Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BC and continued through the Hellenistic period and up until the beginning of the Roman Empire. In Greek, the word philosophy means “the love of wisdom”. Prior to Ancient Greek philosophy, the ancient perspective looks to mythology and religion for explanations about the world phenomena. Ancient Greek philosophers emphasized reason and intelligence instead of senses or emotions to make sense of the world around them and explain things in a non-religious way.
In this lesson, we will broadly cover the key philosophies of Ancient Greek philosophers. You'll be able to compare and contrast the differences amongst Presocratic, Classical Greek, and Hellenistic philosophies, as well as explain the philosophic contributions of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
When we hear Ancient Greek philosophy, the first philosopher that comes to your mind is Socrates, but he wasn’t the first one to talk about philosophy. Greeks were engaged in philosophy 200 years before Socrates was born. The period of Ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates is called the Presocratic philosophy. Among the most significant of the Presocratic philosophers were the Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes), Xenophanes, Heracleitus of Ephesus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Zeno, and Pythagoras. Each of the Presocratic philosophers has its own philosophy, but they all looked to reason, observation, science, or mathematics, instead of religion and mythology, for knowledge of the universe. They searched for a unifying principle that both ordered nature and also explained how change occurred.
Ancient Greek Philosophy is generally divided into three periods. First, all thinkers prior to Socrates are called PreSocratics; the second period spans the lifetimes of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the last period covers diverse developments in philosophy, which includes the Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, Neo-Platonists, and Aristotelians. The end of Ancient Philosophy is marked by the spread of Christianity in the sixth century CE.
Thales of Miletus is considered to be the father of Greek philosophy. He determined that everything was made up of water, which he thought was the single primal element. This idea helped one of his students, Anaximander, to come up with his own idea that the universe was born from an unknowable, unobservable substance known as Apeiron, which loosely translates to "the boundless" or "that which has no limit". It was these early ideas that helped later philosophers to classify the entire world according to the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
One of the most influential groups of the Presocratic philosophers were the Sophists. Sophists were a group of thinkers who employed debate and rhetoric to teach and disseminate their ideas and offered to teach these skills to others. They held relativistic views on cognition and knowledge (that there is no absolute truth, or that two points of view can be accepted at the same time), skeptical views on truth and morality, and their philosophy often contained criticisms of religion, law, and ethics. The practice of taking fees, coupled with the willingness of many practitioners to use their rhetorical skills to pursue unjust lawsuits, eventually led to a decline in respect for practitioners of this form of teaching and the ideas and writings associated with it. By the time of Plato and Aristotle, "sophist" had taken on negative connotations, usually referring to someone who used rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning.
As early as the 5th century, two philosophers, Leucippus and Democritus, thought that the world was made up of little particles that were so small we couldn’t even see them. They called these particles atoms and thought that they made up everything in the universe. Eventually, modern science would prove that these atomic theories were right, even though they were developed thousands of years ago.
Pythagoras is most known for the Pythagorean Theorem which is used to find the length of sides of right triangles. He also believed that the world was based on mathematics.
Much of Western philosophy finds its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
He was born in Athens in 470 BC. Most of what we know about his life and philosophical viewpoints come from literature extracts that other people wrote about him, as he did not write any philosophical teachings. This causes the challenge of identifying the accuracy of the information since two of the most reliable sources, Plato and Xenophon have different views of him. This difficulty in understanding the true character and teachings of Socrates is known as The Socratic Problem.
His largest contribution to philosophy is the Socratic method. The Socratic method is defined as a form of inquiry and discussion between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to illuminate ideas. The principle underlying the Socratic Method is that humans learn through the use of reasoning and logic; ultimately finding holes in their own theories and then patching them up.
He was a student of Socrates. At the beginning of the 4th century BC in Athens, he established a school, the Academy which was the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. His most influential contributions to philosophy was the Theory of Forms. In Theory of Forms, Plato asserts that there are two realms – the physical realm and the spiritual realm. The physical realm is the material stuff we see and interact with on a daily basis, it is changing and imperfect. The spiritual realm exists beyond the physical realm. The Theory of Forms asserts that the physical world is not really the ‘real’ world, instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world. Splitting existence up into two realms also leads us to a solution of two problems, one of ethics, and the other of permanence and change. Our mind perceives a different world, with different objects, compared to what our senses do. It is the material world, perceived through the senses, that is changing. It is the realm of forms, perceived through the mind, that is permanent. By detaching our souls from the material world and bodies, and developing our ability to concern ourselves with the forms, Plato believes this will lead to us finding a value which is not open to change. This solves the ethical problem.
The Republic is the most influential book that Plato wrote and is still the most widely read philosophical book of all time. In The Republic, Plato examined the question “What is justice?” and wrote hundreds of pages about what the right type of government should be.
Aristotle
He was a student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great. Aristotle didn’t necessarily agree with all that Plato said. He liked to focus on more practical areas of philosophy including science. He founded his own school called the Lyceum. He thought that reason was the highest good and that it was important to have self-control. Aristotle was the first to develop a formal system for reasoning. He observed that the deductive validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content, for example, in the syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Even if the content of the argument was changed from being about Socrates to being about someone else, because of its structure, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true.
Perhaps one of the most influential ideas of Aristotle’s was that of the Golden Mean, which was the idea of a middle ground between good and bad, and the belief in moderation, or that people should try to maintain a balance between two extremes. He also made advances in the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, moving away from the idealism of his mentor Plato to a more empirical and less mystical view of the nature of reality. Aristotle was the first philosopher to seriously advance a theory of Virtue Ethics, which is the quest to understand and live a life of moral character. It assumes that we acquire virtue through practice. By honing virtuous habits, people will likely make the right choice when faced with ethical challenges. Instead of focusing on justice, like Plato, Aristotle wrote about all types of learning, such as logic, metaphysics, astronomy, physics, politics, and poetry.
Aristotle initially claimed that everything was made up of five elements: earth, fire, air, water, and Aether. Aristotle is also famous for his “four causes,” which explain the nature of change in an object.
For example, a young lion is made up of tissue and organs (material cause) by its parents who generated it (efficient cause). The formal cause is its species, lion; and its final cause is its instinct and drives to become a mature lion. Aristotle believed that all things could be better understood when its causes were stated in specific terms. He used his causal pattern to organize all knowledge.
The Hellenistic period in Ancient Greece (323 - 146 BC) was after the death of Alexander the Great. This period begins with the death of Alexander and ends with the Roman conquest of Greece. Greek culture, art, and power expanded into the Near and Middle East.
The two schools of thought that dominated Hellenistic philosophy were Stoicism, as introduced by Zeno of Citium, and the writings of Epicurus. Stoicism divided philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics. Epicurus, on the other hand, placed great emphasis on the individual and the attainment of happiness.
