Greek philosophy

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches Greek philosophy through the Socratic initiative, which he regards as a revolution whose effects are not yet exhausted1. Unlike the Presocratics, "physicists" turned towards the heavens, Socrates moves from true and false to good and evil. He replaces "what is?" with "what do you call?", a question addressed to someone, which founds dialogue and an embryo of democracy; philosophy appears here as the daughter of crisis. With Plato and Euclid, he makes geometry a propaedeutic to the intelligible and non-contradiction the form of truth against opinion2. He reads the Republic through the preface to Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, against Popper, and draws on the Seventh Letter and the Gorgias3. In Aristotle, he sees the science of being qua being in Book Gamma as a "philosophical imperialism" in which the Socratic message is already tending to be lost4. He also explains the absence of a Greek physics by slavery, and links the Stoic and Epicurean schools to the passage from the city to the empire.

1. 1From Plato to world revolution14 Jul 2022
2. 2T for Triangle3 Jan 2015
3. 3Michel Clouscard, the paths of praxis (1/2)8 Dec 2015
4. 4#9.16 How can sciences of history be real?4 Mar 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 8 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.