Greek Philosophers & Historians

1. Greek Philosophers & Historians Bringing reason and history to the people

2. Philosophy-Greek for “love of learning.” • Greek philosophers believed that the world could be understood by the human mind through the application of knowledge. • Sophists-professional teachers. They believed knowledge could be used to improve people’s lives. They also believed that there was no such things as right & wrong, that what was right for one person, might be wrong for another. • Pythagoras-believed the universe was governed by numbers. He developed many new ideas about math, especially geometry. The pythagoreantheorum is one of his ideas that is still used today. • Socrates-a Greek teacher who critisized the Sophists. He believed that all real knowledge was within each person, and that all people could be wise if they learned to think for themselves. He also believed that there was such a thing as right and wrong, and that people should try to do the right thing. After the loss of the Peloponnesian War, this idea of questioning everything & thinking for oneself made the government feel threatened, so they executed him. • Socratic method-a teaching method in which the teacher asks pointed (specific) questions that are designed to make the student come up with the answer on his/her own. It is still used today.

3. Plato is one of Socrates student’s. He believes that government should be fair and just. He believed that the average person was led by desire, not logic and knowledge. Since people were not logical, they could not be fair or just, and therefore should not run the country. For this reason, he was against democracy. He believed Greece should be ruled by a philospher-king who would make decisions based on logic and reason, rather than emotion. • Aristotle a student at Plato’s Academy. He wrote 200 books on eveything from government to astronomy. He opened his own school, the Lyceum, where he taught “the golden mean,” which emphasized the idea of moderation in all things. He also had a tremendous influence on science, as he developed the idea of placing things in categories based on their similarities and differences. • He divided governments into three categories. We take this idea for granted now, but it had never been done before Aristotle. • His divisions were monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. • He observed that most oligarchies were run by the rich, while most democracies were run by the poor. He believed the best government would combine the two. • Can you think of a system that combines both types of government?

4. Historians • Prior to the Greeks, people only knew history through oral traditions, songs, poems, legends, and myths. They did not study the events of the past. • Herodotus-the “father of history.” He tried to write accurate histories of events from Greece’s past. One method he developed for doing this was to check the truthfulness of his sources, something historians still do today. His primary history was of the Persian War. • Thucydides- the greatest historian of the ancient world. He dismissed the involved of gods and goddesses in everyday events and stressed using accurate, verified facts when telling history. He wrote on many topics, though his first history was of the Peloponesian War, in which he was a soldier.