s Dialogue#Platonic_dialogues Gorgias . He is an Athens citizen, who is a student of the sophist Gorgias....

Critias

Critias , born in Classical Athens, son of Callaeschrus, was an uncle of Plato, and a leading member of the Thirty Tyrants, and one of the most violent....

Prodicus

Prodicus of Ceos He came to Athens as ambassador from Ceos, and became known as a speaker and a teacher. Like Protagoras, he professed to train his pupils for domestic and civic service; but it would appear that, while Protagoras's chief instruments of education were rhetoric and style, Prodicus made linguistics prominent in his curriculum....
(465-390 BCE)

Hippias

Hippias of Elis Ancient Greece Sophist, was born about the middle of the 5th century BC and was thus a younger contemporary of Protagoras and Socrates....
(485-415 BCE)

Antiphon (person)

Antiphon the Sophist lived in Athens probably in the last two decades of the 5th century BC. There is an ongoing controversy over whether he is one and the same with Antiphon of the Athenian deme Rhamnus in Attica, Greece , the earliest of the ten Attic orators....
(480-411 BCE)

Lycophron

Lycophron (Sophist)

Lycophron was a sophist of Ancient Greece. He is known for his statement , that "law is only a convention, a surety to another of justice". This means that he treats law as a mere means, in the context of a social contract theory, without considering it as something special, in contradistinction to, e.g., Plato but similar to both Thrasymach...

Anonymous Iamblichi

Diogenes of Apollonia
Diogenes Apolloniates

Diogenes of Apollonia or Apolloniates , an ancient Greek natural philosopher, was a native of the Milesians colony Apollonia, Thrace in Thrace, present-day Sozopol on the Black Sea....
(C.460 BCE-Unknown)

Other early Greek thinkers

This list includes several men, particularly the Seven Sages

Seven Sages of Greece

The Seven Sages or Seven Wise Men was the title given by ancient Greece tradition to seven early 6th century B.C. philosophers, statesmen and law-givers who were renowned in the following centuries for their wisdom....
, who appear to have been practical politicians and sources of epigrammatic wisdom, rather than speculative thinkers or philosophers

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
in the modern sense.

Seven Sages of Greece
Seven Sages of Greece

The Seven Sages or Seven Wise Men was the title given by ancient Greece tradition to seven early 6th century B.C. philosophers, statesmen and law-givers who were renowned in the following centuries for their wisdom....

Solon

Solon was an Athens statesman, lawmaker, and lyric poetry. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in Archaic period in Greece Athens....
(c. 594 BCE)

Chilon of Sparta

For the athlete, see Chilon of PatrasChilon of Sparta was a Lacedaemonian, son of Damagetus and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He was elected an ephor in Sparta....
(c. 560 BCE)

Thales

Thales of Miletus , was a Pre-Socratic philosophy Greek philosophy from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek philosophy....
(c. 585 BCE)

Bias of Priene

Bias , the son of Teutamus and a citizen of Priene was a ancient Greece philosopher. Satyrus the Peripatetic puts him as the wisest of all the Seven Sages of Greece....
(c. 570 BCE)

Cleobulus of Rhodes (c. 600 BCE)

Pittacus of Mitylene (c. 600 BCE)

Periander

Periander was the second tyrant of Corinth, Greece in the 7th century BC. He was the son of the first tyrant, Cypselus. Periander succeeded his father in 627 BC....
(625-585 BCE)

Aristeas
Aristeas

Aristeas was a semi-legendary Greek poet and Iatromantis, a native of Proconnesus in Asia Minor, active ca. 7th century BCE. In book IV of Histories , Herodotus reports that Aristeas appeared to drop down dead in a fuller's shop, but before his relatives could collect the body, disappeared, only to return six years later....
of Proconnesus (7th Century BCE ?)
Pherecydes of Syros
Pherecydes of Syros

Pherecydes of Syros was a Greek thinker from the island of Syros, of the 6th century BC. Pherecydes authored the Pentemychos, one of the first attested prose works in Greek literature, which formed an important bridge between mythic and pre-Socratic thought....
(c. 540 BCE)
Anacharsis
Anacharsis

Anacharsis was a Scythian philosopher who travelled from his homeland on the northern shores of the Black Sea to Athens in the early 6th century BCE and made a great impression as a forthright, outspoken "barbarian," apparently a forerunner of the Cynics, though none of his works have survived....
(c. 590 BCE)
Theano (mathematician)
Theano (mathematician)

Theano was a Greeks mathematician. She is also thought to have been a physician.The best known interpretation of her life is that her father Pythonax of Crete was a great supporter of Pythagoras....
(5th century BCE, dates unknown)

External links

D. H. Th. Vollenhoven's
D. H. Th. Vollenhoven

Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Vollenhoven was with Herman Dooyeweerd the first generation of Reformational philosophy, an intellectual movement with which Vollenhoven worked communally from his election in 1936 as President of the newly-organized group formed to advance the movement; the organization is now known as the Association for Reformationa...
translated by H. Evan Runner
H. Evan Runner

Howard Evan Runner, often referred to as H. Evan Runner, was professor of philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States from 1951 until his retirement in 1981....