Knowra Pre-Socratic philosophy Pre-Socratic philosophy Pre-Socratic philosophy is early Greek inquiry into nature, change, and reality, chiefly before Socrates. Its thinkers sought rational accounts of the world and its underlying principles.
Archaic Greece : The period of Greek history from about 800 to 480 BCE, marked by the rise of the polis and wider Mediterranean exchange. The earliest natural philosophers worked amid the cities and trading networks of this period.
Ionian School : A grouping of early Greek thinkers associated with Miletus who sought natural principles underlying the cosmos. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes offered distinct material accounts of nature's underlying order.
Thales of Miletus : A Greek thinker traditionally dated to the sixth century BCE, associated with the claim that water is the world's underlying principle. He became the emblematic founder of naturalistic inquiry in later accounts of Greek philosophy.
Socratic philosophy : The inquiry associated with Socrates, centered on ethical questions, definitions, and the examination of life. Its ethical focus marks a shift from many predecessors' primary concern with nature and cosmology.
Natural philosophy : The systematic study of nature and its causes, historically a broad precursor to modern physical science. Early Greek accounts helped establish nature as something open to rational investigation.
Mythos and logos : Mythos conveys meaning through traditional stories; logos is reasoned discourse or explanation. Pre-Socratic accounts increasingly explained nature through argument rather than divine narrative.
Milesian School : A group of early Greek philosophers from Miletus, conventionally including Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Its members proposed water, the indefinite, and air as different starting points for explaining the world.
Anaximander : A sixth-century BCE Greek philosopher who proposed the apeiron, an indefinite source, as the origin of things. His account moved beyond a familiar substance to an abstract principle of cosmic generation.
Sophists : Professional teachers in fifth-century BCE Greece who taught subjects such as rhetoric, argument, and civic competence. Their attention to persuasion and human conventions differed from inquiries into nature's first principles.
History of science : The study of how scientific knowledge, practices, and institutions have changed over time. Pre-Socratic inquiry is often examined as an early effort to explain nature through general principles.
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