The very significant point here is that philosophy in Greek was used to make sense out of the world in a non-religious way. It dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, logic, biology, rhetoric and aesthetics.
Greek philosophy was influenced by western culture. Alfred North Whiteland explained the position like this: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. There was ceaseless lines of influence for ancient Greek to early Islmic philosophy.
Though the philosophy in ancient Greek ran mostly in a non-religious way, the former period was influenced by the literature of older wisdom and mythological cosmogonies of the ancient Near East. Of course, the force of religious ideas were reflected on the occasion of tragic murder of the new light thrower, the great philosopher Socrates. After Socrates, his student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle carried the materialistic ideas onwards , which is prominently known as the actual Greek philosophy with a concrete base of ideological foundation. During this long period, series of scientific developments came into being . That is why, the period prior to Socrates is termed as pre-Socratic period .The ideological contradiction has been very distinct in Greek.
Let us discuss the categorical nomenclature of the pre-Socratic era. Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Pernides, are some prominent personalities who arose with ideologies which , I think, was not of so much divinity that we observe in the case of ancient India. The periodical differences signify that the advancement of the period had an impact on the maturity of thinking , Xeno being more or less of the same level of thinking of his cotemporary Gautam Buddha in India. The parallel period signify the rising of the sense of the material out look in the two different countries. The reason of co-relaions might be the gradual growth of scientific knowledge , though it was of very primary shape and of meagre depth in terms of materialism at that stage. The race of Pythagoras was based on mathematics. The structure of any creature or the parts of its body had a definite mathematical proportion. So mathematical calculation was always at the root. But on coming over to India and having been close to the philosophical ideas enshrined in the Upanishads he developed his ideas from material world to the heavenly imaginative world of infinity. He based not on the size of any substance, but taking on the appearance or structure that extends from a point like position to the largest thinkable one, he did always assert that every where it was a mathematical outline in the existence of the material body. My submission is that the great mathematician tried to concentrate his ideas on the material body and then tried to extend it to the abstract world.
The Greek philosophers got classified in two camps, namely, dualism and monism. Among the pursuant of monism, Xenophanes, parmenades, Xeno, were prominent. They did not see the change in the things. They mostly believed things to retain properties same and unchanged. In the case of Xenophanes idea, God was the ultimate feature of every thing, Yet he enunciated an idea that God had no image or structure of his own. He was to be of structure of a cow in the eyes of a cow, of a figure with flat nose and black completion in the eyes of Abesinian , of a figure with red hair and blue eyes in the eyes of the Thresians. Down their period appeared Xeno, who championed Eleatic philosophy, proclaimed the theory of dialectics deducing the operation ‘thesis-anti thesis and synthesis`. It he did in his primary stage, but in later years he finally clang to the principle of changelessness. He was perhaps influenced by his contemporary thinker Heraclitus and so was fluctuating in asserting a firm ideology. Heraclitus was a dualist . But he was the stern initiator of the theory of transformability and transience. He formulated his doctrine to speak out that the things were not permanent , but all things were subject to change. He was the first to spell out that a particular quantity of water in a river could not be touched twice. We find in Democritus , coming about half a century later, that matter is formed of the smallest indivisible particle called atom. According to him , atoms move in their own way and coming close together and clashing with each other, they form some collection of mass. This way the earth was formed. So during the pre-Socratic period we are now able to realise how the idea of material world had developed and gradually the property of matters and their style of movement began to come to the knowledge of man. This is the Marxist way of thinking which was in vogue in nature irrespective of whether anyone could foretell or whether there was any creature or not in the being.
Socratic philosophical era
In the foregoing discussion , I have referred elementary ideas about the era beginning from Socrates. It was not without continuity. The idea pursued by Socrates was dragged and developed from Sophistry.When Greece was occupied by Iran, the followers of Pythagoras left Greece and established their centres in Itali. There were some, who in stead of residing permanently at one place, preferred touring and preaching ideology. They were termed as Sophist. Monism was their ideological theme. They were not the same ideologist as Islamic Suphists. The migratory livelihood did not permit them to lead normal life in the face of tortuous royal administration. But their thirst for knowledge did not stop blooming. After the period of Lord Buddha, Sophists pursued the method of rationalism. Socrates was influenced by the doctrine of Sophistry. He denied to accept any thing that was not explainable under the periphery of logical senses. Thus many of the phenomena having been in vogue ritually got affected by the continued arguments from Socrates to come to truth. He did not succumb to any idea that could not be established with rational meansof thinking. His sole aim was to acquire knowledge and spread what deemed true. This trend inflicted an idea among the orthodox people who misunderstood him to have been instigating the youths in the angle of atheism . They brought the charges of atheism and killed him by forceful consumption of poison.
