pre-socratic

The Pre-Socratic thinkers lived from about 650 to about 450 B.C.E. in the towns along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and many of the Greek islands, throughout Thrace and Pelopenesos on the Greek mainland, and in the Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy. Their world included the heroes of Homer and the hard virtues of the archaic life of farming, warfare, and trade, as well the arts and music of the Greek peoples. A precious group of fragmented passages from the first thinkers in what became the Western tradition of philosophy and science have survived as an inspired and marvelously varied set of views on human life and ethics, on nature, on the gods, and on the question of what reality itself is. Their…