The First Philosophers

Here is another blog on philosophy. This one is about early Greek philosophy.

There is a story about how philosophy emerged in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. It has a good source, in Aristotle’s history…

Material Monism?

Parmenides’ Criticism

Parmenides’ Theory of Elements

Storms can be scary. High winds, lots of rain, lightning, thunder, hail. In Greek mythology, Zeus is a storm god hurling thunderbolts at…

Heraclitus the Obscure

Imagine a world in which there is no morality. There are platitudes about how to act and how to treat other people. There are customs and…

On the seventh of Munychion in the year that Laches was the archon of record [399 BC], the infamous trial took place. The prosecution had…

On that fateful day, one group of partisans demanded justice that was long overdue for a malefactor. Another group declared the proceedings…

The world in which Socrates grew up was born in 480 BC, a mere eleven years before Socrates’ birth. The city whose duties and…

Confrontation

Soon after the battle Xerxes ordered the remainder of his fleet — still a large force, but demoralized and in disarray — to return to the…

After the Persian invasion, Athens herself was in ruins. The houses and public buildings had been burned and much of the city wall torn…

Just before the Athenians had made their retreat to Salamis during the war with Persia, a young nobleman on a personal mission led a…

Throughout the turbulent era of the Persian wars, Athens built a powerful democratic political system that held the city together and made…

Socrates’ childhood was probably fairly typical for a boy from a family of modest means. He was born to Sophroniscus and Phaenarete in the…

At school, Socrates had three teachers: a grammatistēs, or reading instructor; a gymnastēs, or physical education instructor; and a…

Socrates’ borough or deme was Alopece, located in the immediate suburbs of Athens to the southeast. In his constitutional reforms of 508…

On February 17th, 478 BC, at Athens, a little before noon, the sky grew unusually dark as though it was twilight. The bright disk of the…

Heraclitus of Ephesus, an important city just to the north of Miletus, meditated on the ideas of his predecessors. In his enigmatic…

A turning point in the succession of cosmologies occurred when Parmenides of Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, wrote a poem…

Writing after Parmenides, Anaxagoras saw the importance of his predecessor’s conception. In a month Anaxagoras could verify Parmenides’…

A luminous fire appeared in the morning sky before sunrise one day in the summer of 466 BC. Morning by morning the fire grew larger…

Around the time the meteor fell, a young Greek tourist was traveling up the Nile River in Egypt. Armed with the latest theories and a…

Meanwhile, back in Athens, Aeschylus wrote a play which featured both the question of the Nile’s floods and Anaxagoras’ new theory:

Anaxagoras left behind a student, Archelaus. Probably a native Athenian, Archelaus continued the tradition of his master, seeking…

The question arises, why would two philosophers go to the island of Samos? Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras about 570 BC. Yet…

After Socrates’ voyage to Samos we hear nothing of his exploits for the next decade. We meet him next at a gathering of educators set in…

Undeterred by the warning, Hippocrates is still dying to meeting the sophist, and Socrates leads him to the house of the rich young patron…

Socrates replies to Protagoras’ claim to teach virtue that he did not think that such knowledge could be taught or communicated to another…

Protagoras has offered a rhetorical tour de force: a story built on a traditional myth, with a moral, which he then uses as the basis of an…