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Essay on Western Civilization
Greeks and Development of Western Intellectual Tradition Something unusual happened in Greece and the Greek colonies of the Aegean Sea some 2,500 years ago. Whereas the previous great cultures of the Mediterranean had used mythological stories of the gods to explain the operations of the world and of the self, some of the Greeks began to discover new ways of explaining things. Instead of reading their ideas into, or out of, ancient scriptures or poems, they began to use reason, contemplation, and sensory observation to make sense of reality.
The story as we know it began with the Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). Colonists such as Thales tried to find the one common element in the diversity of nature. Subsequent thinkers such as Anaximenes sought not only to find this one common element, but also to find the process by which one form changes into another. Other thinkers, such as Pythagoras, turned to the nature of form itself rather than the basic stuff that takes on a particular form. With Socrates the pursuit of knowledge turned inward as he sought not to understand the world, but himself. His call to "know thyself," together with his uncompromising search for truth, inspired generations of thinkers. With the writings of Plato and Aristotle Ancient Greek thought reached its zenith.
These giants of human thought developed all-embracing systems that explained both the nature of the universe and the humans who inhabit it (Lopez, 1967).These lovers of wisdom, or philosophers, came to very different conclusions and often spoke disrespectfully of one another. Some held the universe to be one, while others insisted that it must be many. Some believed that human knowledge was capable of understanding virtually everything about the world and the self, while others thought that it was not possible to have any knowledge at all.......
