Many often did, though I don’t think any of them would have believed in the existence of a “Greek system.” Even the most political of the ancients was less ideological, so to speak, than moderns. There was less talk of systems, and a great deal of assumptions were different. Even Aristotle, whose philosophy revolved around the political community, still saw this community merely as an instrument in allowing the human individual to live “the excellent/virtuous life.”

Most modern philosophies are utilitarian and (despite pretences to the contrary) more communal than individualistic. The modern political philosopher expresses his views, on some ultimate level, as a “pitch” to the nationalistic state, business, and the media [and the private people invested in these] in solving the collective problems of society. “This is how we will stop feeling empty inside”, or “this is how egalitarianism and/or repression will stop social unrest”, are phrased as systemic criticism, to rational listeners who are ultimately concerned with a political system already mature and developed.

The ancient philosopher’s mind was less cluttered. This also means that much of what the philosophers said now seems trivial (if you actually read Aristotle, or for that matter Confucius, your reaction to 70% of his content will be “I knew that”). Their “pitch” was comparatively eccentric, not drawing on a vast pool of communication and systems already available, and dealing with individual problems. Their systems are the immediately apparent societies of the city, the family, and the royal household, not the nation-state. They are not obligated to define a “world-system” of cultures, ethnicities, good and bad influences, except insofar as it will butress their theory. This means the details of the world are “fuzzy”: most philosophers had never visited far parts of their world and had no world-map. They did not feel obligated to explain how it worked. Think of every ancient philosopher as a modern storyteller obeying the Law of Conservation of Detail:

[The] ignorance [of Sherlock Holmes] was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being… should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, [but] the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

-Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

So, on the one hand, few ancient philosophers saw it necessary to have an “opinion” on sundry systems or politics. “World News” did not exist then, and the vast majority of ancients were apolitical. Modern people generally assume there is a great crisis going on, and this crisis necessitates that every man “lend a hand”, socially or intellectually. The ancients had no such concept; there was no sense of a problem necessitating constant intellectual assault. This means the student will be disappointed if he expects any Greek philosopher to have an opinion on something: these people might live in the same world as some nation or dynasty, without ever sparing special thought as to its historical mission, cultural influence, or ultimate meaning to themselves personally (not saying modern people don’t do the same thing: but modern philosophers of any sort rarely do).

This being said, some philosophers, like Socrates, or Diogenes, or the Cynics, spent their whole lives in what might be called a critique of their contemporary human condition. Socrates is the prime example, wandering about (and drawing the ear of the Athenian youth), telling them that everyone should be prepared to radically re-examine their whole framework of thought and social order. To live without this internal examination is an unconscious “half-life”, spent without exercising the full human faculties, and therefore intolerable. Predictably, it led to Socrates becoming universally resented, as the Athenian establishment saw him as questioning the entire framework of communal life, and he was executed for “corrupting the youth” and “denying the existence of the gods” (or “introducing foreign gods” - as he himself pointed out, his accusers were unclear on that point).

SOCRATES: “I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: ‘O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this?’

And if the person with whom I am arguing says: ‘Yes, but I do care’; I do not depart or let him go at once; I interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the lesser... this is the command of God, as I would have you know...

For if I tell you that [to hold my tongue] would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living — that you are still less likely to believe.

—Plato, The Apology of Socrates

Aristotle was altogether less critical, and he and his family was long involved with people in power (his father had been doctor to the Macedonian kings, and Aristotle married the daughter of the despot of Atarneus, as well as tutoring Alexander of Macedon). If Socrates was the contrarian, whose philosophy appealed to upstarts (something which Plato did more explicitly, in his attempt to create a utopian society ruled by philosopher-kings in the Greek colonies in Sicily), then Aristotle was the respectable, mature sort of person the authorities could entrust to teach rather than corrupt their younger members.

^ Fresco of Hades and Persephone, ca. 4th c. BC — from the Royal Tombs at Aegai, seat of the ancient kings of Macedon.

Aristotle’s description of the world was altogether more flattering to Athens - he was not Athenian himself, but in his time the city had become the center of Greek thought - and adopted the general outlines of a world-system which can be found in many other ancient civilizations (which is why I mentioned Confucius, whom I think is very similar). The world is, for Aristotle, divided into progressively more and less civilized societies. Societies are organized by the collective action of their members. Barbaric societies must be ruled by strong rulers, kings or despots, because their members are emotional and not rational. As societies learn to self-criticize and make laws based on reason rather than violence, they begin producing educated citizens, “gentlemen of leisure” who dedicate themselves to politics, who thereon begin educating their children to be rational also.

