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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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HOMER

PLATO

ARISTOTLE

THE GREEK OLD TESTAMENT (SEPTUAGINT)

THE NEW TESTAMENT

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DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

MAXIMUS CONFESSOR

SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

CAVAFY

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Page 16

Aristotle was for twenty years the friend and pupil of Plato, and this left an indelible impression on his thought. Since his own philosophical temperament was very different from his master's, it was inevitable that a note of conflict should be discernible at the heart of his philosophy. His more down-to-earth mentality had no use for a world of transcendent entities which it saw as a mere visionary duplication of the real world of experience. He had a great admiration for his fellow-Northerner Democritus, and it is conceivable that, had it not been for Plato, the atomic view of the world as an undesigned accretion of particles might have undergone remarkable developments in his keen and scientific brain. As it was, he retained throughout life from his Academic inheritance both a teleological outlook and a sense of the supreme importance of form which sometimes led to difficulties in the working out of his own interpretation of nature.

Every natural object is a compound of matter and form, 'matter' in its absolute sense meaning not physical body (all of which possesses some degree of form), but a wholly unqualified substratum with no independent existence but logically demanded as that in which the forms inhere. Immanent form takes the place of the transcendent forms of Plato. Everything has an indwelling impulse towards the development of its own specific form, as is seen most clearly in the organic progress of seed to plant or embryo to adult. The process may also be described as that from potentiality to actuality. This dichotomy of existence into potential and actual was Aristotle's reply to Parmenides's denial of change on the ground that nothing can come to be either out of what is or what is not.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=16