Greek Philosophy

I

Introduction

Greek Philosophy, body of philosophical concepts developed by the Greeks, particularly during the flowering of Greek civilization between 600 and 200 bc. Greek philosophy formed the basis of all later philosophical speculation in the Western world. The intuitive hypotheses of the ancient Greeks foreshadowed many theories of modern science, and many of the moral ideas of pagan Greek philosophers have been incorporated into Christian moral doctrine. The political ideas set forth by Greek thinkers have influenced many different political leaders throughout history. Moreover, modern aesthetic discourse derives to a great extent from the ancient Greek preoccupation with the study of the nature and perception of beauty.

II

The Ionian School

Greek philosophy may be divided between those philosophers who sought an explanation of the world in physical terms and those who stressed the importance of non-material forms or ideas. The first important school of Greek philosophy, the Ionian or Milesian, was largely materialistic. Founded by Thales of Miletus in the 6th century bc, it began with Thales’s belief that water is the basic substance out of which all matter is created. A more elaborate view was offered by Anaximander, who held that the raw material of all matter is an eternal substance that changes into the commonly experienced forms of matter. These forms in turn change and merge into one another according to the rule of justice, that is, balance and proportion. Heraclitus taught that fire is the primordial source of matter, but he believed that the entire world is in a constant state of change or flux and that most objects and substances are produced by a union of opposite principles. He regarded the soul, for example, as a mixture of fire and water. The concept of “nous” (the mind or intellect), an infinite and unchanging substance that enters into and controls every living object, was developed by Anaxagoras, who also believed that matter consisted of infinitesimally small particles, or atoms. He epitomized the philosophy of the Ionian school by suggesting a non-physical governing principle and a materialistic basis of existence. Representative thinkers of the Ionian school are also known as presocratics.

III

Pythagoras, the Eleatic School, and the Sophists

The division between idealism and materialism became more distinct through time. Pythagoras stressed the importance of form rather than matter in explaining material structure. The Pythagorean school also laid great stress on the importance of the soul, regarding the body only as the soul’s “tomb”. According to Parmenides, the leader of the Eleatic school, the appearance of movement and the existence of separate objects in the world are mere illusions; they only seem to exist. The beliefs of Pythagoras and Parmenides formed the basis of the idealism that was to characterize later Greek philosophy.

A more materialistic interpretation was made by Empedocles, who accepted the belief that reality is eternal but declared that it is composed of chance combinations of the four primal substances: fire, air, earth, and water. Such materialistic explanations reached their climax in the doctrines of Democritus, who believed that the various forms of matter are caused by differences in the shape, size, position, and arrangement of component atoms.

Materialism applied to daily life inspired the philosophy of a group known as the sophists, who were active in the 5th century bc. Stressing the importance of human perception, sophists such as Protagoras doubted that humanity would ever be able to reach objective truth through reason and taught that material success rather than truth should be the purpose of life.

IV

Socrates

In contrast were the ideas of Socrates, in whom Greek philosophy attained its peak, and whose thought marks the point of transition from cosmological speculation to critical metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. His avowed purpose was “to fulfil the philosopher’s mission of searching into myself and other men”. Socrates’s method was dialectic: after a proposition had been stated, the philosopher asked a series of questions designed to test and refine the proposition by examining its consequences and discovering whether it was consistent with the known facts. Socrates described the soul not in terms of mysticism but as “that in virtue of which we are called wise or foolish, good or bad”. In other words, Socrates considered the soul to be a combination of an individual’s intelligence and character.