Ancient Greek philosophy

Ancient Greek philosophy is a period in the history of philosophy comprised, approximately, between the emergence of Western philosophy in the Ionia area at the beginning of the 6th century BC. C. until the invasion of Macedonia by the Romans in 149 a. C. It is also sometimes called classical philosophy or ancient philosophy, although that period may include Roman philosophy as well.

Greek philosophy can be divided into three sub-periods: that of pre-Socratic philosophy, which goes from Thales of Miletus to Socrates and the sophists, classical Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle), and the post-Aristotelian or Hellenistic period. A fourth period comprising Christian and Neoplatonic philosophy is sometimes distinguished.

Pre-Socratic philosophy was characterized by a variety of different proposals on how to understand the world and man's place in it. Due to cultural advances and intense contact with neighboring cultures, the cities of the Greek world began to criticize the traditional mythological conception of the world, and searched for an alternative, natural and unified conception. The thought of these early physiologists only comes to us through fragmentary writings and reports by later thinkers.

With the appearance of the sophists in the middle of the fourth century BC. By 300 BC, man became the center of philosophical reflections. The sophists were concerned in particular with ethical and political problems, such as the question of whether norms and values ​​are given naturally or are established by men. At the same time, the Athenian Socrates developed and applied maieutics, a method by which he conversed with other people and led them through a series of questions to reveal the contradictions inherent in his positions. The manifestations of his intellectual independence and his behavior not accommodated to the circumstances, earned him a death sentence for impiety to the gods and corruption of youth.

Because Socrates left nothing in writing, his image was determined by his disciple Plato. His works in the form of dialogues constituted a central point of Western philosophy. Starting from the Socratic question of the form «What is X?» (What is virtue? What is justice? What is good?) Plato created the rudiments of a doctrine of definition. He was also the author of the theory of forms, which served as the basis for the representation of a reality with two parts: the plane of objects perceptible with our senses versus the plane of Forms only accessible to the intellect through abstraction. Only the knowledge of these Forms gives us a deeper understanding of the totality of reality.

Aristotle, a disciple of Plato, rejected the theory of Forms as an unnecessary "duplication of the world." The distinction between form and matter is one of the main features of Aristotle's metaphysics, his school began to classify all of reality —both nature and society— in the various fields of knowledge, to analyze and order them scientifically. Furthermore, Aristotle created the classical logic of the syllogism and the philosophy of science. With this, he established some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions that were decisive until modernity.

In the transition of the V century a. C. to the 3rd century BC C., after the death of Aristotle and the decline of the polis, the wars between the Hellenic kings to succeed Alexander the Great made life problematic and insecure. Then two philosophical schools arose in Athens that, in clear opposition to the Academy Platonic and the Aristotelian Lyceum, put individual salvation at the center of their concerns. For Epicurus and his followers, on the one hand, as well as for the Stoics around Zeno of Citium, on the other hand, philosophy served primarily to achieve psychological well-being or peace by ethical means. Meanwhile, the followers of Pyrrhonian skepticism denied the possibility of sure judgments and undoubted knowledge.

Historic context

Greek society had peculiar characteristics. A political structure based on the polis, a polytheistic religion devoid of hierarchy and orthodoxy, an enterprising social class, dedicated to commerce and leisure and with extensive contacts with other Mediterranean cultures, as well as a developed curiosity. The union of these elements, together with a supposed Greek genius, led to the appearance of new explanations about nature and the human being, until then only clarified by myths and traditions.

The expansion of Greek culture during Hellenism, its absorption by the Roman Empire, the subsequent relationship with Christianity and its definitive recovery in the 13th century thanks to translators such as Averroes, as well as the interest that this group professed during the Renaissance of thinkers, they contributed to the continued study of Greek philosophy, since it became one of the pillars of Western culture.

The Greek world prior to the appearance of philosophy lived installed in the mythical attitude. Through myths man managed to give an explanation of natural phenomena and social institutions. The great spiritual event that the Greeks initiate between the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. C. consisted of trying to overcome this way of thinking about the world with another revolutionary way that bets on reason as the instrument of knowledge and mastery of reality. It should be noted that this step should not be understood as abrupt but rather gradual. Mythical influences are still noticeable in many ancient thinkers. Actually, it was a few people who participated in the new and revolutionary way of thinking (those who were to be called philosophers).), although little by little it became more universal. Even in our time, the mythical attitude has not yet disappeared. This great step from mythology to rationalist explanation is known as the "step from myth to logos."