For Aristotle, this also had a “genetic” component: he believed temperate climatic conditions were necessary to produce temperate children who can be educated, therefore confining civilization to the middle climes, and populating the far north and far south (too cold and too hot, respectively) with intractable, wild peoples. This can be seen as an early racial system, although based on the circumstances of conception itself rather than genes. Inevitably, every nation that has accepted a version of the Aristotelian system (e.g. the Persians and Arabs) decided that the “temperate spot” Aristotle defined meant their own heartland.

To make a long story short, Aristotle believed that Athens was the best political organism present in his time period, but that the nature of human society is not to be “perfect” but “perfectible through education”: therefore Athens was defined by its ability to criticize and amend its laws. The nations around it became progressively less civilized as they became larger and based on violence rather than civic discourse, and thus producing inferior and less critical, rational, and knowledgeable people. He would have considered any polity capable of amending its laws based on civic debate civilized, and a despotic polity inferior: but as his own association with many Greek kings shows, he did not consider this a bad thing. He was a firm believer that the government of a society is representative of its climatic and historical conditions (i.e. its ability or inability to produce rational citizens), and hence despotism was the natural government of irrational peoples, just as slavery, womanhood, or the lowly status of craftsman or foreign resident was the natural status of less rational inhabitants of Athens (i.e. the majority of its population).

It’s not so much that Aristotle believed that Athens was perfect, but that responsible criticism was a process that can only be undertaken by the elite, and without damaging the institutions that had created such a rational, critical elite in the first place. For example, he believed young men under 30 should not study politics: they are irresponsible and prone to radicalism, to speak nothing of women. Unlike his mentor Plato, who believed women should be educated in politics and athletics even if they were not equal to men, Aristotle taught that education should be denied to any mind that could not become fully rational, i.e. a citizen head of family. Outside the body of accredited citizens discussing things with each other (not outsiders), Aristotle did not believe criticism could exist in the first place - it would simply be the ravings of diseased minds (literally, since disease in the body and disease in thought were attributed to the same principle, viz. imbalance in heat).

For the record, I know many readers will laugh at how backwards Aristotle sounds, but these are more or less exactly the principles most political bodies operate on: try becoming a successful politician at under 30, or to advocate the dismantling of systems of education. The gravitas of most institutions that underpin the modern world - from the school system, to parliaments, to militaries, to churches and the ‘ulema - basically operate on Aristotelian principles. The system justifies its own operation by the collective reason of its members, and barriers separating inside from outside - hard barriers of majority and citizenship, or soft barriers of accrued age, credentials, and respect - justify themselves in separating inside from outside. I have seen many people who criticize Aristotle on paper de facto endorse some or all of his ideas in their political choices & attitudes.

None of this should be surprising. Every society has an establishment and its critics: these tend to go hand-in-hand, as “bright lights cast long shadows.”

Yes. For most people, even among those who study the Greeks, the answer is no. But for a small percentage of us, yes, there is value in modern philosophers studying the ancient Greeks beyond merely historical interest.

To give some rather famous modern examples, Hegel’s idea of the dialectic was inspired by his study of the Greeks (specifically, Sophocles), Nietzsche’s Apollonian v Dionysian dichotomy was inspired by his study of the Greeks, and Heidegger’s dasein was inspired by his study of the Greeks (specifically, Parmenides). In the case of Nietzsche, he was trained as a philologist, so literally all of the Greeks were important to his thought.

In fact, if you look at history, not only the history of philosophy but also political, scientific, and religious history, every major Western revolution seems to be immediately preceded by a rebirth of interest in the Greeks. The Renaissance (including the Protestant Reformation), the Enlightenment (including the American Revolution), etc, all began with someone saying “Hey, this Socrates fellow had some really interesting things to say!”

Me personally, I find the Greeks to be the best way to research the monomyth, which is a really intriguing idea of Joseph Campbell on how to understand human nature. We identify the monomyth through comparative mythology, looking for the common features among original stories. But what does it mean? Not only were the Greeks the first to question their own myths, they were (as a result of being the first) also the only culture to question their own myths without having been told how to do so by some outside influence.

That fact doesn’t make the Greeks correct about anything. But it does mean that their ideas are free from outside influence, giving us a glimpse at what untouched thoughts might look like, as uncorrupted as first snow. And I think that speaks to us about the nature of thoughts in a way that modern thoughts are incapable of, if for no other reason than that it is no longer possible to not be influenced by thousands of years of accumulated ideas being shared and debated and influencing the behaviors of other people in our lives before we even learn how to speak.

So, yes. Not only today, but also, IMHO, forever.

The philosophical problems which we have mentioned in this book are: Greek Rationalism, Greek Naturalism, Greek Idealism, Greeks on human mind, Number theory and Greek Metaphysics. We have defined some significant issues like Greek atomism, Nihilism, Solipsism, Dogmatism, Sophism and Pluralism. Conflict and social unrest was created by the wide gap between the rich and the poor. Different city-states had completely different forms of government and ways of life (e.g., Sparta and Athens). Slavery eroded the economy by taking work away from the plebeians.

