Journey

Choose a Journey

Anaximander

c. 610 BCE – c. 546 BCE

Thales asked what the world is made of. Anaximander answered: nothing you can name. The origin is the boundless.

2 chapters→

Anaximenes

c. 586 BCE – c. 526 BCE

Everything is air, thickening and thinning. The first attempt to explain change by a single measurable process.

2 chapters→

Pythagoras

c. 570 BCE – c. 495 BCE

Number is the language of the cosmos. He built a life around that belief.

2 chapters→

Heraclitus

c. 535 BCE – c. 475 BCE

Everything flows. The world is fire, and stillness is a lie we tell ourselves.

1 chapters→

Anaxagoras

c. 500 BCE – c. 428 BCE

Mind orders the cosmos. He brought philosophy to Athens and was exiled for saying the sun is a hot rock, not a god.

2 chapters→

Zeno of Elea

c. 495 BCE – c. 430 BCE

Achilles can never catch the tortoise. Motion is impossible. He invented the paradox as a philosophical weapon.

1 chapters→

Empedocles

c. 494 BCE – c. 434 BCE

Four roots: earth, water, air, fire. Two forces: love draws together, strife tears apart. He jumped into a volcano to prove he was a god.

3 chapters→

Protagoras

c. 490 BCE – c. 420 BCE

Man is the measure of all things. The first and greatest of the Sophists turned philosophy toward human judgment.

2 chapters→

Gorgias

c. 483 BCE – c. 375 BCE

The sophist who argued that nothing exists, and that if it did, no one could know it, and if they could, no one could say it.

2 chapters→

Socrates

c. 470 BCE – 399 BCE

He wrote nothing, but changed everything. Philosophy became a conversation.

5 chapters→

Plato

c. 428 BCE – c. 348 BCE

He saw a world behind the world. The Forms are real; what we see are shadows.

7 chapters→

Diogenes

c. 412 BCE – c. 323 BCE

He lived in a jar, mocked convention, and carried a lantern looking for an honest man.

2 chapters→

Aristotle

384 BCE – 322 BCE

He classified the world. Logic, biology, ethics, politics; he gave each its language.

5 chapters→

Theophrastus

c. 371 BCE – c. 287 BCE

Aristotle's chosen successor, who turned the master's curiosity on plants, weather, stones, and the small comedies of human character.

2 chapters→

Epicurus

341 BCE – 270 BCE

Pleasure is the absence of pain. The good life is quiet, shared, and free from fear.

3 chapters→

Zeno of Citium

c. 334 BCE – c. 262 BCE

He lost everything in a shipwreck and found philosophy. Then he built Stoicism.

2 chapters→