The ancient-philosophy tag has no wiki summary.
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Who was the Greek philosopher that created a punctuation mark meaning “or so it seems to me at the moment”?
In high school I read about an ancient Greek philosopher who developed a punctuation mark that signified "or so it seems to me at the moment." This made it easy for this philosopher to qualify his ...
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How many Philosophers are known of during Greek Antiquity? [closed]
Will counting the number of philosophers in Diogenes Laertius's treatise be enough to give me a rough estimate?
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What was the importance of the Liars Paradox in Stoic Logic?
Chrysippus, an influential stoic philosopher wrote 21 books (chapters) in 12 works on the Liars Paradox. This implies that this paradox was of some importance to their epistomology and logic. Why?
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25 views
To what extent did the Presocratics borrow from neighbouring Babylonian & Egyptian cultures?
The IEP entry on Anaximander has:
The astronomy of neighboring peoples, such as the Babylonians and the Egyptians, consists mainly of observations...In contrast, there exists only one report of an ...
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Is Parmenides a Dualist?
It's commonly understood that Parmenides denied the reality of change. That the world we perceive is an illusion. But is Parmenides better understood as the SEP indicates:
Both Plato and ...
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75 views
Translation of a greek word in Stoic thought
I'm reading this article on Ariston of Chios. On the 9th page of the article Schofield uses " ἡγεμονιχόν", stating that the "What Ariston had noticed was that, although committed to a plurality of ...
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What triggered the philosophical movement in the ancient West?
The history of civilization in the West (i.e. Europe) goes back many thousands of years. Since well before 1000 BC there have been people living in what is now Turkey, Greece, and even Italy, in such ...
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33 views
Is there any sense in which an electron can be said to have free will?
Lucretious posited that without atoms 'swerving' there could be no expression of free will in this universe. Does this suggest that he was considering an atomisation of the conciousness of free will ...
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Formal treatments for Stoic Logic
Philosophers such as Susanne Bobzien have provided work that provides a basis for axiomatising Stoic logic, however, the treatments I have seen focus on exposition of ancient works, with little ...
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166 views
Why did Epicureanism become “the main opponent” of Stoicism?
I was reading about Epicureanism on Wikipedia, and there I saw that, apparently, Epicureanism was in conflict with Stoicism and Platonism. I then read up on those two philosophies, and well, they do ...
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350 views
How do Neoplatonic interpretations differ from original Platonic ideas?
The Wikipedia entry on Neoplatonism says:
Neoplatonists would have considered themselves simply Platonists, and
the modern distinction is due to the perception that their philosophy
contained ...
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91 views
Are there philosophical principles that made convincing in antiquity that the Earth was a sphere?
According to Wikipedia, there is no account of how the sphericity of the Earth was established. Though it goes on to say 'A plausible explanation is that it was "the experience of travellers that ...
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Does Plato see the tyranny as final?
Plato's Republic famously describes the decay of the regimes, a process by which a society decays from the best regime, that of aristocracy, to the lowest, that of tyranny. However, the purpose of ...
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840 views
Was Socrates a fictional character invented by Plato?
I have read a lot of websites that suggest Socrates was a fictional character created by Plato (albeit without the citation of any corroborating evidence), but I have also read the opposite (and by ...
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1answer
113 views
Is Aristotle's “Poetics” the first work of literary criticism?
Is it accurate to characterize Aristotle's Poetics as the first work of literary criticism, or does something earlier than this survive—fragmented or otherwise?
Poetics goes through what a work of ...
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Are there many links from ancient philosophers to quantum mechanics? [closed]
After doing some research on Heraclitus, I noticed that a few of his views are very compatible with quantum mechanics. For example, he is paraphrased as writing:
Into the same river we both step ...
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Is virtue necessary to achieve eudaimonia?
Stoics believe that virtue (ἀρετή) is necessary and sufficient to achieve happiness (εὐδαιμονία). It was the "sufficient" portion that marked Stoics out from other ancient philosophy, but I suspect ...
