Foundational Ideas from Antiquity - The Greek Miracle and the Presocratic Philosphers

10 important questions on Foundational Ideas from Antiquity - The Greek Miracle and the Presocratic Philosphers

What does "psyche" mean to the Greeks and English?

Greeks: signifies a general life-principle; all living things have it, but dead don't
Latin: psyche = anima
English: animal/animated = living things; inanimate = dead ones
English psyche = soul/mind

What did Heraclitus mean with the ambiguous relationship between stability and change, and his idea of the unity of opposites?

Ambiguous relationship: you can never step into the same river twice
The unity of opposites: a road going upward is also going downward, depending on one's relative position and direction

What did the school of followers of Pythagoras discovered and emphasized?

The wondrous regularities of mathematics and their relationship to the physical world
Example: chords, Pythagorean theorem
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Why did Protagoras disagree with Zeno?

He adopted a practical pov and argued that it was fruitless to speculate about big questions such as the ultimate nature and makeup of the universe, or hypothetical paradoxes like Zeno's

Why would Protagoras agree with sophists such as Gorgias?

He favored a focus on purely human experience and behavior and declared: "Man is the measure of all things". This idea lay behind the approach taken by sophists, such as Gorgias. Instead of worrying about ultimate, theoretical questions, the sophists sought to understand people, and especially how they can be manipulated and persuaded to act according to the purpose of those in the know. It was precisely this expediency and relativism that attracted the opposition of Socrates.

What is special about the Hippocratic Corpus, written by the Hippocratics?

These works regarded diseases as natural phenomena, rather than the results of some sort of demonic or supernatural interference with the course of normal health

How does the humoral theory of the Hippocratics explain health and illness?

It explains health and illness as the result of the (im)balance among four prominent liquid substances, which they called humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. People are healthy when the four humors exist within reasonable balance within themselves; sharp deficiences or excesses of one or more produce various disease states, and moderate imbalances lead to differences in temperament or character
Example: On the Sacred Disease, epilepsy a result of an abnormal flow of pleghm into the brain

How do the Hippocratics treat diseases?

Stressed the value of balance and moderation
Tried to remove presumed humoral excesses by purges/bleedings
Emphasized exercise, diet, proper sanitation
Favored cautious experimentation to discover the therapeutic benefits of numerous herbal and other pharmalogical substances

What did the Pythagoreans attach to these wonderful correspondences between abstract mathematics and concrete experiences in the physical world?

A genuine religious significance

What did Zeno mean with infinity?

As, for example, in the idea that any linear distance contains an infinite number of intermediate points between its beginning and end
Example: Achilles and the tortoise paradox

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