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Pre-Socratic philosophy, also known as Early Greek Philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates.Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of these early philosophers spanned the workings of the natural world as well as human society, ethics, and religion.
The ancient Greek concept of four basic elements, these being earth (γῆ gê), water (ὕδωρ hýdōr), air (ἀήρ aḗr), and fire (πῦρ pŷr), dates from pre-Socratic times and persisted throughout the Middle Ages and into the Early modern period, deeply influencing European thought and culture.
Page one of Aristotle's On the Heavens, from an edition published in 1837. On the Heavens (Greek: Περὶ οὐρανοῦ; Latin: De Caelo or De Caelo et Mundo) is Aristotle's chief cosmological treatise: written in 350 BC, [citation needed] it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world.
Air as the arche is a limitless concept, which resembled Anaximander's theory that the arche was the abstract infinite that he called apeiron (Ancient Greek: ἄπειρον, lit. 'unlimited, 'boundless'). At the same time, air as the arche was a defined substance, which resembled the theory of Thales that the arche was water. [35]
The Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and the Stoics are credited with distinguishing between man-made laws and a natural law of universal validity, [20] but Gerhard Kittel states that the Stoic philosophers were not able to combine the concepts of νόμος (law) and φύσις (nature) to produce the concept of "natural law" in the ...
Going further, the philosophical concept of nature or natures as a special type of causation - for example that the way particular humans are is partly caused by something called "human nature" is an essential step towards Aristotle's teaching concerning causation, which became standard in all Western philosophy until the arrival of modern science.
As one of the most prolific natural philosophers of Antiquity, Aristotle wrote and lecture on many topics of scientific interest, including biology, meteorology, psychology, logic, and physics. He developed a comprehensive physical theory that was a variation of the classical theory of the elements (earth, water, fire, air, and aether). In his ...
[44] [45] According to Aristotle, Heraclitus was a dialetheist, or one who denies the law of noncontradiction (a law of thought or logical principle which states that something cannot be true and false at the same time). [46] [47] [ae] Also according to Aristotle, Heraclitus was a materialist. [48]