The main theoretical Leitmotiv will be the tension between two apparently opposite tendences, both deeply ingrained in Greek spirit: the attention to the particular aspects of the World, and the tendency to abstraction, generalization, systematization. Already in Homer, we find complex depictions of the causes and processes of movement and change, whose main causes are the gods, the elements of the natural world (most of all, astronomic Heaven), and (in a secondary way) the aims and actions of mortal beings, among which human beings are. Homer starts also a reflection about the tension between universal necessitarism (implied by the belief in the “Fate”) and personal agency. Many centuries after, Plato’s, Aristotle’s, Epicurus’ and the Stoics’ theories will try to solve this tension.
Historical framework. The Greeks and us. The Greeks and the Ancient Near East. The knowledges of the Near-Eastern civilizations. The birth of Greek philosophy and science: pre-theoretical conceptualization about natural change(s); Homeric depictions of change and movement; the pre-scientific manipulation of the world in the arts and tecniques. Science and philosophy begin to differentiate from other forms of knowledge. The 7 Sages. Orpheus. Pythagoras. The Milesians. Heraclitus. Xenophanes. The Eleatics. Empedocles. Anaxagoras. The Atomists. The historiographical debate about the debt of early Greek science to Near-eastern science, with particular attention to the theories about natural change. V century BC conceptualizations of historic becoming: Herodotus and Thucydides. The Sophists. Socrates. Plato: biography; relationships with Athens’ political life; orality and writing; the problem of the political and moral norm; searching for an epistemic norm and a cosmic order in order to find a moral norm; mathematics and astronomy as the sources of epistemic norm. The ‘Forms’. The psychology. The politics: Republic and Laws. The cosmology and the World-soul: how to reconcile the immutability of the Forms with observed natural becoming? Aristotle: biography. Categories. De interpretatione. Prior Analytics. Second Analytics. Substance, essence, definition in the Organon. Form and matter in the Physics. The 4 principles of change. Potentiality and Actuality as polarities of change in the Physics. Aristotle’s natural philosophy. The telos. The explanation of change. The concept of nature. The being as being. The unity of the categories. Analogy pros hén. Form and matter in the Metaphysics VII-VIII. Potentiality and actuality in Metaphysics IX. The problem of the origin of motion: Physics VIII and Metaphysics XII. Aristotle's cosmology. Life, living bodies, souls. The soul as a source of change for living beings. The general structure of Aristotle’s psychology: the hierarchies of powers and their actualizations, forms and matters, actions and operations. The ‘parts’ of the soul. Nutritive-generative soul. Sensory-perceptual soul. Sense-perception and its hierarchies. Pleasure and pain. Voluntary motion and its exceptions. The intellect. Reason. Aristotle’s biology: birth of a science. Cosmo-biology and astronomy at the Peripatus. Aristotle's two ethics. The politics. The Hellenistic transition: end of classic philosophy. The prevalence of the ethics. Separation between philosophy and science. Epicurus and his school. The Stoà. The Stoà and Roman public morality. Its influence on subsequent Western ideas and paradigms of morality. Skepticism. Cynicism. Science and technology in the Imperial Age. Archimedes and the first mathematization of the problems of continuous movement. Observation and description of societal and political change in Hellenistic historiography: Polybius: Plotinus. Toward Neoplatonism. The causes of the impasse of Hellenistic science. Porphyrius. Proclus.