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The Philosophy of Antiquity
The Axial Age
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers argued that during the period from 800 to 200 B.C. the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece. He termed this period “The Axial Age”. This was a period of intellectual freedom, a period where old certainties had lost their validity and where new ones were still not in place. Platonism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism were major currents of thought in this period, but it also included the pre-Socratic thinkers, as mentioned below.
The pre-Socratic philosophers
Thales of Miletus (about 624 B.C.- 546 B.C; one of the Seven Sages of Greece)
Thales’ rejection of mythological explanations for natural phenomena, became an essential idea for the scientific revolution. The first true mathematician. Water is the origin of all things. All things contain divinity.
Anaximander (about 610 B.C. – 546 B.C.; Miletus)
The original element was material, but without any particular shape. There was movement, and the world was created from this movement. The universe is a series of concentric circles with the Earth in the centre. When the sun starts to shine on the Earth, part of the water condensates and fishlike creatures appear and crawl up on land, and become animals and humans. This is an ongoing process.
Anaximenes (585 B.C. – 528 B.C.; Miletus)
Air is the origin of all things. The principle governing all change is compression and decompression. The world is air in constant movement. Air is a living element.
Anaxagoras (about 500 B.C. – 428 B.C.; born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, moved to Athens. First philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens.)
The Genesis has taken place by rotation and is initiated by nous (spirit or reason). The world is living and organic.
With the above mentioned pre-Socratic thinkers, there are three thoughts that have been important for the subsequent development in philosophy: 1) The idea that the world has been created from forces that are still active; 2) Creation is a continuous process; 3) Nature, both the organic and the inorganic matter, is alive. These ideas are still alive in science.
Heraklit (about 535 B.C. – 475 B.C.; Ephesus, Ionia)
Change is the innermost principle of being, as illustrated by his saying: “No man ever steps into the same river twice.” Change is the result of internal contradictions and conflicts. These conflicts, and not any external force, are the drivers of change. Man must know himself, and by introspection he can hope to find logos (the true expression of the self and of the reality surrounding him). He must move beyond the impressions of the senses through reflection. Our reason unites us with other people, whereas our senses separate us from other people. The material expression of logos is fire.
Parmenides (Elea, Greek city in the southern coast of Italy; born a few decades after Heraklit)
Reason gives us true knowledge, not the senses. Being has not been created, it has always existed. The world is eternal. It is forever the same, and cannot be changed. True knowledge can only be obtained about “what is”. The world of appearances, formed by our sensory faculties, lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful.
Empedocles (about 490 B.C. – 430 B.C.; Agrigente, Sicily))
The basis for the creation of the world consists of the four elements earth, water, fire and air (the firm, the fluid, the burning, and the aireal). These elements are stable, but they occur in varying combinations – thus combining the notions of stability and change. In the larger perspective, the stable structure of necessity governs, whereas chance governs the smaller perspective. The creation of the human being is a result of chance.
Pythagoras (about 570 B.C. – 495 B.C.; born at Samos, moved to Croton in Southern Italy)
Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, formed a religious and philosophical movement. The Pythagorean cosmos was characterized by mathematical harmony, and the planets moved around a centre in a way which created music (“spheric harmony”). This centre was a great fire, around which also the Earth circled. The Earth is round, because the spheric shape is the most perfect, beautiful and harmonic shape. The Pythagoreans viewed homogeneity and stability as positive values, while they feared heterogeneity and movement.
Democritus (about 460 – 370 B.C.; born in Abdera, Thrace; pupil of Leucippus)
The world’s building blocks are small particles, infinite in number. They are so small that they are invisible. The element that forms the particle, which is called “what is”, is so compact that it cannot be divided and is named atomos (Greek for undividable) – atom. The atoms move in a void (called “what is not”). What is and what is not are both just as real (as opposed to Parmenides who thought that there was no void). The movement of the atoms in the void create clusters that the world is made of, and movement, multiplicity and change become possible.
Sophists
The sophists were less interested in natural philosophy and more concerned with human life, such as language, customs, right or wrong. Questions of value and legitimacy took precedence over questions on the origins of the world. Protagoras (about 480 B.C. – 410 B.C.) and Gorgias (died about 380 B.C.) were the two most notable sophists. “Man is the measure of all things”, said Protagoras. The sophists were the carriers of the Athenian Enlightenment, the moral and political teachers of democracy. They gave courses in logic, rhetoric, and policymaking.
