Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend

to have naturally. The questions of what these characteristics are, what causes them and how this causation works, and how fixed human nature is, are amongst the oldest and most important questions in western philosophy. These questions have particularly important implications in ethics, politics and theology. This is partly because human nature can be regarded as both a source of norms of conduct or ways of life, as well as presenting obstacles or constraints on living a good life. Philosophy in classical Greece is the ultimate origin of the western conception of the nature of a thing. The philosophical study of human nature itself originated, according to Aristotle at least, with Socrates, [3] who turned philosophy from study of the heavens to study of the human things. Socrates is said to have studied the question of how a person should best live, but he left no written works. It is clear from the works of his students Plato and Xenophon, and also what was said by Aristotle (Plato's student) about him, that Socrates was a rationalist and believed that the best life and the life most suited to human nature involved reasoning. The Socratic school was the dominant surviving influence in philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages, amongst Islamic, Christian and Jewish philosophers. The human soul in the works of Plato and Aristotle has a divided nature, divided in a specifically human way. One part is specifically human and rational, and divided into a part which is rational on its own, and a spirited part which can understand reason. Other parts of the soul are home to desires or passions similar to those found in animals. In both Aristotle and Plato spiritedness, thumos, is distinguished from the other passions or epithumiai.[4] The proper function of the "rational" was to rule the other parts of the soul, helped by spiritedness. By this account, using one's reason is the best way to live, and philosophers are the highest types of humans. Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, made some of the most famous and influential statements about human nature. In his works, apart from using a similar scheme of a divided human soul, some clear statements about human nature are made:  Man is a conjugal animal, meaning an animal which is born to couple when an adult, thus building a household (oikos) and in more successful cases, a clan or small village still run upon patriarchal lines.[5] Man is a political animal, meaning an animal with an innate propensity to develop more complex communities the size of a city or town, with a division of labor and law-making. This type of [6] community is different in kind from a large family, and requires the special use of human reason. Man is a mimetic animal. Man loves to use his imagination (and not only to make laws and run town councils). He says "we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses." And the "reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, 'that is so and so.'"[7]

For Aristotle, reason is not only what is most special about humanity compared to other animals, but it is also what we were meant to achieve at his or her best. Much of Aristotle's description of human nature is still influential today, but the particular teleological idea that humans are "meant" or intended to be [8] something, has become much less popular in modern times. For the Socratics, human nature, and all natures, are metaphysical concepts. Aristotle developed the standard presentation of this approach with his theory of four causes. Human nature is an example of

a formal cause according to Aristotle. Their teleological concept of nature is associated with humans having a divine component in their psyches, whic

SocraTES
True to his teaching that "an unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 36a), Socrates spent most of his days examining the real reasons, or motivation, behind his human acts . His final act, in fact, epitomized what he was all about: Falsely sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and not believing in the ancestral gods (Apology, 17-42), Socrates, rather than suffer exile from the Athens he loved so much, willingly and with his own hand ended his life with a drink of deadly hemlock. Plato and Xenophon, Socrates' main biographers, paint his vocation, or calling in life, as an ardent desire to help people to live life to the fullest; that is, to live in conformity with their human nature (Phaedo, 63c).

According to the surviving sources on his life, Anaximenes flourished in the mid 6th century BCE and died around 528. He is the third philosopher of the Milesian School of philosophy, so named because like Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes was an inhabitant of Miletus, in Ionia (ancient Greece). Theophrastusnotes that Anaximenes was an associate, and possibly a student, of Anaximanders. Anaximenes is best known for his doctrine that air is the source of all things. In this way, he differed with his predecessors like Thales, who held that water is the source of all things, and Anaximander, who thought that all things came from an unspecified boundless stuff. Anaximenes theory of successive change of matter by rarefaction and condensation was influential in later theories. It is developed by Heraclitus (DK22B31), and criticized by Parmenides (DK28B8.23-24, 47-48). Anaximenes general theory of how the materials of the world arise is adopted by Anaxagoras(DK59B16), even though the latter has a very different theory of matter. Both Melissus (DK30B8.3) and Plato (Timaeus 49b-c) see Anaximenes theory as providing a common-sense explanation of change. Diogenes of Apollonia makes air the basis of his explicitly monistic theory. The Hippocratic treatise On Breaths uses air as the central concept in a theory of diseases. By providing cosmological accounts with a theory of change, Anaximenes separated them from the realm of mere speculation and made them, at least in conception, scientific theories capable of testing.

