1. Development of Ideas in “Physical” Schools in Pre-Socratic Philosophy.

2. Ideas and Thinkers in the Classic period of Antiquity.

3. The Hellenistic period as the final stage of Antiquity.

Western regarding for man originated in Antique Greece and Rome. To compare with Eastern philosophy Antiquity from the very beginning contradicted itself to mythology and religion. It opposed reason and knowledge to faith and imagination.

Nevertheless Antique Philosophy was not less than Eastern dependent on mythology, but it was trying to overcome the mythology of feelings with the mythology of reason. This conflict between sensitive-intuitive and rational was intrinsic for all Antique Philosophy and further all European philosophy as well.

Antique mythology was divided into two periods. The first one symbolized Gods as enemical to people, horrowable and wild like monsters. With the time passing they became ennobled and manlike.

The Gods who lived on Olympus mountain were a tribal community of corporally deathless beings. It was just deathlessness that differed them from people with all their merits and credits.

The most important feature of antique worldview was cosmologism, in particular they laid earthly relations on the world nature. They considered cosmos the bound of the extreme beauty and truth.

To compare with Eastern philosophical tradition, which dissolved man and society in nature, in Antiquity man, was laid on the nature and Cosmos transforming and developing them. So antique philosophy separated itself from mythology attempting to give it rational explanation.

Ionian and mainland Greece, which were to be the parents of Greek thought, were richly placed: the Persian empire to the East, Asia Minor, together with Babylonia and Mecca, Egyptian civilization, in that they had living contacts with some of the high cultures of the period, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, when the first major stirrings of philosophy took place.

It was, then, on the Ionian mainland of Asia Minor that the first seeds of free-ranging thought sprouted. Eventually, as we know, the main center for philosophy came to be Athens, partly because of the free spirit of that city, partly because Socrates performed his probing work there, and partly because of the high level of its literary culture, of which – Plato’s works were a fine and perhaps the most impressive body.

The Ionian school began the quest to find the underlying basis of the world. The speculation there might be a single material source of the universe corresponds to one of the traditional forms of philosophy. In this sense the Ionians stand at the beginning of a powerful process which led through the Presocratics to Socrates and beyond to Plato and Aristotle, Stoicism and a whole number of other schools.

These provided something of an intellectual religion for the Greeks and Romans. For myth had already conceived of some primeval substance out of which the world had been formed. But the new speculations had a different spirit, one in which reliance on tradition was unimportant and something of a free and new look at the world was taking place.

Antiquity broke off with mythology, and the first philosophers tried to account for the world, proceeding from itself, and also their deductions were rationally-logically based in the form of the cosmological theory. Philosophy began to research man’s essence (Socrates), processes of cognition and their laws (Plato, Aristotle), ethics and aesthetics, politics and other.

The main peculiarities of Antique Philosophy are as following:

1. In was based on cosmological theory.

2. It was universal, syncretical in its nature that is all problems were solved in their principal unity, undistributably. Ethical categories were expanded to the whole Universe.

3. Concepts were created and involved into philosophy (Plato’s “ideas”, Aristotle’s “forms”, Stoics’ notion of “sense”, “purport”), at the same time Greeks almost did not know laws of science.

4. The Ethics of Antiquity was mostly ethics of virtues, but not of duties and values as it is now.

5. Philosophy of Antiquity was really practical, gu iding people in their behavior and conduct.

The whole period of Antiquity may be devided into three stages: Pre-Socratic, Classical and Hellenistic (including Roman-Latine time) ones. The first stage was characterized by the entire interest to nature, with seeking for the initial stuff of the Universe. Miletian school was the first philosophical school in ancient Greece.

Thales, who lived in Miletus, flourished at about 580 BCE. We do not have his original writings and the fragmentary evidence we have about him we owe principally to Aristotle. We know that he thought that everything was composed of water and that the earth itself floated on water (in its pure form). No doubt the observation of phenomena such as steam and ice were suggestive in showing how water could easily change its properties

Anaximander was a younger contemporary of Thales, and held a more dialectical view, seeing the four substances of hot, cold, dry and wet as being in polar interplay. But if so, the basic material or stuff of the cosmos must be something which is not bounded or defined in the way in which these forces are. The very possession of particular properties seemed to rule out a substance as the primodial source-material. And so he posited the limitless or unbounded. This lies beyond perception. In a vital way, Anaximander is the father of theory in the West, for his postulation of the imperceptible apeiron takes him beyond the manifest surface of things.

