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Nature of Pre-Socratic Thought

The ancient Greeks of the early classical age were not remarkable among ancient civilizations for their engineering skills or their practical knowledge of the world around them. For example, Greek temples such as the Parthenon have had an enormous influence upon subsequent Western architecture, both directly (e.g., the public monuments of Washington, D.C.) and indirectly (in shaping Western ideas of architecture). Yet they were quite limited in their exploitation of the potentialities of stone. The arch was almost completely unused by the Greeks, in sharp contrast to the extensive use the Romans made of it.

Yet the early-classical Greeks, and in particular the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers, beginning with Thales, are rightly regarded as the forebears of Western science, and more broadly of the Western view of the world as operating by impersonal natural processes, a view which underlies both science itself and much else in the Western outlook. The nature of the pre-Socratic achievement in creating the Western world view can perhaps best be understood by comparing the view of the natural world which they developed with the views of the much more ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, with which the Greeks were in regular contact from an early period, and from which they borrowed much of their actual practical knowledge (as, for example, in astronomy). The following essay inquires into the nature of the pre-Socratic departure from previous modes of thought, what its consequences were, and what conditions may have brought it about.

The pre-Socratic intellectual revolution may be characterized very briefly as the invention of the concept of natural law, and in consequence the dethronement of religious beliefs as central organizing principles in understanding the world. Religious skepticism as we know it began to appear among the pre-Socratics; Xenophanes, for example, is said to have remarked that if other anim...

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Nature of Pre-Socratic Thought. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 19:41, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692983.html