ФИЛОСОФИЯ АНТИЧНАЯ

Philosophy of Antiquity

The totality of philosophical theories developed in the Greek slave-owning society from the end of the 7th century B.C. and in the Roman slave-owning society from the 2nd century B.C. up to the beginning of the 6th century A.D. The Philosophy of Antiquity is an original, but not isolated, phenomenon in the development of man's philosophical cognition.

It took shape on the basis of the rudiments of astronomical, mathematical, physical, and other knowledge brought into the Greek cities from the East as a result of interpretation of ancient mythology in art and poetry and attempts to remove from philosophical thought the mythological conceptions of the world and of man that had held them captive. By the 5th century B.C., philosophical and cosmological systems had been developed in which myths were a means of figuratively expressing ideas rather than the basis of an outlook.

In the 6th and even in the 5th centuries B.C., philosophy and the knowledge of nature had not been separated. The number of hypotheses that occurred owing to the absence of experimental verification was enormous. As far as philosophy was concerned, this multiplicity of hypotheses meant a multiplicity of types of philosophical explanations of the world. This multiplicity and the level of elaboration made Philosophy of Antiquity a school of philosophical thinking for later times. "...The manifold forms of Greek philosophy," wrote Engels, "contain in embryo, in the nascent state, almost all the later modes of outlook on the world." (Dialectics of Nature, p. 44.)

The starting point for the development of the Philosophy of Antiquity was philosophical materialism. Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, despite the many differences between them, all assumed that things originated from some single material source. Among those who held these naive materialist views, certain ideas arose which later led to the development of idealism. The germs of the schism into materialist and idealist trends can be discerned among the earliest Greek thinkers.

In the second half of the 5th and early 4th centuries B.C. these trends developed into the opposites of materialism and idealism. Equally clear in the Philosophy of Antiquity is the antithesis of the dialectical and metaphysical methods of thinking. Many of the early Greek philosophers were actually dialecticians, who studied nature as a single whole and, consequently, in the interaction and connection of its phenomena.

In the more than a thousand years of the development of the Philosophy of Antiquity, the materialism and idealism, dialectics and metaphysics which took shape in early Greek philosophy underwent an intricate evolution, reflecting, in the final analysis, the dialectics of the development of the society of antiquity.

The materialism of the Philosophy of Antiquity was developed by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus. In the teachings of Socrates and, particularly, Plato philosophical idealism took shape, counterposing itself, first and foremost, to the materialism of the atomists. From this time onwards there was a clearly marked struggle between the two main lines of development, materialism and idealism (or, as Lenin said, "the line of Democritus and the line of Plato").

Aristotle, who wavered between materialism and idealism, also expressed his ideas in polemics with theories preceding and contemporary to him. Aristotle's criticism of the theory of the "idea", the central theory in Plato's idealism, was particularly energetic and witty.

In the Hellenic period, the beginning of the crisis of the slave-owning system, the struggle between the different schools in the Philosophy of Antiquity became more acute. Especially sharp was the struggle between the Epicurean school of materialism and the stoics into whose fundamentally materialist doctrine elements of idealism had made extensive inroads.

Questions of ethics came to be placed first among philosophical problems, but these ethics had their basis in the theory of nature and the theory of knowledge and thought. Philosophical schools were shut off from the world, they became coteries of people united in their indifference to external events and their excessive interest in questions of ethics and education.

At the same time there were changes in the relations of philosophy to the specialised sciences, and a new type of scientist and a new type of scientific literature made their appearance; this was special literature comprehensible only to those with special training.

In the epoch of the Roman Empire the crisis of the slave-owning community became more acute and the urge for religious self-oblivion and solace became stronger. A wave of religious cults, doctrines, and mysteries spread from the East to the West. Philosophy itself became religious, even mystical in some doctrines. Examples of this were Neo-Platonism and Neo-Pythagoreanism, the first of which exerted considerable influence on the development of Christian philosophy.

In 529 the Emperor Justinian issued a decree closing down the philosophical schools in Athens. But before this decree and quite independently of it, the basic ideas of the Philosophy of Antiquity had completed their course of development.