Raphael The School of Athens 1504 (detail)
Plato, like his teacher Socrates, was interested in theories about humans. He worked on topics of human knowledge, ethics, and politics.
Aristotle, Plato's student, also worked on these topics, but he also was concerned with how the natural world worked and is known as the father of western logic and empirical science (biology. physics).
A. Plato (c. 425 - 348 BCE)
B. Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE)
C. Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 CE) Neoplatonist Christian Theologian / Philosopher
1. God is incorporeal spirit, not material, as Manichaeists and Stoics had argued.
2. God is the source of all being, not just half of it (non-Manichaeist dualism).
God created the material world; it is not evil. But it has temptations
that entice men to ignore what is above.
3. God is the Good, restless souls want to go to God (teleological). The soul is rational
as is the drive to know God. Unlike post-Humean and post-Freudian views wherein
considerable attention is focused upon the role of the non-rational influences
that govern our thought, Augustine takes over the ancient Greek confidence
in the superiority of the rational over the non-rational.
The Great Chain of Being
The great chain of being (Latin: scala naturae, "ladder of being") is a strict hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought in medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain starts with God and progresses downward to angels, demons (fallen/renegade angels), stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, wild animals, domesticated animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, precious metals and other minerals.
The great chain of being is derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia animalium), Plotinus and Proclus. Further developed during the Middle Ages. It reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism. It would influence Swedish botanist Carl Linneus in defining the modern idea of binomial nomenclature (taxonomy) in 1735: A system of nature of the three kingdoms of nature (animals, plants, minerals), according to classes, orders, genera and species, with characters, differences, synonyms, places.
D. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274) Aristotelian Scholastic Theologian / Philosopher
E. Renaissance Humanism - 15th century
F. Non-Platonic and Non-Aristotelian Schools of Ancient Philosophy - Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics
1: Zeno of Citium 2: Epicurus 3: unknown 4: Boethius or Anaximander? 5: Averroes 6: Pythagoras 7: Alcibiades or Alexander the Great? 8: Antisthenes or Xenophon? 9: unknown or Fornarina as a personification of Love (Francesco Maria della Rovere?) 10: Aeschines 11: Parmenides or Nicomachus? 12: Socrates 13: Heraclitus (Michelangelo?) 14: Plato (Leonardo da Vinci?) 15: Aristotle] (Giuliano da Sangallo?) 16: Diogenes of Sinope 17: Plotinus? 18: Euclid or Archimedes (Bramante?) 19: Strabo or Zoroaster? (Baldassare Castiglione?) 20: Ptolemy R: Apelles (Raphael) 21: Protogenes (Il Sodoma or Timoteo Viti)
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