Greek Philosophers Biographies - Pluralist school Part 1

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2015-12-20 : the website is under construction. THE PROVERBS ARE O.K., but It will take me a few hours to re-insert the images of the greek philosophers, which for some reason were lost, after my last revision, which i have done a few days ago. so until i remove the sign 'website - under - construction' ... you can study the proverbs with safety !. Please stay on Alert !.

Notes: 1. Diogenes of Sinope ... and ... Sinope ... is the same Greek Philosopher

2. Heraclitus of Ephesus ,,, and ... Ephesus is the same Greek Philosopher

( English ) This Webpage Is Last Updated On 2016 January 13, 18:30 GMT hour. I do not have a computer. In order to access the Internet, I visit often ( once a week ) an Internet Cafe. Next Update will be done on 2016 January 31 in the afternoon !, GOD helping!

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Your big ideas will become reality. The Greek Philosophers Biographies and Quotes in English will help you to transform your life, and the world.Proven to Increase Productivity, Engagement & Retention.

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

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Greek Philosophers Biographies - Pluralist school Part 1 in English

The Greek philosophers were among the most influential people in history because they invented both philosophy and science. By asking questions about themselves and the world around them, these philosophers helped create modern civilization.

Interestingly enough, the Greek philosophers thought of themselves as scientists rather than thinkers. They called themselves seekers and lovers of wisdom and often studied a wide variety of subjects, including history, physics, law, sociology, politics, mathematics, and biology. The famous philosophers were also teachers, educating wealthy children and operating schools as well as thinkers.

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Author Birth - Death

06 GREAT GREECE ( GREEK SPEAKING LOWER ITALY ) ( MAGNA GRAECIA ) ( Sicily ) - PLURALISTS - Empedocles of Acragas 490 BC - 430 BC

01 PRE-SOCRATIC - PLURALISTS - Anaxagoras of Clazomenes ( or Clazomenae) (or Klazomenai) 500 BC - 428 BC

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06 GREAT GREECE ( GREEK SPEAKING LOWER ITALY ) ( MAGNA GRAECIA ) ( Sicily ) - PLURALISTS - Empedocles of Acragas

Εμπεδοκλής ο Ακραγαντίνος

Empedocles, 17th-century engraving

Empedocles as portrayed in the Nuremberg Chronicle

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Life and Work

Empedocles (c. 490-430 BC) flourished in the city of Acragas, Sicily. Like Parmenides he wrote in the form of Homeric hexameter. The subject of the first poem On Nature. Is the nature and structure of the physical world, while the second poem On Purifications includes some practical guidance for soul’s purification. The legend of Empedocles’ death describes him flinging into the crater atop of Mount Etna to convince his pupils of his divinity.

The Four Roots

Empedocles maintained the theory that the material world is composed of four elements or roots: fire, air, water and earth. The botanical terms ‘roots’ indicate the vitality of the substructure, their unseen depths and the potentiality for growth. These four essential ingredients are immortal, distinct and equally balanced in cosmos. While themselves remain imperishable, immobile and unchanged, they can produce the various beings in this material world. On this basis, the indestructible nature of the four roots echo Parmenides’ indestructibility of Being.

Love and Strife

Due to the completeness of the four elements, being is continuous, without spatial gaps. Empedocles accepts Parmenides’ thesis that nothing comes-to-be or passes-away. Generation and destruction have to be denied; so-called generation is merely the ‘mixing’ of the elements in various proportions, while destruction is the ‘separation’ of the various compounds into their original elements. The former corresponds to the force of Love, the latter to the force of Strife. Love and Strife are the eternal motive forces which combine and separate the elements within the cosmic cycle.

The Holy Mind

Empedocles’ god is immortal and everlasting, described as a rounded sphere rejoicing in encircling stillness, equal to itself in every direction, without any beginning or end. Empedocles’ God contains holy-mind which embraces all the immortal principles of the cosmos, a God who has little in common with the traditional anthropomorphic gods. The divine nature is conceivable only through human mind. The senses can tell us only about the perceptible world.

The Soul

Whereas God is immortal and unchangeable, human beings are mortal and subject to alteration of the four elements under the act of Love and Strife. The human soul experiences a life of suffering wandering for many years through many mortal bodies and reincarnations. Empedocles further maintains that between the life of mortals and the life of immortals there is a middle-life, the life of spirits or daemons. The daemons are also subject to alteration but though a longer period of time.

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for more information, please visit the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia in the following web page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empedocles

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01 PRE-SOCRATIC - PLURALISTS - Anaxagoras of Clazomenes ( or Clazomenae) (or Klazomenai)

προσωκρατικοί φιλόσοφοι - Αναξαγόρας απο τις Κλαζομενές

Anaxagoras; part of a fresco in the portico of the National University of Athens.

Anaxagoras, depicted as a medieval scholar in the Nuremberg Chronicle

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Introduction

Anaxagoras (c. 500 - 428 B.C.) was an early Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Ionia, although he was one of the first philosophers to move to Athens as a base.

