ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Socrates taught Plato; Plato taught Aristotle; and, Aristotle taught Alexander. When Alexander grew up, he became so powerful and famous that he was called “Alexander the Great.”

From the time that he was very young, Alexander’s mother told him that he would do wonderful things. From his teacher, Aristotle, Alexander learned much about the world, about people, and about how a good king should rule. From others, Alexander learned how to fight well.

Alexander was the son of King Philip, the ruler of Macedonia in the northern part of Greece. The time Alexander was a young man, his father had already led his armies to the south and conquered many Greek city-states, including Athens.

There is a story that, one day, King Philip took the twelve-year-old Alexander to a sale of horses. One horse kept snorting and bucking furiously. “No one can ride so wild and savage a beast,” the men said. King Philip ordered the servants to take the horse away but Alexander spoke up. “Those men do not know how to treat him,” he said.

“Perhaps you can do better?” said his father doubtfully.

“Yes,” said Alexander confidently. He ran to the horse and quickly turned his head toward the sun, because he had noticed that the horse was afraid of his own shadow. He then spoke gently to the horse and patted him with his hand. When he had quieted him a little, he quickly leaped on the horse’s back.

Everybody expected to see the boy tossed to his death. But Alexander held on tight and let the horse run as fast as he could. By and by, the horse became tired, and Alexander rode him back to where his father was standing.

“My son,” said King Philip, “Macedonia is too small a place for you. You must seek a larger kingdom that will be worthy of you.”

A few years later, after his father died, that is just what Alexander did. When he was twenty-two years old, Alexander set off on his horse, which he named Bucephalus, to conquer the world.

Alexander was a strong, intelligent ruler, but he could also be hot-tempered and cruel. Not long after he became king, the Greek city-state of Thebes decided that it no longer wanted to be ruled by Alexander. The young king moved quickly to show his strength: he burned the city to the ground and ordered that the citizens be sold as slaves.

Alexander and his army could not be stopped. With Greece under his control, he marched eastward.

There is a famous legend about Alexander. The legend says that, hundreds of years before Alexander, a king named Gordius made a knot with so many twists and turns that nobody could untie it, a knot more tangled than the worst knot you’ve ever gotten in your shoelaces. This famous knot, called “the Gordian knot,” was tied in a rope on an oxcart. People said that anyone who could undo the knot would have the world for his kingdom.

When Alexander heard about the Gordian knot, he said, “Take me to it.” The people took him to a little temple. There stood the oxcart, with the famous knot tied to it.

“Tell me again,” said Alexander, “what you believe about this knot.”

“It is said,” the people replied, “that the man who can undo it shall have the world for his kingdom.”

Alexander looked carefully at the knot. He could not find the ends of the rope—but what did that matter? He raised his sharp sword and, with one stroke, sliced through the knot. The rope fell to the ground, and the people cheered.

“The world is my kingdom,” said Alexander.

Over the next few years, Alexander conquered a huge empire. He led his armies into Egypt. There, near the Nile River, he built a splendid new city which he named after himself, Alexandria. He then attacked the heart of the once mighty Persian empire, near the Tigris River. The people of Persia accepted Alexander as their king.

Alexander now ruled over most of the ancient world. But that was not enough for Alexander. Always, as soon as he had conquered one land, he would ask, “What lies beyond?” He pushed his army forward into battle after battle. But the soldiers were tired of fighting. They grumbled and argued and often drank too much wine. Finally, they refused to go any farther Alexander was furious, but many of his men had been marching and fighting for eight years, and they had had enough. And so Alexander gave the order to return home.

We will never know whether Alexander would have been a good ruler of his empire, because he soon fell ill and died. He was only thirty-three years old.

In just ten years, Alexander had conquered the largest empire the world has ever known. But soon after his death, his empire fell apart. Other leaders got into fights about who should rule, and none of these leaders was as strong as Alexander. Still, even though his empire did not last, Alexander had a lasting effect on the world because everywhere he went, he spread Greek ideas and learning that are still important today.

ARISTOTLE

One of the greatest thinkers of all time was Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher. His work in the natural and social sciences greatly influenced virtually every area of modern thinking.

