Raphael’s School of Athens

[Petals]

Raphael’s School of Athens



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The School of Athens (1510-1511) by Italian Renaissance painter Raphael adorns a room in the Vatican Palace. The artist depicts several philosophers of classical antiquity and portrays each with a distinctive gesture, conveying complex ideas in simple images. In the center of the composition, Plato and Aristotle dominate the scene. Plato points upward to the world of ideas, where he believes knowledge lies, whereas Aristotle holds his forearm parallel to the earth, stressing observation of the world around us as the source of understanding. In addition, Raphael draws comparisons with his illustrious contemporaries, giving Plato the face of the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci, and Heraclitus, who rests his elbow on a large marble block, the face of the Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo. Euclid, bending down at the right, resembles the Renaissance architect Bramante. Raphael paints his own portrait on the young man in a black beret at the far right. In accordance with Renaissance ideas, artists belong to the ranks of the learned and the fine arts have the stature and merit of the written word.


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To Be Continued....

[Petals]

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Pythagoras
(582?-500?bc)

Greek philosopher and mathematician, whose doctrines strongly influenced
Plato.
Pythagoras
Considered the first true mathematician, Pythagoras established a movement
in 6th-century bc southern Italy that emphasized the study of mathematics as
a means to understanding all relationships in the natural world. The
followers of this movement, Pythagoreans, were the first to teach that the
Earth is a sphere revolving around the Sun.


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Heraclitus
(540?-480? bc)


Greek philosopher, who believed that fire is the primordial source of matter
and that the entire world is in a constant state of change. He was born in
Ephesus, an ancient Greek city in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. Because
of the loneliness of his life and the obscurity and misanthropy of his
philosophy, he is also called the dark philosopher or weeping philosopher.

Heraclitus was in a sense one of the founders of Greek metaphysics, although
his ideas stem from those of the Ionian school of Greek philosophy. He
postulated fire as the primal substance or principle that, through
condensation and rarefaction, creates the phenomena of the sensible world.
Heraclitus added to the “being” of his predecessors the concept of
“becoming,” or flux, which he took to be a basic reality underlying all
things, even the most apparently stable. In ethics he introduced a new
social emphasis, holding virtue to consist in a subordination of the
individual to the laws of a universal, reasonable harmony. Although his
thinking was strongly influenced by popular theology, Heraclitus attacked
the concepts and ceremonies of the popular religion of his day.

Only one work, On Nature, is definitely attributable to Heraclitus. Numerous
fragments of this work were preserved by later writers, and collected
editions of these surviving fragments may be found in several modern
editions.


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Socrates
(469-399bc)


Greek philosopher, who profoundly affected Western philosophy through his
influence on Plato
Socrates (shown here in a copy of a bust originally attributed to the Greek
sculptor Lysippus) was a Greek philosopher and teacher who lived in Athens,
Greece, in the 400s bc. He profoundly altered Western philosophical thought
through his influence on his most famous pupil, Plato, who passed on
Socrates’s teachings in his writings known as dialogues. Socrates taught
that every person has full knowledge of ultimate truth contained within the
soul and needs only to be spurred to conscious reflection in order to become
aware of it. His criticism of injustice in Athenian society led to his
prosecution and a death sentence for allegedly corrupting the youth of
Athens.


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Plato
(circa 428-c. 347 bc)


Greek philosopher, one of the most creative and influential thinkers in
Western philosophy.
Plato, one of the most famous philosophers of ancient Greece, was the first
to use the term philosophy, which means “love of knowledge.” Born around 428
bc, Plato investigated a wide range of topics. Chief among his ideas was the
theory of forms, which proposed that objects in the physical world merely
resemble perfect forms in the ideal world, and that only these perfect forms
can be the object of true knowledge. The goal of the philosopher, according
to Plato, is to know the perfect forms and to instruct others in that
knowledge


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Aristotle
(384-322 bc)


Greek philosopher and scientist, who shares with Plato and Socrates the
distinction of being the most famous of ancient philosophers.

