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Greek Thought
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Before 500BCE most writing was in the
form or poetry
After 500 BCE prose developed
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1st major writers of historia:
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Herodotus
Thucydides
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Around 440BCE a group of thinkers
developed
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Sophists: They were people who used
rhetoric to answer questions of nature and
reality. They especially questioned ideas of
good and evil.
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What is evil?
How does one measure what is just?
 Rhetoric is the art of harnessing reason,
emotions and authority, through language,
with a view to persuade an audience and, by
persuading, to convince this audience to act,
to pass judgement or to identify with given
values
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Around this time drama / plays were
developed
Where funded by the state for annual
festivals (usually for Dionysus)
Writers submitted either tragedies or
comedies
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Famous playwright: Euripides, Sophocles
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Tragedies were often about heroes, legends
or wars
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Oedipus the King – written around 430BCE
by Sophocles
Was about a son who accidentally kills his
father and marries his mom. They all die in
the end.
 Philosophy develops around 600BCE
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Philosophy is the discipline concerned with
questions of how one should live (ethics);
what sorts of things exist (metaphysics); the
nature of knowledge (epistemology); and the
principles of reasoning (logic).
One of the most famous: Pythagoras (founded
geometry)
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The most famous philosophers were:
Socrates (c. 470 BC–399 BC),: used questioning
to challenge the thought process of an opponent
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Was blamed in part for the collapse of Athens in
404BCE and executed.
Plato (427 BC – 348 BC),: a student of Socrates. A
severe critic of Sophists ideas of defining good and
evil. Argued for practical structures of government
to foster good.
Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE): Student of Plato.
He argued for the creation of good within
individuals. He saw the polis as an organism that is
created between natural bonds between people
and the state.
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Medicine
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Under the quest for knowledge, Greeks developed a
systematic approach to healing. They recorded
cures as well as studied the physiology of the
human form
But their ideas were not always accurate
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They believed that one’s health was dependant on the
balance of the four humours.
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Blood
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Air
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Yellow Bile
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Black Bile
Democritus argued the presence of atoms
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But he argued the number is the only thing that
makes trees different from humans.