Home

Syllabus

Readings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Archelaus

 

1.
Archelaus came from Athens or Miletus. His father was Apollodorus or, according to some, Midon. He was a pupil of Anaxagoras and a teacher of Socrates. He was the first to bring natural philosophy from Ionia to Athens, and he was called a natural philosopher - indeed natural philosophy actually ended with him, when Socrates introduced the subject of ethics. But he too seems to have touched upon ethics; for he philosophized about laws and about the noble and the just. (Socrates took this over from him and was supposed to have invented the subject because he developed it to its height.)
He said that there are two causes of generation, hot and cold, and that animals were generated from the mud. And that things are just or ignoble not by nature but by convention.


(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers II 16)

 

 

 

Empedocles | main | Democritus