The Philosophy of Ancient Greece

Before the philosophers, people worked under the assumption that human beings were the centre of all things. The Ancient Greeks had even imagined their gods as essentially people (albeit people with superpowers); always arguing and fighting among themselves, and indulging in interpersonal dramas like a sort of cosmic soap opera. With the arrival of philosophy, however, this began to change. Philosophers started to explore the idea that human beings were simply a part of a much larger system–not necessarily its most important ingredient. They asked what our place was in the wider universe; what the world and its constituent parts were made of; and how it might have come into being. They decided that made-up stories were no longer sufficient as explanations for the basics of nature, and realised that dedicated study and reasoning were the only way to find the genuine answers.

Their work took them down a bewildering array of blind alleys and dead ends, but much of what they hit on was surprisingly accurate, paving the way for the generations of thinkers that followed them, and laying the basis of everything we now know, and are still learning about. They didn’t always come up with the right answers, but they asked a lot of the right questions, often realising that the questions were more important than the answers anyway.

The pre-Socratic philosophers were those who lived before, or at least not later than, Socrates himself (5th century BCE). They were the first philosophers to adopt new ways of studying the nature and order of the world–known as cosmology–and the possible origins of the world (cosmogony).

The Milesian school is so named because its ideas stem from the philosophers of the town of Miletus. They pursued the idea that all things in life have their basis in one single substance–although they had rather