Greek Thought

Before 500BCE most writing was in the form or poetry

After 500 BCE prose developed 1st major writers of historia:

Herodotus Thucydides

Around 440BCE a group of thinkers developed

Sophists: They were people who used rhetoric to answer questions of nature and reality. They especially questioned ideas of good and evil.

What is evil? How does one measure what is just?

Rhetoric is the art of harnessing reason, emotions and authority, through language, with a view to persuade an audience and, by persuading, to convince this audience to act, to pass judgement or to identify with given values

Around this time drama / plays were developed

Where funded by the state for annual festivals (usually for Dionysus)

Writers submitted either tragedies or comedies

Famous playwright: Euripides, Sophocles

Tragedies were often about heroes, legends or wars

Oedipus the King – written around 430BCE by Sophocles

Was about a son who accidentally kills his father and marries his mom. They all die in the end.

Philosophy develops around 600BCE Philosophy is the discipline concerned with

questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist (metaphysics); the nature of knowledge (epistemology); and the principles of reasoning (logic).

One of the most famous: Pythagoras (founded geometry)

The most famous philosophers were: Socrates (c. 470 BC–399 BC),: used questioning

to challenge the thought process of an opponent Was blamed in part for the collapse of Athens in

404BCE and executed. Plato (427 BC – 348 BC),: a student of Socrates. A

severe critic of Sophists ideas of defining good and evil. Argued for practical structures of government to foster good.

Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE): Student of Plato. He argued for the creation of good within individuals. He saw the polis as an organism that is created between natural bonds between people and the state.

Medicine Under the quest for knowledge, Greeks developed a

systematic approach to healing. They recorded cures as well as studied the physiology of the human form

But their ideas were not always accurate They believed that one’s health was dependant on the

balance of the four humours. Blood Air Yellow Bile Black Bile

Democritus argued the presence of atoms But he argued the number is the only thing that

makes trees different from humans.