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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 7

About the same time, or a little earlier, the unique and enigmatic Heraclitus of Ephesus was also advancing towards lie fateful division between reason and the senses. He preached the folly of relying on sense-perception unchecked by the judgment of its rightful interpreter, reason, though without going so far as to reject its witness absolutely as did Pannenides. In contrast to the Eleatic, who denied the very possibility of movement, he saw the whole natural world in terms of a continuous cycle of flux and change. Rest, not movement, was the impossibility. Any apparent stability was only the result of a temporary deadlock between the opposite tensions which were ceaselessly at work. Everlasting is only the logos which in its spiritual aspect is the rational principle governing the movements of the universe, including the law of cyclic change. The qualification ('in its spiritual aspect') is necessary because at this early stage of thought nothing is yet conceived as real without some physical manifestation, and the logos is intimately connected with that substance which had a kind of primacy in the world of Heraclitus, namely fire, or 'the hot and dry'.

The original and paradoxical philosophies of Heraclitus and Parmenides both had considerable influence on the mind of Plato. The rest of the Presocratic period was marked by the efforts of natural philosophers to escape the distasteful conclusion of Parmenides by a change from monism to pluralism. If the monistic hypothesis led to denying the reality of the apparent multiplicity of the world around us, then in the interests of the phenomena that hypothesis must be rejected. This was the reasoning of Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the atomists.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=7