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When citing Greece’s contributions to world culture – from democracy to theatre and athletics – philosophy is one of the first that come to mind by Neos Kosmos.
Busts of great philosophers.
Photo: PXFUEL
Unsurprisingly, its name is Greek, from philosophia meaning “love of wisdom”.
Unlike other practices and bodies of knowledge, such as architecture and visual arts, which were perfected but not invented by Greeks, Greece is believed to be the birthplace of Western philosophy, in that the notion of philosophy as the study of the basic axioms that comprise knowledge was actually created there.
There are of course older philosophical systems in the world, such as the Hindu Samkhya tradition, but they are generally believed to have developed independently, and there is no substantial historical evidence of contacts and exchanges between these cultures -until the times of Alexander the Great- that would suggest an influence of one over the other. Similarities between Hindu and early Greek thought are therefore generally considered incidental.
When thinking about Greek philosophy, certain names inevitably crop up. Figures like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – each a disciple of the former- are held to universal acclaim and may often be referred to even by people completely unfamiliar with the study of philosophy...
We begin with the pre-Socratics, the philosophers that either preceded Socrates, or were his contemporaries but developed completely independent schools of thought with no influence from him. All the philosophers that followed Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were to some extent influenced by some or all of them, even if only by their differences.
Source: Neos Kosmos and Greek News Agenda
