Pre-Socratic Philosophy - Legacy

Legacy

• The Pre-Socratic method of critical reasoning deployed in the examination of the natural world was applied by Socrates to an examination of the human individual and his social institutions.

• Karl Marx's doctoral thesis "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature" evaluates the thought of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, one of the founders of Atomic theory.

• Within the Marxist philosophical tradition the Pre-Socratics are recognized as the first Materialists.

• Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, calls them the tyrants of the spirit, and says of Socrates that “the hitherto so wonderfully regular, although certainly too rapid, development of the philosophical science was destroyed in one night.”

• Karl Popper, one of the 20th Century's most influential philosophers of science, placed great importance on the critical tradition embodied in the development of Pre-Socratic thought, the analysis of which contributed to his own epistemological theories. His well known essay on the subject "Back to the Pre-Socratics" can be found in the anthology of his essays; "Conjectures and Refutations - The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 2nd Edition. Routledge Publishing. 2002.