One of Pythagorianism's main doctrines appears to have been metempsychosis, and another one was of the " harmony of the spheres", which maintained that the planets and stars move according to mathematical equations, which correspond to musical notes and thus produce an inaudible symphony. Adherents were bound by a vow to Pythagoras and each other, shared all their possessions among them, practiced vegetarianism and lived ascetic lives dedicated to the study of religious and philosophical theories. He is credited with scientific discoveries including Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids and the Theory of Proportions, while he was also among those said to have originated the idea of Earth's sphericity.Īround 530 BC he travelled to the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a " school", functioning mostly as a commune or sect. Yet, at his time, science and philosophy were closely intertwined. Hence, many might think of him solely as a mathematician. 495 BC), is mostly famous nowadays for developing the eponymous theorem, one of the basic rules of geometry. Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise, 1869, Fyodor Bronnikov (via Wikimedia Commons) According to Aristotle, Thales’ cosmological thesis was that the originating principle of nature was a single material substance: water. He thus charted the course for all the other pre-Socratic philosophers. He is recognised as the first known person to have turned away from mythological explanations, trying instead to interpret natural phenomena through naturalistic theories and hypotheses, in a precursor to modern science. 546 BC) was regarded as the first philosopher by Aristotle, and reckoned among the Seven Sages of Greece. All the philosophers that followed Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were to some extent influenced by some or all of them, even if only by their differences. We begin with the pre-Socratics, the philosophers that either preceded Socrates, or were his contemporaries but developed completely independent schools of thought with no influence from him. They are anything but obscure within the sphere of philosophy and academia, but anyone not specialised in these fields is very likely to never have heard of them or at least know much of their actual contributions. This list includes not only ancient Greek philosophers, but also several prominent thinkers of the Byzantine era and Modern times. In this article, you can find a small list of important thinkers and philosophers of Greek origin you may not have heard about. Figures like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle -each a disciple of the former- are held to universal acclaim and may often be referred to even by people completely unfamiliar with the study of philosophy. When thinking about Greek philosophy, certain names inevitably crop up. Similarities between Hindu and early Greek thought are therefore generally considered incidental. There are of course older philosophical systems in the world, such as the Hindu Samkhya tradition, but they are generally believed to have developed independently, and there is no substantial historical evidence of contacts and exchanges between these cultures -until the times of Alexander the Great- that would suggest an influence of one over the other. Unlike other practices and bodies of knowledge, such as architecture and visual arts, which were perfected but not invented by Greeks, Greece is believed to be the birthplace of Western philosophy, in that the notion of philosophy as the study of the basic axioms that comprise knowledge was actually created there. Unsurprisingly, its name is Greek, from philosophia meaning "love of wisdom". When citing Greece’s contributions to world culture -from democracy to theatre and athletics- philosophy is one of the first that come to mind.
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