Ancient Greek Philosophy and Science
This domain tests the arguments of Greek thinkers and the content of Greek science: Presocratic cosmology, Plato's metaphysics and ethics, Aristotle's logic and natural philosophy, the Hellenistic schools, and technical work from Hippocratic medicine to Ptolemaic astronomy. Questions reward exact attribution of doctrines and the ability to reconstruct an argument step by step.
Presocratics and Plato
- Thales: water as arche; Anaximander: the apeiron; Heraclitus: logos and flux; Parmenides: being versus becoming; Empedocles: four roots plus Love and Strife; Democritus: atoms and void.
- Plato: Forms as separate, eternal, intelligible objects; the Sun–Line–Cave sequence in Republic 6–7; the tripartite soul (logistikon, thymoeides, epithymetikon); recollection in the Meno; the elenchus as refutation rather than doctrine.
Aristotle
- Four causes (aitiai, explanatory factors): material, efficient, formal, final.
- Hylomorphism: compounds of matter and form, with the soul as the form of a living body.
- Logic: terms, propositions, syllogisms; Barbara (All M are P; All S are M; therefore All S are P) is valid whatever the truth of its premises.
- Ethics: eudaimonia as activity of the soul according to virtue; the mean relative to us; phronesis as practical wisdom.
Hellenistic schools and science
- Stoics: logos pervading the cosmos, virtue as the only good, apatheia as freedom from pathos (not emotionlessness), the cosmopolis.
- Epicurus: pleasure as the absence of pain, atomism, no afterlife and therefore no fear of death.
- Sceptics: epochē, suspension of judgement.
- Science: Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease naturalises disease; Euclid's Elements argues deductively from axioms; Archimedes on levers and displacement; Aristarchus proposes a heliocentric model; Eratosthenes measures the earth; Ptolemy's Almagest codifies geocentrism; Galen dissects animals, not humans.
Worked example
Why does Aristotle say a bronze statue has four causes? Reasoning: the bronze answers 'out of what?' (material), the sculptor 'by what?' (efficient), the shape 'what is it?' (formal), the purpose 'for the sake of what?' (final). The common error is to hear 'cause' as efficient causation only and conclude that Aristotle offers one cause under three descriptions. He treats all four as answers to different, non-competing why-questions.
Traps
- Attributing separate Forms to Aristotle.
- Reversing the order of the Sun, Line and Cave.
- Assuming Epicurus endorses active indulgence; his pleasure is largely the removal of disturbance.
- Judging a syllogism by the truth of its conclusion rather than its form.
- Describing Galenic anatomy as human dissection.