With this new way of thinking, the Greeks propose that the things of the world are ordered according to laws. The world is a cosmos, not a chaos, so nature does not behave first in one way and then in a completely different way, but in its behavior there is a certain order that follows laws, which can be discovered by reason. With the Greeks, many of the fundamental philosophical questions appear for the first time, and several of the possible solutions are already articulated in Greek philosophy.

Periods

Presocratic philosophy

Greek philosophy originated in the Greek cities of Asia Minor (Ionia), from the first reflections of the pre-Socratics, focused on nature, based on rational thought or logos. The goal of the pre-Socratic philosophers was to find the arché, or the first element of all things, the origin, substratum and cause of reality or the cosmos. The search for a permanent substance against change, for the essence against appearance, for the universal against the particular will be what would lay the foundations for later philosophical explanations.

The first philosophers of this period were monists, in that they sought a single principle or material foundation of reality. For Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher according to Aristotle, water was this "primordial matter", based on the discovery of fossils of marine animals inland and on the fact that water is essential for the nutrition and growth of any living being. Anaximander, for his part, considered that it was the unlimited or indeterminate (ápeiron), from which the opposites of nature are produced (in the first place, the cold and the hot), while for Anaximenes the primordial matter was air, a neutral principle like the apeiron but not without properties.

On the other hand, Pythagoras held the thesis that "all things are numbers", which means that the essence and structure of all things can be determined by finding the numerical relations they express. He held the novel idea of ​​the immortality of the soul and of the possibility of the transmigration of the human soul after death to other animal forms.

Two great pre-Socratics, initiators of the Western metaphysical tradition, were Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus accounted for the sensitive becoming of the universe and postulated reason (Logos) as the regulating principle of this becoming, since it unifies opposites. Reality is in perpetual change, each opposite tends towards its opposite, in a process with order and measure, according to the Logos. In the manner of his predecessors, he conceived of "ever-living" fire as the principle or foundation of the universe, although understanding it as an image of perpetual becoming, rather than as a material constituent element of all things.

On the contrary, for Parmenides reality is one and immutable. The Being exists, while the non-Being does not exist. Once this is established, change or becoming is impossible if non-Being does not exist (whose impossibility is logical). His arguments in favor of this thesis were taken up by Plato to justify his division of reality into two spheres: the illusory sphere of change and the real scope of permanence. Aristotle will also rescue from his arguments the three fundamental principles of logic, the art of reasoning. Parmenides understood reason as the human faculty of thinking or reasoning,means to discover the essential properties of Being (which is one, immutable, indivisible, uncreated, imperishable, homogeneous), unlike Heraclitus who conceived it as order of the universe. If the latter used the senses to affirm what reality is like, for Parmenides trusting them leads us down the path of deception and error, the path of opinion (doxa). What truly is (the Being) and how it is, can only be revealed to us through reason.

Subsequently, some philosophers began to search for more than one ground of reality. Empedocles was prominent among these pluralist philosophers. This founded the doctrine of the four elements, which will last in the philosophy of nature until the eighteenth century: water, fire, earth and air, from which the moving principles "love" and "hate" make up all things. The pluralist Anaxagoras, for his part, held that everything is made up of minute parts (homeomeries), ordered by an intelligence (Nôus).

The atomists constituted the most important pluralist school, with great influence on post-Aristotelian physics. Its founders, Leucippus and Democritus, conceived of reality as composed of two types of spaces: one empty and one full (matter). The latter is made up of atoms, which, as the name implies, are indivisible particles. All visible things are composed of atoms linked together due to their different shapes (spheres or hooks). But these unions are produced only by colliding according to random movements in empty space.

