Sophie's World Flashcards
By philosophy we mean the completely new way of thinking that evolved in Greece about 600 years before the birth of Christ.
Until that time people had found answers to all their questions in various religions. A myth is a story about the gods which sets out to explain why life is as it is. A mythological world picture existed in Greece when the first philosophy was evolving. The stories of the Greek Gods, such as Zeus and Apollo, had been handed down from generation to generation for centuries.
The Greek philosophers attempted to prove that these explanations were not to be trusted.
“He who cannot draw from 3000 years is living from hand to mouth” Goethe
“The unexamined life is not worth living” Socrates
Around 700 BC much of the Greek mythology was written down by Homer and Hesiod.
The earliest Greek philosophers criticised Homer’s mythology because the gods resembled mortals too much and were just as egoistic and treacherous. For the first time it was said that myths were nothing but human notions.
One exponent of this view was the philosopher Xenophanes, who lived from about 570BC. Men have created the gods in their own image, he said. He criticized and satirized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod, the belief in the pantheon of anthropomorphic gods.
During that period the Greeks founded many city-states, both in Greece itself and in the Greek colonies where all manual work was done by slaves, leaving the citizens free to devote all their time to politics and culture.
In these city environments people began to think in a completely new way. Individuals could now ask philosophical questions without recourse to ancient myths.
We call this the development from a mythological mode of thought to one based on experience and reason. The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural explanations for natural processes.
The earliest Greek philosophers are sometimes called natural philosophers because they were mainly concerned with the natural world and its processes. What little we do know about them is contained within the writings of Aristotle (classical philosopher).
Philosophy gradually liberated itself from religion. We could say that the natural philosophers took the first step in the direction of scientific reasoning, thereby becoming the precursors of what was to become science.
The last of the great natural philosophers was Democritus (460 to 370 BC). He thought that everything in nature was made up of eternal and immutable blocks or atoms. His atom theory marked the end of Greek natural philosophy.
With the new directions in Greek philosophy, a Greek medical science arose which tried to find natural explanations for sickness and health. The founder of Greek medicine is said to have been Hippocrates.
The natural philosophers are also called the pre-Socratic, because they lived before Socrates. Socrates represents a new era geographically (Athens) and temporally.
After about 450 BC Athens was the cultural centre of the Greek world. From this time on, philosophy took a new direction.
The Sophists (a wise and informed person) dominated the Athenian scene at the time of Socrates. They were a group of itinerant teachers and philosophers.
They had one characteristic in common with the natural philosophers: they were critical of the traditional mythology.
Socrates (470 to 399 BC) never wrote a single line, yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought. His life is mainly known to us through the writings/dialogues of Plato. Thus it is not always easy to distinguish between the two.
But who Socrates ‘really’ was is relatively unimportant.
Socrates just asked questions as if he knew nothing. In the course of the discussion he would generally get his opponents to realise the weakness of their arguments.
He could feign ignorance or pretend to be dumber than he was. We call this Socratic irony.
In the year 399 BC he was accused of ‘introducing new gods and corrupting the youth’, as well as not believing in the accepted gods. With a slender majority, a jury of 5 found him guilty and he was sentenced to death.
Socrates valued his conscience and the truth higher than life.
He was a master in the art of discourse and spoke on behalf of something greater than himself.
The definition of an educated person is one who truly understands his own ignorance.
Socrates felt that it was necessary to establish a solid foundation for our knowledge. He believed that this foundation lay in man’s reason. He was a rationalist.