The Greeks made important contributions to philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Literature and theatre was an important aspect of Greek culture and influenced modern drama. The Greeks were known for their sophisticated sculpture and architecture. They also developed ideas governing governments and social relationships, as well as theories of human nature influencing our modern thinkers today. These debates laid important philosophical foundations for Greece and beyond, helping shape both politics and philosophy in Ancient Greece for generations to come.

Ancient Greek Philosophy

Ancient Greek Philosophy

vaseFrom Thales, who is often considered the first Western philosopher, to the Stoics and Skeptics, ancient Greek philosophy opened the doors to a particular way of thinking that provided the roots for the Western intellectual tradition. Here, there is often an explicit preference for the life of reason and rational thought. We find proto-scientific explanations of the natural world in the Milesian thinkers, and we hear Democritus posit atoms—indivisible and invisible units—as the basic stuff of all matter. With Socrates comes a sustained inquiry into ethical matters—an orientation towards human living and the best life for human beings. With Plato comes one of the most creative and flexible ways of doing philosophy, which some have since attempted to imitate by writing philosophical dialogues covering topics still of interest today in ethics, political thought, metaphysics, and epistemology. Plato’s student, Aristotle, was one of the most prolific of ancient authors. He wrote treatises on each of these topics, as well as on the investigation of the natural world, including the composition of animals. The Hellenists—Epicurus, the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Skeptics—developed schools or movements devoted to distinct philosophical lifestyles, each with reason at its foundation.

With this preference for reason came a critique of traditional ways of living, believing, and thinking, which sometimes caused political trouble for the philosophers themselves. Xenophanes directly challenged the traditional anthropomorphic depiction of the gods, and Socrates was put to death for allegedly inventing new gods and not believing in the gods mandated by the city of Athens. After the fall of Alexander the Great, and because of Aristotle’s ties with Alexander and his court, Aristotle escaped the same fate as Socrates by fleeing Athens. Epicurus, like Xenophanes, claimed that the mass of people is impious, since the people conceive of the gods as little more than superhumans, even though human characteristics cannot appropriately be ascribed to the gods. In short, not only did ancient Greek philosophy pave the way for the Western intellectual tradition, including modern science, but it also shook cultural foundations in its own time.

Presocratic Thought

An analysis of Presocratic thought presents some difficulties. First, the texts we are left with are primarily fragmentary, and sometimes, as in the case of Anaxagoras, we have no more than a sentence’s worth of verbatim words. Even these purportedly verbatim words often come to us in quotation from other sources, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute with certainty a definite position to any one thinker. Moreover, “Presocratic” has been criticized as a misnomer since some of the Presocratic thinkers were contemporary with Socrates and because the name might imply philosophical primacy to Socrates. The term “Presocratic philosophy” is also difficult since we have no record of Presocratic thinkers ever using the word “philosophy.” Therefore, we must approach cautiously any study of presocratic thought.

Presocratic thought marks a decisive turn away from mythological accounts towards rational explanations of the cosmos. Indeed, some Presocratics openly criticize and ridicule traditional Greek mythology, while others simply explain the world and its causes in material terms. This is not to say that the Presocratics abandoned belief in gods or things sacred, but there is a definite turn away from attributing causes of material events to gods, and at times a refiguring of theology altogether. The foundation of Presocratic thought is the preference and esteem given to rational thought over mythologizing. This movement towards rationality and argumentation would pave the way for the course of Western thought.

a. The Milesians

Thales (c.624-c.545 B.C.E.), traditionally considered to be the “first philosopher,” proposed a first principle (arche) of the cosmos: water. Aristotle offers some conjectures as to why Thales might have believed this (Graham 29). First, all things seem to derive nourishment from moisture. Next, heat seems to come from or carry with it some sort of moisture. Finally, the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and water is the source of growth for many moist and living things. Some assert that Thales held water to be a component of all things, but there is no evidence in the testimony for this interpretation. It is much more likely, rather, that Thales held water to be a primal source for all things—perhaps the sine qua non of the world.

Like Thales, Anaximander (c.610-c.545 B.C.E.) also posited a source for the cosmos, which he called the boundless (apeiron). That he did not, like Thales, choose a typical element (earth, air, water, or fire) shows that his thinking had moved beyond sources of being that are more readily available to the senses. He might have thought that, since the other elements seem more or less to change into one another, there must be some source beyond all these—a kind of background upon or source from which all these changes happen. Indeed, this everlasting principle gave rise to the cosmos by generating hot and cold, each of which “separated off” from the boundless. How it is that this separation took place is unclear, but we might presume that it happened via the natural force of the boundless. The universe, though, is a continual play of elements separating and combining. In poetic fashion, Anaximander says that the boundless is the source of beings, and that into which they perish, “according to what must be: for they give recompense and pay restitution to each other for their injustice according to the ordering of time” (F1).