Anaximander explained the particular features of the cosmos in terms of these forces. The ocean, for instance, was the moisture left after the congealing of the earth under the influence of the hot. As for men, they had come from animals, which first formed in the ocean before coming onto dry land. This was a primitive anticipation of evolutionary theory. We can see from all this that the bent of Anaximander was naturalistic. He stood at the dawn of human science.

If for Anaximander the primodial substance was the apeiron, for Anaximenes (flourished 545 BCE), the third of the great Milesians, it was air, which can rarefy into fire or condense into wind, water, earth and rock in successive stages. He did not like the idea of “separating off” which had been brought in by Anaximander to explain the transition from the apeiron to the polarity of hot and cold. He wanted to see all manifestations as due to the varying states of the one substance air. Quantitative change of this one mode of thing led to qualitative differences. But in some other ways Anaximenes’ account of the world was more simplistic than that of Anaximander.

Another Greek, for he came from the island of Samos, Pythagoras (c. 570-490 BCE) migrated to Croton in South Italy where he became leader of a community there. It is possible that it was he who invented the word philosophia. At any rate the notion of the love of wisdom was vital, for his community and its sisters in other cities in South Italy that were religious in character and aimed at cultivating the soul, partly through intellectual inquiry and partly through ascetic practices, like abstaining from the eating of meat and beans. The cosmos was seen as a harmony in which limit was imposed on the apeiron. Human beings and animals were thought of as being in the process of transmigration or rebirth from one life to the next. The cosmos was a vast system of things whose inner nature was numerical. The discovery that musical harmonies could be represented mathematically was considered to be of profound importance. The universe itself was seen therefore as a huge mathematical and musical harmony.

This model of numbers as forming the basis of things in part reflected the fact that already mathematics was beginning to develop in Greece and could be seen as the paradigm of knowledge, being certain and precise. This idea of the priority of numbers had a grip on Plato and was to have momentous consequences in the evolution of science in the West.

Heraclitus, who flourished about 501 BCE, was a mysterious and poetic writer. He considered the stuff of the cosmos to be fire in varying forms. But in order to explain change it was necessary to postulate strife, a force opposite to love, which stirs things up in the world. It tears things apart, as love brings them together. This dialectical interplay explained change. Change itself was continuous: as Heraclitus’s famous dictum had it, panta rhei, all things flow. You cannot step into the same river twice. In all this Heraclitus, clearly saw something - you could combine the notions of change and stability by postulating a law or formula according to which things regularly change. This principle he called Logos — a word of wide-ranging meaning in Greek, meaning reason, or formula, or definition or — most commonly — word. It is of course the term that was later in the New Testament used for the Word, or underlying principle of Creation. Heraclitus thus had a dialectical and formulaic notion of the way things operate in the world, which was more important than his identification of fire as the fundamental element underlying the cosmos.

The problem of change and permanence had already of course been posed in principle by the Pythagoreans. Numbers seemed unchanging, but the cosmos appeared to change. Pythagoras considered the world as self-sufficient entity. It was the members of the Eleatic school, and in particular its chief figure, Parmenides, who posed the question in the starkest form. If it is the case that there is something unchanging, and yet panta rhei, then what are we to make of this?

Parmenides (bc. 515 BCE) of Elea in southern Italy (hence the name “Eleatic” to pinpoint his school) produced his own cosmology though there were some reminiscences of Heraclitus’s schema. The importance of Parmenides is that he posed a severe question to those philosophers, who wished to affirm something eternal or unchanging. The very idea of a thing suggested something unchanging beneath changing appearances. It was partly because of him that Aristotle opted for a theory of substances which dictated the norm for Western philosophy. His principle was –“nothing can come from nothing”.

