Greek, Romans, Hellenistic worlds.. pfffffew!

Ancient philosophy after Aristotle.. As exciting as it sounds. I was starting to get my hopes up because the book has actually been quite interesting so far and I’ve definetely opened my eyes and my mind for a different kind of thinking and analysing (philosophical maybe..?). But this chapter killed my interest – totally. It started off alright, describing how the Greek speaking world was divided into three different periods; the free city states (freedom and disorder), the Maledonian domination (subjection and disorder) and finally the Roman Empire (subjection and order). It also gave a brief summary of the Hellenistic age and gave examples of how the Greeks changed during the ages as they came to learn about new cultures and superstitious ideas – with other words, they developed their own theories and religion towards a new modern version.

Even though the book mostly talks about one or two dominant philosophers from a certain point in time, I do think there must have been more ideas out and about that never got as much attention as for example Plato and Aristotle’s ideas did. Maybe even more interesting and developed ideas were circulating in the ancient Greek, ideas that might have changed something else or developed a new perspective on life etc., but maybe due to the extreme publicity that previous mentioned philosophers had during and especially after their lifetime, we lost out on bits that could have changed for example society and the government to the better because someone else was in the lime light at that point. Who knows? Who will ever know..?

With the Roman Empire we can see roles and positions that can still be found in present governments etc, and it definitely shows that both the Greek and the Roman age are to be considered as very important mile stones for Western societies philosophy, politics and development as a whole. I do think that even without these two groups we would have a government in today’s society, somewhat similar to what we have, but not as well developed as it is said to be ( -if we can call today’s government well developed... This is definitely a later question which is very debatable...)

Ah well, got a bit side tracked from the book – but if I wouldn’t have read the book the thoughts and ideas mentioned here would probably not ever occur to me... And since I found the part (no 3, book 1) not very exciting, I’d rather bore you all people with something I do find exciting instead of something I don’t even care about... Anyway... Long story short – there is still much to read in my book – better get going again.

Cheerios

Mads