If our dates are approximately correct, Anaximenes (c.546-c.528/5 B.C.E.) could have had no direct philosophical contact with Anaximander. However, the conceptual link between them is undeniable. Like Anaximander, Anaximenes thought that there was something boundless that underlies all other things. Unlike Anaximander, Anaximenes made this boundless thing something definite—air. For Anaximander, hot and cold separated off from the boundless, and these generated other natural phenomena (Graham 79). For Anaximenes, air itself becomes other natural phenomena through condensation and rarefaction. Rarefied air becomes fire. When it is condensed, it becomes water, and when it is condensed further, it becomes earth and other earthy things, like stones (Graham 79). This then gives rise to all other life forms. Furthermore, air itself is divine. Both Cicero and Aetius report that, for Anaximenes, air is God (Graham 87). Air, then, changes into the basic elements, and from these we get all other natural phenomena.

b. Xenophanes of Colophon

Xenophanes (c.570-c.478 B.C.E.) directly and explicitly challenged Homeric and Hesiodic mythology. “It is good,” says Hesiod, “to hold the gods in high esteem,” rather than portraying them in “raging battles, which are worthless” (F2). More explicitly, “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things that are blameworthy and disgraceful for human beings: stealing, committing adultery, deceiving each other” (F17). At the root of this poor depiction of the gods is the human tendency towards anthropomorphizing the gods. “But mortals think gods are begotten, and have the clothing, voice and body of mortals” (F19), despite the fact that God is unlike mortals in body and thought. Indeed, Xenophanes famously proclaims that if other animals (cattle, lions, and so forth) were able to draw the gods, they would depict the gods with bodies like their own (F20). Beyond this, all things come to be from earth (F27), not the gods, although it is unclear whence came the earth. The reasoning seems to be that God transcends all of our efforts to make him like us. If everyone paints different pictures of divinity, and many people do, then it is unlikely that God fits into any of those frames. So, holding “the gods in high esteem” at least entails something negative, that is, that we take care not to portray them as super humans.

c. Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism

Ancient thought was left with such a strong presence and legacy of Pythagorean influence, and yet little is known with certainty about Pythagoras of Samos (c.570-c.490 B.C.E.). Many know Pythagoras for his eponymous theorem—the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the adjacent sides. Whether Pythagoras himself invented the theorem, or whether he or someone else brought it back from Egypt, is unknown. He developed a following that continued long past his death, on down to Philolaus of Croton (c.470-c.399 B.C.E.), a Pythagorean from whom we may gain some insight into Pythagoreanism. Whether or not the Pythagoreans followed a particular doctrine is up for debate, but it is clear that, with Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, a new way of thinking was born in ancient philosophy that had a significant impact on Platonic thought.

The Pythagoreans believed in the transmigration of souls. The soul, for Pythagoras, finds its immortality by cycling through all living beings in a 3,000-year cycle, until it returns to a human being (Graham 915). Indeed, Xenophanes tells the story of Pythagoras walking by a puppy who was being beaten. Pythagoras cried out that the beating should cease, because he recognized the soul of a friend in the puppy’s howl (Graham 919). What exactly the Pythagorean psychology entails for a Pythagorean lifestyle is unclear, but we pause to consider some of the typical characteristics reported of and by Pythagoreans.

Plato and Aristotle tended to associate the holiness and wisdom of number—and along with this, harmony and music—with the Pythagoreans (Graham 499). Perhaps more basic than number, at least for Philolaus, are the concepts of the limited and unlimited. Nothing in the cosmos can be without limit (F1), including knowledge (F4). Imagine if nothing were limited, but matter were just an enormous heap or morass. Next, suppose that you are somehow able to gain a perspective of this morass (to do so, there must be some limit that gives you that perspective!). Presumably, nothing at all could be known, at least not with any degree of precision, the most careful observation notwithstanding. Additionally, all known things have number, which functions as a limit of things insofar as each thing is a unity, or composed of a plurality of parts.

d. Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.540-c.480 B.C.E.) stands out in ancient Greek philosophy not only with respect to his ideas, but also with respect to how those ideas were expressed. His aphoristic style is rife with wordplay and conceptual ambiguities. Heraclitus saw reality as composed of contraries—a reality whose continual process of change is precisely what keeps it at rest.