Empedocles dating from the first part of the fifth century BCE, was a political leader in his own city before being exiled; he practiced healing; had wide scientific interests; wrote two major poems; and claimed to be divine: he was an all-round sage. Probably his chief contribution to the later development of ideas was his notion of the four elements. He agreed with the principle which had been laid down by Parmenides, namely that nothing can come out of nothing. But he felt that anything which would explain the cosmos would have to be multiple. You could not get differentiation out of a single substance like fire or water. So he postulated a theory of four elements, the everlasting particles of which combined or uncombined under the influence of the two cosmic forces of love and hate. The four “roots of all things” were earth, air, fire and water. This theory of elements was taken up by, among others, Plato and Aristotle. Empedocles, as well as believing in the material roots of things also postulated a soul. Thus individuals also obey the law that nothing can come from nothing. Rather, they are continually being reborn.

On the side of cosmology the various schools of thought we have looked at point towards the atomic theory which was to be put forward primarily by Leucippus and Democritus. About the former we know little, but he probably lived in the second part of the fifth century, while Democritus’ life may have been from 460 to 370, in Abdera. He is supposed to have starved himself to death during a plague, but generally was known for his cheerfulness, being nicknamed ‘the laughing philosopher”. His writings were extensive and it was he who worked out the details of the atomistic worldview.

The fact is that the attempt to work out a cosmology by postulating one or more substances, such as fire or water, raised the issue of particles of such substances. Moreover, the Parmenidean principle that nothing comes from nothing, so what is must be everlasting, was highly persuasive. The Pythagorean notion of cosmos suggested a self-sufficient entity. If you put these thoughts together you may come to think that the universe is composed of a void with scattered in that void an infinite number of atomic, that is indivisible or uncuttable, entities. These, swirling about, form larger combinations and out of this we have the formation of the world as we know it. Since there is no reason why atoms should be one shape rather than another, they have an infinity of different shapes.

The Atomists, consistently, had a materialist view of the soul, which was composed, according to Democritus, of round atoms, good for smooth penetration; and an account was given of the engagement of the senses with images coming from outside. In general the Atomists rejected all notions of design in the cosmos. Everything was to be explained in terms of the necessities arising from the constitution and combination of atoms. As for the theory of knowledge, Democritus held a kind of modified empiricism. The data, which we have about the world come through the senses, but sense-experience, can be very mis­leading. We have to go beyond it in order to understand the world, for by and large the atoms themselves are invisible. And as the world is to be explained by atomic theory, so ethics does not have a supernatural sanction. Moral behavior should be moderate, and the pleasures of the soul are better than those of the body. Nevertheless Democritus did not deny the existence of gods, who seem to be refined denizens of the cosmos. There are, consistently with his theory, a large number of worlds, many without sun or moon or water.

The various Pre-Socratic philosophies have some general resemblance to the world of the Buddha and of the early Upanishads. The Greeks seem to have been more inclined towards physical science; in India medicine was best developed.

The Sophists, who might be described as a new class of critical educators, one of whose main interests was rhetoric, have been given a bad name by both Plato and Aristotle, who accused them of producing sham knowledge or wisdom in order to make money, and of using rhetoric in a cynical way. They could be thought to be destructive of received or traditional ideas (but so were Plato and Aristotle).

In some ways their nearest analogy elsewhere are ancient Chinese philosophers, especially in the tradition of Kong. Their interest too was educational. They thought that virtue could be enhanced or taught, and while they were less given to ritual, they never­theless had a strong concern with the performative. For it was above all by the “magical” use of words that we persuade one another. Moreover, some Sophists appealed to innate or natural tendencies as the basis of law and ethics: thus Protagoras (500-430 BCE) held that aidos or shame is imparted to all humans. He was the first who considered that man is the measure of the things. This idea was supported by Socrates.

Classical stage of Antiquity is characterized by the shift of philosophical investigations towards man. Philosophy of man becomes the key to the philosophy of nature.

Socrates (469-399 BC). Undoubtedly the most influential teacher of philosophy in ancient Greece, he lived in Athens prac­tically all his life. Besides serving in the Athenian army, he also held several minor public offices. Because he eventually attained a secure financial position, he was able to teach without asking for fees. This, along with his refusal to sub­mit to teaching official government doctrines when he felt they were contrary to good judgment, aroused the ire of both officialdom and his fellow teachers. He was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, and was subsequently tried and sentenced to death. On several occasions he could have escaped from prison with the help of his many friends, but he insisted upon his obligation to respect the sentence, even though it was wrong. His justification for his own death, and his willing, philosophical acceptance of the poisonous hemlock that he felt it was his duty to drink, earned him the admiration of both his contemporaries and posterity. He is mainly known to history through the dialogues of Plato, who was his student. His philosophy was based on his famous characterization of himself as an ignorant person whose only virtue was that he was aware of his ignorance. Rather than possess superficial knowledge, he would prefer to remain ignorant. However, his very knowledge of his ignorance compelled him to seek true knowledge. The road to such knowledge was through reason, and the result was virtue. According to him, then, virtue, which is embodied in knowl­edge, is the highest end of man. He left no written works.

