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.

Editorial

Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Rick Lewis

In this issue we’ll be looking at ancient Greek philosophy as a guide to modern life.

The philosophical tradition of Ancient Greece lasted many hundreds of years and went through various phases. The first Greek philosophers – the ones we now call the pre-Socratics – thought mainly about metaphysics. They wanted to understand the nature of change, to know how the universe worked, and to find out whether there was a single substance underlying everything. In this way their ideas were the distant ancestors of modern science.

…