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, on the northwest coast of the Aegean Sea. His father was a friend and the physician of the king of Macedonia. At 17, he went to Athens to study. He enrolled at the famous Academy directed by the philosopher Plato.

Aristotle threw himself wholeheartedly into Plato's pursuit of truth and goodness. Plato was soon calling him the "mind of the school." Aristotle stayed at the Academy for 20 years, leaving only when his beloved master died in 347 BC. In later years he renounced some of Plato's theories and went far beyond him in breadth of knowledge.

Aristotle became a teacher in a school on the coast of Asia Minor. He spent two years studying marine biology on Lesbos. In 342 BC, Philip II invited Aristotle to return to the Macedonian court and teach his 13-year-old son Alexander. This was the boy who was to become conqueror of the world ( see Alexander the Great ). No one knows how much influence the philosopher had on the headstrong youth. After Alexander became king, at 20, he gave his teacher a large sum of money to set up a school in Athens.

In Athens Aristotle taught brilliantly at his school in the Lyceum. He collected the first great library and established a museum. In the mornings he strolled in the Lyceum gardens, discussing problems with his advanced students.

Athenians called his school the Peripatetic which means “to walk about”) because he walked about while teaching. He led his pupils in research in every existing field of knowledge. They dissected animals and studied the habits of insects. The science of observation was new to the Greeks. Hampered by lack of instruments, they were not always correct in their conclusions.

One of Aristotle's most important contributions was defining and classifying the various branches of knowledge. He sorted them into physics, metaphysics, psychology, rhetoric, poetics, and logic, and thus laid the foundation of most of the sciences of today.

Anti-Macedonian feeling broke out in Athens in 323 BC. The Athenians accused Aristotle of impiety. He chose to flee, so that the Athenians might not "twice sin against philosophy" (by killing him as they had Socrates). He fled to Chalcis on the island of Euboea. There he died the next year.

After his death, Aristotle's writings were scattered or lost. In the early Middle Ages (also called Dark Ages) the only works of his known in Western Europe were parts of his writings on logic. Early in the 13th century other books reached the West. Some came from Constantinople; others were brought by the Arabs to Spain. Medieval scholars translated them into Latin.

DEMOCRACY’S BIRTHPLACE

From the ancient Greeks, Western Civilization got many new ideas, including a very important idea from the city of Athens; one was called democracy.

For hundreds of years, the Athenians had tried different ways of governing their city. They argued a lot about the best way. Some Athenians got tired of being ruled by a small group of powerful and strict leaders. They spoke up and said, “Why should just a few people make laws for everyone else, especially when they make bad laws?”

Leaders who make bad laws and are cruel to the people are called “tyrants.” Many Athenians got tired of being ruled by a few tyrants. “Let’s get rid of the tyrants and rule ourselves!” they said. And that is what the Athenians did. They invented a new king of government, in which the people chose their leaders. And if those leaders began to act like tyrants, then the people had the power to choose new leaders. This new kind of government, born in Athens and still with us today, is called “democracy.” Democracy means “rule by the people” or “people power.”

In Athens, democracy was not perfect. Not all the people had power. Not all the people were allowed to take part in the government. Only citizens were allowed to vote, and not every adult was a citizen. Woman and slaves were not citizens, so they could not vote. It would take many more years for human beings to figure out that all people are created equal and should have equal rights, not just grown men who own property.

Still, even though democracy in Athens left out women and slaves, it was the beginning of an idea that is very important today in our own country—the idea that ordinary people can help make the laws and choose their own leaders. This idea of democracy made ancient Athens different from most other places on earth at that time, where the laws were made by a king, or a small group of warriors or priests. Where would you rather live? In a place where you helped make the laws and pick the leaders, or where you never had any say?

SOCRATES VS. SOPHISTS

Socrates is the ancient Greek thinker who laid the early foundations for Western philosophical thought. His "Socratic Method" involved asking probing questions in a give-and-take which would eventually lead to the truth. Socrates was born in Athens and fought as a foot soldier in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, but in later years became a devotee of philosophy and argument. He spent years in the public places of Athens, engaging his fellow citizens in philosophical discussions and urging them to greater self-analysis. Socrates's tendency to question traditional and popular ideas upset some powerful people, and at age 70 he was charged with heresy and corruption of local youth. Convicted, he carried out the death sentence by drinking hemlock, becoming one of history's earliest martyrs of conscience. Socrates's most famous pupil was Plato, who in turn instructed the philosopher Aristotle.