Yet he influenced on the development of philosophy greatly. He was greatly impressed by Sophists’ regarding man as the measure of all things. He followed that tradition and put man into the center of his philosophy. Thus he started the epoch of classical Antique Philosophy. He considered Reason to be the basics of all perceived things, Reason that controls and governs the universe. He meant not only the ultimate Reason or Mind, but man’s mind as well. The principle “aware yourself” which he found out on the wall of Appolo Temple in Delphas struck him so much that he made it the main principle of his philosophy. He combined ontological problems with moral ones, with the problem of human ego. Man possesses the sole that promotes consciousness, cognition, mental activity and moral virtues. The potential of man’s sole is realized in his cognitive activity, the lack of which leads to ignorance. Through cognition man consciously comes to main virtues: wisdom, justice, moderatioin and thus he acquires the harmony of the sole, that is freedom. Man’s happiness means to be virtual and free.

 He philosophized in a dialogical manner asking questions which made his partner contradictory to himself and then Socrates manifested his own position. His peculiarity was his irony, which gave him an impulse for further self-awareness and self-development, an example of which was his famous “I know that I know nothing”.

He contributed greatly into the development of philosophy by regarding the truth as a concept: both as being and as cognition. His universal notions preceded man’s activity they were a kind of patterns for man to follow. He questioned for the universal definitions of such attributes as courage or piety, but he failed to expose their origination. Later Plato, his best disciple named them the Ideas or Forms and manifested his own theory based on Socrates’ ideas.

Plato (427-347 BC). Born on the island of Aegina, a colony of Athens, he was one of the most enduring of the ancient Greek philosophers. He was given the best education available and spent eight years as a student of Socrates. He acquired a broad knowl­edge of pre-Socratic philosophies (e.g. Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides etc.) and founded his own school in Athens in 387. He taught at the Platonic Academy until his death. His philosophy represents one of the great and lasting strains of thought in history, and still remains of major significance and influence. The entire construction of his thought is based upon his conception of true reality as a world of Ideas. These Ideas, or Forms (the terms are used inter­changeably), are universal, immaterial essences that con­tain the true and ultimate realities (being) of things, while the actual world of things perceivable by the senses is only a vague, transitory and untrustworthy copy. Thus, since the function of thought is to perceive reality, its function becomes precisely to perceive the world of Ideas. Only the cognition of Ideas, or of the Universal Forms, enables man to perfect himself and to act with wis­dom. In line with this view, Plato criticized reliance on knowledge gained through the senses because the objects of true senses exist only as imperfect manifestations of the Universal Forms (Ideas) that comprise their essences; such knowl­edge, therefore, is itself imperfect—in his words, opinion, not truth. Through the reasoned exercise of the mind, how­ever, man is able to arrive at true knowledge by the rational perception of the Universals (Forms, Ideas) that contain the essence of all sensible, material things. The mind is able to perceive the Universal Ideas by virtue of the fact that the mind has its own Universal Idea (i.e. there is a Universal Mind that contains the essence of all finite and individual minds).) Plato states further that within the world of Universal Ideas there is a certain hierarchy. The Idea of Good is at the top, and all other Ideas participate in it and derive from it, just as all material objects participate in and derive from their own Universal Ideas. The Idea of Good, being the ultimate Idea, permeates all things. The relation, then, of man to ultimate reality (The Universal Ideas) is basically an imitative one (i.e. man should mentally per­ceive and imitate the perfection of the Universal Idea of himself).) Although there are contradictions and unresolved conflicts in Plato's system, especially as it relates to the various subdivisions of philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, etc.), and although his system has never been able to be worked out to the total satisfaction of logic, it is a grand design that has had profound, lasting and valid significance. His method is best defined as dialectic, in that he demonstrated his arguments by opposition. He believed in the unity of opposites, and it is said by some that the dialectical style in which his works were written is the true reflection of his philosophy— that, reality consists in the unity of opposites and that the cognition of this unity constitutes knowledge of reality

In his own manner Plato had political ambitions. The main idea of society organization was justice. The major point which informed Plato’s thinking was that since virtue, to be deep, involved the higher knowledge, including geometry and the dialectical inquiry into the arrangement and hierarchy of the Forms, not excluding the ultimate and unspeakable vision of the Good, there was need of a ruling class of wise people. Philosophers thus shall be kings. There is in this way a solidarity between ethics and politics.

