Category: Classical Philosophy

These notes cover Sophist philosophy in full: the historical context of rhetoric in Athenian democracy; types of scepticism (common-sense, philosophical, absolute); Protagoras’s relativism and ‘man is the measure of all things’; Gorgias’s three nihilist theses; the physis-nomos distinction and its application to justice, religion, and morality; Callicles on natural justice and the strong; Thrasymachus on…

These notes provide the essential historical context for classical Greek philosophy: the evolution of Athenian democracy from Draco through Solon to Cleisthenes; the Persian Wars and the rise of Athens under Pericles; the nature of direct democracy and its vulnerability to rhetoric; the arrival of the Sophists; the contrast between Athens and Sparta; the Peloponnesian…

These notes cover ancient atomism across four philosophers — Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. Topics include: core atomic theory (atoms, void, change as rearrangement), the three problems atomism solved, Lucretius’s five principles from observation, the motion debate (eternal motion vs free fall vs the swerve), how qualities arise from quality-less atoms (Epicurus’s properties/accidents vs Democritus’s…

These notes cover Anaxagoras — his critique of Empedocles’s four elements, the concept of infinite qualitatively distinct seeds, the homoiomerous test for ultimate elements, ‘everything is in everything’, the nature and role of Nous, the primordial mixture and its separation into the cosmos, internal tensions in his system, his scientific observations, and his legacy as…

These notes cover Empedocles of Akragas — how he reconciled Parmenides and Heraclitus using four permanent elements and two forces (Love and Strife), his experimental refutation of Parmenides’s denial of motion, his shift from monism to pluralism, the cyclical world process, his proto-evolutionary theory of biological diversity, his theory of sense perception, transmigration of the…

These notes cover Zeno of Elea — his method of reductio ad absurdum, what a paradox is, and his four categories of argument: against the senses (Millet Argument), against plurality (infinite size and infinite number), against space (infinite regress of containers), and against motion (the Racecourse, Achilles and the Tortoise, and the Flying Arrow). Also…

These notes cover Parmenides of Elea — the axiomatic method in Greek geometry, his three axioms (being is one; what is, is; what is not, is not), his seven conclusions (being is uncreated, indestructible, unchangeable, eternal, indivisible, motionless; time is unreal), three hidden philosophical principles, the debate over material versus ideal being, Parmenides as the…

These notes cover Heraclitus of Ephesus — the problem he inherited from the Milesians, his concept of eternal flux symbolised by fire, the river analogy, the continuity of process as the basis of identity, unity of opposites with three types of examples, the Logos as universal rational principle, key ethical fragments, and his five-point philosophical…

These notes cover Xenophanes of Colophon — his three-part critique of Homer and Hesiod’s gods, his rational concept of a single non-anthropomorphic God, the distinction between revealed and natural theology, his pioneering work in epistemology (the problem of certainty, relativity of perception), and his use of fossil evidence in natural inquiry.

These notes cover Pythagoras of Samos — his religious community, the doctrine of metempsychosis, his metaphysics of number and form, the sacred Tetraktys, the mathematical basis of musical harmony, the structure of the cosmos, and his lasting significance in the history of Western philosophy.