A student of ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Aristotle shared his teacher’s
reverence for human knowledge but revised many of Plato’s ideas by
emphasizing methods rooted in observation and experience. Aristotle surveyed
and systematized nearly all the extant branches of knowledge and provided
the first ordered accounts of biology, psychology, physics, and literary
theory. In addition, Aristotle invented the field known as formal logic,
pioneered zoology, and addressed virtually every major philosophical problem
known during his time. Known to medieval intellectuals as simply “the
Philosopher,” Aristotle is possibly the greatest thinker in Western history,
and historically, perhaps the single greatest influence on Western
intellectual development.


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Epicurus
(341-270 bc)


Greek philosopher, born on the island of S?mos of an Athenian family, and
privately educated by his father, a schoolteacher, and by various
philosophers. At the age of 18 he went to Athens to perform military
service. After a brief stay he joined (322) his father in Colophon, where he
began teaching. Epicurus founded a philosophical school in Mitil?ni on the
island of Lésvos about 311, and two or three years later he became head of a
school in Lampsacus (now Lâpseki, Turkey). Returning to Athens in 306, he
settled there permanently and taught his doctrines to a devoted body of
followers. Because instruction took place in the garden of Epicurus's home,
his followers were known as “philosophers of the garden.” Both women and men
frequented his garden, and this occasioned much gossip about the alleged
activities there. Students from all over Greece and Asia Minor flocked to
Epicurus's school, attracted as much by his charm as by his intellect.

Epicurus was a prolific author. According to the account of his life by the
3rd-century ad historian and biographer Diogenes Laërtius, he left 300
manuscripts, including 37 treatises on physics and numerous works on love,
justice, the gods, and other subjects. Of his writings, only three letters
and a number of short fragments survive, preserved in Diogenes Laërtius's
biography. The principal additional sources of information about the
doctrines of Epicurus are the works of the Roman writers Cicero, Seneca,
Plutarch, and Lucretius, whose poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of
Things) delineates the Epicurean philosophy. See Epicureanism.


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Euclid of Megara
(flourished about 300bc)


Greek philosopher and founder of the Megarian school of philosophy, born in
Megara. One of the chief disciples of Socrates, Euclid combined the Socratic
philosophy that virtue is knowledge with the Eleatic concept of the universe
as a changeless unity that can be understood only by philosophic reflection.


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Averroës, in Arabic, Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad
ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd

(1126-98)


Spanish-Arab Islamic philosopher, jurist, and physician, born in C?rdoba,
Spain. His father, a judge in C?rdoba, instructed him in Muslim
jurisprudence. In his native city he also studied theology, philosophy, and
mathematics under the Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl and medicine under the
Arab physician Avenzoar. Averroës was appointed judge in Seville in 1169 and
in C?rdoba in 1171; in 1182 he became chief physician to Abu Yaqub Yusuf,
the Almohad caliph of Morocco and Muslim Spain. Averroës's view that reason
takes precedence over religion led to his being exiled in 1195 by Abu Yusuf
Yaqub al-Mansur; he was restored to favor shortly before his death.

Averroës held that metaphysical truths can be expressed in two ways: through
philosophy, as represented by the views of Aristotle, and through religion,
which is truth presented in a form that the ordinary person can understand.
Although Averroës did not actually propound the existence of two kinds of
truth, philosophical and religious, his views were interpreted in that way
by Christian thinkers, who called it the theory of “double truth.” He
rejected the concept of a creation of the world in the history of time; the
world, he maintained, has no beginning. God is the “prime mover,” the
self-moved force that stimulates all motion, who transforms the potential
into the actual. The individual human soul emanates from the one universal
soul. Averroës's extensive commentaries on the works of Aristotle were
translated into Latin and Hebrew and greatly influenced the Scholastic
school of philosophy in medieval Europe and medieval Jewish philosophy. His
main independent work was Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the
Incoherence), a rebuttal of the attack on Neoplatonic and Aristotelian
philosophy by the Islamic theologian al-Ghazali. Averroës also wrote books
on medicine, astronomy, law, and grammar.

[Haymana]

Thanks Petals for these great infos









Best Wishes

Haymana

[Petals]

And I thank you dear for passing by.

You don't get lotta people who reads these< so I'm kinda thrilled.lol


Petals