Tradition

Greek Philosophy

6th to 4th century BC

The classical Athenian achievement: that the good life and the good city are subjects for argument rather than for revelation or custom, and that both can be reasoned about.

Greek philosophy is where the West begins asking political questions in a form it still recognizes, and the decisive move was to treat the arrangement of a city as something that can be argued about at all.

Before Socrates, the answer to why a people lived as it did was custom, or the gods. The sophists broke that by teaching that laws are conventions, made by people and therefore changeable, and by charging fees to prove it. Socrates turned the same corrosive questioning on the sophists in turn, and was executed by a democracy for it, which planted the tradition's oldest suspicion: that a city and a philosopher may not be able to tolerate each other.

Plato's answer was to subordinate the city to knowledge. If there is a truth about justice, then ruling is an expertise, and the qualified should hold power whether or not anyone votes for them. Aristotle's answer was to subordinate theory to practice: collect the constitutions, ask what actually lasts, and settle for the best a given people can sustain. Almost every later dispute about expertise and consent runs along the line between those two.

Around them the historians were doing something different and equally durable. Thucydides described power without moralizing about it and gave realism its founding text; Xenophon and later Polybius asked what makes regimes stable and what makes them decay.

The schools that followed each took one thread and pulled: the Stoics the universal law, the Epicureans the contract of mutual advantage, the Skeptics the suspension of judgment. This entry holds the Athenian core they came out of.

Lineage

Gave rise to

Aristotelianism4th century BC, revived repeatedly
Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato's Academy and defined his own position against it, keeping the conviction that the good life is a subject for argument and rejecting the claim that it is known by a separate expertise.
Epicureanism4th century BC to 2nd century AD, revived 17th century
The atomism is Democritus and the ethical question is the Socratic one, answered by removing rather than by perfecting the desires.
Moral PhilosophyAncient to present
Socrates, Seneca and Epictetus set the question — what does a good life require of a person — that the tradition has been answering ever since.
PlatonismAncient to present
Plato's theory of Forms, reworked through Middle Platonism and Plotinus, is the strand of ancient thought that outlived its own school.
Political IdealismAncient to present
The Republic is the founding text of idealist political theory — the claim that a regime should be measured against a rational account of the good rather than against practice.
Political PhilosophyAncient to present
The questions are Socratic and the method is the dialogue: what justice is, who should rule, and why anyone should obey.
Political RealismRenaissance to present
Thucydides' Melian Dialogue is the founding text of the realist account of power, and every later realist has read it as such.
Political RhetoricClassical to present
Aristotle's Rhetoric is the founding text, written to answer Plato's charge in the Gorgias that persuasion is mere flattery.
Renaissance Humanism14th-16th century
The humanists defined themselves by recovering and reading Cicero directly, against a scholastic curriculum that had received him through commentary.
SkepticismAncient to present
Pyrrho founded the practice and Sextus Empiricus recorded it: a branch of the ancient schools rather than a modern invention.
Stoicism3rd century BC to 3rd century AD
Zeno came to Stoicism through the Cynics and the Socratic schools, and the founding claim that virtue is the only good is Socrates pressed to its limit.
Dialectical Philosophy19th century to present
Hegel took the term and the method from Plato's dialogues and said so, treating the Socratic elenchus as dialectic in an undeveloped form.
Rationalism17th-18th century
The rationalist conviction that reality is intelligible to mathematics before it is intelligible to the senses is Platonic in origin and was understood as such.

Thinkers5

Thinker

Socrates

470–399 BCE

Socrates was the founding figure of Western philosophy, whose relentless questioning of Athenian politicians and poets — and his acceptance of an unjust death sentence — made him philosophy's first martyr

Thinker

Aristotle

384–322 BCE

Aristotle was the ancient Greek founder of political science, grounding politics in the conviction that humans are by nature political animals who flourish only in community

Thinker

Plato

428–348 BCE

Plato was the Athenian philosopher who concluded that democracy hands power to those without the wisdom to use it, arguing in the Republic for rule by philosopher-kings and founding political philosophy as a discipline

Thinker

Xenophon

430–354 BCE

Soldier and student of Socrates who wrote the first mirror for princes, and whose portrait of Cyrus taught Europe how to think about the education of a ruler.

Thinker

Thucydides

460–400 BCE

The Athenian general whose history of the Peloponnesian War founded the realist account of politics: that states act on interest and fear, and that justice enters only between equals.

Related through shared thinkers6

Archetype

Greek Philosophy

Gave rise to

Socrates

Aristotle

Plato

Xenophon

Thucydides

Religious Conservative

Reactionary Strongman

Compassionate Libertarian

Independent Localist

National Conservative

Techno-Authoritarian