SALVAVIDAS I PERIODO

Philosophy as concept creation is as old as human thought. Normally, when you begin to study the history of Philosophy, you are told to go back to Ancient Greece, roughly by the 6th or 5th century B.C., to a little island called Miletus. In that time and place, there was a weird person called Thales, who is considered the first Western philosopher. In a way, this story is true: Thales introduced a special breakthrough that was radical and even dangerous for his time, the notion that mythological explanations of reality are not enough to explain the inner mechanisms of nature. For Thales, humans cannot explore the world by assuming magical stories of gods and monsters. We need the Logos, the Rational Principle that makes reality explainable by identifying patterns, regularities, and order among the chaos. This division between Mythos and Logos is the birthplace for philosophical (and scientific) thought in Western Civilization. However, this story has its problems...

For the sake of clarity, we are going to believe the classical story, and we'll follow up from there. So, in the next link you'll find a comprehensive list of the presocratic philosophers that continue Thales' project for developing the Logos or the rational explanation for how the universe began to exist and, more importantly, by which specific process it started to mold or to form into the shapes and structures of the natural world. Before dwelling in the text, consider presocratic philosophy not just as a philosophy of origins but as a philosophy of shapes and forms. For Ancient Greece, the question was never about the creation of everything from nothing (this is not a Greek conception of cosmology but a conception we have inherited from the Christian world) but rather the creation of order out of chaos. So the fundamental revolution of presocratic philosophy was not the Arché (the principle of reality) as a beginning point of creation, but the Arché as a principle of formation or shaping the order out of chaos: what classical philosophy called the problem of Morphé, or what Plato would call the Theory of Forms.

Having made our way through Classical Greece, it's time to enter the subsequent Hellenistic and Roman periods. These were dominated by schools of thought that were influenced by the great classical thinkers, though they took their teachings into new territory. Eclectics, Neoplatonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, who were they and what were their beliefs? Let's find out!