RAZELLE B.

TAGBACAOLA
BSEd - English 1

1. What are the three groups of Ancient Greek Philosophers?

Ancient Greek philosophers can be categorized into three groups: the Pre-Socratics, the
Socratics, and the Post-Socratics.

2. Why did Aristotle placed the rational soul in the heart rather than the brain?
In Aristotle's treatise On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration, Aristotle
explicitly states that while the soul has a corporeal form, there is a physical area of the soul
in the human body, the heart. Aristotle states the heart is the location of the 5 sensations of
the body and is directly responsible for respiration and the sustenance of life. The heart is
of further importance as it is all animal's area of heating the body and blood and the
creation of pneuma, or life force that animates the body. To Aristotle this explains why
dead things become cold, do not breathe, and that their souls have left them. Because the
heart is the location of the human soul and life force, it is the organ of utmost importance
in Aristotelian physiology. Correspondingly, the heart is the first organ to appear during
embryonic development.
In the fourth century B. C., Aristotle considered the brain to be a secondary organ that
served as a cooling agent for the heart and a place in which spirit circulated freely. He
designated the space in which all the spirits came together as the sensus communis -- the
origins of our much more metaphorical term, "common sense."

3. What are the different assumptions of the 3 greek philosophers?

Pre-Socratic philosophers mostly investigated natural phenomena. They believed that
humans originated from a single substance, which could be water, air, or an unlimited
substance called “apeiron.” One well-known philosopher from this group was Pythagoras,
the mathematician who created the Pythagorean Theorem.
 The Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. These are
some of the most well-known of all Greek philosophers. Socrates (470/469–399 B.C.E.)
is remembered for his teaching methods and for asking thought-provoking questions.
Instead of lecturing his students, he asked them difficult questions in order to challenge
their underlying assumptions—a method still used in modern-day law schools. Because
Socrates wrote little about his life or work, much of what we know comes from his student
Plato.

Plato (428/427–348/347 B.C.E.) studied ethics, virtue, justice, and other ideas relating
to human behavior. Following in Socrates’ footsteps, he became a teacher and inspired the
work of the next great Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), while
also interested in ethics, studied different sciences like physics, biology, and astronomy.
He is often credited with developing the study of logic, as well as the foundation for
modern-day zoology.

The Post-Socratic philosophers established four schools of philosophy: Cynicism,

Skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism. The Post-Socratic philosophers focused their
attention on the individual rather than on communal issues such as politics. For example,
stoicism sought to understand and cultivate a certain way of life, based on one’s virtues, or
wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. Modern philosophers and educators still
employ the patterns of thinking and exploration established by ancient Greek
philosophers, such as the application of logic to questions of thought and engaging in
debate to better convey philosophical ideas.

4. Explain the phrase "Essence is subsumed in the phenomena".

Aristotle suggested that the ideal is subsumed in the phenomena. Aristotle called the ideal
as essence, and the phenomena as the matter. He emphasized that these 2 co-exist, and is
dependent with one another. What Plato called idea or ideal, Aristotle called essence, and
its opposite, he referred to as matter. Matter is without shape or form or purpose. It is just
“stuff,” pure potential, no actuality. Essence is what provides the shape or form or purpose
to matter. Essence is “perfect,” “complete,” but it has no substance, no solidity. Essence
and matter need each other!
Essence realizes (“makes real”) matter. This process, the movement from formless stuff to
complete being, is called entelechy, which some translate as actualization.
5. Research on Thales and his dominant works.
Thales of Miletus (/ˈθeɪliːz/ THAY-leez; Greek: Θαλῆς; c. 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC)
- was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and pre-Socratic philosopher from
Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most
notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, and he is
otherwise historically recognized as the first individual known to have entertained and
engaged in scientific philosophy. He is often referred to as the Father of Science.
Thales is recognized for breaking from the use of mythology to explain the world and the
universe, instead explaining natural objects and phenomena by offering naturalistic
theories and hypotheses. Almost all the other pre-Socratic philosophers followed him in
explaining nature as deriving from a unity of everything based on the existence of a single
ultimate substance instead of using mythological explanations. Aristotle regarded him as
the founder of the Ionian School of philosophy, and reported Thales' hypothesis that the
originating principle of nature and the nature of matter was a single material substance:
water.

In mathematics, Thales used geometry to calculate the heights of pyramids and the
distance of ships from the shore. He is the first known individual to use deductive
reasoning applied to geometry by deriving four corollaries to Thales' theorem. He is also
the first known to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed.
Thales has been credited with the discovery of five geometric theorems: (1) that a circle is
bisected by its diameter, (2) that angles in a triangle opposite two sides of equal length are
equal, (3) that opposite angles formed by intersecting straight lines are equal, (4) that the
angle inscribed inside a semicircle is a right angle, and (5) that a triangle is determined if
its base and the two angles at the base are given. His mathematical achievements are
difficult to assess, however, because of the ancient practice of crediting particular
discoveries to men with a general wreputation for wisdom.
The claim that Thales was the founder of European philosophy rests primarily on Aristotle
(384–322 BCE), who wrote that Thales was the first to suggest a single material
substratum for the universe—namely, water, or moisture. According to Aristotle, Thales
also held that “all things are full of gods” and that magnetic objects possess souls by virtue
of their capacity to move iron—soul being that which in the Greek view distinguishes
living from nonliving things, and motion and change (or the capacity to move or change
other things) being characteristic of living things.

Thales’ significance lies less in his choice of water as the essential substance than in his
attempt to explain nature by the simplification of phenomena and in his search for causes
within nature itself rather than in the caprices of anthropomorphic gods. Like his
successors the philosophers Anaximander (610–546/545 BCE) and Anaximenes of
Miletus (flourished c. 545 BCE), Thales is important in bridging the worlds of myth and
reason.