Discussions
Map compliments of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. See https://oxfordre.com/classics/page/maps/maps-of-the-ancient-world.
Studies
The Presocratics
The philosophers before Socrates focused on how the world arose and how it works. They wrote speculatively about nature and the cosmos. Some challenged the possibility of science. And some emphasized practical studies about how people can get along or get ahead in the world. Their speculations led to advances in scientific knowledge.
Socrates
Socrates turned away from cosmology, and while he was fascinated with efforts of the Sophists to pursue on practical subjects, he himself insisted that what we should concern ourselves with was not our own success but what is right and wrong, good an evil. He turned philosophy towards ethics and moral theory.
Plato
A follower of Socrates, Plato wished to put the study of ethics on a firm foundation by developing a science of reality, or metaphysics, a science of knowledge, or epistemology, and studies of political science, education, aesthetics, and, eventually, natural science. He saw the world of experience as subject to an ideal realm.
Aristotle
A student of Plato, Aristotle never accepted his mentor's focus on the ideal realities of another world. He saw the ground of reality as concrete physical objects, from which ideal or universal entities were but abstractions. He developed a powerful account of science, and divided knowledge into most of the departmental studies that make up the modern curriculum.
Early Science
Early Greek science was deeply influenced by most of the early thinkers. The Presocratics believed in making and testing hypotheses. They invented concepts such as those of sources, principles, elements, compounds, atoms and empty space. Aristotle formalized logic and also took over the concept of a logic of scientific discovery and proof from Plato.
Recent Discussions
Being 2.2.2: Socratic Questions
If we focus on Socrates’ method as portrayed in Plato’s early dialogues, we see Socrates seeking wisdom from the people he talks to, his “interlocutors,” in philosophical parlance. These are sometimes self-appointed experts, but they may also be just ordinary people, sometimes even teenagers at the gymnasium. He typically presents himself as unable to attain wisdom himself, and seeks for help from an interlocutor. Socrates almost always narrows the discussion to a question for a definition, usually of some desirable virtue, suggesting that until they can define the virtue, they
Being 2.2: The Rise of Socrates
2.2.1 The Street Philosopher and his Disciples The heyday of the sophists was the second half of the fifth century BCE. During the same period, another thinker rose to prominence, one who, like the sophists, was concerned not with the origin and functioning of the cosmos but with the human world and human welfare. Yet he was in many ways the complete antithesis of the sophists. Whereas they promoted themselves, touted their professional successes, and advertised their educational skills, attracting large crowds and amassing wealth for themselves, Socrates went about
Being 2.1.3: The Legacy of the Sophists
So what did the sophists contribute to the intellectual world of what is sometimes called the Greek Enlightenment? They clearly were men of the hour, who offered something that a great many ambitious young men were after: education in practical matters relating to politics and business. In the mid-fifth century BC, democracy had emerged as an exciting new political experiment. Athens in particular, led by reformers such as Pericles, was opening the door to ordinary citizens to fill more, and eventually all, the positions of government. In Athens and other
Being 2.1.2.2: Is Everything Relative?
Perhaps the most striking, and most influential, approach of the sophists was their exploitation of the notion that things are relative. Plato has the sophist Protagoras, when he is asked whether good things are beneficial to humans, launch into a diatribe: I know plenty of things—foods, drinks, drugs, and many others—which are harmful to men, and others which are beneficial, and others again which, so far as men are concerned, are neither, but are harmful or beneficial to horses, and others only to cattle or dogs. Some have no effect
Being 2.1.2: Teachings of the Sophists
The sophists brought new energy and excitement to the intellectual scene in Greece in the mid-fifth century BCE. But did they introduce an intellectual revolution? There is a temptation to treat them as offering an intellectual revolution, revealing the naivete of traditional conceptions which based knowledge on ancient myths and inherited ways of thinking. They did indeed tend to emphasize new ways of thinking, and they did promise to give their students the tools to challenge inherited customs and to overthrow traditions. But at the same time that they offered
Being 2.1: The Rise of the Sophists
2.1.1 The Lure of Practical Knowledge The mid-fifth century BCE saw the rise of the sophists. The sophists were intellectuals who could claim to be heirs of the wise men previous centuries. One group of wise men came to be known as the Seven Sages, who included Thales, by all accounts the first philosopher. But even here the picture is a bit muddy. For the term ‘philosopher’ (philosophos) which appeared occasionally in early times, was not yet the name of a recognized profession or intellectual activity. Terms like starting with
The Buried Library: A Conference on the Herculaneum Papyri
On perhaps the 24th of October, 79 CE, in southern Italy, Mt. Vesuvius erupted with more force many atom bombs. Within 48 hours, the nearby cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under up to 80 feet of volcanic ash; thousands of people died in the calamity. In Herculaneum, one lavish villa with an extensive library was buried. In the 1500s, some locals digging below the surface of the land discovered ancient structures and artefacts. They searched and found what looked like small burned logs that turned out to be
Being 1.5.3.4: The Emergence of Ancient Greek Meteorology
Before Parmenides and especially before Anaxagoras, there was no strong distinction between what we would call astronomy and what we would call meteorology. Both had to do with astra, stars or heavenly bodies, and with meteora, mid-air phenomena. On most theories, these were continuous with each other. Anaximander, it is true, had heavenly bodies that were much larger than earth but, my modern standards, not much larger: the sun consisted of a circular tube like a bicycle tire that had a diameter 27 times that of earth; the moon, a
Being 1.5.3.3: Catch a Falling Star
Soon after Anaxagoras had published his theory of the heavens, a shooting star appeared in the daytime, leaving a trail as it plunged through earth’s atmosphere. It crashed to the ground in the vicinity of Aegospotami “Goat Rivers,” a town in the Hellespont in northern Greece. It left a large stone the size of a wagon, presumably in a huge crater.[1] It would become a tourist attraction down to the time of the Roman Empire. It was, in modern terms, a meteorite from outer space. Something strange happened in the
Being 1.5.3.2: Empedocles the Cosmologist
We hear from Aristotle that Empedocles was younger than Anaxagoras, but presumably not by much, since the two philosophers were, by all accounts, contemporaries.[1] Empedocles was a native of Acragas (which the Romans called Agrigentum, the Italians Agrigento), a Greek colony in the middle of the south coast of Sicily. He was influenced not only by Parmenides and other Presocratics, but also by Pythagoras in his views of the soul and religion. Like Parmenides, he composed philosophical poetry in epic verse in two poems, On Nature and Purifications, or perhaps
Being 1.5.3: The Breakthrough
In speculating about the nature of the cosmos and particularly the heavens, Parmenides had done something that no one on earth had ever done before. He had made a major scientific breakthrough. And, as we shall see, soon everybody—well, at least everybody who studied the cosmos—knew it. 1.5.3.1 Anaxagoras the Cosmologist Writing in the early fifth century BCE, Anaxagoras probably led the way in appreciating Parmenides’ breakthrough. Born in Clazomenae, a Greek colony in Ionia on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, he was the first Ionian philosopher to set up
Being 1.5.2.3: Leucippus’ Atomism
We come at last to the secret success of fifth century BCE pluralism: atomism. We have the advantage of hindsight here: after 25 centuries of toying with the idea that there might be some minimal particles that form the building blocks of all matter, it was discovered that atomism was true. (In the meantime, it emerged that the minimal particles were not pieces of solid matter, but themselves composed of subatomic particles: weird packets of energy. But that is a story for another time. In any case, the ancient theory