The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

The Pre-Socratic philosophers were the thinkers of the Greek cities of Ionia, southern Italy and Sicily in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE who first tried to explain the world without the gods: Thales, who said all is water; Anaximander, with his boundless; Heraclitus, with his river and his fire; Parmenides, who denied that anything changes; Empedocles and Anaxagoras; and Democritus, with his atoms. Nothing survives but fragments quoted by later writers and reports of their views, gathered in modern collections. Plato and Aristotle argued with them, and Nietzsche and Heidegger returned to them as the source before philosophy hardened into schools.