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ANCIENTGREEK PHILOSOPHY

Shaped the Ancient Greek’s views


Mythological of human nature and cosmos
World Picture
Pre-Socratics:
The Milesians
Criticisms to the Mythological World
Picture
• Thales of Miletus
(circa 585 BC)
• Xenophanes (Circa 570 BC)
Heraclitus: Change and the
Logos
Xenophanes:
Anthropomorphism and
Pantheism
Parmenides: The One
Democritus: Atomism

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit:


Nothing Can Come From Nothing
Heraclitus:

“You cannot
step into
the same
river twice”
A shift to Athens…and to “man”
“To know
thyself is the
beginning of
wisdom.”
~ Socrates
Know
thyself!
~ Socrates
The question on man could not
be totally divorced from the
cosmological, since man was
conceived as part of nature.

The Socratic motto 'Know


Thyself' was viewed not in
isolation from the quest for some
order in the cosmos...

Man was seen as a microcosm,


and the search for truth about
man was simultaneously the
search for truth about the
universe.
Socrates
• The ugliness of Socrates
and the Athenian
fondness for beauty
• (470-399 BC)
• An enigmatic figure in
philosophy, possibly a
mouthpiece of Plato.
• Mother : midwife
• Father : mason
• Mason, soldier,
philosopher
Socratic Irony
• Question and
Answer model in
education.
• When the oracle
announced that
Socrates is the
wisest man of
all, he did not
believe it.
Protagoras:
“Man is the measure of all things”

Socrates:
“One thing only I know, and that is
that I know nothing.
Christianity in Medieval Europe
Christianity in Medieval Europe
Philosophy became the
hand-made of Theology.

Man was viewed still as


part of nature but nature
now was God's creation,
and man, next to the
angels, was the noblest of
God's creatures, created
in His image and likeness.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD)
• Philosophy became the
search for the ultimate
causes of things,
eventually leading to the
truth about God.

• Man's ideal was to


contemplate God and His
creation, and his action
was to conform to the
natural moral law
implanted in his readon.
Thus the Christian
Medieval philosophical
approach to the study of
man was theocentric.
Modern
Philosophy
Rene
Descartes
(1596-1650)
With the emergence of
Descartes'Cogito,
philosophy became
anthropocentric. The
question of man was now
the foreground of other
questionings on nature or
on God.
This rationalistic kind of
anthropocentrism reached its
climax in the philosophy of GWF
Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel built a system of the Mind


in the process of evolving itself in
a kind of dialectic, of reason
putting an other to itself
(antithesis) and coming to a
resolution (synthesis).

And it is against the


philosophizing of Hegel that
contemporary philosophies are
said to have started.
One of those who reacted
against Hegel was Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
who is acknowledged as the
father of existentialism. He
reacted against Hegel and
said that man cannot be
placed as a part of a machine
or a system. Reacting against
Hegel, he stressed the infinite
passion of man.

With Kierkegaard, philosophy


became the search for the
meaning of life.
References
• Dy, Manuel B. Philosophy of Man: Selected
Readings. Makati City: Goodwill Trading, 2001.
• https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/110/
1-presocratics.htm

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