He is sometimes considered to be part of the poorly-defined school of Pluralism, and some of his ideas also influenced the later development of Atomism. Many of his ideas in the physical sciences were quite revolutionary in their day, and quite insightful in retrospect.

Life

Anaxagoras (pronounced an-ax-AG-or-as) was born around 500 B.C. to an aristocratic and landed family in the city of Clazomenae (or Klazomenai) in the Greek colony of Ionia (on the west coast of present-day Turkey). As a young man, he became the first of the major Pre-Socratic philosophers to move to Athens (which was then rapidly becoming the centre of Greek culture), where he remained for about thirty years.

During this time he became a favourite (and possibly a teacher) of the prominent and influential statesman, orator and general Pericles (c. 495 – 429 B.C.), one of the architects of Athens' primacy during the Golden Age. Although it seems that Anaxagoras and the young Socrates never actually met, one of Socrates' teachers, Archelaus, studied under Anaxagoras for some time. His work was also known to the major writers of the day, including Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes.

In about 450 B.C., however, Anaxagoras was arrested by Pericles' political opponents on a charge of contravening the established religion by his teachings on origins of the universe, the first philosopher before Socrates to be brought to trial for impiety. With Pericles' influence he was released, but he was forced to retire from Athens to exile in Lampsacus in Ionia, where he died around the year 428 B.C.

Work

Anaxagoras wrote at least one book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived in work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th Century A.D.

He is best known for his cosmological theory of the origins and structure of the universe. He maintained that the original state of the cosmos was a thorough mixture of all its ingredients, although this mixture was not entirely uniform, and some ingredients are present in higher concentrations than others and varied from place to place. At some point in time, this primordial mixture was set in motion by the action of nous ("mind"), and the whirling motion shifted and separated out the ingredients, ultimately producing the cosmos of separate material objects (with differential properties) that we perceive today.

For Anaxagoras, this was a purely mechanistic and naturalistic process, with no need for gods or any theological repercussions. However, he did not elucidate on the precise nature of Mind, which he appears to consider material, but distinguished from the rest of matter in that it is finer, purer and able to act freely. It is also present in some way in everything, a kind of Dualism.

Anaxagoras developed his metaphysical theories from his cosmological theory. He accepted the ideas of Parmenides and the Eleatics that the senses cannot be trusted and that any apparent change is merely a rearrangement of the unchanging, timeless and indestructible ingredients of the universe. Not only then is it impossible for things to come into being (or to cease to be), he also held that there is a share of everything in everything, and that the original ingredients of the cosmos are effectively omnipresent (e.g. he argued that the food an animal eats turns into bone, hair, flesh, etc, so it must already contain all of those constituents within it). He denied that there is any limit to the smallness or largeness of the particles of the original cosmic ingredients, so that infinitesimally small fragments of all other ingredients can still be present within an object which appears to consist entirely of just one material (presaging to some extent the ideas of Atomism).

In the physical sciences, Anaxagoras was the first to give the correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including his claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones.

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Life and Work

Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 BC) was born in the Ionian city of Clazomenae but he is the first Presocratic who activated in Athens. He seems to be the teacher of Pericles. Anaxagoras is the first philosopher before Socrates who brought in trial for impiety. But in contrast to Socrates, and probably with the political help of Pericles, he exiled and died in Lampsacus. He wrote a book in prose with the title On Nature.

Cosmogony

For Anaxagoras, in the beginning of the cosmos, there was not one but two principles all infinite and everlasting in nature: (1) Mind (Nous) and (2) the Primeval Mixture (Migma). In the beginning ‘everything was in everything’. The revolutionary formation of the cosmos started when the infinite ‘seeds’ (spermata) within the primeval mixture separated from the mixture by the motive power of Mind. Mind initiated the rotation of the ‘seeds’ resulting in the predominantly heavy parts coming to the center of the vortex and the subtler parts to the outer part encircling them.

The Seeds

The compact ingredients of the primeval mixture were an infinite number of ‘seeds’ such as the opposite qualities of the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold, the bright and the dark. The ‘seeds’ are not generated nor destroyed; they are the ultimate combined, indivisible, and imperishable elements, unlimited in number and different in shape, colour and taste, with each ‘stuff’ containing everything. Anaxagoras’ ‘seeds’ are not elemental principles, as in Empedocles, but aggregations of the homoiomeroi. Homoiomeria means that for any given substance, its greater ratio is comprised of an infinite number of smaller particles having the same nature as the whole (and thus of all particles in existence), included in all physical mixtures.

Nous

Mind (nous) is the motive force that initiated the primeval matter. Mind is completely separate from matter, the only exception to the universal criterion ‘everything in everything’. Matter under the control of Mind expands continually and indefinitely outwards from the original microdot which contained everything in the whole universe. Nous is described as ‘unlimited’, ‘self-controlling’, ‘unmixed’, ‘alone in itself and by itself’, ‘the finest’, ‘the purest’, ‘possessing complete knowledge’, ‘supreme in power’, ‘the controller of everything alive’.

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for more information, please visit the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia in the following web page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras

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