Anaximenes of Miletus
(fl. c.546 bc)The junior member of the Miletian school, and probably a pupil of Anaximander. His astronomy was relatively unsophisticated, but he is remembered for the doctrine that one primary ...
archive
A historical document. The plural form is also applied to the place where such documents are housed, e.g. a county record office.
atomism
A philosophical doctrine at least as old as Democritus, and plausibly viewed as an attempt to combine an a priori conviction of the unchangeable and immutable nature of the world with the variety and ...
change
The central problems for a philosophy of change are the relationship of change to time, and the relationship of both of them to us. Although change is a fundamental element of the perceived world, a ...
Cleanthes
(c.331–232 bc)Stoic philosopher, and second head of the Stoic school. Coming between Zeno of Citium, the founder, and Chrysippus, the ‘second founder’ of the Stoic school, Cleanthes has usually been ...
Cratylus
(5th c. bc)Greek philosopher, sometimes thought to have been a teacher of Plato before Socrates. He is famous for capping the doctrine of Heraclitus that you cannot step into the same river twice by ...
cult of statues
GreeceThe veneration of images of deities was well ‐established by the 7th cent. bc, when monumental temples to house a cult's principal statue became common; in the manufacture of colossal ...
Diogenes Laertius
(? 3rd c. ad)Greek biographer. Diogenes is not a serious philosopher, but his book Lives of Eminent Philosophers is a major biographical source for all classical Greek and Roman philosophers until ...
etymology
The study of the origins and development of words and their meanings. [From Greek etymos true + logos a word]
fate
A fate worse than death rape; the term is recorded from the early 19th century, although earlier in the mid 17th century Dorothy Osborne in a letter refers to ‘the Roman courage, when they killed ...
fire
One of the four elements in ancient and medieval philosophy and in astrology (considered essential to the nature of the signs Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius).fire and brimstone torment in hell; often ...
flux
Everything is in flux according to Heraclitus, who is reputed to have said that ‘everything flows’, and that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. The idea, in Plato's ...
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844–1889) British Catholic priest and poetPoems [edited (by) Robert Bridges] (1918) PoetryPoems: Second Edition, with Additional Poems [edited (by) Charles Williams] (1930) PoetryPoems [edited (by) ...
Hippasus
Of Metapontum, an early Pythagorean later regarded as having founded the branch of the school called μαθ-ηματικοί or ‘mathematicians’ (see Pythagoras (1)), and as having been punished for revealing a ...
logos
(Greek, statement, principle, law, reason, proportion)In Heraclitus, the cosmic principle that gives order and rationality to the world, in a way analogous to that in which human reason orders human ...
Marius the Epicurean
A philosophical romance by Pater, published 1885.Pater describes the boyhood, education, and young manhood of Marius, a serious young Roman imbued with a ‘morbid religious idealism’. With his friend ...
metaphor and simile
Are features of literary language that have been extensively discussed by theorists and critics since antiquity. The first purposeful investigations are Aristotle's. By the time of Quintilian ...
mineralogy
The scientific study of minerals, comprising crystallography, mineral chemistry, economic mineralogy, and determinative mineralogy (concerned mainly with physical properties).
Oswald Spengler
(1880–1936)German philosopher of history.Spengler was educated at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle, completing in 1904 a PhD thesis on Heraclitus. He worked as a grammar-school teacher ...
philosophers on poetry
The engagement of philosophers with poetry was a recurrent and vital feature of the intellectual culture of Graeco‐Roman antiquity. By c.380 bc, Plato in his Republic could already refer to ‘a ...