Fire plays a significant role in his picture of the cosmos. No God or man created the cosmos, but it always was, is, and will be fire. At times it seems as though fire, for Heraclitus, is a primary element from which all things come and to which they return. At others, his comments on fire could easily be seen metaphorically. What is fire? It is at once “need and satiety.” This back and forth, or better yet, this tension and distension is characteristic of life and reality—a reality that cannot function without contraries, such as war and peace. “A road up and down is one and the same” (F38). Whether one travels up the road or down it, the road is the same road. “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow” (F39). In his Cratylus, Plato quotes Heraclitus, via the mouthpiece of Cratylus, as saying that “you could not step twice into the same river,” comparing this to the way everything in life is in constant flux (Graham 158). This, according to Aristotle, supposedly drove Cratylus to the extreme of never saying anything for fear that the words would attempt to freeze a reality that is always fluid, and so, Cratylus merely pointed (Graham 183). So, the cosmos and all things that make it up are what they are through the tension and distention of time and becoming. The river is what it is by being what it is not. Fire, or the ever-burning cosmos, is at war with itself, and yet at peace—it is constantly wanting fuel to keep burning, and yet it burns and is satisfied.

e. Parmenides and Zeno

Heraclitus (born c. 540 bce, Ephesus, Anatolia [now Selçuk, Turkey]—died c. 480) Greek philosopher remembered for his cosmology, in which fire forms the basic material principle of an orderly universe. Little is known about his life, and the one book he apparently wrote is lost.

If it is true that for Heraclitus life thrives and even finds stillness in its continuous movement and change, then for Parmenides of Elea (c.515-c.450 B.C.E.) life is at a standstill. Parmenides was a pivotal figure in Presocratic thought, and one of the most influential of the Presocratics in determining the course of Western philosophy. According to McKirahan, Parmenides is the inventor of metaphysics (157)—the inquiry into the nature of being or reality. While the tenets of his thought have their home in poetry, they are expressed with the force of logic. The Parmenidean logic of being thus sparked a long lineage of inquiry into the nature of being and thinking.

Parmenides recorded his thought in the form of a poem. In it, there are two paths that mortals can take—the path of truth and the path of error. The first path is the path of being or what-is. The right way of thinking is to think of what-is, and the wrong way is to think both what-is and what-is-not. The latter is wrong, simply because non-being is not. In other words, there is no non-being, so properly speaking, it cannot be thought—there is nothing there to think. We can think only what is and, presumably, since thinking is a type of being, “thinking and being are the same” (F3). It is only our long entrenched habits of sensation that mislead us into thinking down the wrong path of non-being. The world, and its appearance of change, thrusts itself upon our senses, and we erroneously believe that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is the truth. But, if non-being is not, then change is impossible, for when anything changes, it moves from non-being to being. For example, for a being to grow tall, it must have at some point not been tall. Since non-being is not and cannot therefore be thought, we are deluded into believing that this sort of change actually happens. Similarly, what-is is one. If there were a plurality, there would be non-being, that is, this would not be that. Parmenides thus argues that we must trust in reason alone.

In the Parmenidean tradition, we have Zeno (c.490-c.430 B.C.E.). As Daniel Graham says, while “Parmenides argues for monism, Zeno argues against pluralism” (Graham 245). Zeno seems to have composed a text wherein he claims to show the absurdity in accepting that there is a plurality of beings, and he also shows that motion is impossible. Zeno shows that if we attempt to count a plurality, we end up with an absurdity. If there were a plurality, then it would be neither more nor less than the number that it would have to be. Thus, there would be a finite number of things. On the other hand, if there were a plurality, then the number would be infinite because there is always something else between existing things, and something else between those, and something else between those, ad infinitum. Thus, if there were a plurality of things, then that plurality would be both infinite and finite in number, which is absurd (F4).

The most enduring paradoxes are those concerned with motion. It is impossible for a body in motion to traverse, say, a distance of twenty feet. In order to do so, the body must first arrive at the halfway point, or ten feet. But in order to arrive there, the body in motion must travel five feet. But in order to arrive there, the body must travel two and a half feet, ad infinitum. Since, then, space is infinitely divisible, but we have only a finite time to traverse it, it cannot be done. Presumably, one could not even begin a journey at all. The “Achilles Paradox” similarly attacks motion saying that swift-footed Achilles will never be able to catch up with the slowest runner, assuming the runner started at some point ahead of Achilles. Achilles must first reach the place where the slow runner began. This means that the slow runner will already be a bit beyond where he began. Once Achilles progresses to the next place, the slow runner is already beyond that point, too. Thus, motion seems absurd.

Lady Philosophy, still doing Boethius proud!

