The history of Philosophy in the west begins with the Greeks, and particularly with a group of philosophers commonly called the pre-Socratics. This is not to say that there were not other pre-philosophical rumblings in Egyptian, Semitic, and Babylonian cultures. Certainly there were great thinkers and writers in each of these cultures, and there is evidence that some of the earliest Greek philosophers may have had contact with at least some of the products of Egyptian and Babylonian thought. However, the early Greek thinkers add at least one element which differentiates their thought from all those who came before them. For the first time in history, we discover in their writings something more than dogmatic assertions about the way the world is ordered -- we find reasoned arguments for various beliefs about the world.
As it turns out nearly all of the various cosmologies proposed by the early Greek philosophers are profoundly and demonstrably false, but this does not diminish their importance. For, even if later philosophers summarily rejected the answers they provided, they could not escape their questions.
And just as important as the questions they asked was the method they followed in forming and transmitting their answers. The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomenon they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. In other words they depended on reason and observation to illuminate the true nature of the would around them, and they used rational argument to advance their views to others. And though there has been a great deal of argument about the relative weights that reason and observation should have, philosophers for two and a half centuries are basically united in the use of the very method first used by the pre-Socratics.
Pre-Socratic philosophers are often very hard to pin down, and it is sometimes very difficult to determine the actual line of argument they used in supporting their particular views. This problem arises not from some defect in the men themselves or in their ideas, but is simply the result of their separation from us in history. While most of these men produced significant texts, we have no complete versions of any of those texts. All we have is quotations by later philosophers, historians, and the occasional textual fragment.
Thales is the first know greek philosopher, he lived around 600 BC. His contact with non-greek cultures led him to question the traditional explanations provided by greek mythology for the world around him. After all, didn't the egyptians have their own contradictory set of explanations, provided by their own mythological system? However, he was not content with a purely skeptical outlook, and so he attempted to form a cosmological system of his own -- a system not based on tradition, but upon reason. He argued that the universe is eternal, an that all of the various things around us come from watter. After all he could see that watter turned into both a ice (a solid) and steam (a gas), could it not by extention become other kinds of solid, and even air.
Xenophanies?, Parmenides, and the other Eleatic? philosophers
Leucippus and Democritus
Protagoras and the Sophists?
Zeno? (Zeno of Citium or Zeno of Elea?), Epictetus?
The Neo-Platonists: Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus?, Porphyry?, Proclus, Iamblichus?)
Eclecticism?
Stoicism?
The spread of Christianity through the Roman world ushers in the end of the Helinistic philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of [Mediaeval Philosophy]?.
In the east, and particularly in China, less emphasis was laid upon materialism as a basis for reflecting upon the world and more on conduct, manners and social behaviour as is evidence in Taoism and Confucianism.
Chinese philosophy -- Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism?
[Indian philosophy]?
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