way Hermes takes care to keep the two of us hidden from each other.
So the messenger has herewith been introduced. Naturally he answers
to his name and is altogether very well behaved.
But to return to philosophy. We have already completed the first part of
the course. I refer to the natural philosophers and their decisive break with the
mythological world picture. Now we are going to meet the three great classical
philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Each in his own way, these
philosophers influenced the whole of European civilization.
The natural philosophers are also called the pre-Socratics, because they
lived before Socrates. Although Democritus died some years after Socrates,
all his ideas belong to pre-Socratic natural philosophy. Socrates represents a
new era, geographically as well as temporally. He was the first of the great
philosophers to be born in Athens, and both he and his two successors lived
and worked there. You may recall that Anaxagoras also lived in Athens for a
while but was hounded out because he said the sun was a red-hot stone.
(Socrates fared no better!)
From the time of Socrates, Athens was the center of Greek culture. It is
also important to note the change of character in the philosophical project
itself as it progresses from natural philosophy to Socrates. But before we
meet Socrates, let us hear a little about the so-called Sophists, who
dominated the Athenian scene at the time of Socrates.
Curtain up, Sophie! The history of ideas is like a drama in many acts.
Man at the Center
After about 450 B.C., Athens was the cultural center of the Greek world.
From this time on, philosophy took a new direction. The natural philosophers
had been mainly concerned with the nature of the physical world. This gives
them a central position in the history of science. In Athens, interest was now
focused on the individual and the individual’s place in society. Gradually a
democracy evolved, with popular assemblies and courts of law.
In order for democracy to work, people had to be educated enough to
take part in the democratic process. We have seen in our own time how a
young democracy needs popular enlightenment. For the Athenians, it was first
and foremost essential to master the art of rhetoric, which means saying
things in a convincing manner.
A group of itinerant teachers and philosophers from the Greek colonies
flocked to Athens. They called themselves Sophists. The word “sophist”
means a wise and informed person. In Athens, the Sophists made a living out
of teaching the citizens for money.
The Sophists had one characteristic in common with the natural
philosophers: they were critical of the traditional mythology. But at the same
time the Sophists rejected what they regarded as fruitless philosophical
speculation. Their opinion was that although answers to philosophical ques-
tions may exist, man cannot know the truth about the riddles of nature and of
the universe. In philosophy a view like this is called skepticism.
But even if we cannot know the answers to all of nature’s riddles, we
know that people have to learn to live together. The Sophists chose to
concern themselves with man and his place in society.
“Man is the measure of all things,” said the Sophist Protagoras (c. 485-
410 B.C.). By that he meant that the question of whether a thing is right or