Ancient Greek Philosophy
Greek philosophy encompassed the various speculations of the ancient Greeks with regard to the origin of things. This is but a partial description of the intellectual efforts made by the keen and powerful minds of the ancient world to solve those problems which science nowadays is so eagerly investigating. The origin of Greek philosophy was the gradual disbelief that seized men's minds as to the truth of the ancient poetical cosmogonies and antique mythologies of religion. Faith was dead and reason had awakened.
In the 7th century BC, in the flourishing city of Miletus, capital of the Ionian colony, the first Greek philosopher propounded the question which is still being put, What is the basic substratum of all phenomena? Thales of Miletus (636 BC) declared it was water, which to him seemed to permeate and give life to all things. Thales was the first of the Greek physicists, or materialists, and was considered one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece. He was the founder of the Ionian School of Philosophy. He was succeeded in the long line of philosophical inquirers by Anaximenes (529 BC) : who looking for the first element, the first cause, found it in air. Air was universal and must be the parent of all things. It was the breath of life and must therefore be the source of it.
Diogenes of Appollonia (460 BC) fixed upon a higher notion as the first cause of things. He saw the ruling race of mankind prevailed over nature by their intelligence. He decided that intelligence was the cause and foundation of all things. In these speculations as to the nature of the universe and its origin he was followed by Anaximander of Miletus (610 BC) and Pythagoras, who invented the word philosophy. The former taught that all existence came from the infinite — a vague term, which did not mean the infinite intelligence but the infinite existence. Pythagoras said that number was the first thing, from which all else proceeded— a metaphysical abstraction, which almost defies analysis. Aristotle says the Pythagoreans "taught that number was the beginning of things, the cause of their material existence, and of their modifications and different states."
The school of Eleatics is chiefly represented by the poet Xenophanes (620 BC). His philosophic creed is thus described by Aristotle: "Casting his eyes upward at the immensity of heaven, he declared that The One was God." Reason and imagination led this thinker to become at once a Monotheist and a Pantheist. Parmenides who was born (536 BC) at Elea, a city which gave its name to Eleatics, was the first to make the great distinction between truth and opinion, between the deductions of reason and the impression of sense. He made being the basis of things, for non-being was impossible — a discovery which at that stage in philosophical speculation was of great importance. Zeno, another Eleatic, born 500 BC, who was the inventor of logic, was persecuted and put to death for free-thinking and was a follower and disciple of Parmenides. Plato says that the master proved the existence of the one; the disciple established the non-existence of the many. He preserved his master's distinction between truth and opinion. "Your senses," he would say, "tell you that there are many things existing; reason avers that there is but one."
A contemporary of Zeno was a man who began at Ephesus those speculations as to the origin of the universe to which as preliminary he added a theory on the origin of knowledge. This was Heraclitus (503 BC). He was a disciple of Xenophanes and taught that fire is the origin of everything, and there is no existence, but only change; things cannot be said to be, but only to be becoming; processes and not states formed the mode of existence. Heraclitus taught that it is not possible to know or name anything with truth, for as the observer looks at the object, it changes, and is something different from what was thought.
Anaxagoras came from Clazomenaeto Athens just when the age of Pericles was dawning; he had indeed Pericles, Euripides and Socrates as his pupils. He attacked the patriotic religion of the proud city and was banished to Lampsacus. He thought that all sense — knowledge — was delusive until corrected by reason. He believed that intelligence was the creative and regulating influence of the universe. Things as they are were brought about by the concourse of infinite atoms; but these atoms were of all sorts, and that like was united to like in an infinite series of movement and combination; gold by the union of gold atoms that had existed from eternity, fires from fire atoms, air from atoms of air. These atoms were the famous homoeomeriae spoken of and condemned by Aristotle.
Empedocles (444 BC) was of the great city of Agrigentum; in his views of knowledge he belonged to the Eleatics and maintained that the senses were fallible, while reason was a sure guide to truth. He was a poet and declaimed against anthropomorphic ideas of deity. He gathered in one the doctrines of the Ionian physicists declaring the primary elements were four, namely, earth, air, fire and water. Love was the formative principle of things, hate the dissolver and destroyer. One was harmony, the other discord, and God is the One, "a sphere fixed in the bosom of harmony, rejoicing in calm rest."
Democritus of Abdera (460 BC) was a rich man who entertained Xerxes at his house. He went one step further than Anaxagoras and almost entered the circle of modern science by teaching the atomic theory, namely that everything in the world is the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms, all of the same substance, but making various things through the various forms they take in uniting. Color, sweetness, cold, are the result not of substances essentially differing; all is form.
