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Egypt as precursor to some of Greek Philosophy
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by unfinished thought: [QB] Greek philosophy focused on the role of both reason and inquiry in the world around them. Although philosophers and scientists before the Greeks may have also relied on reason and inquiry, the Greeks pushed the envelope further by abandoning popular dogmatic principles, and instead relied on rational debates among one another to come up with a consensus, often not invoking the notion of God...something unheard of in previous societies. Certainly great thinkers and writers existed in the elder civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, however, the early Greek thinkers add at least one element which differentiates their thought from all those who came before them. For the first time in history, we discover in their writings something more than dogmatic assertions about the ordering of the world - we find reasoned arguments for various beliefs about the world. It is now believed that decision making through oral debate in the polis would have developed rational thought to carefully construct arguments for and against an action, and these debates would have required calling on abstract principles such as justice, without invoking the notion of a god. As it turns out, nearly all of the various cosmologies proposed by the early Greek philosophers are profoundly and demonstrably false, and this was often due to their speculations running far ahead of what their senses could cope with, but this does not diminish their importance. For even if later philosophers summarily rejected the answers they provided, they could not escape their questions: * What is life? * From where does everything come? * Of what does it really consist? * How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature? * And why can we describe them with a singular mathematics? And the method the Greek philosophers followed in forming and transmitting their answers became just as important as the questions they asked. The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. In other words they depended on reason and observation to illuminate the true nature of the world around them, and they used rational argument to advance their views to others. And though philosophers have argued at length about the relative weights that reason and observation should have, for two and a half millennia they have basically united in the use of the very method first used by the pre-Socratics. This type of thinking heavily influenced the expanding Roman culture of the time, as the Romans adopted much of the Greek culture as their own while the expanded their global empire. This type of philosophical thinking would end with the Roman adoption of Christianity which eventually lead to Medieval thinking, and the Dark Ages. Much of modern philosophy, and modern scientific thought, reflect the basic principles of ancient philosophy. If you look into the Greek philosophic movement of Pythagoreanism, you can see the foundation for mathematics still used today. If you look into the Socratic Method, you can see the roots of moral philosophy & ethics still used today in Western civilization, and if you look into Platonic Realism, you can see the beginnings of metaphysical thought, which has heavily influenced Western philiosophy and religion. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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