Philosophy Summaries - Ancient

Up until the 6th Century BCE, it seems that basically all the peoples of China, Southern Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe believed that a pantheon of invisible gods controlled the world, often as a by-product of fights and intrigues amongst themselves. Each culture had its own set of gods, though some of these gods were shared between adjacent cultures.

In the 6th Century, a few thinkers began to question this view. This happened independently in several areas with Laozi in China, the Buddha in India and the Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Laozi, China, 6th Century BCE (Daoism) [5]

During the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) people believed that fate was controlled by gods. During the following Zhou Dynasty, the god-given authority of the emperor justified all political decisions. In the 6th Century BCE, the Zhou dynasty crumbled, giving way to a period of internal wars. A new class of administrators arose and developed strategies for effective government and codes for ethics and morality (The Hundred Schools of Thought).

Laozi developed the Daode Jing (The Way and its Power), a theory of just rule based on virtue. This became the basis of Daoism. Dao (The Way) is the natural way of the universe and virtue meant living in accordance with the Dao.

Confucius, China, 551-479 BCE [5]

Kong Fuzi (latinized to Confucius) lived at the time of the Warring States. His work was a search for moral values that would enable rulers to govern justly. While maintaining adherence to traditional religious practices like ancestor worship, he developed a new moral philosophy. Fragments of his wrtings are preseserved in The Analects.

His philosophy emphasises virtue, knowing one's place in the social hierarchy, loyaly, ritual and tradition, sincerity and self-reflection. While having little impact on Chinese culture in his day, his ideas became one of the most important foundation of Chinese culture and government in later centuries and its influence spread outside China to places like Japan and Korea. Confucianism lies behind the importance in Chinese and other Asian cultures of being seen to do the right thing and not losing face.

Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), India, 563-483 BCE [3]

Gautama was brought up in comparative luxury, but didn't see this as bringing him happiness. He tried ascetism, but found that no more satisfying. He decided that there must be a middle way that would bring more success than either of these extremes.

He saw the widespread suffering in the world around him as a given. He saw attachment to (desire for) things we need as the cause of suffering and sought the elimination of such attachments. These attachments, he argued, are a feature of the 'self', something which is transient and insubstantial compared to the greater and permanent 'eternal' of which we are a part. Realising this and ceasing from being concerned about the self was the key.

Detatchment from desire for things can be achieved by following the 8-fold path: right action, right intention, right livelihood, right effort, right concentration, right speech, right understanding, right mindfulness. Success in overcoming our desires will lead to release from the endless cycle of suffering, death and rebirth, and bring us to Nirvana, a state where we become one with the eternal and cease to exist as a self.

Thales, Greece, 624-546 BCE [7]

Thales of Miletus is the earliest philosopher of whom we have record. He was an accomplished mathematician and astronomer and reputedly predicted a solar eclipse. He came to believe that natural events could be explained rationally as being caused by other events, rather than as the capricious actions of the gods, which was the dominant way of thinking at the time. In an attempt to explain the world from first principles, he deduced that everything is made from a single fundamental material, water.

Pythagoras, Greece, 570-495 BCE [3]

Pythagoras was deeply religious and believed in reincarnation. He started and led a religious cult in Southern Italy called the Pythagoreans. Their aim was to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. Their means included strict dietary rules (e.g. they didn't eat beans because a fart was considered to be the loss of part of one's spirit) and a study of the nature of things, mathematics in particular. He saw numbers as being the basis by which the cosmos could be explained. Like Thales, Pythagoras came from Miletus and it is likely that Thales' thinking impacted him in his younger days.

Pythagoras is, of course, best remembered for his theorem about right-angled triangles, but he also made the first discoveries about musical harmonics and introduced the idea of deductive reasoning. He saw reasoning as superior to observation, an idea which was taken up by many later philosophers.

Democritus, Greece, 460-371 BCE [10]

Democritus and his colleague, Leucippus, considered that everything was made of tiny indivisible entities which they called atoms. Between the atoms was empty space. This suggested a mechanistic universe which runs by itself without the necessity of any intervention by gods.

Socrates, Greece, 469-399 BCE [6]

Socrates developed the Socratic or dialectic method of enquiry in which one questions statements in order to reveal their real meaning and any hidden assumptions and contradictions. He used it to question many ideas that were taken for granted by his society, particularly about what we as humans are and the nature of life.

He was eventually found guilty of corrupting the youth with his ideas and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. What we know of his arguments was written down by his student Plato.

Socrates saw knowledge as the most important possession and the reason why we live. He saw evil as the consequence of ignorance. Knowledge is necessary for the wellbeing of our immortal soul.

Plato, Greece, 427-347 BCE [2]

Plato was a student of Socrates. He established the Academy in Athens. He did much of his writing after Socrates' death in the form of dialectic dialogues involving Socrates.

Plato is most famous for his idea that everything in this illusory world of the senses is an imperfect shadow of a perfect form that exists in the real world of ideas. For instance a circle drawn on paper, if looked at sufficiently closely, would be shown not to be exactly circular, but just a shadow of the perfect circle that exists as a form.

He believed there are two parts to us, the body with its senses and the soul with its reason. The soul is eternal and lived before our birth in the world of forms. Our souls thus have innate knowledge of the forms, but we can only access that knowledge by using reason. Reason is superior to observation because it reveals the real world rather than the illusory world.

In his Republic Plato lays out his vision of the ideal city-state. To rule a city-state properly requires rigorous understanding of concepts like justice, virtue etc. Thus rulers of city states should be philosophers.

Aristotle, Greece, 384-322 BCE [6]

Aristotle studied under Plato at the Academy in Athens for 20 years. However, he didn't subscribe to Plato's theory of forms. He suggested that, instead of having innate knowledge of the form of a dog, we build up a picture of what makes something a dog from numerous observations of different dogs. The same goes for concepts like goodness, justice etc.

With an interest in the natural world and his focus on the priority of observation, Aristotle developed a classification system for living things (and non-living things). Modern taxonomy is based on his system. In the process of developing the classification system, he also developed the syllogism as a means to making rational decisions.

Aristotle saw all things as having a purpose and the ideas of good and bad as being based on how well things fulfill their purpose. People's lives have purpose and a good person is one who fulfills that purpose, the highest purposes being virtue and wisdom.

Aristotle’s cosmology was a geocentric system where a stationary, spherical Earth lies at the center, surrounded by concentric, rotating celestial spheres holding the sun, moon and planets. The universe was divided into a corruptible, four-element sublunary realm (earth, water, air, fire) and an eternal, incorruptible superlunary realm made of "aether" or "quintessence". Motion of the spheres was caused by an "Unmoved Mover". Matter on earth had its place, earth's place being closest to the centre of the Earth, fire being furthest from it, and natural processes (which we now ascribe to gravity) caused objects to tend to move towards their natural place.

Aristotle's works were studied widely in the later Christian and Muslim worlds and his ideas were considered by many thinkers to be the best representation of the nature of things until the 16th Century.

Diogenes, Greece, 404-323 BCE (Cynicism) [7]

Diogenes believed that happiness comes from living in accordance with the rhythms of nature, free from the conventions of society. "The happiest person is the one who is content with the least." He lived by his creed, assuming a life of poverty with just an abandoned tub for a home.

Diogenes was the first of a number of thinkers known as the Cynics (the word coming from the Greek for dog-like). Many people in his day (including Plato) considered him mad.

Epicurus, Greece, 341-270 BCE (Epicureanism) [9]

Epicurus saw the ultimate good as a pleasant life, i.e. one free from pain and fear. He assumed Democritus' view that the universe, including us, is made of atoms and empty space. He said that we have a soul made from certain types of atom that are distributed around the body. These atoms are fragile and dissolve when we die. As our consciousness lies in our soul, there is no consciousness after death.

In Greek thinking of the time there was widespread fear that the gods will administer pain and torment after death because of the sins committed during life. This belief was the cause of fear. Belief that death was the end eliminated that fear and allowed us to live pleasant lives.

Epicurus' ideas were not widely accepted during his lifetime because they went against prevailing religious views. However they started to be of more interest in the scientific revolution and later.

Zeno of Citium, Greece, 332-265 BCE (Stoicism) [4]

Zeno studied with a follower of Diogenes. He believed that the universe is governed by natural laws ordained by a god and that humans are unable to do anything about this. However, humans are able to accept and be indifferent to pleasure and pain, wealth and poverty and to follow a life of virtue and duty. This will mean that they are living in harmony with the devine laws. This is seen as the best way to live.

This philosopy fitted better than Epicurus' with the religious beliefs of the time. Its emphasis on virtue and duty made it very acceptable politically and it was widely adopted in Hellenistic Greece and later in the Roman Empire.

It should be noted that Zeno of Citium was a different person from the earlier Zeno of Elea who came up with Zeno's paradoxes.

Plotinus, Hellenistic Rome, 205-271 CE (Neopatonism) [1]

Plotinus wrote the Enneads which form the basis of the Neoplatonic school of thought. Neoplatonism was considered to be the true interpretation of Plato’s teachings. It posits that reality flows from The One (absolute unity/goodness) to the Nous (divine intellect/forms), then to the Soul (psyche), and finally to the material world. The aim is for the soul to escape the material world and achieve mystical union with the divine through philosophy and contemplative action.

Neoplatonism was fairly widely adopted in the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th Centuries. It is largely compatible with Christian theology of the time, the two ideas influencing each other to some extent.