In the Golden Age of Greece (500 B.C.E.-400 B.C.E.), emphasis shifted from cosmological concerns to human (ethical, political) concerns.

Sophists: There are no universal, objective standards. There is no “right” way except perhaps “winning.”

Socrates: There are universal, objective standards. "THAT there are universal standards I know; what they are in detail, I don’t know; I seek.”

Sophists: The key question is a WHO question—an authority question—WHO is to say.

Socrates: The key question is a WHAT question—WHAT can be said for & what can be said against such and such a line of conduct on the merits of the case?

Sophists: There is no objective right and wrong. Right and wrong are merely matters of convention. What people say is right or wrong is right or wrong; their saying or believing that it is right or wrong makes it so. Because of this radical ethical relativism, the radical sophists adopted a might-makes-right philosophy and taught: do whatever is necessary to achieve your objectives. Help your friends; harm your enemies.

Socrates: It is never right to do wrong. Yet, it is always an open question as to whether X is in fact shown to be wrong. In a sense, right and wrong are rooted in the nature of things. If X turns out to be wrong (presumably for everyone or anyone), then it is never right to do it—not because others do it, not because the culture allows it or even demands it, and not because of reward promised or punishment threatened—because nothing compensates for losing the right way to live or losing your soul.

Sophists: Knowledge is for political use. Knowledge is essential to succeed.

Socrates: Knowledge is for becoming virtuous. Knowledge is essential to becoming virtuous. If someone really knows and understands the good, he or she would not choose to do the bad.

Conclusion: Socrates’ view is often described as holding virtue and knowledge to be identical, so that no man knowingly does wrong. Since virtue is identical with knowledge, it can be taught, but not as a professional specialty as the Sophists had pretended to teach it. However, Socrates himself gave no final answer to how virtue can be learned.

SOPHISTS

Originally, Sophists were traveling teachers during the fifth century B.C. in Greece who provided education through lectures and in return received fees from their audiences. The sophistic movement arose at a time when there was much questioning of the absolute nature of familiar values and ways of life. An antithesis arose between nature and custom, tradition, or law, in which custom could be regarded either as artificial restraints on the freedom of the natural state or as beneficial and civilizing restraints on natural anarchy. Both views were represented among the sophists, though the former was the more common. Their first and most eminent representative was Protagoras; other notable sophists include Gorgias and Antiphon.


• Protagoras held that though the social virtues are not themselves innate, the capacity to acquire them is, and we all need to develop such virtues if we are to flourish both individually and as a species.

• Antiphon argued that by nature we all pursue our own advantage and that most man-made laws are unfavorable to this pursuit and should be evaded if we can escape detection.

• Some sophists took Antiphon’s view further and claimed that the dictates of nature represented a ‘natural justice’ which endorsed the supremacy of the strong over the weak. (An example of this kind of philosophy is the belief that “might makes right.”)

• Others opted for a social contract theory by means of which individuals agree to forgo the ultimate good of committing conventional injustice in order to avoid the ultimate evil of suffering it.

• The more notorious of them boasted of their ability to "make the worst appear the better reason."

• Modern studies have stressed the contributions of Protagoras and Gorgias to a theory of knowledge and to ethics. They are frequently cited today as forerunners of pragmatism.

[Modern pragmatists usually tried to dispense with an account of truth and concentrate upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief on the one hand must have a close connection with success on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because beliefs have effects: they work. ]

Generally, ‘nature’ connotes what comes as an inborn characteristic, while ‘convention’ connotes that which is suggested by custom and practice. The opposition between these two terms was an important feature of ancient Greek political thought. Until challenged by the sophists, political thinkers seem to have thought of moral ideas as being natural in the sense that a morally mature person would come to acquire them. The sophist challenge lay in the idea that perhaps moral ideas were human inventions, which were proposed ultimately because they were convenient. It was also theorized that people who have both meted out and received injustice began to set down their own laws and to determine what is lawful and just. Justice, then, is a mean between what is best—doing injustice without paying the penalty—and what is worst—suffering injustice without being able to avenge oneself. Plato's characters in his dialogue called the Republic makes these assertions, while Socrates devotes the rest of the Republic to arguments designed to rebut this and to show that ideas of justice are indeed natural.

The Greek distinction between the natural and conventional has persisted. For instance, those writers who follow the organic analogy are siding with Plato and Aristotle in thinking of the political institutions or ideas they praise as ‘natural’. Those who deny the organic analogy and regard institutions and ideas as human artifacts side with the sophists.

Protagoras (c. 490-420 BC) was the most successful of the Sophists. He is famous for the relativistic statement that “man is the measure of all things.” Relativism is a theory that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

The precise meaning of Protagoras’ relativistic assertion that “man is the measure of all things” is debatable. One interpretation leads to subjective idealism, the theory that nature has no objective existence independent of the minds that perceive it. In this way, it means that whatever seems true for a person is true for that person.

Relativism is similar to perspectivism, the view that all truth is truth from or within a particular perspective; the perspective may be a general human point of view, set by such things as the nature of our sensory apparatus, or it may be thought to be bound by culture, history, language, class, or gender. Since there may be many perspectives, there are also different families of truths. In other words, something that is true for one person (or group of people) can very well be false for another.

THE FIRST ATOMIC THEORISTS

Democritus ("chosen of the people") was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos. His exact contributions are difficult to disentangle from his mentor Leucippus, as they are often mentioned together in texts. Their hypothesis on atoms is remarkably similar to modern science's understanding of atomic structure, and avoided many of the errors of their contemporaries. Largely ignored in Athens, Democritus was nevertheless well-known to his fellow northern-born philosopher Aristotle. Plato is said to have disliked him so much that he wished all his books burnt. Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science".


• Heraclitus taught that everything changes.

• Parmenides taught that change is logically impossible.

• The question is: How can matter change yet maintain its existence?

• The answer is: It is composed of indestructible units called atoms.

The ancient philosopher, Heraclitus, maintained that everything is in a state of flux. Nothing escapes change of some sort (it is impossible to step into the same river). On the other hand, Parmenides argued that everything is what it is, so that it cannot become what is not (change is impossible because a substance would have to transition through nothing to become something else, which is a logical contradiction). Thus, change is incompatible with being so that only the permanent aspects of the Universe could be considered real.

An ingenious escape was proposed in the fifth century B.C. by Democritus. He hypothesized that all matter (plus space and time) is composed of tiny indestructible units, called atoms. This idea seems motivated by the question of how finely one can go on cutting up matter. While Democritus performed no experiments and had only the flimsiest evidence for postulating the existence of atoms, his theory was kept alive by the Roman poet Lucretius which survived the Dark Ages to be discovered in 1417. The atoms in Democritus theory themselves remain unchanged, but move about in space to combine in various ways to form all macroscopic objects. Early atomic theory stated that the characteristics of an object are determined by the shape of its atoms. So, for example, sweet things are made of smooth atoms, bitter things are made of sharp atoms.

In this manner permanence and flux are reconciled and the field of atomic physics was born. Although Democritus' ideas were to solve a philosophical dilemma, the fact that there is some underlying, elemental substance to the Universe is a primary driver in modern physics, the search for the ultimate subatomic particle.

It was John Dalton, in the early 1800's, who determined that each chemical element is composed of a unique type of atom, and that the atoms differed by their masses. He devised a system of chemical symbols and, having ascertained the relative weights of atoms, arranged them into a table. In addition, he formulated the theory that a chemical combination of different elements occurs in simple numerical ratios by weight, which led to the development of the laws of definite and multiple proportions.

He then determined that compounds are made of molecules, and that molecules are composed of atoms in definite proportions. Thus, atoms determine the composition of matter, and compounds can be broken down into their individual elements.

