History of Ancient Philosophy

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the special sciences, the single ijiioo-oijiiai, and these then continued to develop on more or less independent lines. Concerning the history and meaning of the name of philosophy, see especially B. Haym, in Ersch aud Gruber-s Ency- klopadie, III. division, vol. 24; Ueberweg, Grundriss, I. 1; Windelband,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the special sciences, the single ijiioo-oijiiai, and these then continued to develop on more or less independent lines. Concerning the history and meaning of the name of philosophy, see especially B. Haym, in Ersch aud Gruber-s Ency- klopadie, III. division, vol. 24; Ueberweg, Grundriss, I. 1; Windelband, Jlraeludien, p. 1 ff. The word became a technical term in the Socratic school. It meant there exactly what science means in German. In later time, after the division into the special sciences, the word philosophy had the sense of ethico-religious practical wisdom. See 2. The beginnings of scientific life that are thus found in ancient philosophy are most influential upon the entire development that follows. With proportionately few data, Greek-philosophy produced, with a kind of grand simplicity, conceptual forms for the intellectual elaboration of its facts, and with a remorseless logic it developed every essential point of view for the study of the universe. Therein consists the peculiar character of ancient thought and the high didactic significance of its history. Our present language and our conception of the world are thoroughly permeated by the results of ancient science. The naive ruggedness with which ancient philosophers followed out single motives of reflection to their most one-sided logical conclusions, brings into clearest relief that practical and psychological necessity which governs not only the evolution of the problems of philosophy, but also the repeated historical tendencies toward the solution of these problems. We may likewise ascribe a typical significance to the universal stages of development of ancient philosophy, in view of the fact that philosophy at first turned with undaunted courage to the study of the outer world; thwarted there, it ...