I. Greek Humanism

“The Greeks originated the Western humanist tradition. They valued the human personality and sought the full cultivation of human talent. In the Greek view, a man of worth pursued excellence, that is, he sought to mold himself in accordance with the highest standards and ideals. …. [Homer’s] great epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, contain the embryo of the Greek humanist tradition: the concern with man and his achievements.”
- Perry in Sources of the Western Tradition pgs 46/48

Homer’s humanism –


“He who wins of a sudden, some noble prize
In the rich years of youth
Is raised high with hope; his manhood takes wings;
He has in his heart what is better than wealth
But brief is the season of man’s delight.
Soon it falls to the ground;
Some dire decision uproots it.
- Thing of a day! Such is man: a shadow in a dream.
Yet when god-given splendor visits him
A bright radiance plays over him, and how sweet is life.”

- The Greek poet Pindar (c. 518 – 438 B.C.) praising a victorious athlete


“[Man] the skilled, the brilliant! He conquers all, taming with his techniques the pretty that roams the cliffs and wild lairs, training the stallion, clamping the yoke across his shaggy neck, and the tireless mountain bull. And speech and thought, quick as the wind, and the mood and mind for law that rules the city – all these he has taught himself. … Never without resources, never an impasse as he marches on the future – only Death, from Death alone he will find no rescue, but from desperate plagues he has plotted his escapes.

Man the master, ingenious past all measure, past all dreams, the skills within his grasp – he forges on, now to destruction, now again to greatness. When he weaves in the laws of the land, and the justice of the gods that binds his oaths together, he and his city rise high – but the city casts out that man who weds himself to inhumanity thanks to reckless daring. Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts, whoever does such things.”
- Sophocles (c. 460 – 406 B.C.) in a famous passage from his play Antigone

Useful definitions:

Humanity - 1. The condition, quality or fact of being human.

Humanism - 1. The condition or quality of being human. 2. A philosophy or attitude that is concerned with human beings, their achievements and interests, rather than with the abstract beings and problems of theology.”

II. Greek Philosophy:

Philosophy is the inquiry into the nature of things around us and the processes whereby they had come into being and by which they changed. Philosophy is traditionally divided pre and post Socrates (469-399). Inquiring into the nature of the world was not new, all societies attempt to explain the natural world, why it exists and what the role of man was; the Greeks, though, took this inquiry to the next level.

The basic three questions of Greek, and subsequent, philosophy:

1) The Problem of Reality: what exists and how it came into being / what is the world made of?
2) The Problem of Knowledge: How can we know and what does it mean to know?
3) The Problem of Ethics: How should we behave/what should we do?

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY


THE COSMOLOGISTS



“Winds occur when the finest vapours of the air are separated off and when they are set in motion by congregation; rain occurs from the exhalation that issues upwards from the things beneath the sun, and lightning whenever wind breaks out and cleaves the clouds…. [All] these things occur [thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, whirlwinds and typhoons] as a result of wind: for whenever it is shut up in a thick cloud and then burst out forcibly, though its fineness and lightness, then the bursting makes the noise, while the rift against the blackness of the cloud makes the flash…”
- Anaximander (c. 611-547 B.C.)



“[The Pythagoreans] saw that the attributes and the ratios of the musical scales were expressible in numbers; since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled after numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of natures, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number. And all the properties of numbers and scales which they could show to agree with the attributes and parts and the whole arrangement of the heavens, they collected and fitted into their scheme.”
- Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) writing on Pythagoras (c. 580 – 507 B.C.) and his followers


EXPANSION OF REASON AND INQUIRY


“I am about to discuss the disease called ‘sacred.’ It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men’s inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character. … My own view is that those who first attributed a sacred character to this malady were like magicians, purifiers, charlatans and quacks of our own day, men who claim great piety and superior knowledge. Being at a loss, and having no treatment which would help, they concealed and sheltered themselves behind superstition, and called this illness sacred, in order that their utter ignorance might not be manifest.”
- A follower of Hippocrates (c. 460 – 377 B.C.) writing on epilepsy excerpted from The Sacred Disease.

“In investigating past history … [people] are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way – even when these stories concern their own native countries…. Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear. However, I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology.”
- Thucydides (c. 460 – 400 B.C.) writing about his method of historical inquiry in his History of the Peloponnesian War.


THE SOPHISTS



“There was a time when the life of men was unordered, bestial and the slave of force, when there was no reward for the virtuous and no punishment for the wicked. Then, I think, men devised retributory laws, in order that Justice might be dictator and have arrogance as its slave, and if anyone sinned, he was punished. Then, when the laws forbade them to commit open crimes of violence, and they began to do them in secret, a wise and clever man invented fear (of the gods) for mortals, that there might be some means of frightening the wicked, even if they do anything or say or think it in secret. Hence he introduced the Divine (religion)….”
- An excerpt from a surviving fragment of a play by Critias (c. 480 – 403 B.C.)

Physis


Nomos


“Man is the measure of all things”
- Protagoras


“If you ask one of them a question, they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you’re transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You’ll never get anywhere with any of them.”
- Socrates (469 – 399 B.C.) railing against the followers of Heraclitus of Ephesus.



Useful definitions:

Sophist – 1. a. A member of a pre-Socratic school of philosophy in ancient Greece. b. Any of a class of later Greek teachers of rhetoric and philosophy who came to be disparaged for their over subtle, self-serving reasoning. 2. a. A scholar or thinker; especially one skillful in devious arguments.

Sophistry – 1. A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument. 2. Plausible but fallacious argumentation; faulty reasoning.

Sophomoric – 1. Characteristic of a sophomore; especially, immature and over-confident.