TWO PLURALISTS

Pluralism is the doctrine that reality is composed of many ultimate substances and that no single explanatory system or view of reality can account for all the phenomena of life. Here, I will discuss the ideas of two great Ancient Greek thinkers who were pluralists, Empedocles and Anaxagoras.

Empedocles (490 B.C. - 430 B.C.) theorized that all matter was composed of four basic ingredients: fire, air, water, and earth. He believed that two forces, harmony and discord, interact to bring together and separate the four substances. Believing in the transmigration of souls, he declared that salvation requires abstention from eating the flesh of any animals because their souls may once have inhabited human bodies.

He tried to find the basis of all change. He believed that an existence could not pass into non-existence, and vice versa. He viewed changes as the result of mixture and separation of unalterable substances. Thus, coming into existence from a non-existence, as well as a complete death and annihilation, are impossible; what we call coming into existence and death is only mixture and separation of what was mixed.

Anaxagoras (500 B.C. - 428 B.C.), another great Ancient Greek thinker who was a pluralist, is best remembered for his cosmology and for his discovery of the true cause of eclipses. In doing so, however, he was accused of contravening the established religion and was forced to flee to Lampsacus, an Ancient Greek colony. His cosmology grew out of the efforts of earlier pre-Socratic philosophers to explain the physical universe in terms of a single element. The most original aspect of his system was his doctrine of nous ("mind," or "reason"), according to which the cosmos, including all living things, was created by mind in a process of attraction of "like to like"; mind also accounts for the power of living things to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. He is famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous (mind), as an ordering force. He regarded material substance as an infinite multitude of imperishable primary elements, referring all appearance and disappearance to mixture and separation respectively.

PARMENIDES vs. HERACLITUS

Parmenides (active 475 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher, leader of the Eleatics. The Eleatics was a school of pre-Socratic philosophy that flourished in the 5th century BC. It took its name from the Greek colony of Elea (Velia) in southern Italy. It is distinguished by its radical monism. Monism is the doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being.

Parmenides asserted that true being and knowledge, discovered by the intellect, must be distinguished from appearance and opinion, based on the senses. He held that there is an eternal One, which is timeless, motionless, and changeless.

His general teaching has been reconstructed from the few surviving fragments of his lengthy verse composition On Nature. He held that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality, "Being." This doctrine, which was formulated as the principle that "all is one," entails that all claims of change or of non-Being are illogical. Because of his method of basing claims about appearances on a logical concept of Being, he is considered a founder of metaphysics. Plato's dialogue Parmenides discusses his thought.

The Way of Truth is the way of the intellect; it discovers True Being, which is unitary, timeless, motionless, and changeless although spatially limited. Its opposite, Non-Being, cannot be intellectually known and is therefore to be denied as a concept. The contradictory Heraclitean notion of Simultaneous Being and Non-Being is also denied.

[According to Heraclitus, there was no permanent reality except the reality of change; permanence was an illusion of the senses. He taught that all things carried with them their opposites, that death was potential in life, that being and not-being were part of every whole-therefore, the only possible real state was the transitional one of becoming. He believed fire to be the underlying substance of the universe and all other elements transformations of it. He identified life and reason with fire and believed that no man had a soul of his own, that each shared in a universal soul-fire.]

According to Parmenides, The Way of Opinion, that is the usual path of mortals, deals with the evident diversity of nature and the world perceived through the senses. The validity of sense data and of the objects perceived through the senses is denied. Parmenides insists on not confusing the physical objects with those of the intellect. Underlying all physical reality are the external opposites, Fire and Darkness. A mixture of the two governs the makeup of all organic life.

Parmenides's importance lies in his insistence on the separation of the intellect and the senses. His allegorical discussion of the paths of thought represents the earliest attempt to deal with the problems of philosophical method.

