Introduction by author

[Note: this is similar to what is available on the Kindle Look-in Page. The latter includes full particulars, the Table of Contents and part of the first chapter.]

Students of Philosophy, especially of its history, have always felt the need for a concise compendium, providing a key to the confusing number of systems that were constructed throughout the centuries. This volume, therefore, is meant to provide such a key to ancient Greek thought. If it wishes to acquit itself of such a task, it must, unavoidably, restrict itself to the very essentials of Greek philosophy. But once students have grasped these essentials, it will not be difficult for them to fill in the flesh to this skeleton by consulting the texts of Greek thinkers, as far as these fragments exist, or works that deal in greater detail with the history of ancient Greek thought.

In working out the essentials of Greek philosophy, this compendium has restricted itself to the brief discussion in historical order of certain fundamental problems. For once a certain central problem, with which a certain thinker is concerned, how it arose and by what method it is “solved,” is understood, the respective philosopher’s whole system is understood. For instance, if the nature of the problem of universals is clearly understood in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophy and their respective method of dealing with it is clearly realized, then their respective cosmology, ontology, anthropology, logic, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of state ought to be understood as well. What matters, therefore, is to grasp the fundamental approach of a thinker and to place this approach within the framework of the whole.

The attempt is thus made in this concise account of Greek thought to present its unity and differentiation at the same time. In order to show its continuity from mythological thought, the principal features of the latter are presented first and then, linking up with these, the characteristic features that recur in each philosophical system, but at the same time the novel features and the growing complexity of Greek thought are emphasized at the discussion of salient problems, as they develop from a certain system and lead to the construction of another, under changed circumstances.

In this way, it is hoped that the continuity of Greek thought (or its basic unity) is realized, and yet the peculiar character of each system is sufficiently appreciated.

Last, but not least, the student should obtain some impression of philosophy as an open science. Its history in particular ought to have made it clear that man’s chief-business in life is the enquiry into truth. At the same time it should have become evident, that man cannot attain to the truth and that the various philosophical systems are only aspects of it. It follows that the question about truth will have to be asked again and again, as life’s circumstances change, and that it is in connection with this permanent question that man, in collaboration with his fellow-man, keeps building and rebuilding his cultural systems.

Gerhard A. Rauche                                          Fort Hare, July, 1966