Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Pre-Socratic philosophy is Greek ancient philosophy before Socrates (and includes schools contemporary to Socrates that were not influenced by him[1]). In Classical antiquity, the Presocratic philosophers were called physiologoi (Greek: φυσιόλογοι; in English, physical or natural philosophers).[2] Aristotle called them physikoi ("physicists", after physis, "nature") because they sought natural explanations for phenomena, as opposed to the earlier theologoi (theologians), whose philosophical basis was supernatural.[3] Diogenes Laërtius divides the physiologoi into two groups, Ionian and Italiote, led by Anaximander and Pythagoras, respectively.[4]
Hermann Diels popularized the term pre-socratic in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics) in 1903. However, the term pre-Sokratic was in use as early as George Grote's Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates in 1865. Edouard Zeller was also important in dividing thought before and after Socrates.[5] Major analyses of pre-Socratic thought have been made by Gregory Vlastos, Jonathan Barnes, and Friedrich Nietzsche in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
It may sometimes be difficult to determine the actual line of argument some Presocratics used in supporting their particular views. While most of them produced significant texts, none of the texts has survived in complete form. All that is available are quotations by later philosophers (often biased) and historians, and the occasional textual fragment.
The Presocratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations of the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. These philosophers asked questions about "the essence of things":[6]
History
Western philosophy began in ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE. The Presocratics were mostly from the eastern or western fringes of the Greek world. Their efforts were directed to the investigation of the ultimate basis and essential nature of the external world.[7] They sought the material principle (archê) of things, and the method of their origin and disappearance.[7] As the first philosophers, they emphasized the rational unity of things, and rejected mythological explanations of the world. Only fragments of the original writings of the presocratics survive. The knowledge we have of them derives from accounts of later philosophical writers (especially Aristotle, Plutarch, Diogenes Laërtius, Stobaeus and Simplicius), and some early theologians (especially Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome). The Presocratic thinkers present a discourse concerned with key areas of philosophical inquiry such as being and the cosmos, the primary stuff of the universe, the structure and function of the human soul, and the underlying principles governing perceptible phenomena, human knowledge and morality.
Milesian School
The first Presocratic philosophers were from Miletus on the western coast of Anatolia. Thales (624-546 BCE) is reputedly the father of Greek philosophy; he declared water to be the basis of all things.[7] Next came Anaximander (610-546 BCE), the first writer on philosophy. He assumed as the first principle an undefined, unlimited substance without qualities (apeiron), out of which the primary opposites, hot and cold, moist and dry, became differentiated.[7] His younger contemporary, Anaximenes (585-525 BCE), took for his principle air, conceiving it as modified, by thickening and thinning, into fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth.[7]