SHORT HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Human beings have lived on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. We, of course,
cannot know all the experiences and thoughts of the earliest people. Still, it is possible to suppose that
people then, as now, were driven by the desire to explain the world. Perhaps, our earliest ancestors
thought about how the world was formed, whether they were unique among the animals, and whether
there was a world beyond the earthly one surrounding them. They may have also wondered whether
there was a uniform standard of moral behavior or social order that applied to to the various tribes they
encountered. Whatever they may have thought about these subjects, their opinions are now
irretrievably lost through time. It is only through the introduction of writing that we know the precise
speculation of any of our ancestors. When we look at the earliest writings of around the globe, we find
that various regions had their had their own speculative traditions.

The story of Western philosophy begins in a series of Greek islands and colonies during the 6 th
century BCE. That is before the Common Era. Some original thinkers were driven by specific puzzles,
most notably “what are things really like?” and “how can we explain the process of change in things.”
The solutions they gave to these puzzles were shortly thereafter dubbed philosophy.- the love of
wisdom. What underlies these speculations were the gradual recognition that things were not exactly
what they seem to be. Appearance often differs from reality. There are brute facts of birth, death,
growth and decay. These facts raised sweeping questions on how things and people come into
existence, can be different at different times. Many of the answers given to these questions by the
earliest philosophers are not as important as the fact that they focused upon these specific questions.
They approached these problems with a fresh and new point of view that was in stark contrast to the
more mythical approach taken by the great poets of the time.

The birthplace of Greek philosophy was the seaport town of Miletus. Because of their location,
the first philosophers were called Milesians. By the time the Milesian philosophers began their
systematic , roughly around 585 BCE, Miletus had been a crossroad for commerce and cosmopolitan
ideas. The wealth of the city allowed for leisure time, without which the life of art and philosophy could
not develop. Further, the broad-mindedness and inquisitiveness of its people created a congenial
atmosphere for philosophical intellectual activity.

Notable Pre-Socratic Philosophers:

1. Homer
2. Hesiod
3. Thales of Miletus
4. Anaximander
5. Anaximenes
6. Pythagoras