A critical history of Greek philosophy

Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. at Stagirus, a Grecian colony and seaport on the coast of Thrace. His father Nichomachus was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, and fro...

None of the predecessors of Plato had constructed a system of philosophy. What they had produced, and in great abundance, were isolated philosophical ideas, theories, hints, and...

The Eleatics are so called because the seat of their school was at Elea, a town in South Italy, and Parmenides and Zeno, the two chief representatives of the school, were both c...

Amid the destruction of all ideals of truth and morality, which was brought about by the Sophists, there appeared in Athens the figure of Socrates, who was destined to restore o...

The first period of Greek philosophy closes with Anaxagoras. His doctrine of the world-forming intelligence introduced a new principle into philosophy, the principle of the anti...

It is natural that, at the commencement of any study, one should be expected to say what the subject-matter of that study is. Botany is the knowledge of plants, astronomy of the...

The word Neo-Platonism is a misnomer. It does not stand for a genuine revival of Platonism. The Neo-Platonists were no doubt the offspring of Plato, but they were the illegitima...

Anaxagoras was born at Clazomenae in Asia Minor about 500 B.C. He was a man of noble family, and possessed considerable property. He neglected his property in the search for kno...

The earliest Greek philosophers belong to what in after times came to be called the Ionic school. The name was derived from the fact that the three chief representatives of this...

Zeno of Cyprus, the founder of the Stoic School, a Greek of Phoenician descent, was born about 342 B.C., and died in 270. He is said to have followed philosophy; because he lost...

Upon the death of Socrates there ensued a phenomenon which is not infrequent in the history of thought. A great and many-sided personality combines in himself many conflicting t...

Not much is known of the life of Pythagoras. Three so-called biographies have come down to us from antiquity, but they were written hundreds of years after the event, and are fi...

Heracleitus was born about 535 B.C., and is believed to have lived to the age of sixty. This places his death at 475 B.C. He was thus subsequent to Xenophanes, contemporary with...

The founder of the Atomist philosophy was Leucippus. Practically nothing is known of his life. The date of his birth, the date of his death, and his place of residence, are alik...

Epicurus was born at Samos in 342 B.C. He founded his school a year or two before Zeno founded the Stoa, so that the two schools from the first ran parallel in time. The school...

Scepticism is a semi-technical term in philosophy, and means the doctrine which doubts or denies the possibility of knowledge. It is thus destructive of philosophy, since philos...

The rest of the story of Greek philosophy is soon told, for it is the story of decay. The post-Aristotelian is the least instructive of the three periods of Greek thought, and I...

Empedocles was a man of Agrigentum in Sicily. The dates of his birth and death are placed about 495 and 435 B.C. respectively. Like Pythagoras, he possessed a powerful and magne...

It has been doubted whether Neo-Platonism ought to be included in Greek philosophy at all, and Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy," places it in the medieval division. For,...