Thales (624 BC-546 BC) lived in Ancient Greece and was arguably the world's first philosopher and scientist. Prior to Thales, supernaturalism was considered to be the cause of most if not all things. For example, the answer to a question such as, "Why does the wind blow?" or "What caused the epidemic?" would invariably involve a supernatural explanation such as, "It is the will of the gods." Explanations based on supernaturalism, however, are not really explanations at all. They represent non-rational, untestable assertions (such as god's motives) and, consequently, make the possibility of scientific advance impossible. Thales rejected the pseudo-science of supernaturalism and put forth a radically different explanation of causes, one from which an advance in knowledge could occur. Specifically, Thales believed that water is ultimately the cause of all things. While this belief is incorrect, Thales's idea was revolutionary because it implied that natural forces are the cause of

events,

not

supernatural

ones.

In other words, Thales is the father of theories -- objective statements about the world that can be subject to criticism, revision or rejection based on internal consistency and sensory evidence. Largely because of the contributions of Thales, both philosophy and science soon developed on a grand scale, laying the intellectual foundation for the Greco-Roman civilization as well as the modern world.

Anaximander / nks mnd r/ (Greek: , Anaximandros; c. 610 c. 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia; Milet in modern Turkey. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and arguably,Pythagoras amongst his pupils. Little of his life and work is known today. According to available historical documents, he is the first philosopher known to have written down his studies,[2] although only one fragment of his work remains. Fragmentary testimonies found in documents after his death provide a portrait of the man. Anaximander was one of the earliest Greek thinkers at the start of the Axial Age, the period from approximately 700 BC to 200 BC, during which similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India, Iran, the Near East, and Ancient Greece. He was an early proponent of science and tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe, with a particular interest in its origins, claiming that nature is ruled by laws, just like human societies, and anything that disturbs the balance of nature does not last long.[3] Like many thinkers of his time, Anaximander's contributions tophilosophy relate to many disciplines. In astronomy, he tried to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. In physics, his postulation that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things led Greek philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. His knowledge of geometry allowed him to introduce the gnomon in Greece. He created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography. He was also involved in the politics of Miletus and was sent as a leader to one of its colonies. Anaximander's theories were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition, and by some ideas of Thales the father of philosophy as well as by observations made by older civilizations in the East (especially by the Babylonian astrologists).[8]All these were elaborated rationally. In his desire to find some universal principle, he assumed like traditional religion the existence of a cosmic order and in elaborating his ideas on this he used the old mythical language which ascribed divine control to various spheres of reality. This was a common practice for the Greek philosophers in a society which saw gods everywhere, therefore they could fit their ideas into a tolerably elastic system.[9] Some scholars saw a gap between the existing mythical and the new rational way of thought which is the main characteristic of the archaic period (8th to 6th century BC) in the Greek city states. Because of this, they didn't hesitate to speak for a 'Greek miracle'. But if we follow carefully the course of Anaximander's ideas, we will notice that there was not such an abrupt break as initially appears. The basic elements of nature (water, air, fire, earth) which the first Greek philosophers believed that constituted the universe represent in fact the primordial forces of previous thought. Their collision produced what the mythical tradition had called cosmic harmony. In the old cosmogonies Hesiod (8th7th century BC) and Pherecydes (6th century BC) Zeus establishes his order in the world by destroying
[10]

the powers which were threatening this harmony, (the Titans). Anaximander claimed that the cosmic order is not monarchic but geometric and this causes the equilibrium of the earth which is lying in the centre of the universe. This is the projection on nature of a new political order and a new space organized around a centre which is the static point of the system in the society as in nature.[11] In this space there is isonomy (equal rights) and all the forces are symmetrical and transferrable. The decisions are now taken by the assembly of demos in the agora which is lying in the middle of the city.[12] The same rational way of thought led him to introduce the abstract apeiron (indefinite, infinite, boundless, [13] unlimited ) as an origin of the universe, a concept that is probably influenced by the original Chaos (gaping void, abyss, formless state) of the mythical Greek cosmogony from which [14] everything else appeared. It also takes notice of the mutual changes between the four elements. Origin, then, must be something else unlimited in its source, that could create without experiencing decay, so that genesis would never stop.[15]

