Idealists believe that the external, material world is produced by the mind or ideas and that it cannot exist separately. Reality therefore begins inside the head, not out in the street. Plato: Plato thought that everything in the material world owes its existence to a perfect, external, and unchanging idea from which it is modelled. […]

 After Socrates’ death, three new schools of thought were founded in Athens. All of them were influenced by Socrates’ search for what is Good. The Cynics: Started by Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates, the Cynics became widely known through the antics of Diogenes, Antisthenes’ pupil. Diogenes preached that the only path to happiness was living […]

The pre-Socratics (The Early Greeks) were the first philosophers in the West. They are classed as the school that started Western philosophy off on its 2,500-year-old-history. The ancient Greeks believed in a family of gods, who lived in palaces at the top of Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece. The whole universe and its […]