Ancient Greek philosophy

Ancient Greek philosophy: origin of Western philosophy——Aristotle: a man with encyclopedical knowledgeName：Liu Qiucen（刘秋岑）Major: EnglishStudent number:1141051014College of Foreign Languages and Cultures Sichuan University【Abstract】Considering its role in western philosophy history, ancient Greek philosophy can be said, without exaggeration, to be the origin of the all western philosophy. A variety of wise philosophers have sprung up in ancient Greece, especially in Athens and Aristotle is one of the three great ones, who was renowned for his thoughts about logic, metaphysics, zoology, rhetoric, etc. In Aristotle, the great humanist and the great man of science meet.【Key words】Philosophy and science ；Ancient Greek philosophy；western philosophy；AristotleIntroductionTo learn about western culture, it’s important to learn about western philosophy; to learn about western philosophy, it’s a mustto learn about ancient Greek philosophy and more importantly to get to know philosophy.Philosophy, a Greek word for “love of wisdom”, however, is never an easy work to perceive and define. If someone asks the question what is mathematics, we can easily give him a dictionary definition: the science of number. A definition can be given in this way of any field where a body of knowledge exists. But philosophy as well as philosopher cannot be so defined. Perhaps, the only way to find out what philosophy is, is to do philosophy; to find out what philosopher does is to think as a philosopher. To be simple, we may regard philosophy as a way not to solve our troubles nor to save our souls, but as a kind of sightseeing adventure undertaken for its own sake, as the Greeks put it.It’s nev er overrated to consider that in some serious sense, all western philosophy is Greek philosophy because of the significance of the ancient Greek philosophy as origins. The thinkers of Greece, or we may say , the Greek philosophers were not ivory-tower intellectuals of the kind that our modern world has inherited from the scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages.Actually, it’s hard to tell apart philosophy and science in early Greek philosophy as they are always together with which Greekcivilization laid a basic and solid foundation for Western civilization. Science deals with known facts but all starts from philosophic exploration, while philosophy relates to speculation, such a speculative activity means a kind of exploration somewhat scientifically.Ancient Greek philosophers ask general questions centered on What questions like what is universe? What is man? What is knowledge? Also there are ethical questions about good and evil. Is there something we call wisdom? Surely all these questions cannot be settled by carrying out experiments in a laboratory, but they are all thought over by the ancient Greek philosophers. Ancient Greek philosophy has been roughly divided into three periods: PeriodⅠ—Before Socrates, PeriodⅡ—Socrates ,Period Ⅲ—After Socrates.It’s no easy work to understand the ancient Greek philosophy history, but to roughly know some about that is helpful when we finally come to the great thinker Aristotle.Among the civilizations of the world the Greek is a later one whereas those of Egypt and Mesopotamia are older by several millennia, both of which are agricultural societies but neither developed science or philosophy. From this fact ,we can see how influential the Greek philosophy is to the whole western philosophy.Ancient Greek philosophy originated from pure mythology and gradually resulted in many complicated and smart theories.Ancient Greek thinkers are quite rational on general questions so that Greek Rationalism is well-known. The first major Greek philosopher was Thales of Miletus, who claimed that Nature is rational, and so human beings could use their own reasoning to understand Nature, and was famous for his statement that the world is made of water. And then came Anaximander who viewed the world in terms of opposites: hot and cold, dry and moist; Pythagoras who explained the whole world with numbers, was famous for his Pythagorean Theory and later the Pythagoreans and its Pythagorean Schools; Heraclitus who had the famous saying that All things are in flux; Parmenides whose denial of change lies at the origin of all subsequent theories of materialism; Democritus who argued that everything in the universe obeys the laws of necessity with his atomic theory.As the time went by, there came the three great ancient Greek philosophers in Athens. First for Socrates, who disagreed with the Sophists of the Skeptics ,who believed that reasoning couldn’t solve the riddle of Nature and took money for a literary education. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates taught not for money and developed the question-and-answer method of argument: the dialectics, trying toclarify ethical problems by discussion. And Socrates’ student and also friend ,Plato had philosophy ideas coming from Socrates and finally developed his own. He laid the foundations of a school, Academy where he studied ,lectured on philosophy and gained his own disciples. Plato built up a comprehensive system of philosophy called idealism and was famous for his work Republic.AristotleHere, after having a rough knowledge about how ancient Greek philosophy developed from its very beginning, comes the great thinker Aristotle, one philosopher who can be described in large parts in any philosophic books for his unique position and great impact on the history of the western philosophy.Aristotle was one of the earliest students at the Academy and the most famous one. He went to attend the school as a young man and stayed there for many years until Plato’s death. Later he became tutor of Alexander the Macedonian King who conquered a large part of the world and founded his own school Lyceum and spent years in teaching and research. Through years of study, travel and experience, Aristotle achieved a lot on philosophy and as a result he needn’t be modest to be called the first professional philosopher.1.ZoologyHis work on the classification of animals belongs to his Academic period. During his stay in Aegean he must have conducted his researches in marine biology ,a field in which he made contributions that were not improved on until the 19th century. what’s more, Aristotle managed to categorize all known living and non-living things.2.The Metaphysics‘Metaphysics’ literally means simply ‘after physics’. It received such a name simply because an early editor placed it after the Physics in his arrangements of the works. It would have been more to the point to have placed it before Physics because that is where it naturally belongs. Aristotle would have called it ‘first philosophy’, a discussion of the general preconditions of enquiry. And he got the theory of matter and form（ideas）. In his theory, forms turn out after all to be more important than matter. For it is form that is creative, matter being of course required too , but merely as raw material.3.LogicAlthough some problems of logic had been discussed before Aristotle, it is Aristotle who had the complete survey. His logic depends on a number of assumptions that are connected with his metaphysics, introducing certain terms like premisses , syllogism and so on, in which a syllogism is an argument with twosubject-predicate premisses that have one term in common. This middle term disappears in the conclusion. Thus , all humans are rational, babies are human , therefore babies are rational, is an example of a syllogism. Aristotle believed Logic is not science in the ordinary sense, but rather a general way of dealing with things which is in fact indispensable for science. It affords criteria for discrimination and demonstration and should be considered as a tool or instrument which is brought to bear on scientific enquiry.4.Other major achievementsNot only on zoology, metaphysics, and logic, Aristotle ,being called the master of those who know, also did much on moral philosophy, politics, psychology, physics, poetry, rhetoric so that his philosophical and scientific outlook of an entire culture dominated European thought for over a thousand years.conclusionAristotle is undoubtedly highly respected in later thousand years, and has ever been thought as an inviolable authority, somehow causing many tragedies and holding western thinking back for a very long time due to his solid beliefs like that women were incomplete man and that the earth was the center of theuniverse. But, however, his influence was enormous, as in Aristotle the great humanist and the great man of science meet.And Aristotle ,becoming a fruitful philosopher and having great influence on the western philosophy, is never an accident as he had absorbed greatly from his predecessors’ ideals, theories, improved his own through practice. Thus he is a symbol and representative to prove that ancient Greek philosophy laid a basic foundation for the western philosophy.Main reference books:Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West(Ⅰ),Central Compilation＆Translation Press.2010.王佐良, European culture: an Introduction, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.1992.02.(1)周叔麟，C.W. Pollard. June Almes. A Survey of the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Peking University Press. 2004.05. 黄忏华.西洋哲学史纲. 东方出版社.2007.05（1）。