Pre-Socratic philosophy

I am developing this article. —Keisuke Noda 04:25, 6 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Western philosophy began with philosophers in ancient Greece. Those philosophers who opened the paths of philosophy before Socrates are in group called Pre-Socratics or Pre-Socratics philosophers. Some philosophers were contemporary to or after Socrates, but they are also included in the group, since they kept the same line of thought. Those thinkers tried to find the principle that can uniformly and consistently explain all phenomena in nature and events in human life without appealing to mythology. Their style of though is often called natural philosophy, but their concept of nature is much broader than ours. It encompasses ethical, spiritual, mythical, and cosmological elements as well as physical ones. Within their thoughts, we can also find insights into the questions of metaphysics.

Works by twentieth century philosophers such as Heidegger and Werner Jaeger contributed to re-discover the significance of those ancient thinkers and the originality of their thoughts.

Studies of ancient thinkers are restricted by lack of primary sources. Their writings were lost and fragments of their thoughts, words, and ideas have been preserved in the works of other authors such as Aristotle, Herodotus, and others.

Those fragments have been gathered and indexed by H. Diels and W. Kranz in their Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. This is a current standard source for Pre-Socratics. The name "Pre-Socratics" came to be widely used among philosophical scholarships by this work.