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This concise, lively introduction to ancient Greek philosophy will help beginning students of both classical studies and philosophy get their bearings within an important yet complex array of names, schools, and ideas. The book illuminates the key period from the sixth to the third century BC, looking at the ideas that engaged the Greeks, in particular those of the Presocratics, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the earliest Hellenistic philosophers. After chronologically mapping the main figures and their interconnections, "Introducing Greek Philosophy" focuses on themes especially relevant to philosophy today, including the origins of the universe and its mathematical structures; divine creation versus evolution and natural law; probability theory and the criteria for truth; political debates on democracy, citizen rights, and state obligations; and finally ethics, happiness, and the best way to live.
About the author
M. R. Wright, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Wales, Lampeter, is the author of Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, Cosmology in Antiquity, Cicero: On Stoic Good and Evil, and The Presocratics: The Main Fragments in Greek, and the editor of Reason and Necessity: Essays on Plato's Timaeus.
