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Title: A Short History of Greek Philosophy

Author: John Marshall

Release Date: February 1, 2007 [EBook #20500]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREEK PHILOSOPHY ***

Produced by Al Haines

A SHORT HISTORY

OF

GREEK PHILOSOPHY

BY

JOHN MARSHALL

M.A. OXON., LL.D. EDIN.

RECTOR OF THE ROYAL HIGH SCHOOL, EDINBURGH

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

IN THE YORKSHIRE COLLEGE, LEEDS

LONDON

PERCIVAL AND CO.

1891

All rights reserved

PREFACE

The main purpose which I have had in view in writing this book has been to present an account of Greek philosophy which, within strict limits of brevity, shall be at once authentic and interesting—authentic, as being based on the original works themselves, and not on any secondary sources; interesting, as presenting to the ordinary English reader, in language freed as far as possible from technicality and abstruseness, the great thoughts of the greatest men of antiquity on questions of permanent significance and value. There has been no attempt to shirk the really philosophic problems which these men tried in their day to solve; but I have endeavoured to show, by a sympathetic treatment of them, that these problems were no mere wars of words, but that in fact the philosophers of twenty-four centuries ago were dealing with exactly similar difficulties as to the bases of belief and of right action as, under different forms, beset thoughtful men and women to-day.

In the general treatment of the subject, I have followed in the main the order, and drawn chiefly on the selection of passages, in Ritter and Preller's Historia Philosophiae Graecae. It is hoped that in this way the little book may be found useful at the universities, as a running commentary on that excellent work; and the better to aid students in the use of it for that purpose, the corresponding sections in Ritter and Preller are indicated by the figures in the margin.

In the sections on Plato, and occasionally elsewhere, I have drawn to some extent, by the kind permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press and his own, on Professor Jowett's great commentary and translation.

JOHN MARSHALL.

Transcriber's notes:

The passage numbers in the Ritter-Preller book mentioned in the second paragraph above are indicated in this book with square brackets, e.g. "[10]". In the original book they were formatted as sidenotes. In this e-book they are embedded in the text approximately where they appear in the original book, unless they are at the start of a paragraph, in which case they appear immediately before that paragraph.

Page numbers are indicated with curly brackets, e.g. "{5}". They are embedded into the text where page breaks occurred in the original book.

In the original book, pages had headings that varied with the material being discussed on that pair of pages. In this e-book, those headings have been collected into an "introductory" paragraph at the beginning of each chapter.

The original book uses several Greek words. These words, the chapters they are used in, and their transliterations are as follows:

Chapter I (pages 3, 4, 12) - "arche" - alpha (with the soft-breathing mark), rho, chi, eta; "phloios" - phi, lambda, omicron, iota, omicron, final sigma.

Chapter III (page 28) - "soma" - sigma, omega, mu, alpha; "sema" - sigma, eta, mu, alpha.

Chapter IV (page 33, 34 - "doxa" - delta, omicron, xi, alpha; "Peri" - PI, epsilon, rho, iota; "Phueos" - PHI, upsilon, sigma, epsilon, omega, final sigma.

Chapter V (page 48) - "logos" - lambda, omicron, gamma, omicron, final sigma; "hule" - upsilon with rough breathing mark, lambda, eta.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

     I.—THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS—
            I. Thales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
           II. Anaximander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

    II.—THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS (concluded)—
          III. Anaximenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
           IV. Heraclitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

III.—PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS . . . . . . . . . 22

    IV.—THE ELEATICS—
            I. Xenophanes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
           II. Parmenides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

     V.—THE ELEATICS (concluded)—
          III. Zeno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
           IV. Melissus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

    VI.—THE ATOMISTS—
            I. Anaxagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

   VII.—THE ATOMISTS (continued)—
           II. Empedocles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

  VIII.—THE ATOMISTS (concluded)—
          III. Leucippus and Democritus . . . . . . . . . . 74

    IX.—THE SOPHISTS—
            I. Protagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

     X.—THE SOPHISTS (concluded)—
           II. Gorgias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

XI.—SOCRATES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

XII.—SOCRATES (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

  XIII.—THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS—
            I. Aristippus and the Cyrenaics . . . . . . . . 124
           II. Antisthenes and the Cynics . . . . . . . . . 128
          III. Euclides and the Megarics . . . . . . . . . . 132

XIV.—PLATO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

XV.—PLATO (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

XVI.—PLATO (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

XVII.—PLATO (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

XVIII.—ARISTOTLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

XIX.—ARISTOTLE (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

XX.—ARISTOTLE (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

XXI.—THE SCEPTICS AND EPICUREANS . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

XXII.—THE STOICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .