Week 3 Greek Philosophy

• Today we will be looking at the Ancient Greek philosophers. • 776 Beginning of the Ancient Greek period. • 620-420 BC. Pre-Socratic Philosophers. • 490. Battle of Marathon, start of Athenian dominance in Greece. • 469-399 BC. Socrates. • 427-347 BC. Plato. • 384-322 BC. Aristotle. • 356-323. Alexander the Great. • 341-270 BC. Epicurus.
• Democritus of Abdera (c.460-370 B.C.) argued that knowledge was derived through sense perception, the senses illustrate to us that change does occur in nature.
• A Sophist was a person who could argue eloquently and could prove a position whether that position was correct or incorrect. In other words, what mattered was persuasion and not truth. • Although 5th century Athens was a troubled city-state, they maintained a democratic government in which citizens had the opportunity to participate directly in important social decisions.
• Instead of reading their ideas from ancient religious works, they began to use reason, contemplation, and sensory observation to make sense of reality. • The Greeks who gave birth to modern philosophy were Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. • Between about 420 and 320 BC, these giants of human thought developed allembracing systems that explained both the nature of the universe and the humans who inhabit it.
• The groundwork for them was done by their predecessors, what are known as the Pre-Socratic (before Socrates) philosophers, between about 600-420 BC. • Influenced by thought from Babylon and Egypt, the Pre-Socratics rejected mythological (based on the gods) explanations for the world in favour of more rational explanations. • The first Greek philosopher of note was Thales of Miletus (a city of Ionia), who was active around 585 B.C.
• From the ranks of the Sophists came Socrates (c.469399 B.C.), perhaps the most noble and wisest Athenian to have ever lived.
•The Athens into which Socrates was born in 470 B.C. was a city still living in the glory of its epic victory over the Persians at Marathon, and it was bursting with new ideas. •The Parthenon's foundation was laid when Socrates was twenty-two, and its construction completed fifteen years later.
• Heraclitus earned his reputation as ‘the Riddler’ by delivering his statements in deliberately contradictory form. • The structure of puzzling statements, he believed, mirrored the chaotic structure of thought, which is a parallel to the complex character of the world itself. • Rejecting the Pythagorean ideal of harmony, Heraclitus saw the natural world as an environment of perpetual struggle. Everything is changing all the time.
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Titian, Concert Champetre, 1510
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A 19th Century Japanese Geisha.
A Chinese beauty
• Understanding the meaning of beauty is one of the key themes in the philosophical study known as aesthetics. The word aesthetics comes from the ancient Greek meaning a perceiver or sensitive. • Aesthetics is one area that philosophers study. • The word ‘philosophy’ also comes from the ancient GreekΦιλοσοφία, (philosophia) which may be translated as ‘love of wisdom’.
• For him the universe contained an inbuilt mathematical order. In the Pythagoreans the emphasis is on form rather than matter. We move from sense perception to the logic of mathematics. • Perhaps the most important of all the PreSocratic philosophers was Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 BC).
• Miletus was a prominent trading post and its people had direct contact with the ideas of the Near East. • Around 600 B.C., Milesian thinkers ‘discovered’ speculation after asking a simple but deep question: ‘what exists?’ • Thales of Miletus (c.624-548 BC), answered that everything in the universe was made of water and resolves itself into water.
• This contributed to a renewed interest in practical philosophy. The sophists provided students with training in the exercise of citizenship. • It’s known from Plato's writings that many sophists maintained schools of debate, were respected members of society, and were well paid by their students.
• Something unusual happened in Greece and the Greek colonies of the Aegean Sea some 2,500 years ago. • Whereas the previous great cultures of the Mediterranean had used mythological stories of the gods to explain the operations of the world and people, some of the Greeks began to discover new ways of explaining things.