Philosophy is "the rationalistic search for understanding, without calling in the aid of intuition, inspiration, revelation, or other nonrational sources of information" (Asimov, p. 1) Philosophers are, per translation from Greek, "lovers of wisdom." (Asimov, p. 1). [Note: many philosophers would disgree with this definition].

While humans have been in existence in some form for over 1 million years, and have been genetically indistinguishable from modern humans for over 100,000 years, only about 10,000 years ago did spoken language gain a foothold in humanity. (Source unknown) Spoken language was to early humans what the engine is to modern humans. It transformed humanity.

As spoken language developed, some articulate, early human thinkers "began to think there was a god in their speech, something that could outlast its mortal thinkers and connect each new generation of mortality back to the forgotten sky, the way things really were. They became, in brief, philosophers, and the mythologies we find recorded by later, literate thinkers are the distorted record–Aristotle was later to say–of past philosophy." (Clark, p. 2)

A broad definition of ancient philosophers could include a range of persons from major religious figures to speculative cave-dwellers. A narrow definition would chiefly refer to the ancient Greeks–Plato, Aristotle, Democratius and others. Greek philosophers are notable for their development of geometry, which they attempted to apply to the whole of philosophy, a theme taken up time and again by later philosophers such as Spinoza and Kepler. The ancient Greek had only crude technology and were limited in the precision with which they could perform experiments and collect data. Their view that the world is a rough, crude environment compared to the human mind lead them to focus on mental rather than physical explorations into science, although a few important physical observations lead the Greeks to conclude that the Earth is a sphere and make a fairly precise calculation of the size of the Earth and rough calculations of the size of and distance to the Sun and Moon. (Clark)

1. S. Clark, "Ancient Philosophy", Oxford History of Western Philosophy, A. Kenny, ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994.

2. I. Asimov, The History of Physics, Walker and Company, New York, 1966.

© 2001 by Mark P. A. Ciotola mciotola@stars.sfsu.edu