The sophists were seen as a menace by the nobility, because they enabled ordinary citizens to participate in political life – at the expense of the nobility’s political hegemony. The reaction of the nobility (voiced through Socrates in Plato’s dialogues) was criticism against the sophists along several lines: 1) They were teaching for pay, 2) They said they could teach arête (excellence, virtue), but the nobility contended that this was an innate quality which was not accessible to ordinary people; 3) Sophists were only occupied with utility; 4) Sophists did not accept that there was a given truth; everything was relative (cf. the citation of Protagoras above).
The Classic period in Western philosophy
Socrates (469 B.C. – 399 B.C.; Athens)
We know Socrates mainly from the texts of Plato. Some contemporaries, the playwright Aristophanes and the historian Xenophon, did not give flattering portraits of Socrates. Plato, however, gave Socrates the main role in the many dialogues he wrote. It seems fair to think that Plato saw something that Aristophanes and Xenophon did not see. The major message left by Socrates, aside from all the important points that appear in the dialogues and which we cannot clearly separate from Plato’s own ideas, is that dialogue is the principal vehicle leading to truth. Ethics and the search for truth through the use of reason was his basic concern, through which he is seen as one of the founders of Western philosophy.
Plato (about 424 B.C. – 348 B.C.; Athens)
Plato was a student of Socrates, and founder of the Academy in Athens – the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Most of his writings were in the form of dialogues where Socrates played a prominent part. Since Socrates himself did not write anything, it is not possible to say which parts of the dialogues come from Socrates’ ideas and which parts are Plato’s own ideas. Plato’s dialogues introduced a new way of expressing ideas, opening up for an exploration – through the meeting of opposing ideas – of the way leading to truth. Plato’s cosmologic thoughts, expressed in the dialogue Timaios, saw the world as existing at two levels, one level being a divine, permanent, timeless, harmonious world governed by reason, and the other level being the world as our senses see it, characterized by change and random disturbances. This brought together the views of Parmenides and of the Pythagoreans.
Plato’s world of ideas, as drawn from the vision of perfection governing the divine level of the world, contains beings and elements in their true form and in a harmonious relation to each other. The famous allegory of the grotto gives a striking example of this thought. Plato’s dialogues represent an effort to get closer to this ideal world. Goodness, justice and beauty are notions that exist in themselves, and not solely as subjective objects of the senses (as the sophists contended), and the purpose of the dialogues was to bring our knowledge closer to the truth of these and other notions.
Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C.; Chalcidice, later Athens)
Empirical observation of the world as it appeared was more important for Aristotle than for Plato, who was more concerned with theoretical questions of normative character. Plato was a rationalist, less inclined to rely on the observations of the senses. Whereas Plato’s ideal world exists in its own right, alongside with the material world we observe, the world of Aristotle links ideas and matter through observation and the notion of change is part of this interdependence. It is for Aristotle not static, as it is for Plato.
However, Aristotle has taken his fundamental categories of thought from Plato. The originality of Aristotle stems from his development of new methods to tackle the problems faced. He broadens his scientific outlook from mathematics (which was Plato’s scientific platform) to include also physics and metaphysics (questions of being and non-being). Politics, ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics and poetry were also among his subjects of interest. His writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy. Studies of nature (physical science) are his prime interest, and in his work he develops major classifications based on his observations. Every object consists of form and matter, and it has a potential for development that it will strive to attain (telos).
Epicureans
Epicurus (341 B.C. – 271 B.C.; born at Samos, but lived in Athens) created a school of philosophy which gathered at “Epicur’s Garden” in Athens. It was open to all, including women and slaves. The senses and the states of mind were at the center of his preoccupations, and all sensations have the same authority. Man possesses a free will, and we have the power to choose our destiny. To lead a happy life, man needs to fight the false impressions that govern his life. By living in the Epicurean community, the pupil of the school learns to discharge himself of all the false impressions and conventions his culture has equipped him with. Dialogue with his teacher is the vehicle of change. The aim of life is to prevent pain and achieve joy or pleasure (hedone). The way to attain pleasure is to live modestly and gain knowledge of the world and the limits of one’s own desires, thus reaching a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence from bodily pain (aponia).
