Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Paper Summary:

This paper examines many of the main pre-Socratic philosophers of 6th Century Greece. It explores their main strands of thought and their conceptions of the world around them. The paper also explores the different types of reasoning that were practised by different schools of philosophy, from more speculative angles progressing to critical thinking. The paper describes the philosophical foundations that were built upon by the later great philosophers Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.

From the Paper:

"Abstract thought about the nature of the world and of human existence began to appear in cultures all over the world during the sixth century BCE, and Greek philosophy expressed its' ideas in three main ways. These were speculative thinking, practical thinking and critical thinking. Speculative thinking expressed human curiosity about the world, and strove to understand in natural (rather than super natural) terms how things really are, what their composition was and how they functioned. "Speculation or speculative thinking designates a knowledge or cognition that transcends experience and is directed at the spiritual, super-natural and divine, fundamental to experience" . Practical thinking emphasized the desire to guide conduct by comprehending the nature of life and the place of human beings and human behaviour in the greater scheme of reality and was "directed at moral, ethical and other practical issues" . Finally critical thinking, (the hallmark of philosophy itself) involved a careful examination of the foundations upon which thinking of any sort must rely, tried to achieve an effective method for assessing the reliability of positions adopted on significant issues. Philosophers in general wanted to simply take part in the "rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct" . Similarly to Kant's critical philosophy, critical thought avoided both dogmatism and skepticism and tried to find a middle path that allowed it on the one hand to consider metaphysical principles as necessary constituents of a holistic philosophy and on the other, to re-think these principles on a different level or from another perspective, in the light of the latest insights in science, as well as in the light of the whole preceding development of mankind."

Sample of Sources Used:

• http://www.hyponoesis.org/html/glossary/t.html#speculativethinking
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philosophy
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/
• http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/anaximen.htm
• http://www.iep.utm.edu/x/x-phanes.htm

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