Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Overview

What’s New in… Ancient Philosophy

In the first of our ‘Overview’ series, Mark Daniels describes the latest work on the earliest philosophers.

Ancient Philosophy is the name given to early Greek philosophy starting with the inaugural musings of Thales of Miletus (c 600 BCE), one of the original seven wise men of Ancient Greece, and working forwards historically through Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and then on through the various schools of philosophy such as the Epicurean, Stoics and neo-Platonists. It culminates with such worthies as St Augustine and Boethius (c400-500 CE) whose concerns are usually understood as being more ‘medieval’ in nature (which probably means that they were more interested in the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, rather than in philosophy itself). For some more detail see the Timeline on page 33. Alas, there is no space to give a proper account of the thoughts of these great minds. My purpose here is simply to map out the new work which is being done in the study of Ancient Philosophy today.

…