A modern philosopher, of whatever school, has over 2,800 years of philosophical endeavor to draw from when approaching a question. The ancients spent considerable effort setting up the fundamental questions, positions, categories, and terminology Philosophy needed to gain traction as a discipline. For instance, Aristotle revolutionized Ethics when he posited that humans can think something is ethical and yet fail to do it through weakness of Will. His teacher, Plato, seems to have thought that knowing something was ethical was enough to make a person do that thing. You'll find Roman authors, like Cicero, pepper their writing with Greek terms simply because Latin (at that time) lacked a vocabulary of sufficient precision to “do philosophy”. Even with all his advances, Aristotle's work existed mainly as a critique of Plato until the High Middle Ages when Muslim and Christian Monotheists found it an apt tool for discussing fine Theological distinctions (though I would be remiss in failing to mention that Augstine was already a fan of Aristotle's Categories in the 4th and 5th centuries C.E.). We stand on the shoulders of giants. Their herculean efforts make our lofty field of vision possible.

That isn’t just the way it is in the modern world.

Philosophy was something for mostly the elite in Ancient Greece as well.

Even though you had Greek philosophers like my teacher trying to change that and make Philosophy more accessible—it was still largely for the elite.

One of the reasons that Epicureanism probably grew so large and was really only rivaled by Stoicism is because both of these schools thought Philosophy was for everyone.

Stoics and Epicureans didn’t discriminate based on class in taking students, and both are documented to have taught slaves, which was considered extremely taboo because it could make one eligible to sue for their freedom.

Epicureans were trying to help slaves sue for their freedom. Because Epicurus abhorred slavery. There are disagreements about rather this is what the Stoics were aiming for or not.

It seems to be though. Because a Stoic would often buy a slave with the intent of educating them and helping them sue for their freedom.

They often did, which eventually led Rome to restrict how many slaves could be freed in a year.

Aristotle and several others were privileged though, and that shows by the societal models they favored in many instances.

Aristotle was interested in keeping the wealthy and privileged where they were. It isn’t hard to work that out from Aristotle’s societal ideas.

The word “criticize”in its self is Greek. Not only is Greek but it is typical Greek.

I could tell that it is one of the most main words in Greek. This word is a basic(…now i just criticized) one and it exists on the same level with the very basic words as :Idea, Politics, Theos(God), Physics, Hyper, Psyche(soul), Nous(mind) etc.

The Greek meaning of this word is translated into English in an insufficient(i criticize now) way. This fact makes difficult to explain the word especially to non Greeks(criticism).

F.ex Hindu texts that contains the meaning of the word “criticize” and are translated to Greek, mentions the word as something “no good”. The same(criticism) in the Christian(criticism) religion, Christ said dont criticize so you will not be criticized by others. Even in Greek, English and many other languages it is common to say “dont criticize”.

To criticize in ancient Greek is a must and it is considered as a good word. To criticize it almost means to have the ability to see what it is alike or not i.e to see the difference in a bipolar world.

To criticize is one of the most main functions that human beings have got from God(if you believe in god, if not, then from nature). See an example : When you say that something is white then you criticize!!! The original meaning is that you see that this something is at least not black(or an other color)!!! When you say this is a child and not an adult then you declare that you have the ability of criticizing.

Criticizing is a must because that way it will be possible to say what is good or bad !!!

So, let me come to the answer : To criticize has been an every day life matter for Greeks. Greeks criticizes(take the original meaning) the most in the world. It is this factor that had made among other things the Greeks to be dominant for 1000nds of years now in having the biggest fleet in the world even if it is a small country(that is why Onassis is famous). It is this word that made Greece to have the most known philosophers of all times. (Plato, Aristoteles, Heraclitus, Thales, Archimedes, Epicure, Anaximandros, Anaximenis and 2.000 more of them, …the mathematicians were philosophers) .

The ancient Greeks as the modern ones does, liked to criticize a lot. That is why they criticized every body and everything. F,ex they criticized other Greeks by calling them as Barbarians. They ment that this person in spite of he/she being Greek is behaving like a barbarian or speaking like a barbarian etc.

Normally the rolle of a Philosopher is not to speak about contemporary matters(as the modern “philosophers” does) and thus the pure philosophers they haven't criticized the politicians. Those that used to criticize were the Retors, the Sophists(quasi-Philosophers, the Demagogs etc).

Wow, what a big question! But I guess we can make it small with a birds-eye view.

For ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, ethics was concerned with ones way of life, or what we today might call an ethos. The basic ethical question, was “how should a person live?” or “what is the best manner of life?”

Unlike modern ethics, their approach did not presuppose at the outset that a person should necessarily be morally good — although usually that turned out to be their conclusion. Rather they were more concerned with knowing what made a person happy, or what was the natural life.

Typically it was investigated by asking, What is the greatest good (summum bonum) of human existence? Is it being moral? Or prosperous? Feeling pleasure? The various schools of ancient philosophy (Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, etc.) each had their own answers, and from their different answers they derived different ethical systems.

The best ethical comparison of the various ancient philosophical schools and explanation of their views on the summum bonum is supplied by Cicero in his work, On Moral Ends (De finibus).

