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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

PLOTINUS

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

MAXIMUS CONFESSOR

SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

CAVAFY

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Page 18

The abandonment of the transcendent forms of Plato had momentous consequences for ethics. The existence of justice, courage, temperance, etc., among the absolutes of this transcendent world meant that the answers to questions of conduct were bound up with metaphysical knowledge. A man might act rightly by doing what he was told, relying on an 'opinion' implanted by another; but he would have no 'knowledge' of why he was behaving thus. Morals must be securely founded on fixed principles, and for this we need the philosopher who by long and arduous training has recovered his knowledge of reality, that is of the absolute forms of the virtues which are but palely reflected in any virtuous acts on earth. For Aristotle all this is changed. Moral virtue and rules of conduct lie entirely within the realm of the contingent. In the first two books of the Ethics he reminds us no less than six times of the principle that precision is not to be sought indiscriminately in all subjects and is out of place in the study of morality, the goal of which is not knowledge but practice. The sentence ' We are not trying to find out what virtue is, but to become good men' seems aimed deliberately at Plato and Socrates.

In psychology, Aristotle defined the soul as, in his technical sense of the word, the 'form' of the body; that is, the highest manifestation of the particular compound of form and matter which is a living creature. This does not of course imply an epiphenomenalist view. That would be to turn his philosophy upside down. Form is the prior cause and is in no way dependent on matter. It does, however, exclude the doctrine of transmigration which Plato shared with the Pythagoreans. Aristotle is shy of the subject of immortality, but seems to have believed in the survival, though not necessarily the individual survival, of nous, which is our link with the divine, and, as he once puts it, the only part of us which 'comes in from outside'.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=18