This is also brought out by Plato’s thinking of human psychology as a kind of microcosm of the polls. The human soul according to him has three aspects. The highest is rational aspect. Next there is that aspect which is full of spirit: we might call it the courageous aspect. Then there is the lowest aspect, which is the appetitive (self-control). Roughly these correspond to the three main classes which Plato envisages.

If the rich dialogues remained a monument to Plato’s thought, there was another that for many centuries was perhaps even more vital: the Academy. This community of inquirers lasted until 529 CE, when Justinian forbade the teaching of Platonism as such, though of course Plato had, through Neo-Platonism, an immense influence upon Christianity. The Academy was not a kind of university, but was devoted to knowledge and to mutual teaching through the joint practice of dialectic.

Aristotle (384-322 BC). Born in the Greek colony of Stagira in Macedonia, at 18 he became a student of Plato at Athens and remained for nearly 20 years as a member of the Platonic Academy. After Plato’s death, he left Athens and, among other things, became the tutor of young Alexander of Mace­donia, later known as Alexander the Great. Eventually he returned to Athens (335) where he spent 12 years as head of a school he set up in the Lyceum (known as the Peripa­tetic School). As the result of an outbreak of anti-Mace­donian feelings in Athens after the death of Alexander (323), he was forced to leave the city for Chalcis, where he died a year later.

Aristotle possessed one of the few truly encyclopedic minds in the history of western man. Those of his works which still exist cover all the sciences known to his time and are characterized by subtlety of analysis, sober and dispassionate judgment, and a superior mastery of facts and evidence — collectively, they constitute one of the most monumental achievements ever credited to a single mind.

He divided the sciences into the theoretical, the aim of which was objective knowledge; the practical, the aim of which was the guidance of conduct; and the productive, whose aim was the guidance of the arts. He put above and before these three divisions the science and art of logic — called by him analytics — its mastery the requisite to all other investigations, since its purpose was to set forth the conditions to be observed by all thinking that had truth as its aim. Beginning with this principle, he spent his life­time ferreting out the truths of all the sciences, from ethics to art, from physics to politics. He was the originator of the syllogism (that form of reasoning whereby, given two propositions, a third follows necessarily from them by nature of a term common to both premises — e.g. all men have brains; Jack is a man; therefore, Jack has a brain) which is the core of deductive logic.

At the heart of his complex philosophy is his concept of dualism — the duality of all things in the universe — a con­cept he initiated and which has had an unalterable influence on the course of philosophy ever since. Everything is made of a union of matter and form, he postulated, and the two are interdependent, one incapable of existing without the other. The matter of an object is what makes it an object; the form is what makes an object the particular thing it is (table, man, etc.). The two together constitute the being of an object (matter possessing the capacity for form, form requiring matter to define its being). Aristotle developed this philosophy primarily to refute Plato’s doctrine that being belongs only to the universal Ideas of things (the Forms) and cannot exist in the material manifestations of these Ideas (in other words, the being of a chair or tree is not in the particular chair or tree, but in the universal Idea of the chair or tree, for each object is but a single, imperfect manifestation of a singular, perfect Idea).

To support and complement his doctrine of the dualism of being, Aristotle also developed a corresponding dualism of potentiality and actuality: matter is the potentiality of any object, while form is that which gives the object its actuality. With these twin distinctions in hand, he claimed to have solved the difficulties that earlier thinkers had en­countered in attempting to explain the process of change, visible in everything about them. Change, according to Aristotle, is the process by which matter becomes form, by which potentiality becomes actuality (and not the passage from non-being to being,) as previous thinkers had considered change to be). He called this process, entelechy.