XENOPHANES

Xenophanes (zĕnŏf'ənēz), c.570-c.480 B.C. was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Colophon. Although thought by some to be the founder of the Eleatic school, his thought is only superficially similar to that of Parmenides. Xenophanes opposed the anthropomorphic representation of the gods common to the Greeks since Homer and Hesiod. Instead he asserted there is only one god, eternal and immutable but intimately connected with the world. Although interpretations of his thought vary, it was probably a form of pantheism. Pantheism is doctrine that the universe is God and, conversely, that there is no god apart from the substance, forces, and laws manifested in the universe

PYTHAGORAS

Pythagoras (570 B.C. - c. 500 B.C.) travelled widely, which influenced his way of thinking from many sources. Although legends say that Pythagoras developed a great part of his wisdom in Egypt, he was the great ancient Greek thinker who is credited with discovering the Pythagorean Theorem in geometry. The theorem states that the sum of the squares of the two legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse.

Pythagoras introduced philosophy as a way of life. His ideas influenced the thinking of other great thinkers (including Plato and Aristotle) who also largely contribute to our Western way of life today. It can be said that the foundations of the classical physical sciences and mathematics could be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers and sages whose writings and recorded wisdom were rediscovered during the Dark Ages in Europe's history and led the Western Civilization into the Age of Enlightenment after the Renaissance (or "Rebirth").

The Renaissance, the ‘rebirth’ of literature, art, and learning that progressively transformed European culture from the mid‐14th century in Italy to the mid‐17th century in England, was strongly influenced by the rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin literature, and accelerated by the development of printing. The Renaissance is commonly held to mark the close of the Middle Ages (which is also called the “Dark Ages”) and the beginning of the modern Western world. The Dark Ages was due to the loss of classical learning. Enlightenment is a direct continuation of the Renaissance's intellectual tendencies.

The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment) is the era in Western philosophy and intellectual, scientific and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source for legitimacy and authority.

The re-examination of the ancient Greek culture by the post-dark age Western culture laid the very foundations of the intellect of the post-dark-age Western culture that has been the model for approaches to accurate thinking. Nonetheless, however, some ancient Greeks have posited some ideas that led the Western Civilization into the dark ages by way of a dogmatic view of life through static religious notions.

As a Greek philosopher, mathematician and religious teacher, Pythagoras established a community of followers who adhered to a way of life he prescribed. His school of philosophy reduced all meaning to numerical relationships and proposed that all existing objects are fundamentally composed of form and not material substance.

The principles of Pythagoreanism, including belief in the immortality and reincarnation of the soul and in the liberating power of abstinence and asceticism, and his theory of forms influenced the thought of Plato and Aristotle and not only contributed greatly to the development of the mathematics and Western rational philosophy, but also to its religion--Christianity.

HERACLITUS

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (540 B.C. - 460 B.C.) attempted to explain the nature of the universe by assuming the existence of the "logos," that is, order or reason, as the unifying principle which guides all things and by specifying fire as the basic substance which underlies physical reality.

He is a solitary figure who claims to have sought the truth within himself, and although his work shows familiarity with the writings of other philosophers, particularly those of Anaximander, both his unique ideas and his peculiar literary style set him apart.

The basis of his philosophy is the world of appearance, the sensible world. He state that "All things are constantly changing, and thus it is impossible to step into the same stream twice." Change is due to the mutual resolution of opposites such as hot and cold, day and night, hunger and satiety, although underlying all change and guiding it is a basic unity expressed by the idea of the logos. He also believed that that which seems to be at variance with itself through conflict or tension (which is inherently the case with opposites) is in reality expressive of a kind of harmony.

Although the cosmos, in Heraclitus's view, has always existed and therefore did not come into being at some arbitrary point in time, fire, under the influence and guidance of the logos, is the basic substance in it, and all elements are some transformation of it. It is not completely independent but is infused with the logos, as is the human soul, and it is for  this reason that the soul may come to grasp the truth of the cosmos, although human understanding may reach only childish limits.

Heraclitus enjoins men to learn the nature of the universe through an understanding of their own souls and has been considered as the first mental philosopher. Exact language and thought are of paramount importance to him, since he conceives of the logos as both the underlying order in the cosmos and the soul's verbal expression about it.

He is important as one of the first Greek philosophers to take up the problem of knowledge, and he is undoubtedly the first to stress the importance of an understanding of the soul as a step toward understanding the external world order. Here, soul means the animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and conceived as an immaterial entity. The writings of Heraclitus provided much of the theoretical basis for Stoicism.