In summary:

• The Milesian thinkers, who tried to explain nature by reducing it to a single original principle and primordial matter. Thales proposed that the fundamental matter from which everything originates and everything is composed is water; Anaximander assigned that role to the indeterminate (tó ápeiron), the ápeiron, and Anaximenes to the air.
• Pythagoras and the Pythagorean school, for whom numbers were the determining principle and structure of all reality, thus anticipating an important principle of modern science, although retaining an archaic thought, considering numbers as discrete units and not as merely abstract entities.
• Heraclitus, who proposes a dialectical vision of reality. He postulated reason (the logos) as the structure of reality, a unifying principle of opposites, from whose tension and opposition the identity of each thing is constituted.
• Parmenides, who postulated an ontology of permanence and not of change. Parmenides pointed out the unity and immutability of being, since change is impossible if there is no non-being (whose impossibility is logical).
• A series of philosophers who tried to combine the Eleatic premises with the sensitive observation of reality, interpreting concepts such as generation or corruption through others as a union or separation of certain original components. Thus Empedocles de Acragas founds the doctrine of the four elements or roots -water, earth, air and fire- from whose mixture and separation all known reality is formed, in a continuous cosmic cycle dominated by two forces, love and hate. On the other hand Anaxagoras of Clazomenas, will postulate that it is impossible for something to arise from where there is none, maintaining that everything is in everything from the beginning, in an infinite substance and infinite divisibility, whose interaction and mixture, which begins with the impulse of an Intellect, called nous, gives rise to everything we know. Finally, pre-Socratic thought reaches its maximum expression with the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. Atomism expresses that everything is composed of indivisible and infinitely small particles called atoms from whose group, from atoms of different shapes and sizes, all known reality arises, without the intervention of any external force and in a mechanical way.

Classical greek philosophy

The sophist school first, and Socrates later, focused their reflections on ethics and politics, as well as on the nature of language, norms, laws and society. His interest breaks away from cosmology to focus on human affairs.

The appearance of great systematic thinkers (such as Plato and Aristotle) ​​will mean the consecration of the first great philosophical conceptions, which will include a plurality of topics, from cosmology to politics, passing through anthropology or ethics. However, among all these issues, the systematic treatment of ontology stands out (theory of Being or of the entity as an entity) as well as the first texts that reflect on the method to be followed in philosophy, in order to be in a position to produce an authentic knowledge, specifically a legitimate knowledge of the principles or foundations - Cf. p. eg, The Republic VI and VII, as well as the book Gamma (Γ) or IV, ch. 4, from the Metaphysics

There is considerable discussion about why Athenian culture promoted philosophy, but one popular theory is that it happened because Athens had a direct democracy. It is well known from the writings of Plato that many sophists maintained schools of debate, that they were respected members of society, and that they were well paid by their students. It is also well known that the orators had a tremendous influence on Athenian history, possibly even causing its failure (see Battle of Miletus).

Another theory about the popularity of the philosophical debate in Athens was due to the use of slavery in the place - the work force, mostly slaves, performed the work that the male population of the city would otherwise do. Free to work in the fields or in productive activities, they organized assemblies in Athens, and spent long hours discussing popular philosophical questions. The theory fills in the blanks by stating that the students of the sophists wanted to acquire oratorical skills so that they could influence the Athenian assembly, and thus be rich and respected. As won debates led to wealth, the subjects and methods of debate were extremely developed.

Hellenistic philosophy

Hellenistic philosophy is the period of Greek philosophy from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the invasion of Macedonia by the Romans (148 BC). Greek cities lose their independence and Athens loses its commercial, political and, to a lesser extent, cultural hegemony. The Hellenistic monarchies succeed the city-states. There is a continuous situation of political instability. The differences between social classes are accentuated.

In the transition from the 4th to the 3rd century BC. C., after the death of Aristotle and the decline of the Greek city states, the wars between the Hellenic kings to succeed Alexander the Great made life problematic and insecure. Then, two philosophical schools arose in Athens which, in clear opposition to the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelian Lyceum, placed individual salvation at the center of their concerns: for Epicurus and his followers, on the one hand, as well as for the Stoics on the other. Zeno of Citium, on the other hand, philosophy served primarily to achieve psychological well-being or peace by ethical means.

While the followers of the Pyrrhonian skepticism, in principle, denied the possibility of sure judgments and indubitable knowledge, Plotinus, in the third century AD. C., transformed the theory of Plato's Ideas to give rise to a Neoplatonism. His conception of the gradation of Being (from "One" to matter) offered Christianity a variety of links and was the dominant philosophy of late antiquity.The different later schools are usually included in this period, such as the Peripatetics, the Skeptics, the Cynics, the Epicureans and the Stoics, all of them concerned mainly with ethical questions, but for that reason also, necessarily, with the problems of knowledge.