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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
 

W.K.C. Guthrie 
A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.

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HOMER

PLATO

ARISTOTLE

THE GREEK OLD TESTAMENT (SEPTUAGINT)

THE NEW TESTAMENT

PLOTINUS

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

MAXIMUS CONFESSOR

SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

CAVAFY

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Page 6

Before the end of the century, the philosophical impulse was carried from the eastern to the western borders of the Greek world by the migration of Pythagoras of Samos to the cities of Greek settlement in South Italy. Together with physical translation, it underwent a change of spirit. From now on, the Ionian and Italian branches of philosophy develop in different ways, though the division is not so clearly marked as some later Greek scholars and classifiers supposed, and there was some cross-fertilization, as for example when Xenophanes from Asiatic Colophon followed in the track of Pythagoras and settled in Magna Graecia. So far as Pythagoras and his followers were concerned, the change in spirit affected both the motive and the content of philosophy. From satisfaction of the sheer desire to know and understand, its purpose became the provision of intellectual foundations for a religious way of life; and in itself it acquired a less physical, more abstract and mathematical character. Study of matter gave way to study of form. The logical trend was followed up in the West by Parmenides of Elea and his school, and reached its climax in his teaching that true being was not to be found in the physical world because, from the propositions 'It is' and 'It is one' (on which Milesian cosmology might be said to have been based; in any case Parmenides argued that the second followed from the first), the only valid conclusion was an unqualified denial of physical movement and change. Reason and the senses gave contradictory answers to the question: 'What is reality?', and the answer of reason must be preferred.

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=6