A History of Philosophy  (English, Paperback, Thilly Frank)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GREEK PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 1. Origin And Development Op Early Greek Thought Few of the ancient peoples advanced far beyond the mythological stage, and perhaps none of them can be said to have developed a genuine philosophy except the Greeks. It is for this reason that we begin our ac- History of count with them. They not only laid the founda- tions upon which all subsequent systems of Western thought have been reared, but formulated nearly all the problems and suggested nearly all the answers with which European civilization occupied itself for two thousand xears. Their i philosophy is one of the best examples of the evolution of human thinking from simple mythological beginnings to complex and comprehensive systems that any people has furnished. The spirit of independence and the love of truth which animate their thinkers have never been sufpassed and rarely equaled. For these reasqhs the study of Greek philosophy ought to be an attractive arid valuable discipline to the student interested in higher speculative thought. By the history of Greek philosophy we mean the intellectual movement which originated and developed in the Hellenic world. We shall include in it, however, not only the systems of the Greeks themselves, but also those which exhibit the essential features of Greek thinking and which are manifestly the products of Hellenic civilization, whether they flourish at Athens, Rome, Alexandria, or in Asia Minor. The people whose philosophy we are to study inhabited the mountain peninsula of Greece, a territory whose natural characteristics were favorable to the production of a ,, . . ., . , , , Environment strong and active race, and whose many harbors, while encouraging navigation and commerce, furnished an outlet for emigration overi. the i...