Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

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The same interest in the foundations of morality and moral relations opened up the whole subject of the power of human consciousness to discern such relations. It was a logical necessity that turned thought from a review of man’s relations with his fellows to a criticism of his own constitution. What is man? What are his faculties? Has he any that give him the truth and the reality? Or do they all deceive him so that he cannot detect the real from the sham of life? What are the mental faculties used in disputation, and how are they to be trained so that man may rise to an eminence of culture among his fellows? The Greek thus turned to a criticism of his knowing faculties, and the positive social and moral demands made such a criticism necessary to his well-being. Greek science took a strong anthropological direction, and logic, ethics, psychology, rhetoric, etc., took the place of natural science subjects. The Greek in the fifth century B.C. was interested in man—in his inner activities, his ideations and volitions. Of this critical and individualistic attitude Euripides is the literary exponent; Pericles is the political personification; Socrates and the Sophists are its philosophical expression.