180024 VO-L History of Philosophy I (Antiquity) (2024W)

The aim of these lectures is to review the history of Ancient Philosophy from its beginning with the so-called Presocratics and until the time of Plotinus, but we will do so be will do so focusing on ancient cosmology and ontology. Ancient philosophy begins with theorising about the world (kosmos). These theories address questions such as how the world has come about, which are the principles accounting for the world, and of what entities the world consists. These questions were for the first time systematically treated by Plato in his dialogue Timaios. In this dialogue we are presented with the view that the world has been created by God, an intellect, who is portrayed as craftsman and maker of the universe. Aristotle disputes that view and he argues instead that nature alone is responsible for the orderly, logical nature and preservation of the world. The Hellenistic philosophers, the Stoics and the the Epicureans, reject the cosmologies of Plato and Aristotle and are inspired mainly by the corresponding views of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Democritus. Cosmology becomes particularly prominent in later ancient philosophy, because for the philosophers of that time, Platonists, Peripatetics, and early Christian philosophers, the topic of the origin and structure of the world bears much on the question of the nature of God and of human beings as well as on the relation between humans and God. The ancient cosmological theories are closely connected with ontological positions, i.e. positions about the different ways or kinds of being. Therefore we will also deal with the main ancient ontological theories to the extent that they are inseparable from the cosmological theories.