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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
 

W.K.C. Guthrie 
A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.

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Page 13

To account for the extraordinary influence of Socrates over subsequent philosophy is something that must be left until later. Here it may be said that almost all later schools, whether originating with his own disciples or, like Stoicism, founded long after his death, whether dogmatic or sceptical, hedonistic or ascetic in character, acclaimed Socrates as the fountain-head of all wisdom including their own. This at least suggests that we shall err if we regard him as a simple character. Schools founded by his immediate disciples included the logically subtle Megarians, the pleasure-loving Cyrenaics and perhaps the ascetic Cynics, as well as the Academy of Plato, but only of the last have we anything more than fragmentary knowledge.

Socrates had bequeathed to his successors some of the most intractable of intellectual problems. It might seem that in bidding men seek 'the true nature of goodness' as the sole requirement for right living, he had decided by an act of faith rather than of reason (a) that goodness has a 'true nature', (b) that the human mind can grasp it, (c) that the intellectual grasp of it will be an all-sufficient incentive to right action in practice. But this, in modern terms, is to raise fundamental questions of ontology, epistemology, ethics and psychology. To contemporaries it would seem like begging the question involved in the 'nature- versus-convention' controversy rather than settling it.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=13