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Tradition

Early Greek Philosophy

The Greek thinkers before Socrates, who first asked what single source and order underlie the many things of the world.

Also called Presocratic philosophy, the Presocratics

Introduction

Early Greek philosophy is the name for the thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, in the Greek cities of Ionia, southern Italy and Sicily, who sought to explain the world by reason rather than by myth. They are often called the Presocratics, though some were Socrates’ contemporaries.

The first of them, at Miletus, asked what the single source (archē) of all things might be: water, for Thales; the boundless, for Anaximander; air, for Anaximenes. Pythagoras and his followers found the order of the world in number, and taught the immortality and rebirth of the soul. Xenophanes criticized the gods of Homer for being made in human likeness. Heraclitus taught a hidden unity of opposites governed by the logos, and Parmenides argued that being is one, whole and unchanging. Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the atomists then tried, in different ways, to explain change and plurality without denying Parmenides’ argument.

Their writings survive only in fragments quoted by later authors, and in reports of their views. Yet the questions they raised, about the one and the many, being and becoming, reason and the senses, and the order of the cosmos, set the agenda for all later Greek philosophy, and they remain among the earliest Western statements of the unity of things.

History

Historical

Thales of Miletus, traditionally the first philosopher, is said to have predicted an eclipse of the sun in 585 BCE. The Milesians were followed by Pythagoras, who emigrated from Samos to Croton in southern Italy, and by Xenophanes, a wandering poet. Around 500 BCE Heraclitus wrote at Ephesus, and in the early fifth century Parmenides composed his poem at Elea, in southern Italy, where his pupil Zeno devised his paradoxes of motion. The pluralists and atomists worked in the later fifth century.

Plato engaged with these thinkers throughout his dialogues, above all in the Parmenides and the Sophist, and Aristotle surveyed their views in the first book of his Metaphysics. Much of what survives was preserved by later writers: Plato and Aristotle; the Stoics, who took up Heraclitus’ fire and logos; Christian authors such as Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus; and the sixth-century commentator Simplicius, who copied long passages of Parmenides.

In 1903 Hermann Diels published Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, later revised by Walther Kranz, whose numbering of the fragments is still standard. Nietzsche and Heidegger returned to the early Greeks as thinkers of being before metaphysics, and comparative philosophers have set them beside the Upaniṣads, which are roughly contemporary.

  1. 585 BCEThales, by tradition, predicts an eclipse
  2. 6th c. BCEPythagoras founds his community at Croton
  3. c. 500 BCEHeraclitus writes at Ephesus
  4. early 5th c. BCEParmenides’ poem; Zeno’s paradoxes
  5. 1903Diels’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

  • Unity, with Advaita Vedānta

    Scholarship

    Parmenides’ argument that being is one, whole and unchanging, and that plurality and change belong to opinion, has often been compared with the Advaita teaching that Brahman alone is real.

Areas of divergence

  • Being, with Buddhism

    Scholarship

    Parmenides holds that only unchanging being truly is; Buddhism holds that all conditioned things are impermanent processes without fixed being. Heraclitus, with his world in flux, stands nearer the Buddhist view.

Cite this entry
Chicago (bibliography)

“Early Greek Philosophy.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/early-greek-philosophy.

Chicago (note)

“Early Greek Philosophy,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/early-greek-philosophy.

MLA

“Early Greek Philosophy.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/early-greek-philosophy.

BibTeX
@misc{traditions-early-greek-philosophy,
  title = {{Early Greek Philosophy}},
  howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society},
  note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/early-greek-philosophy}
}

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