Four presuppositions form the characteristics of classical Greek philosophy.
A particular attitude towards reality
The aim is not to change the world but to know reality. The ancient Greeks highly esteemed an inquiring mind. Knowledge is man’s reflection of nature and knowledge is an end for its own sake. Augustine (354-430AD) says empiricism is a method that seeks knowledge through. Empiricism attempts to discover interrelatedness between sensory impressions. For the empiricist ideas begin with sensory experience. By rational induction they are transformed into empirical knowledge. Human reason is capable of revealing the truth.
The Cosmos is conceived as a totality
(a) The classical Greek philosopher poses questions concerning phenomena as a totality and not questions concerning separate phenomena. His problems relate to the whole not to particular parts of it.
(b) The whole or total reality or totality is conceived as a Cosmos that is an orderly whole. There is no chaos. The Cosmos is a non chaotic, orderly total reality.
(c) The Cosmos is bounded in space and time.
(d) Reality reflects an organizing spirit.
The nature of life
The nature of life is not strife and chaos, but tranquility and equilibrium. The very canon of Greek life and thought is harmony.
The idea of the constant
The Greeks valued the constant, the independent, the static, the invariable, the unchanging, and they took a conceptual approach to understanding it. Because of the Greek conceptual and methodological approach, logic and geometry, which are formal or conceptual sciences par excellence, were developed and flourished in the Greek thought. The Greek love of the constant is well mirrored in Plato’s conception of “Ideas” as external and invariable.