Like Thales, Pythagoras is rather known for mathematics than for philosophy. Anyone who can recall math classes will remember the first lessons of plane geometry that usually start with the Pythagorean theorem about right-angled triangles: a+b=c. In spite of its name, the Pythagorean theorem was not discovered by Pythagoras. The earliest known formulation of the theorem was written down by the Indian mathematician Baudh yana in 800BC. The principle was also known to the earlier Egyptian and the Babylonian master builders. However, Pythagoras may have proved the theorem and popularised it in the Greek world. With it, his name and his philosophy have survived the turbulences of history. His immediate followers were strongly influenced by him, and even until today Pythagoras shines through the mist of ages as one of the brightest figures of early Greek antiquity. The Pythagorean theorem is often cited as the beginning of mathematics in Western culture, and ever since mathematics -the art of demonstrative and deductive reasoning- has had a profound influence on Western philosophy, which can be observed down to Russell and Wittgenstein. Pythagoras influence found an expression in visual art and music as well, particularly in the renaissance and baroque epoch. The far-reaching imprint of his ideas is yet more impressive if we consider that he did not leave any original writings. Instead, all what is known about Pythagoras was handed down by generations of philosophers and historiographers, some of whom, like Heraclitus, opposed his views. In this light it is remarkable that Pythagoras teachings have survived relatively undistorted until the present day. Pythagoras was a native of the island of Samos. During his early life, Samos was governed by the powerful, unscrupulous tyrant Polycrates. Pythagoras did not sympathise with his government and thus emigrated to Croton in Southern Italy. Like the ancient Greek cities in Ionia, Croton was a flourishing commercial city that lived from importing and exporting goods. Obviously it was in Croton where Pythagoras developed most of his important ideas and theories. Pythagoras founded a society of disciples which has been very influential for some time. Men and women in the society were treated equally -an unusual thing at the time- and all property was held in common. Members of the society practised the masters teachings, a religion the tenets of which included the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating

beans. Pythagoras followers had to obey strict religious orders where it was forbidden to eat beans, to touch white cocks, or to look into a mirror beside a light. If all of this seems a bit odd, it might lead us to suspect that Pythagoras personality reflects the inseparable blend of genius and madness that we associate with many other great men. It is said that once Pythagoras was walking up a lane in Croton when he came by a dog being ill-treated. Seeing this he raised his voice: Stop, dont hit it! It is a soul of a friend. I knew it when I heard its voice. Spirits, ghosts, souls, and transmigration were obviously things he believed in deeply. There was an opposition -if not rivalry- in ancient Greece between the gods of the Olympus and the lesser gods of more primitive religions. Pythagoras, like no other, embodied the contradistinctions of the mystical and rational world, which is woven into his personality and philosophy. In his mind, numbers, spirits, souls, gods and the mystic connections between them formed one big picture. The following text tells the legend of his own existences: He was once born as Aethalides and was considered to be the son of Hermes. Hermes invited him to choose whatever he wanted, except immortality; so he asked that, alive and dead, he should remember what happened to him. Thus, in life he remembered everything, and when he died he retained the same memories. [...] He remembered everything - how he first had been Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus, then Pyrrhus, the Delian fisherman. When Pyrrhus died, he became Pythagoras. (Diogenes Laertius, Live of Philosophers, VIII 4-5) Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis and thought that eating meat was an abominable thing, saying that the souls of all animals enter different animals after death. He himself used to say that he remembered being, in Trojan times, Euphorbus, Panthus son who was killed by Menelaus. They say that once when he was staying at Argos he saw a shield from the spoils of Troy nailed up, and burst into tears. When the Argives asked him the reason for his emotion, he said that he himself had borne that shield at Troy when he was Euphorbus. They did not believe him and judged him to be mad, but he said he would provide a true sign that it was indeed the case: on the inside of the shield there had been inscribed in archaic lettering EUPHORBUS. Because of the extraordinary nature of his claim they all urged that the shield be taken down - and it turned out that on the inside the inscription was found. (Diogenes Laertius) After Pythagoras introduced the idea of eternal recurrence into Greek thought, which was apparently motivated by his studies of earlier Egyptian scriptures, the idea soon became popular in Greece. It was Pythagoras ambition to reveal in his philosophy the validity and structure of a higher order, the basis of the divine order, for which souls return in a constant cycle. This is how Pythagoras came to mathematics. It could be said that Pythagoras saw the study of mathematics as a purifier of the soul, just like he considered music as purifying. Pythagoras and his disciples connected music with mathematics and found that intervals between notes can be expressed in numerical terms. They discovered that the length of strings of a musical instrument correspond to these intervals and that they can be expressed

in numbers. The ratio of the length of two strings with which two tones of an octave step are produced is 2:1. Music was not the only field that Pythagoras considered worthy of study, in fact he saw numbers in everything. He was convinced that the divine principles of the universe, though imperceptible to the senses, can be expressed in terms of relationships of numbers. He therefore reasoned that the secrets of the cosmos are revealed by pure thought, through deduction and analytic reflection on the perceptible world. This eventually led to the famous saying that all things are numbers. Pythagoras himself spoke of square numbers and cubic numbers, and we still use these terms, but he also spoke of oblong, triangular, and spherical numbers. He associated numbers with form, relating arithmetic to geometry. His greatest contribution, the proposition about right-angled triangles, sprang from this line of thought:

