Works

Socrates sits in prison, awaiting execution. His old friend Crito arrives before dawn to urge him to escape. Socrates refuses, arguing that one must never do wrong, even in return for wrong done to oneself.

A dialogue on the nature of love, told through a series of speeches at a drinking party. Socrates recounts the teachings of Diotima on the ascent from physical beauty to the Form of Beauty itself.

The dialogue set on the day of Socrates' execution. Contains arguments for the immortality of the soul and the theory of recollection.

Aristotle's most important work on ethics. Argues that happiness (eudaimonia) is the highest good, achievable through a life of virtue and the cultivation of practical wisdom.

A systematic study of the state, citizenship, and constitutions. Famous for declaring that humans are by nature political animals.

A collection of treatises on first philosophy: the study of being as being, substance, causation, and the unmoved mover.

The earliest surviving work of dramatic theory. Defines tragedy, introduces catharsis, and argues that poetry is more philosophical than history.

Thales wrote nothing that survives. What we know comes from later authors (Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and others) who preserved fragments of his thought on water, the soul, and the divine.

Thales is said to have predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BCE and to have measured the height of the pyramids by their shadows. These accounts, preserved by Herodotus and others, made him the first figure where science meets philosophy.

A collection of moral precepts attributed to Pythagoras, though likely composed by later followers. The verses outline a daily practice of self-examination, moderation, and reverence for the cosmic order.

Pythagoras founded a religious community as much as a school. Later sources (Iamblichus, Porphyry, Diogenes Laertius) preserved his teachings on number, music, the transmigration of souls, and the rules of the Pythagorean way of life.

Democritus wrote prolifically (over 70 works by some accounts) but only fragments survive. They reveal a thinker concerned equally with physics and ethics, atoms and cheerfulness.

Democritus was as much a moralist as a physicist. His ethical fragments praise cheerfulness, moderation, and the inner life of the soul over wealth and reputation.

Diogenes wrote nothing that survives. His philosophy lives in stories, told by Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, and others, of radical freedom, public provocation, and devastating wit.

Diogenes reportedly wrote a Republic that made Plato's look tame. It abolished currency, borders, and social convention. Only fragments and descriptions survive through later authors.

Forty short maxims summarizing core Epicurean teachings on pleasure, justice, friendship, and the gods.

Zeno's original writings are lost. His teachings survive through students and commentators (Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Seneca) who preserved the foundations of Stoic philosophy.

Zeno's Republic, written before he fully developed Stoicism, imagined a city governed by the wise, where all citizens live by reason alone. Only fragments survive, but they shaped centuries of political thought.

Pyrrho wrote nothing. His student Timon of Phlius and later Sextus Empiricus preserved his radical teaching: that we should suspend judgment about all things, and in that suspension find peace.

Stories about Pyrrho told by Diogenes Laertius. They paint a man who lived his philosophy: indifferent to danger, unmoved by circumstance, serene in the face of everything.

Heraclitus saw the soul as made of fire, the noblest element. A dry, fiery soul is wise; a wet soul is foolish or drunk. These fragments, distinct from his cosmic writings, concern self-knowledge and the depth of inner life.

Two poems, surviving only in fragments. On Nature describes the four roots and the cosmic cycle of Love and Strife. Purifications deals with the transmigration of souls and ritual purity.

Fragments from a single work, probably called On Nature. Anaxagoras proposed that Mind (Nous) is the ordering principle of the cosmos, separate from matter and infinite in power.

Almost nothing survives directly. The two most famous sentences in the history of philosophy are attributed to him, preserved by Plato and Sextus Empiricus.

Zeno's paradoxes survive through Aristotle's reports. They argue that motion, plurality, and space lead to contradiction if you accept the common-sense view of the world.

The lost prose treatise, possibly the first in the Greek tradition, in which Anaximander set out the boundless as the origin of all things and described a cosmos governed by necessity. Only a single sentence survives, quoted by later writers.

Anaximenes' account of how air, by condensing and thinning, becomes wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. Surviving only in fragments and later reports, it is the first attempt to explain qualitative change through a single measurable process.

Gorgias's notorious treatise, surviving only in summary, that runs a chain of arguments to three impossible conclusions: nothing exists; if anything did, it could not be known; and if known, it could not be communicated. Part logic, part provocation, it pushes the limits of reason and language to their breaking point.

Thirty short sketches of human types — the flatterer, the chatterbox, the penny-pincher, the man of petty ambition — each drawn in a few precise, witty strokes. The first work of character writing, it shaped comedy and the essay for two thousand years.