MAIN PART
The Greek philosophical thought from its roots in Homer to late Hellenistic age (42 hours)

Historical framework. The Greeks and us. The Greeks and the Ancient Near East.

The birth of Greek philosophy and science: the pre-theoretical acquantaince with the world; Homeric depictions of nature; the pre-scientific manipulation of the world in the arts and tecniques.
Science and philosophy begin to differentiate from other forms of knowledge.

The 7 Sages. Orpheus. Pythagoras.

The Milesians. Heraclitus. Xenophanes. The Eleatics. Empedocles. Anaxagoras. The Atomists.

The Sophists.
Socrates.

Plato: biography; relationships with Athens’ political life; orality and writing; the problem of the political and moral norm; searching for an epistemic norm in order to find a moral norm; mathematics as the source of epistemic norm. The Ideas. The psychology. The politics: Republic and Laws. The cosmology and the World-soul.

Aristotle: biography. Categories. De interpretatione. Prior Analytics. Second Analytics. Substance, essence, definition in the Organon. Form and matter in the Physics. Potentiality and Actuality in the Physics. Aristotle’s natural philosophy. The telos. The explanation of change. The concept of nature. The being as being. The unity of the categories. Analogy pros hén. Form and matter in the Metaphysics VII-VIII. Potentiality and actuality in Metaphysics IX. The problem of the origin of motion and of the order of the cosmos: Metaphysics XII. Life, living bodies, souls. The general structure of Aristotle’s psychology. Nutritive-generative soul. Sensory-perceptual soul. Sense-perception and its hierarchies. Pleasure and pain. Voluntary motion and its ecceptions. The intellect. Reason. Aristotle’s biology: birth of a science. The two ethics of Aristotle. The politics.

The Hellenistic transition: end of classic philosophy. The prevalence of the ethics. Separation between philosophy and science.

Epicurus and his school.
The Stoà. The Stoà and Roman public morality. Its influence on subsequent Western ideas and paradigms of morality.
Skepticism.
Cynicism.
Science and technology in the Imperial Age.
Toward Neoplatonism.
Plotinus. Porphyrius. Proclus.

ADDITIONAL PARTS
After the 42 hours course: only for pupils of the 63 hours course

The birth of Greek philosophy and science – 2: the role of religion.
The birth of mathematics. The birth of cosmography. The birth of medicine. The birth of ethnography, and of social and political theory.
Other insights on Plato: Plato’s myths: the eschatology; late developments of the theory of Ideas.
The followers of Plato and the young Aristotle.
Other insights on Aristotle: the ontological status of the cosmos, and the arguments for the eternity of the World; the demonstration of the existence of a First Mover in the Physics; the ‘minor’ physical writings; psychology: some details of Aristotle’s theory on sense-perceptions; some details on intellect; rhetoric; poetics.
Other insights on Hellenistic philosophy.