Stoics
The Stoic (Hellenistic) school of thought was antiauthoritarian, as opposed to the Epicurean school where much was centered around the almost divine authority of Epicur. Pupils were encouraged to develop their own thoughts and to create a room for reflection around their situation. Their impulses and thoughts should be tested by use of reason. There were many likenesses between Epicurean and Stoic thinking. Central to both was the importance of a free will, dialogue, the criticism of customs and conventions, openness to all (men, women, and slaves), and the emphasis on moral philosophy and attainment of reason (logos). The Stoics emphasize that nothing separates men and women as regards the capacity of their reason. Differences between humans are random; what is permanent their likeness in reason, a likeness they share with the gods. The greatest enemy of reason is passion, the strong feelings. They have to be resisted.
The earliest Stoics were Zeno (332 B.C. – 260 B.C.), Cleanthes (330 B.C. – 230 B.C.), and Chrysippus (280 B.C. - 208 B.C.). Zeno taught philosophy at the Stoa Poikile (“the painted porch”), from which the philosophy got its name.The intermediate period of Stoicism was linked to Posidonius (about 135 B.C. – 51 B.C.). Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. – 43 B.C.) was also an important person in this context. The later period was marked by Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), Epictetus (A.D. 50 – 120) and Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121 – 180).
Sceptics
In the Hellenistic philosophies of the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Neo-Platonics (see below) we find integrated systems of thought leading to views on how to live. The Sceptics were against contructing any system. Classical philosophical skepticism derives from the “Skeptikoi”, a school who “asserted nothing”. Pyrrho (about 360 B.C. – 270 B.C.), Carneades (about 213 B.C. – 129 B.C.) and Sextus Empiricus (A.D. 200 – 250) were among the best known Sceptics. The Sceptics emphasized doubt as the main attitude to life. They also fought false ideas and impressions, but they did not wish to introduce any new ideas to replace the old ones (which might have the same types of weaknesses). Systematic doubt liberates the mind. Absence of anguish, peace of the soul (ataraxia) was the goal.
Neo-Platonics
Neo-Platonism designates the dominating philosophy of antiquity in the period from A.D. 200 to A.D. 500. Plotinus (205 A.D. – 270 A.D.) was its earliest and major philosopher.This philosophy, taking its point of departure from Plato’s world of ideas, had a great influence on the early development of Christian thought. The world is divided into a spiritual and a material world. The world of ideas is a truer world where things are as they are meant to be. This world is unchanged and characterized by stability. The spiritual world is divided in three parts: the Soul, the Intellect and “The One” (representing the harmonious whole).
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers argued that during the period from 800 to 200 B.C. the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece. He termed this period “The Axial Age”. This was a period of intellectual freedom, a period where old certainties had lost their validity and where new ones were still not in place. Platonism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism were major currents of thought in this period, but it also included the pre-Socratic thinkers, as mentioned below.
The pre-Socratic philosophers
Thales of Miletus (about 624 B.C.- 546 B.C; one of the Seven Sages of Greece)
Thales’ rejection of mythological explanations for natural phenomena, became an essential idea for the scientific revolution. The first true mathematician. Water is the origin of all things. All things contain divinity.
Anaximander (about 610 B.C. – 546 B.C.; Miletus)
The original element was material, but without any particular shape. There was movement, and the world was created from this movement. The universe is a series of concentric circles with the Earth in the centre. When the sun starts to shine on the Earth, part of the water condensates and fishlike creatures appear and crawl up on land, and become animals and humans. This is an ongoing process.
Anaximenes (585 B.C. – 528 B.C.; Miletus)
Air is the origin of all things. The principle governing all change is compression and decompression. The world is air in constant movement. Air is a living element.
Anaxagoras (about 500 B.C. – 428 B.C.; born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, moved to Athens. First philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens.)
The Genesis has taken place by rotation and is initiated by nous (spirit or reason). The world is living and organic.
With the above mentioned pre-Socratic thinkers, there are three thoughts that have been important for the subsequent development in philosophy: 1) The idea that the world has been created from forces that are still active; 2) Creation is a continuous process; 3) Nature, both the organic and the inorganic matter, is alive. These ideas are still alive in science.
Heraklit (about 535 B.C. – 475 B.C.; Ephesus, Ionia)
Change is the innermost principle of being, as illustrated by his saying: “No man ever steps into the same river twice.” Change is the result of internal contradictions and conflicts. These conflicts, and not any external force, are the drivers of change. Man must know himself, and by introspection he can hope to find logos (the true expression of the self and of the reality surrounding him). He must move beyond the impressions of the senses through reflection. Our reason unites us with other people, whereas our senses separate us from other people. The material expression of logos is fire.