The system of nature as thus developed by Aristotle con­sists of a series of matter-and-form existences on many levels, in which the forms of simpler beings act as the matter for the next higher beings, and so on. Hence, at the base of nature is prime matter which, having no form is mere poten­tiality and not actual being. The simplest formed matters are the primary elements — earth, air, fire, and water. These, in their forms, constitute the matter for the next in the line of ascending forms; and these forms comprise the matter for the next higher, etc., until man is reached, the highest of the universe’s beings. Man’s reason is the highest of the forms, and is what gives him actuality as man and defines him; whereas God, existing, so to speak, at the opposite end of the spectrum from prime matter, is pure form. These basic principles, formulated by Aristotle in his Analitics, were carried into all the diverse studies he undertook and helped to solve the problems raised by each inquiry. He explained all questions in the light of his conclusions in logic and applied these conclusions with equal effectiveness to, among other things, problems about time and space, God, human good, the state, and the arts. Although modern science has rendered much of Aristotle’s thought obsolete, he is still a force in modern thought; further, a very large part of our technical vocabulary, both in science and philoso­phy, is rooted in the terms Aristotle used and defined.

Hellenism (from Greek Hellas) the name of that ancient Greeks gave to their motherland. This period is characterized by threadening Greek culture to the Mediterranian areas. The epoch of Hellinism began with the Alexander Macedonian invading the East. He founded a great empire which was broken up after his death. The culture of various realms manifested a synthesis of Greek and local cultures. Later when this area was invaded by Rome their culture had been enriched by the Rome one.

The late Hellenism may be defined as a cross-cultural process of Antiquity and Christianity.

The Main peculiarities of Hell e nis tic philosophy:

1. The key problem was man’s being in the universe (ontological aspect, the problem of man’s existence) to compare with social-ethical tendency in classic Antiquity.

2. Irrationalism.The prevailing of will, contemplation and intuition over reason. The picture of the world became more figurative, mythological, mystic.

3. Being was regarded as a unity of different spheres which were transformed in their approach to Devine being.

Philosophy of that period remained anthropological in its nature but the problem of the sense of life was set forth.

There are four main philosophical teachings of Hellinism: Scepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism.

Scepticism was founded by Pyrrho of Elis at the end of the 4th age BC. According to their opinion the world was flowing, changeable, relative and illusory. One can not have any account of it, as human perceptions of the world are wrong and human reason is contradictory. One should be very careful in making conclusions which only have probabilistic character. The sceptics did not suppose that man and the world were knowable, they rejected rational ground for moral norms. In their conceptions relativism reached its top. They rejected the existence of good and evil, logics in the being of the universe and society. They did not only consider the world unknowable, but even more they did not consider it to be worth awaring.There are three truths to their opinion:

1. Nothing exists.

2. If something exists it is unknowable.

3. If something is knowable it is unexpressible.

So their aim was getting an irony as for the world, avoiding any stable judgements and keeping self-control, equanimity, tranquility, wise silence aimed to achieve salvation.

Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium (c. 336— c. 264 BCE) at the Stoa in Athens. Stoicism had its own interest in logic and rhetoric, but as a worldview it was interested in removing dualism between forms and individual entities and between souls and bodies. For the Stoics there were only particulars, apprehended by sense-perception, and then classified through memory and through general ideas formed by reason. There are active and passive forces in the cosmos, but essentially the universe is a single entity, moved by fire, which is also identified with God, who is the dynamic soul of the cosmos. He sows in the world the seed principles, which unfold as individuals. Very often the world goes up in a universal conflagration and then is renewed in a new cycle of existence, when everything is repeated exactly as in the prior world-period. There is no radical human freedom, therefore: freedom is doing consciously and with agreement what would happen in any event. Fate rules all, or to put it more mildly, the Providence of God. All is ordered for the best, even if viewed by itself an act or happening may seem bad and or painful. In the wider scheme of things there is perfection.

Life should be lived in accord with nature, that is, the necessities of the universe. Virtue means being in consonance with reason, the ruling pattern of nature and identical with Zeus or Fire. Moral evil in essence consists in the attitudes brought to bear by human beings, while virtue is its own reward. The Stoics sought above all to cultivate equanimity in the pursuit of four chief virtues of Wisdom, Courage, Self-Control and Justice. Pleasure, sorrow, desire and fear are the feelings we possess and should be eliminated, for they are irrational. Humans therefore should aim at a heroic self-sufficiency.