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy (and especially Stoicism) is not discussed half as much as it deserves to be. The natural law reasoning of Aristotle, Cicero and many Stoic philosophers have a world of understanding to convey to us moderns.

Unfortunately, the children of Karl Marx with their emphasis on oppression of the majority by the wealthy minority or the cultural exploitation that figures so prominently in the philosophers of the Frankfurt School (especially Herbert Marcuse), the Postmodernists, progressive pragmatists like Richard Rorty and legal welfare-state theorists like John Rawls continue to dominate today’s discussions.

The world will be much better off if today’s philosophers would go back to the empirical theories that followed from Socrates’ example and Aristotle’s study of nature. Aristotle observed that every species must use its capacities to satisfy its needs. That is true of mankind and is why men and women need to enjoy the freedom to use their capacities to satisfy their needs, as well.

That is the basis of natural law/natural rights philosophy that was lost with the skepticism of David Hume and the rationalistic theories advanced by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartes, etc.

Ethics is one of the works of Aristotle. The views of Aristotle on ethics represent, mainly, the prevailing opinions of educated and experienced men of his day. They are not like Plato's ideas with mystical religion.

The most important doctrine on ethics which I adore the most is the one of the golden mean. This is by Aristotle. Every virtue is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice. This is proved by an examination of the various virtues.

Courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness; liberality is between prodigality and meanness; proper pride is between vanity and humility; ready wit is between buffoonery and boorishness; modesty between bashfulness and shamelessness.

Some virtues do not fit into this scheme, for example, truthfulness. Aristotle put this as a mean between boastfulness and mock-modesty.

There were many schools of philosophy in ancient Greece which emphasized ideas of virtue and vice, some of them originating from the disciples of Socrates (Antisthenes of Athens).

The Cynics, Cyrenaics, Stoics, Epicurean, etc. were some of the famous Greek Schools of Philosophy which had ethics as one of the foundational ideas.

Some of the philosophers displayed eccentric behavior. Diogenes was one such a person. He was called a dog by people. He replied as to why: “ because I fawn upon those who give anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues.” Diogenes often slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace. He made a virtue of poverty.

I would single out Heraclitus (d. 475BCE) as having a view of the world that most accords with all modern sciences: physical ‘things’ are actually processes, subject to continuous change according to abstract Laws. Heraclitus had the intuition that you, and every other distinct thing, exist due to a constant dynamic interplay between opposite forces. He called this principle the Logos. In the case of you, and any other biological entity, if he applied his idea to current scientific knowledge, he might say that your continuing existence depends on the balance between the input of food and water and the output of waste products, between the heat energy generated by the combustion of that food and the thermostatic controls keeping you cool, between the production and destruction of the 330 billion cells being replaced in your body every day, etc. In humans there are the additional opposing forces that sustain your consciousness, such as rest and activity, stress and relaxation, private and social interactions, etc.

I think that Heraclitus was about the only ancient philosopher who grasped that existence IS change, and all things are actually processes. His most famous example is of course the River: Perhaps the nearest to what he actually said was: “Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers”. A river retains its identity only so long as there is a constant flow of new water to replace that which is already heading out to sea. Don’t be confused by those who equate Heraclitus with chaotic change; he would have considered it absurd to say that the River Nile doesn’t exist because its water is never the same - that’s what enables it to exist!

Indeed, and I doubt that anybody ever passed grade school without hearing from him…you know that thingy about the sides of a triangle?

That is called the Pythagoras theorem. Now, besides being a mathematician and philosopher this gentleman also created a religion, unknown to most people, that lastly existed in Christian times under the general term Albiguense or Cathars in the Middle Ages.

Women in Athens and most other Greek city states were excluded from political life. They were also disadvantaged in many ways in the private sphere. Although they supervised the household and the education of the children, they were not allowed to inherit and were not even allowed to participate in festivals.

In Sparta it was completely different. There, young women also lived in barracks with their brothers. But they learned to read and write, did gymnastics and trained in athletics. There were good reasons for this treatment, as the Spartans saw women and girls as the mothers of future brave warriors and therefore as valuable members of Spartan society.

Women in Sparta were granted no civil rights per se, and thus had no formal political influence. However, women from higher classes did have a certain influence and decision-making power in society. This was possible, among other things, because, unlike women in other poleis, Spartan women could inherit land and, as widows, they did not just manage their husband's property in trust for their sons, but actually had ownership of it. Thus, at least potentially, Spartan women were fully financially secure and had full rights of disposal over these resources.

