I. Ancient Philosophy

Philosophy began in Greece in the 6th century B.C. with the Pre-Socratics, who were mostly concerned with the origin and basis of the material world. With Socrates the emphasis shifted dramatically to ethics and political philosophy. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle laid the intellectual foundation of western civilization. It is hard to overestimate their influence. Socrates' conception of the psyche, or soul, for example, strongly influenced Christianity. His "Socratic method" of inquiry, his search for definitions, and his desire for logical consistency transformed philosophy into a real discipline--out of which most other intellectual disciplines later grew. Plato, one of Socrates' students, founded the Academy, the first genuine university, at Athens in around 385 B.C. His theory of ideas has informed the whole history of philosophy, especially the traditions of idealism and romanticism.

Aristotle, who studied twenty years at Plato's Academy, also founded his own university, the Lyceum, and in his time was the master of all knowledge . He invented the separate sciences of biology, physics psychology, formal logic, and on and on. As late as the l4-th century Aristotle was still considered the highest authority on all subjects. Without these philosophers there would be no telling how the history of the world might have turned out. It is no exaggeration to say that, without them, we might not have a civilization at all!

After Aristotle several "late classical" schools of philosophy flourished--the Stoics, who believed that wisdom lay in accepting the inevitable; the Epicureans, who taught that happiness could only be achieved through the suppression of desire; and the Skeptics, who counseled doubt. And finally there were the Neo- Platonists, who gave a mystical reworking to Plato's philosophy which dominated pagan thought until it was incorporated by St. Augustine into Christianity in the 5th century A.D., at the beginning of the Middle Ages.