The Egyptians had known that a triangle whose sides are 3, 4, 5 has a right angle, but apparently the Greeks were the first to observe that 3+4=5, and, acting on this suggestion, to discover a proof of the general proposition. Unfortunately for Pythagoras this theorem led at once to the discovery of incommensurables, which appeared to disprove his whole philosophy. In a right-angled isosceles triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is double of the square on either side. Let us suppose each side is an inch long; then how long is the hypotenuse? Let us suppose its length is m/n inches. Then m/n=2. If m and n have a common factor, divide it out, then either m or n must be odd. Now m=2n, therefore m is even, therefore m is even, therefore n is odd. Suppose m=2p. Then 4p=2n, therefore n=2p and therefore n is even, contra hyp. Therefore no fraction m/n will measure the hypotenuse. The above proof is substantially that in Euclid, Book X. (Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy) This shows how Pythagoras formulation immediately led to a new mathematical problem, namely that of incommensurables. At his time the concept of irrational numbers was not known and it is uncertain how Pythagoras dealt with the problem. We may surmise that he was not too concerned about it. His religion, in absence of theological explanations, had found a way to blend the mystery of the divine with common-sense rational thought. From Pythagoras we observe that an answer to a problem in science may give raise to new questions. For each door we open, we find another closed door behind it. Eventually these doors will be also be opened and reveal answers in a new dimension of thought. A sprawling tree of progressively complex knowledge evolves in such manner. This Hegelian recursion, which is in fact a characteristic of scientific thought, may or may not have been obvious to Pythagoras. In either way he stands at the beginning of it.

Socrates's contributions to philosophy were a new method of approaching knowledge, a conception of the soul as the seat both of normal waking consciousness and of moral character, and a sense of the universe as purposively mind-ordered. His method, called dialectic, consisted in examining statements by pursuing their implications, on the assumption that if a statement were true it could not lead to false consequences. The method may have been suggested by Zeno of Elea, but Socrates refined it and applied it to ethical problems. His doctrine of the soul led him to the belief that all virtues converge into one, which is the good, or knowledge of one's true self and purposes through the course of a lifetime. Knowledge in turn depends on the nature or essence of things as they really are, for the underlying forms of things are more real than their experienced exemplifications. This conception leads to a teleological view of the world that all the forms participate in and lead to the highest form, the form of the good. Plato later elaborated this doctrine as central to his own philosophy. Socrates's view is often described as holding virtue and knowledge to be identical, so that no man knowingly does wrong. Since virtue is identical with knowledge, it can be taught, but not as a professional specialty as the Sophists had pretended to teach it. However, Socrates himself gave no final answer to how virtue can be learned.

Plato's Contribution to Philosophy: Plato carved out a subject matter for philosophy by formulating and discussing a wide range of metaphysical and ethical questions. To explain the similarities and resemblances among objects of the physical world, he developed a metaphysics of Forms. His views about ethical questions could be grounded in his metaphysics of Forms via the contemplation of the Form of The Good. Plato therefore found an inherent connection between metaphysics and ethics. His greatest work, The Republic, developed an insightful analogy between harmony in the state and harmony in the individual, and it is often considered one of the greatest works ever written. Plato wrote dialogues that considered the nature of virtue itself, as well as the nature of particular virtues. He also considered epistemological questions, such as whether knowledge is justified true belief.
Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Platos theory of forms. As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinasreferred to him simply as The Philosopher. In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive. Unfortunately for us, these works

are in the form of lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today. As the father of the field of logic, he was the first to develop a formalized system for reasoning. Aristotle observed that the validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content. A classic example of a valid argument is his syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Given the structure of this argument, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also guaranteed to be true. Aristotles brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later. Aristotles emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief in the scientific method forms the backdrop for most of his work. For example, in his work in ethics and politics, Aristotle identifies the highest good with intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one who cultivates certain virtues based on reasoning. And in his work on psychology and the soul, Aristotle distinguishes sense perception from reason, which unifies and interprets the sense perceptions and is the source of all knowledge. Aristotle famously rejected Platos theory of forms, which states that properties such as beauty are abstract universal entities that exist independent of the objects themselves. Instead, he argued that forms are intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from them, and so must be studied in relation to them. However, in discussing art, Aristotle seems to reject this, and instead argues for idealized universal form which artists attempt to capture in their work. Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school of learning based in Athens, Greece; and he was an inspiration for the Peripatetics, his followers from the Lyceum.