From the study of the ideology pursued by Socrates, it is gathered that his mode of thinking was a development of Sophistry , though he had imprinted new ideas with the approach of realism . Thus he attempted to throw light along the path of non-belief in God. But it ccan not be said that he had gone out of the boundary of idealism . what truth is revealed is that there we find continuity of ideological thoughts in the progressive trend , a march from old views to new ones, from pre-Socratic cognition to a further development of ideas which outlines the doctrine of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The trend of meditation initiated by Socrates had a bearing on the ongoing development of ideas carried forward by Plat and Aristotle. Plato proceeded one step forward as a student of Socrates witnessing the fatal murder of his preceptor. He developed in him poignant hatred against the ruler who got Socrates arrested and threw him in public judgement. A sense of rebellious attitude developed in him. Though he came of a respectable family, but the class of generation he belonged to could not honourably withstand the rising business class. The oppressive character of the riler and the class of business held him impossible to lead usual flow of life. So he left the old fashion of life and adopted a different pattern of life involved in art and culture , literary activities and was bogged up in philosophical researches. His realisation in the philosophical field was that the philosophy did not emerge out of nothing. It had a footing on the base where people existed and pulled on. He was in unision with the opinion of Socrates that idea emerged from careful observation and study of the existing circumstances. At the same time he discovered the truth that the environment he lived in was in change and in motion. In his doctrine two entities existed side by side like mind and body. Mind excelled in thinking and the hand executed the thought. But according to him the real truth existed beyond the reach of human beings. The political doctrine pursued by Plato was derived from the republic, the laws, and the statesman. For this it would be suggested to look out for a philosopher king to maintain a rule of justice. He had an intention to bring ideology in the arena of politics for proper retention of the qualities of a republic. Ultimately he was occupied by the philosophy of dualism. Two entities together could make existence possible. Those are mind and hand, one was abstract and the other was concrete . Any of the two without the other would make the nature incomplete. The elongation of the dualism made the approach of matter and energy, i.e. idealism and materialism, though Plato did approach like this.
Following Plato, appeared the top Philosopher in the ancient western world. He did not discard the ideology of Plato , his teacher; at the same time he did not follow his idealism in to-to. When Plato spoke of idea and practice as the two entities of one truth, he considered idea as linkless with practice, i.e. the task of the hand. But the greatness of Aristotle was in the fact that he considered the strength of idea lay in making the direct world understandable in its true sense. According to him, the real sense confines in matter and the matter is preserved in the idea. He acquired vast knowledge over all the faculties like logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric, politics, poetry, botany and zoology. So he had the capacity to better analyse the natural courses and draw conclusion to the possible extent. Aristotle asserted that the depth of idealist world had a greater focus than the range of materialistic focus. He realised that arguments were the means to truth. Of course, he believed in God as ultimate truth.
From Socrates to Aristotle we may look into the developments in the truth-finding searches and expectedly derive that a trend has come to the fore to qualify what is abstract and what is concrete and also to proceed more from idealism to materialism so far the finding of truth is concerned.The foregoing discussion in phase-3 establishes the fact that the human society each of the philosophers lived in and worked about was the base on which the thinking habits had grown and which their provided the factors for or against their ways of life. While responding to the situation , they might need to use the contents of the environment or to modify it to suit their conditions.In whichever way they dealt with the ingredients of the society, it was natural for them to go intocharacteristics and gather knowledge of their properties. All of these activities formed an idea of thecourses of nature and led their intellect to proceed towards the impending results for further progress in the positive direction. Where knowledge failed to explain the occurrences, they placed God to fill in that vacancy in the answer. So God assumed the to be existing in the realm of uncertainty.