Hello, my passion blog posts this semester will be about the great philosophers of the past. Not all of them will be from ancient Greece, but for my first post I am going to provide some background to what philosophy exactly is.
To start, the definition of what philosophy is according to the Oxford dictionary is “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline”. This school of thought started in the ancient Mediterranean with various cultures dabbling in math, astronomy, and creation myths to help explain reality. All this knowledge came together in ancient Greece where philosophy was made a main academic field. The questions the Greeks asked concerned many fields of study from engineering to epistemology (the study of knowledge). The three biggest known philosophers in ancient Greece were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. These three are the most influential philosophers to the Western world, but before I can write about them and other philosophers I must describe the world from before Socrates.
Ancient Athens was populated with creation myths and everything in the world was because of the gods (Zeus, Athena, etc.) and their stories were presented by Homer and Hesiod ( two Greek poets who wrote about the gods). The philosophers known as the Milesians ( due to the fact they were from the Milesian school of Philosophy) were the first to ask questions and answer with critical and practical thinking. Miletus is near modern day Turkey.
The first Milesian was a man named Thales who was from around six hundred B.C. He is known for predicting an eclipse and studying geometry, engineering, and astronomy. Thales made the claim that everything came from water and that the soul is what produces motion. The notion that everything is water is a ridiculous concept to us modern readers, but what was radical about this claim is that he backed it up with reasoning and arguments.
Continuing the trend of asking questions, the rest of the Milesians would ask critique the reasoning of their teacher and make their own reasonings and pose new questions. The questions that started circulating concerned not only mathematics and astronomy, but how the Earth operated in terms of a cosmological image and what the basic matter of the universe was. Some theories were that the basic element of the universe was water, earth, air, and more.
As the philosophers kept improving their philosophies by using more reasoning and arguments to expand their claims they also started asking deeper metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God and ethics. The sophists taught before Socrates and were one of the groups that led Socrates to start thinking critically about the claims they were making and how to verify certain claim made. Socrates was able to make a method that would be revolutionary, the Socratic method which revolutionized philosophy and gave way to proper reasoning. I will not write too much about Socrates since he will be the first of the philosophers I choose to write about. Now, with some proper context established in my next blog post I will write about the impact Socrates had on the Greek world.