Lisa Connolly
Christy Hawthorne
Autobiography of Civilization
February 10, 2015
The Legacy of Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece was the origin of Western Civilization. Many great achievements were attained during this time period in the arts, architecture, medicine, math, philosophy, literature, and government. The impact of their achievements have lasted for thousands of years.
The early era of Greece was called the Dark Ages. There is not much know about this era except that people lived in “farming communities and produced only essential tools and domestic objects” (Experience Humanities 39).
In the era called the Archaic Age from 800-479 BCE changes began to happen. Government and political advancement began taking shape in
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The Greeks “invented natural philosophy, a term that encompasses the fields we now call “philosophy” and “science” (Experience Humanities 47)”. Philosophers of Ancient Greece concentrated on reason and inquiry. They tried to answer questions posed through intelligence and reason. To be a philosopher you were considered a thinker. There were many philosophers during Ancients Greece, but the three most prominent are Socrates. Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates was considered the founder of philosophy. His method of philosophy was to ask questions and break them down. “Those who want wisdom must protect, nourish, and expand their psyches by giving their minds the maximum amount of knowledge” (Experience Humanities 68)”. Discussion, examination and observation was how Socrates believed a person could come to reason and find the answers. Plato was a student of Socrates. Plato wrote many works but his most influential were in regards to ethics and the humanism. Plato’s philosophy was “a thought system that emphasizes spiritual values and makes ideas, rather than matter, the basis of everything that exists (Experience Humanities 68)”. Plato believed that the human body was in a material world, and the psyche was in the forms. The psyche could only remember a higher realm by recollection. Aristotle was a student of Plato. Aristotle philosophy was that the natural world was all that existed. He did not believe in the higher realm as Plato. Aristotle believed that “nature could be studied and understood by observation, classification, and comparison (Experience Humanities 70)”. Aristotle believe that knowledge came from reasoning. Many scholars have studied Aristotle’s writing, “regarding them as containing authoritative teachings on natural world (Experience Humanities 70)”. The legacy of Ancient Greece in the field of Philosophy overwhelming because it was truly the