Greco-Roman Philosophy

Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.) = an Athenian philosopher who walked about the city engaging others in conversation about the good life. He wrote nothing, and his preferred manner of teaching was not the lecture or exposition of his own ideas but rather a constant questioning of the assumptions and logic of his students’ thinking. Concerned always to puncture the pretentious, he challenged conventional ideas about the importance of wealth and power in living well, urging instead the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. He was critical of Athenian democracy and on occasion had positive things to say about Sparta, the great enemy of his own city. Such behavior brought him into conflict with city authorities, who accused him of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced him to death.At his trial, he defended himself as the “gadfly” of Athens, stinging its citizens into awareness.To any and all, he declared,“I shall question, and examine and cross-examine him, and if I find that he does not possess virtue, but says he does, I shall rebuke him for scorning the things that are most important and caring more for what is of less worth.”

Thales = drawing on Babylonian astronomy, predicted an eclipse of the sun and argued that the moon simply reflected the sun’s light. He also was one of the first Greeks to ask about the fundamental nature of the universe and came up with the idea that water was the basic stuff from which all else derived, for it existed as solid, liquid, and gas.

Democritus = suggested that atoms, tiny “uncuttable” particles, collided in various configurations to form visible matter.

Pythagoras = believed that beneath the chaos and complexity of the visible world lay a simple, unchanging mathematical order.

Herodotus = wrote about the Greco-Persian Wars, explained his project as an effort to discover “the reason why they fought one another.”This assumption that human reasons lay behind the conflict, not simply the whims of the gods, was what made Herodotus a historian in the modern sense of that word.

Plato (429–348 B.C.E.) = wrote extensively on Ethics and government. He wrote The Republic,a design for a good society. It would be ruled by a class of highly educated “guardians” led by a “philosopher-king.” Such people would be able to penetrate the many illusions of the material world and to grasp the “world of forms,” in which ideas such as goodness, beauty, and justice lived a real and unchanging existence. Only such people, he argued, were fit to rule.

• founded the Academy (Akademia) in (circa) 387 B.C.E. in Athens.

• Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) - a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great, was perhaps the most complete expression of the Greek way of knowing, for he wrote or commented on practically everything.With an emphasis on empirical observation, he cataloged the constitutions of 158 Greek city-states, identified hundreds of species of animals, and wrote about logic, physics, astronomy, the weather, and much else besides. Famous for his reflections on ethics, he argued that “virtue” was a product of rational training and cultivated habit and could be learned.As to government, he urged a mixed system, combining the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

Causation in AP World History: Modern

While Greek rationalism is no longer in the curriculum of AP World History, there are numerous examples of the application of the influence of it in the curriculum. Below are a few examples.

1.) The Golden Age of Islam

The Greek legacy had entered Islamic culture through intentional efforts by the Abbasid Caliphate to procure these texts from the Byzantine Empire. Systematic translations of Greek works of science and philosophy into Arabic, together with Indian and Persian learning, stimulated Muslim thinkers and scientists, especially in the fields of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geography, and chemistry. It was in fact largely from Arabic translations of Greek writers that Europeans became reacquainted with the legacy of classical Greece, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

2.) Shaped the theology of Christianity

• An emerging Christian theology was expressed in terms of Greek philosophical concepts, especially those of Plato.

• European scholars gained access to classical Greek texts after the twelfth century C.E. as a result of diffusion from dar-al Islam. From that point on, the Greek legacy has been viewed as a central element of an emerging “Western” civilization. It played a role in formulating an updated Christian theology after the twelfth century C.E

  • • for example, Plato’s dialogue Phaedo develops a metaphysical framework for the Immortality of the Soul.

• Their purpose of university scholars was to reconcile these Greek works with the ideas of Christianity during the the twelfth- and thirteenth-century

3.) Renaissance Political Literature

• Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469‒1527) famous work The Prince was heavily influenced by classical models such as Plato's The Republic. The Prince was a prescription for political success based on the way politics actually operated in a highly competitive Italy of rival city-states rather than on idealistic and religiously based principles.

• To the question of whether a prince should be feared or loved, Machiavelli replied:

One ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved....For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain....Fear is maintained by dread of punishment which never fails....In the actions of men, and especially of princes, from which there is no appeal, the end justifies the means.

4.) Europe’s Scientific Revolution

a vast intellectual and cultural transformation that took place between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. These men of science would no longer rely on the external authority of the Bible, the Church, the speculations of ancient philosophers, or the received wisdom of cultural tradition. For them, knowledge would be acquired through a combination of careful observations, controlled experiments, and the formulation of general laws, expressed in mathematical terms.

• the translations of Greek classics played a major role in the birth of European natural philosophy (as science was then called) between 1000 and 1500.

• European universities featured “a basically scientific core of readings and lectures” that drew heavily on the writings of the Greek thinker Aristotle, which had only recently become available to Western Europeans. Most of the major figures in the Scientific Revolution had been trained in and were affiliated with these universities.

• Before the Scientific Revolution, educated Europeans held a view of the world that derived from Aristotle, perhaps the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers, and from Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer who lived in Alexandria during the second century C.E