What Are The Origins Of Philosophy? The First Thinkers
Western philosophy has a long history and tradition. Its beginnings are usually attributed to Greek thinkers, who have significantly influenced our way of interpreting the world. In fact, this is largely why Hellenic culture is known as “the cradle of Western civilization.”
In this article we will take a general tour of The origins of philosophy, beginning with the pre-Socratics and passing through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Western philosophy was born in Miletus, Ionia, which was a Greek colony located in Asia. Among other things, Miletus was a cosmopolitan city where people with different religious beliefs lived together and there was great cultural diversity. That is to say, there were people with many different perspectives and beliefs.
In addition, It was in Miletus that religious myths were first significantly questioned and the first legislations were devised, which finally made people move away from magical or supernatural thoughts.
At these times, leisure (free time) was dedicated precisely to developing this thinking based on the natural, the existing and the concrete. In fact, from this (from the word “leisure” in Greek), the word “school” emerged, although its current meaning is quite far from that of “free time.”
Thales of Miletus is considered the first philosopher of the West, since he was the first to explain the phenomena of the world based on explanations of nature, and no longer through pure mythology Of course, philosophy continued to be a task with an important component of speculation, given that science as we know it did not yet exist, and on the other hand, the transmission of culture was fundamentally oral.
The philosophers who were trained in the same period as Thales of Miletus They are known as the pre-Socratics After them, with the arrival of Socrates, there was a very important change in the Western worldview, which is why it is considered a new stage in the history of philosophy (the Socratics). Finally, it is the disciples of Socrates who close the first stage of ancient philosophy.
The pre-Socratics understood and analyzed the origins of the universe through magical-religious stories and myths. At this time, nature was not the terrain of the material that is available to human activity, as if they were two separate elements.
On the contrary, Nature is closer to the idea of force, power or energy, intrinsic to the human being himself There was not this radical dissociation between nature and culture, any more than there was between body and mind. For the same reason, knowledge of what is natural was not given by quantitative and rational explanations, but by an understanding closer to aesthetics, ethics or ontology.
The pre-Socratics are mostly native to Asia Minor, therefore, Much of his thinking converges with Eastern philosophies In fact, due to the history of mobilization from one territory to another, largely mediated by disputes and wars, Ionian cities had a great relationship with the East. Part of this relationship resulted, for example, in the development of writing, calculation and astronomy.
2. Socrates
The history of the origins of philosophy is mainly divided before and after Socrates. This is because with Socrates magical-religious explanations were finally abandoned and searches were made for rational responses about world phenomena From myth we moved to logos (reason or word), which is positioned as the basis for creating knowledge, to this day.
This knowledge is acquired through questions, because they are what allow rational discussion, and to ask these questions it is necessary to have doubts about everything that happens around us. That is, staying alert, curious and a little skeptical about the phenomena of the world.
What changes from his philosophy is the way of understanding justice, love, virtue (similar to the “soul”), ethics and morality, and the knowledge of being For Socrates, virtue and knowledge are strongly connected, just as ignorance and vice are.
The written records we have about Socrates were not written directly by him, but by his best-known disciples: Plato and later Aristotle.
3. Plato
Plato’s real name was Aristocles, he was a descendant of an aristocratic family and was a relative of the last king of Athens. But, when the oligarchy condemned Socrates, he soon created an affinity with the idea of democracy. However, it was the same Athenian democrats who completed the condemnation of Socrates, which left him once again disappointed.
Among these and other experiences, Plato develops a theory of State based on life and the political affairs of the polis (the city). After leaving Athens for a long time, he returned to the gardens of Academos, the first university in the world, which received the name of the Academy.
For Plato, knowledge is not only achieved through reason, but through affection, or rather love (of wisdom). He established a series of myths that illustrate how abstract ideas mix with the dimension of the concrete.
His texts are written in the form of dialogues and some of the most famous are Phaedrus (on love and beauty), Phaedo (on the immortality of the soul), the Symposium, the Gorgias and perhaps the most representative: the Republic, where he captures a series of social utopias that continue being discussed to this day.
Aristotle is the most popular disciple of Plato in the history of philosophy. He founded his own school, which was dedicated to Apollo Lycius, so it was called the Lyceum. Aristotle thought that the elements of reality were singular and were the same things. He developed the idea of “substance” and divided it into three types: sensible and perishable substance, sensible and external substance, and immobile substance.
Aristotle’s philosophy is considered a realist philosophy, while, unlike Plato who developed “the ideas”, Aristotle I wanted to see things in themselves, as dynamic, individual and concrete entities For him, the essence of an object is the object itself.
According to this philosopher, all living beings have a soul, which is the power of life, a body. But souls are not the same for everyone, so there are different types of powers. For example, there is a nurturing soul, a motor soul, or a sensitive soul.
Likewise, according to Aristotle, The difference between human beings and other living beings is the active intellect which reflects on the activity of knowledge in the face of the data it produces, is immortal and is what defines us as rational beings.
The works that we have inherited from Aristotle talk about Logic, Physics, Ethics and Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics and Metaphysics. The first of them is Categories, and among the last is Rhetoric Art and Poetics.