An important side to Stoicism was its cosmopolitanism. All humans equally share in Reason, drawn from God, and so we should see ourselves above all as citizens of the cosmos as a whole. The attractions of this ethical outlook, especially its courageous self-control and equanimity, to late Republican Romans, wishing to restore the virtues of the older Roman State, gave Stoicism a certain influence in the Roman world. Some noble Romans followed its example of suicide as an honored way to go in the face of dishonor.

Epicurus, who opened his school at Athens in 306 BC, created a worldview at variance with Stoic values. He taught that pleasure and happiness are the natural ends of life. Contrary to later misinterpretations, he did not advocate the bold pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, but only those pleasures that are consistent with reason and moderation. Joys of the mind are superior to pleasures of the body. His con­cept of nature mainly followed the atomism of Democritus, though he disavowed determinism and established a doctrine of cosmic chance (i.e. an element of chance enters into the atoms’ motions and causes deviations, thus accounting for both natural and psychic disorders).

Epicurus saw the cosmos as composed of innumerable atoms of various weights, forms and sizes, existing in a vast empty void. Teeming downwards in oblique paths, they collide and form larger entities as they get stuck to one another. Vortices are formed out of which emerge various worlds separated from one another by huge empty spaces. Human souls are composed of atoms too, and dissolve at death. The Epicureans did not deny the gods, who (also material) lived a luxurious life in the interstices between worlds. They can be honored, but fear of them is ridiculous. They have neither interest in nor access to human worlds. Pleasure is the highest goal for humans, but to get the best out of it, it needs to be pursued in moderation.

Neo-Platonism is a philosophical strain, which completed the philosophy of Antiquity and met Christianity. Its name is stipulated for all representing philosophers followed the ideas of Plato attempting to make a synthesis with Aristotelian philosophy and Christian worldview.

The Main peculiarities of Neo-Platonism are:

1. A clear delimitation of spiritual and material start points in the world with the primacy of spiritual.

2. Universal is as emanation of Devine Principle into various kinds of being, but the Devine remains in otherworld.

3. Awareness of the Devine and the world is possible by means of mystic contemplation.

Plotinus, born in Egypt, he lived and taught in Rome for over 25 years, and died there. At first a pagan, he became an authority on and advocate of the philosophy of India, as well as the idealism of Plato. He based his thought on the theory that the material reality perceived by the senses is of a lower order and value than spiritual reality conceived by mind, which is the true reality. He maintained a hierarchy of reality, each less than the next in value and all emanating from the ultimate One. Mind (nous) and soul (psyche) emanate directly from the One, while further down the ladder is matter, then material objects. Since man participates in all these emanations, he is a composite of spirit and matter. Because of this, sense knowledge is virtually valueless in the quest for truth, since that which the senses are capable of knowing (material objects) are of a lower order and value than the sensory agent (man). Thus, very much like the Universals of Plato, his reality consists of Intelligible Ideas and is headed by the Idea of Beauty, which is the One. The climax of knowledge consists in an intuitive and mystical union with the One.

Proclus, a man of wide-ranging knowledge, tended to multiply the staged emanation, Proclus was more concerned with the life of contemplation saw the practice of virtue and the spiritual life as a kind of turning back, which is the mirror-image of the whole process of emanation. The soul turns back to its Source, through control, asceticism, higher knowledge and finally the intuitive vision of the One. He also held that everything in the world reflects every other.

There are those, of course, who see a large gap between Plotinus and Neo-Platonism on the one hand and Plato on the other. There are two or three points of some divergence. Thus the later Platonists were less Pythagorean than Plato himself. Their interests were less in science than in religion or salvation. Second, whereas the Forms were depicted by as if they hung loose from God, they are firmly anchored in the Nous in Neo-Platonism. Third, Plato may or may not have thought of his vision of the Good in mystical terms, that is, as a “vision” yielded by contemplative or yogic practice; but this is the main thrust of Neo-Platonism. It thus converged with the growing interest in mysticism exhibited in Christianity. The ascetic life was a way of affirming values which were likely to wither since Christianity became the official faith of the Empire.

LE CTURE 5.