ANAXIMENES

Anaximenes (599 B.C. - 524 B.C.) was the third and last of the important Greek philosophers of the Greek city named Miletus. The other two were Thales and Anaximander. According to Theophrastus, Anaximenes was an associate, and possibly a student, of Anaximander.

Anaximenes was perhaps the first philosopher to insist on an underlying physical law governing the universe. In his attempt to present a rational, scientific view, in the form of describing a natural process as responsible for making a world, and by reducing qualitative differences to quantitative differences, Anaximenes was only partially free from mythological beliefs. However, he provided a pattern to be followed by the natural philosophers in the development of science.

In short, Anaximenes is best known for his doctrine that air is the source of all things. In this way, he differed with his predecessor Thales, who thought that water is the source of all things, and Anaximander, who thought that all things came from an unspecified boundless stuff. But, note that each one of these three great thinkers broke with the tradition of their time and culture of attributing natural causes to myths or religious beliefs.

THE FIRST SCIENTIST

Anaximander (c. 610 B.C. - c. 546 B.C.) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in a city named Miletus. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of Thales, his teacher. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and Pythagoras amongst his pupils.

His contributions to philosophy relate to many disciplines. In astronomy, he tried to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to Earth. In physics, his postulation that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things led Greek philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. His knowledge of geometry allowed him to introduce the gnomon in Greece. He created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography.

With his assertion that physical forces, rather than supernatural means, create order in the universe, Anaximander can be considered the first scientist. He is known to have conducted the earliest recorded scientific experiment.

He apparently wrote treatises on geography, astronomy, and cosmology that survived for several centuries and made a map of the known world. He was the first thinker to develop a cosmology. He was a rationalist who prized symmetry and used geometry and mathematical proportions to help map the heavens; his theories thus departed from earlier, religious conceptions and foreshadowed the achievements of later astronomers. Whereas earlier theories had suggested that Earth was suspended or supported from elsewhere in the heavens, Anaximander asserted that the Earth remained unsupported at the centre of the universe because it had no reason to move in any direction.

Even though he had no theory of natural selection, some people consider him as evolution's most ancient proponent. His theory of aquatic descent of human beings was re-conceived centuries later as the aquatic ape hypotheses. However, they illustrate the beginning of a phenomenon sometimes called the "Greek miracle," whereas people try to explain the nature of the world, not with the aid of myths or religion, but with material principles. this is the very principle of scientific thought, which was later furthered by improved research methods.

NATURALISM

Naturalism may be defined as the system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes or causes consistent with cause-and-effect relationships freely and mechanistically occurring in nature.

Thales of Miletus (624 - 546 B.C.E.), in the Ancient Greek intellectual tradition, attempted to explain natural phenomena without reference to religious ideology. Thus, according to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales." Many others , including Aristotle, regard Thales as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition.

The attempt by Thales to explain natural phenomena without reference to "the gods," was tremendously influential. All of the other pre-Socratic philosophers followed him in attempting to provide an explanation of ultimate substance, change, and the existence of the world without reference to religious ideology.

Thales rejection of religious explanations became an essential idea for the modern scientific revolution. He was also the first known to define general principles and set forth hypotheses, and as a result has been called the "Father of Science."

In mathematics, Thales used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of a pyramid and the distance of ships from the shore. He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to a theorem named after him (Thales's Theorem). As a result, he has also been called the first true mathematician and is the first known individual to whom mathematical discovery has been attributed.

[Thales' theorem (named after Thales of Miletus) states that if A, B and C are points on a circle where the line segment AC is a diameter of the circle, then the angle ABC is a right angle (which measures 90 degrees).]

Although Thales shared many great theories with Western Civilization (some of which he probably learned from the Ancient Egyptians), perhaps his greatest contribution to the intellectual and (subsequently) to the technological greatness of Western Civilization was his break from the Ancient Greek tradition of religiously attributing natural phenomena to the will of anthropomorphic gods. Contrary to explaining natural occurrences with religious explanations, Thales aimed to explain natural phenomena by way of rational explanations that referenced natural processes inherent within nature itself.