Abigail D.

Mariano
BSEd 4A English

Thales
Thales wanted to know why things behave the way they do. Thales was the founder of
the philosophy that all of Nature had developed from one source. According to Heraclitus
Homericus (540–480 BCE), Thales drew this conclusion from the observation that most things
turn into air, slime, and earth. Thales thus proposed that things change from one form to
another. Thales observed that water was important in everyday life. Most things were moist.
Life needed water for nourishment, and many things lived near water. Thales believed that
water was the origin of all things in Nature. To explain earthquakes, he envisioned the earth
floating on water. The waves of the water virtually “rocked the boat,” thus causing
earthquakes.

Anaximander
In his cosmogony, he held that everything originated from the apeiron (the “infinite,”
“unlimited,” or “indefinite”), rather than from a particular element, such as water (as Thales
had held). Anaximander postulated eternal motion, along with the apeiron, as the originating
cause of the world. This (probably rotary) motion caused opposites, such as hot and cold, to be
separated from one another as the world came into being. However, the world is not eternal
and will be destroyed back into the apeiron, from which new worlds will be born. Thus, all
existing things must “pay penalty and retribution to one another for their injustice, according to
the disposition of time,” as he rather figuratively expressed it.

Anaximenes
Anaximenes is best known for his doctrine that air is the source of all things. In this way,
he differed with his predecessors like Thales, who held that water is the source of all things, and
Anaximander, who thought that all things came from an unspecified boundless stuff.

Xenophanes
Xenophanes is best known for philosophy about religion and knowledge. A few hundred
years before Xenophanes broke onto the scene, the epic poet Homer was a Greek icon. His
stories, The Odyssey and The Iliad, told fantastical stories about heroes, gods, and monsters.
While most Ancient Greeks LOVED Homer and his stories, Xenophanes was full of criticism.
First, Xenophanes thought the Greek gods that lived on Mount Olympus were immoral. To
Xenophanes, the popular figures in Greek mythology like Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera were the
embodiment of everything that was wrong with mankind. They weren't role models for mere
mortals, instead they committed crimes and had illegitimate children. Xenophanes also had
problems with Homer's use of anthropomorphism, or describing the Greek gods with human
qualities and personalities. For Xenophanes, only one God existed and that God definitely did
not act or look like a human. At the time, Xenophanes' idea about one God was radical. He
explained that this single God was made up of every living thing on earth. Another philosopher,
Theophrastus, explained Xenophanes' big philosophical idea: 'The all is one and the one is God.'
For Xenophanes, God was the thing that created everyone, but was not himself created.

Parmenides
Parmenides, (born c. 515 BCE), Greek philosopher of Elea in southern Italy who
founded Eleaticism, one of the leading pre-Socratic schools of Greek thought. Parmenides held
that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance
of a single eternal reality (“Being”), thus giving rise to the Parmenidean principle that “all is
one.” From this concept of Being, he went on to say that all claims of change or of non-Being
are illogical. 

Heraclitus of Ephesus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (l. c. 500 BCE) was one of the early Pre-Socratic philosophers who,
like the others, sought to identify the First Cause for the creation of the world. He rejected
earlier theories such as air and water and claimed that fire was the First Cause as it both
created and destroyed.

Empedocles
Empedocles was a Greek philosopher who is best known for his belief that all matter
was composed of four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Some have considered him the
inventor of rhetoric and the founder of the science of medicine in Italy.

Anaxagoras
Among the emerging theories on Mind of Pre-Socratic philosophers, the originality of
Anaxagoras’ concepts is particularly imposing. Anaxagoras’ doctrine of the autonomous,
infinite, powerful and eternal Mind, which is the purest of all things, the master of itself and the
ruler on everything, controlling all the elements and directing all the physical interactions in the
universe by the most proper way, is the most innovatory amazing theory in ancient philosophy.
In addition, his ahead of the times subtle theory of the relationship between matter and
energy, predicted in a prophetical way the revolutionary data of the modern science and
philosophy.

Democritus
The theory of Democritus held that everything is composed of "atoms," which are
physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between atoms, there lies empty space; that
atoms are indestructible, and have always been and always will be in motion; that there is an
infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms, which differ in shape and size. Of the mass of
atoms, Democritus said, "The more any indivisible exceeds, the heavier it is." However, his
exact position on atomic weight is disputed
Zeno of Elea
Zeno of Elea, (born c. 495 BCE—died c. 430 BCE), Greek philosopher and mathematician,
whom Aristotle called the inventor of dialectic. Zeno is especially known for his paradoxes that
contributed to the development of logical and mathematical rigour and that were insoluble
until the development of precise concepts of continuity and infinity. Zeno was famous for the
paradoxes whereby, in order to recommend the Parmenidean doctrine of the existence of “the
one” (i.e., indivisible reality), he sought to controvert the commonsense belief in the existence
of “the many” (i.e., distinguishable qualities and things capable of motion). 

Pythagoras
Pythagoreanism is the philosophy of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 570
– ca. 490 BCE), which prescribed a highly structured way of life and espoused the doctrine of
metempsychosis (transmigration of the soul after death into a new body, human or animal)

Socrates
Socrates believed that philosophy should achieve practical results for the greater well-
being of society. He attempted to establish an ethical system based on human reason rather
than theological doctrine. Socrates pointed out that human choice was motivated by the desire
for happiness.

Plato
In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational treatment of the forms and their
interrelations, starting with the most fundamental among them (the Good, or the One);
in ethics and moral psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just a
certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had suggested) but also habituation to healthy
emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of the soul (according to
Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite). His works also contain discussions in aesthetics, political
philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His school
fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly conceived but in a wide range of endeavours
that today would be called mathematical or scientific.

Aristotle
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher who contributed to the foundation of both
symbolic logic and scientific thinking in Western philosophy. He also made advances in the
branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, moving away from the idealism of his mentor
Plato to a more empirical and less mystical view of the nature of reality. Aristotle was the first
philosopher to seriously advance a theory of Virtue Ethics, which remains one of the three
major schools of ethical thought taken most seriously by contemporary philosophers. With all
these contributions, he may have been the single most important philosopher in history until at
least the late 18th century.