All attempts had so far failed to solve the problems of the material world and of human knowledge. Many theories were put forth, none were universially accepted, although they were each discussed: This brought the Sophists on to the stage of philosophy — men who taught the arts of discussion, not of investigation. One of the greatest of them was Protagoras. He was a disciple of Democritus and taught that opinion was everything, "Man, the individual man, each for himself, is the measure of all things." The Sophists were the first skeptics.
A new epoch arose with Socrates (469 BC). He was the most remarkable man in all the Greek world; for his love of disputation he was classed by some with the Sophists, for his ridicule of traditional views in religion and physics, he was condemned to death — yet he succeeded in substituting morals for physics as as the subject of philosophy. He first gave to philosophical methods the definition and the inductive argument, or reasoning by analogy.
One of his disciples, Aristippus of Cyrene, while he followed the method of his master, founded the Cyrenaic school which taught that pleasure was the criterion of the true: Socrates had taught that the good as judged by the individual conscience was that criterion. Then followed the Cynics, under Antisthenes who went to the opposite extreme to Aristippus, who became an ostentatious ascetic, and in this was followed by Diogenes of Sinope, who made his home in a cask or tun, and tried to set the example of a rugged virtue, which is misanthropic, but triumphant over bodily appetite.
In the sphere of philosophical prose in the Attic period, there are but two writers of commanding eminence, Plato and Aristotle. Plato (c. 427-347 BC), founder of the Academy, is regarded by many critics as the greatest master of Greek prose style. His beautiful prose is often akin to poetry and reveals a literary artist of vivid imagination, inimitable charm, and keenest wit. In Plato's 'Dialogues' we have a comprehensive exposition of - the ethical views of his teacher, Socrates who left no writings. Perhaps the best known of the works of Plato is the 'Republic', which is an inquiry into the nature of justice and a description of an ideal state founded on this virtue. Of peculiar interest is the series of dialogues concerned with the last days and death of Socrates, namely, the 'Euthyphro,' the 'Apology' (Socrates' speech in his own defence when on trial for his life), the 'Crito,' and the 'Phaedo' (on the immortality of the soul).
It was left to Plato to exhibit the complete adoption and application of the Socratic method. He believed that in each man resided the power of detecting the truth, from having seen the perfection of things, in an ideal world during a previous state of existence; he could judge of the good and the beautiful here from his memory of what their perfect archetypes were. His voluminous writings enable judgement both of his ethical and political system, but they both fail in practicality.
His most famous pupil was Aristotle (384 BC), a man of encyclopedic mind, the first scientific observer, the inventor of the syllogism. Plato was an idealist and a rationalist; Aristotle a materialist and an empiric. The one trusted to reason, the other to experience. Aristotle always argued against the ideal theory of his master and deduced his conclusions from things as he saw them. He invented grammar as well as logic and was in himself an epitome of the philosophic learning of his predecessors. But by reasoning from experience he had opened the way for the skeptics, of whom the first was Pyrrho, who taught that there is no criterion of truth. Phenomena are mere appearances, how can we prove they are anything else? This was what in modern times is called agnosticism, that one cannot prove and therefore cannot know the truth of anything seen.
Under the name of Aristotle (384-322 BC), Plato's pupil, an incredibly large collection of writings has come down to the present. It is probable that some of these works were written by his pupils, perhaps on the basis of lecture-notes. Aristotle was a profound thinker and investigator and followed the most varied interests; his treatises, therefore, are concerned with diverse subjects. Students of literature and the drama are especially interested in the 'Rhetoric' (the art of Persuasion) and the 'Poetics' (a treatise on the poetic art. Aristotle's style has little charm; it is scientific prose which at times is easily intelligible and then again involves difficulty of interpretation largely through the technical terminology.
But after this suicide of philosophy in the school of Pyrrho, she revived again as a moral mentor in the person of Epicurus, of Sanios (342 BC). He taught the highest good is pleasure; this is the moral end of existence. He was controverted by the Stoics. Zeno was their leader, a man of stern unbending character and abstemious life, whose aim was to show that virtue consisted in manhood and manhood in the power to endure hardness and to despise the body. Skepticism, indifference, sensuality and epicurean softness were not to be combated by the vague dreams of Plato or the cumbrous system of Aristotle.
The Stoic attempted to meet the growing decadence by an exactly opposite self-denial and impassive reserve. But Stoicism was egotistic; its aim was the repression of feeling, it was apathy, death in life. The last struggle of Greek philosophy to dominate the mind of society was witnessed in the rise of the New Platonists and their New Academy. Carneades (213 BC) was their most illustrious representative, and he was the type of a school that took up the doctrines of Plato, expanded and enlarged them until the time when Christianity appeared and faith, not reason, as in the old days 700 years before, dominated the world of opinion.
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