Ancient Greek And Roman

Philosophers of the ancient Mediterranean world working on the nature of being, substance, causation and the cosmos, from the early Ionian and Milesian thinkers who sought a single material principle behind change, through the Eleatic school's argument that true being is changeless, the atomists who reduced reality to indivisible particles moving in a void, Plato's theory of Forms and the philosophers of his Academy, the Peripatetic school that succeeded Aristotle, the materialist metaphysics of Roman Epicureanism, and the late antique Neoplatonists of Alexandria and Rome who built a hierarchy of reality descending from a single transcendent source. Spans roughly the seventh century BCE through the fifth century CE, ending with the last pagan philosophers of the classical world before Christian, Islamic and Byzantine thought reshaped the discipline's own questions and institutions. Excludes philosophers who continued the Neoplatonic tradition specifically inside the later Byzantine Empire, grouped instead under Other Metaphysical Traditions.