Permit me to preface my remarks by admitting that I’m rather baffled by the popularity of the French intellectual Michel Foucault (1926–1984) here where I live (the USA). I did graduate work in philosophy about 35 years ago at a university that had a strong commitment to what is called “continental” philosophy and while there I read (in translation) all of Foucault’s major publications. I have enormous respect for his work of European intellectual history known here in the USA as The Order of Things (1966), but aside from that impressive tome, I could never find much of philosophical interest in his many other publications. Many years later, while employed at the main library of a huge state university, I was shocked to learn that pretty much every undergraduate would be assigned, in one of their Humanities courses, one of his easier texts (usually volume one of his History of Sexuality). The average undergraduate at that university will never read anything by, or perhaps never even hear the name mentioned, of 20th century French thinkers such as Bergson, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Aron, or Levi-Strauss—but they will know who Foucault is. This is odd.

So, to respond to your question: Writers of both fiction and nonfiction have been looking at and criticizing society through the lens of “the marginalized”, as you say, for a few centuries now—Dickens did it, Brecht did it (The Threepenny Opera) Orwell did it, Sartre did it (Saint Genet) and Steinbeck did it. So you are correct that Foucault didn’t invent this type of social critique.

But Foucault doesn’t critique modern or post-Enlightenment European societies “based on the views of those at the margins” of such societies. He examines the societal institutions like mental hospitals and prisons tasked with warehousing the marginal. He has no interest in the opinions of lunatics or criminals or sexual “perverts”—he wants to illuminate certain structural features of modern society that effect everyone by scrutinizing the institutionalization of the few (deviants).

Philosophy as an early discipline, mapped out and established taxonomical classification systems for several knowledge domains. The concept of philosophers did not “go away”. It still flourishes. However, one branch of philosophy was recognized by 1832 as growing at such a phenomenal rate that it had to separate from the parent group. This was the branch of philosophy titled Natural Philosophy. So with the explosive growth of knowledge in such areas as The Periodic Table of Elements and Electromagnetic Theory the Natural Philosophers felt compelled to abandon the branches of philosophy which researched:

1 Metaphysics —2 Epistemology —3 Politics —-4 Esthetics —- 5 Ethics

What we see today is still “philosophy” even when it is not identified as such. The onset of competing worldviews has left modern people with many misunderstandings and mistaken impressions. The competing ideas that always have been in play, are in full operation even today. With “standardized” education however, it is evident that much of the modern population is not being shown the full spectrum of knowledge. It is because of an ongoing campaign in this competition of ideas, that there are attempts to eliminate the ability of the general population to think at all. Much of the world’s population in the early decades of the 21st Century are not discovering all of the information that they actually need to engage in “freethinking”. All of this is reflected in the ability or inability of the population to communicate such things as the definition for thinking, the distinction between percepts and concepts, the Academic Vocabulary and a recognition of Aristotle’s 3 Laws of Logic, Causal Closure, The Mind/Body Problem, The English Language “Interchanges” and Argumentation Theory.

See also on http://www.Quora.com

This is a tricky question and it really depends on who you ask.

Generally speaking, I would say that modern Greeks share an admiration and respect towards ancient Greece. We all believe that it played an important role in shaping modern civilization and it is also what gave us our history, our monuments, many of our values etc.

Moreover, ancient Greece is often used as a point of reference to criticize the situation of modern Greece, which is idle, stuck in constant recession and does not seem to be doing very well. The sayings of the ancient Greeks are also used very often in every day communication and the theories and works of ancient Greek playwrights, politicians and people of interest are studied and taught.

However, while Greeks appreciate the contributions ancient Greece made to the world, not all of them are very educated on ancient history.

Finally, there is a certain feel of disconnect between modern and ancient Greece, given that chronologically, they are worlds apart. So, while we might look back at what our ancestors did, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we know everything about them or that we don’t have anything else to learn from.

Typically slaves in ancient Athens did not have families. Unlike the American south which would "breed" Slaves the Athenians tended to capture them in war, or bring them from slave markets. While some Greeks like Aristotle tried to justify slavery based on some humans having a "servile mentality" and thus slavery was "natural" usually slaves were not badly treated. While one the ones who worked in tge silver mines at Lavrio often were in appaling conditions slaves could seek refuge in temples and by their freedom. Some slaves were owned by the state and used as some forms of civil services like police duty and corralling citizens into the assembly. While Athens was famous for having a "soft hand" to slaves, they were of course still slaves owned by another person and whose fate was not in their own hands with few, if any rights.

By default, all Greeks understand few things in ancient Greek. Few things however may not be enough to get the context of complex poetic texts or even classical Greek authors such as Thucydides, Plato etc. It also depends on which ancient Greek…Koine Greek is easy and people hear it when attending church. Homeric Greek is basically like another language. At this point, it all depends on the education and exposure each person had. For example, depending on the school program, some students are getting taught more or less ancient Greek than others. Then you have the ancient Greek dialects…Does anyone understand Pamphylian or Eleian by default? Hell no! You need university studies for that. Believe it or not, the Pella katadesmos from Macedonia, is far more understandable for commoners than this Pamphylian inscription below: