Epistemology

• greek philosophy
  14 November 2005

  hellenistic philosophy

• epicureanism
  14 November 2005

  Both epicureanism and stoicism sought to give ataraxia , or peace of mind. For Epicurus the aim of life was pleasure; the highest pleasure was absence of pain; pleasure of the mind was preferable to that of the body.
  The soul dies with the body, so we must not fear death or afterlife; the gods exist but do not concern themselves with humanity or natural phenomena (all of which can be explained scientifically); we should avoid public life and emotional commitments in order to escape the (...)

• stoicism
  14 November 2005

  After the death of Zeno of Citium, the Stoic school was headed by Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and its teachings were carried to Rome in 155 by Diogenes of Babylon.
  There its tenets were made popu-lar by Panaetius, friend of the great general Scipio Aemilianus, and by Posidonius, who was a friend of Pompey (see your textbook if you don’t recognize these names); Cicero drew heavily on the works of both.
  Stoic ideas appear in the greatest work of Roman literature, Vergil’s Aeneid , and later the (...)

• scepticism
  14 November 2005

  Scepticism is actually not a philosophical school, but one could generally group a number of Hellenistic schools under this rubric, including the Second Academy (Hellenistic Platonists), the Second Sophistic, the Cynics, the Skeptics, and so on, and, for the most part, the Stoics as well.
  All these schools to some degree or another espoused the idea that human beings cannot arrive at certain truth about anything (not all denied certainty was impossible, only that human beings could never (...)

• politics
  14 November 2005

  Politics is the study of human institutions and governments; it is essentially a branch of ethics.

• ethics
  14 November 2005

  Ethics is the science of human action; its primary question from classical Greece onwards is "what is a good life?"

• theology
  14 November 2005

  Theology is a branch of metaphysics and concerns the nature of the divine and the relationship of that nature to the physical, moral, and spiritual worlds.

• metaphysics
  14 November 2005

  Metaphysics is the study of the principles behind the principles governing the universe; metaphysics, you might say, is the science of first or originary principles.
  For instance, if you conclude that God is behind everything in the universe, the study of God is a branch of metaphysics.

• Physics
  14 November 2005

  Physics is the source of European philosophy; in its original form, physics was the study of the underlying principles of change in the natural world. Eventually, physics became the study of change in the material world and the laws underlying those changes (this is still true of physics today).

• rhetoric
  14 November 2005

  Logic is a science of language, and so is rhetoric. While logic is the science of propositions and demonstration, rhetoric is the science of persuasion. It is less concerned with the truth of a proposition as it is concerned with using language, gesture, argument, and emotion to persuade other people of a truth or an opinion.

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