Pre-Socratic philosophy

The group of early Greek philosophers commonly called the pre-Socratics include:

This article is a part of the
History of Philosophy series.

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Thales
Anaximander
Pythagoras
Empedocles
Heraclitus
Parmenides, Xenophanes, and the other Eleatic philosophers
Leucippus and Democritus (the atomists)
Protagoras and the Sophists.

Pre-Socratic philosophers are often very hard to pin down, and it is sometimes very difficult to determine the actual line of argument they used in supporting their particular views. While most of these thinkers produced significant texts, we have no complete versions of any of those texts. All we have is quotations by later philosophers, historians, and the occasional textual fragment.

The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. They asked:

Where does everything come from?
What is it really made out of?
How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
Why are we able to describe them with a singular mathematics?

Nearly all of the various cosmologies proposed by the early Greek philosophers are demonstrably false. Later philosophers rejected the answers they provided, but continued to place importance on their questions.

This article is part of The Presocratic Philosophers series