Parmenides (Elea, Greek city in the southern coast of Italy; born a few decades after Heraklit)
Reason gives us true knowledge, not the senses. Being has not been created, it has always existed. The world is eternal. It is forever the same, and cannot be changed. True knowledge can only be obtained about “what is”. The world of appearances, formed by our sensory faculties, lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful.
Empedocles (about 490 B.C. – 430 B.C.; Agrigente, Sicily))
The basis for the creation of the world consists of the four elements earth, water, fire and air (the firm, the fluid, the burning, and the aireal). These elements are stable, but they occur in varying combinations – thus combining the notions of stability and change. In the larger perspective, the stable structure of necessity governs, whereas chance governs the smaller perspective. The creation of the human being is a result of chance.
Pythagoras (about 570 B.C. – 495 B.C.; born at Samos, moved to Croton in Southern Italy)
Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, formed a religious and philosophical movement. The Pythagorean cosmos was characterized by mathematical harmony, and the planets moved around a centre in a way which created music (“spheric harmony”). This centre was a great fire, around which also the Earth circled. The Earth is round, because the spheric shape is the most perfect, beautiful and harmonic shape. The Pythagoreans viewed homogeneity and stability as positive values, while they feared heterogeneity and movement.
Democritus (about 460 – 370 B.C.; born in Abdera, Thrace; pupil of Leucippus)
The world’s building blocks are small particles, infinite in number. They are so small that they are invisible. The element that forms the particle, which is called “what is”, is so compact that it cannot be divided and is named atomos (Greek for undividable) – atom. The atoms move in a void (called “what is not”). What is and what is not are both just as real (as opposed to Parmenides who thought that there was no void). The movement of the atoms in the void create clusters that the world is made of, and movement, multiplicity and change become possible.
Sophists
The sophists were less interested in natural philosophy and more concerned with human life, such as language, customs, right or wrong. Questions of value and legitimacy took precedence over questions on the origins of the world. Protagoras (about 480 B.C. – 410 B.C.) and Gorgias (died about 380 B.C.) were the two most notable sophists. “Man is the measure of all things”, said Protagoras. The sophists were the carriers of the Athenian Enlightenment, the moral and political teachers of democracy. They gave courses in logic, rhetoric, and policymaking.
The sophists were seen as a menace by the nobility, because they enabled ordinary citizens to participate in political life – at the expense of the nobility’s political hegemony. The reaction of the nobility (voiced through Socrates in Plato’s dialogues) was criticism against the sophists along several lines: 1) They were teaching for pay, 2) They said they could teach arête (excellence, virtue), but the nobility contended that this was an innate quality which was not accessible to ordinary people; 3) Sophists were only occupied with utility; 4) Sophists did not accept that there was a given truth; everything was relative (cf. the citation of Protagoras above).
The Classic period in Western philosophy
Socrates (469 B.C. – 399 B.C.; Athens)
We know Socrates mainly from the texts of Plato. Some contemporaries, the playwright Aristophanes and the historian Xenophon, did not give flattering portraits of Socrates. Plato, however, gave Socrates the main role in the many dialogues he wrote. It seems fair to think that Plato saw something that Aristophanes and Xenophon did not see. The major message left by Socrates, aside from all the important points that appear in the dialogues and which we cannot clearly separate from Plato’s own ideas, is that dialogue is the principal vehicle leading to truth. Ethics and the search for truth through the use of reason was his basic concern, through which he is seen as one of the founders of Western philosophy.
Plato (about 424 B.C. – 348 B.C.; Athens)
Plato was a student of Socrates, and founder of the Academy in Athens – the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Most of his writings were in the form of dialogues where Socrates played a prominent part. Since Socrates himself did not write anything, it is not possible to say which parts of the dialogues come from Socrates’ ideas and which parts are Plato’s own ideas. Plato’s dialogues introduced a new way of expressing ideas, opening up for an exploration – through the meeting of opposing ideas – of the way leading to truth. Plato’s cosmologic thoughts, expressed in the dialogue Timaios, saw the world as existing at two levels, one level being a divine, permanent, timeless, harmonious world governed by reason, and the other level being the world as our senses see it, characterized by change and random disturbances. This brought together the views of Parmenides and of the Pythagoreans.
Plato’s world of ideas, as drawn from the vision of perfection governing the divine level of the world, contains beings and elements in their true form and in a harmonious relation to each other. The famous allegory of the grotto gives a striking example of this thought. Plato’s dialogues represent an effort to get closer to this ideal world. Goodness, justice and beauty are notions that exist in themselves, and not solely as subjective objects of the senses (as the sophists contended), and the purpose of the dialogues was to bring our knowledge closer to the truth of these and other notions.
Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C.; Chalcidice, later Athens)
Empirical observation of the world as it appeared was more important for Aristotle than for Plato, who was more concerned with theoretical questions of normative character. Plato was a rationalist, less inclined to rely on the observations of the senses. Whereas Plato’s ideal world exists in its own right, alongside with the material world we observe, the world of Aristotle links ideas and matter through observation and the notion of change is part of this interdependence. It is for Aristotle not static, as it is for Plato.
However, Aristotle has taken his fundamental categories of thought from Plato. The originality of Aristotle stems from his development of new methods to tackle the problems faced. He broadens his scientific outlook from mathematics (which was Plato’s scientific platform) to include also physics and metaphysics (questions of being and non-being). Politics, ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics and poetry were also among his subjects of interest. His writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy. Studies of nature (physical science) are his prime interest, and in his work he develops major classifications based on his observations. Every object consists of form and matter, and it has a potential for development that it will strive to attain (telos).
Epicureans
Epicurus (341 B.C. – 271 B.C.; born at Samos, but lived in Athens) created a school of philosophy which gathered at “Epicur’s Garden” in Athens. It was open to all, including women and slaves. The senses and the states of mind were at the center of his preoccupations, and all sensations have the same authority. Man possesses a free will, and we have the power to choose our destiny. To lead a happy life, man needs to fight the false impressions that govern his life. By living in the Epicurean community, the pupil of the school learns to discharge himself of all the false impressions and conventions his culture has equipped him with. Dialogue with his teacher is the vehicle of change. The aim of life is to prevent pain and achieve joy or pleasure (hedone). The way to attain pleasure is to live modestly and gain knowledge of the world and the limits of one’s own desires, thus reaching a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence from bodily pain (aponia).
Stoics
The Stoic (Hellenistic) school of thought was antiauthoritarian, as opposed to the Epicurean school where much was centered around the almost divine authority of Epicur. Pupils were encouraged to develop their own thoughts and to create a room for reflection around their situation. Their impulses and thoughts should be tested by use of reason. There were many likenesses between Epicurean and Stoic thinking. Central to both was the importance of a free will, dialogue, the criticism of customs and conventions, openness to all (men, women, and slaves), and the emphasis on moral philosophy and attainment of reason (logos). The Stoics emphasize that nothing separates men and women as regards the capacity of their reason. Differences between humans are random; what is permanent their likeness in reason, a likeness they share with the gods. The greatest enemy of reason is passion, the strong feelings. They have to be resisted.
The earliest Stoics were Zeno (332 B.C. – 260 B.C.), Cleanthes (330 B.C. – 230 B.C.), and Chrysippus (280 B.C. - 208 B.C.). Zeno taught philosophy at the Stoa Poikile (“the painted porch”), from which the philosophy got its name.The intermediate period of Stoicism was linked to Posidonius (about 135 B.C. – 51 B.C.). Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. – 43 B.C.) was also an important person in this context. The later period was marked by Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), Epictetus (A.D. 50 – 120) and Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121 – 180).
Sceptics
In the Hellenistic philosophies of the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Neo-Platonics (see below) we find integrated systems of thought leading to views on how to live. The Sceptics were against contructing any system. Classical philosophical skepticism derives from the “Skeptikoi”, a school who “asserted nothing”. Pyrrho (about 360 B.C. – 270 B.C.), Carneades (about 213 B.C. – 129 B.C.) and Sextus Empiricus (A.D. 200 – 250) were among the best known Sceptics. The Sceptics emphasized doubt as the main attitude to life. They also fought false ideas and impressions, but they did not wish to introduce any new ideas to replace the old ones (which might have the same types of weaknesses). Systematic doubt liberates the mind. Absence of anguish, peace of the soul (ataraxia) was the goal.
Neo-Platonics
Neo-Platonism designates the dominating philosophy of antiquity in the period from A.D. 200 to A.D. 500. Plotinus (205 A.D. – 270 A.D.) was its earliest and major philosopher.This philosophy, taking its point of departure from Plato’s world of ideas, had a great influence on the early development of Christian thought. The world is divided into a spiritual and a material world. The world of ideas is a truer world where things are as they are meant to be. This world is unchanged and characterized by stability. The spiritual world is divided in three parts: the Soul, the Intellect and “The One” (representing the harmonious whole).