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Note: Giovanni reale is a Catholic
who, for reasons of bias, prefers to strongly insult and deny the East.
Everything about him must be observed carefully, just as Maxine did by reading semi-corrupt texts.
Philosophy was the brainchild of the Hellenic genius: it didn't come to the Greeks from precise stimuli taken from Eastern civilizations; from the East, however, came some scientific, astronomical, mathematical and geometric knowledge, which the Greeks knew how to rethink and recreate in a theoretical dimension, while the Orientals conceived them in a predominantly practical sense.
Thus, if the Egyptians developed and passed on the art of calculation, the Greeks, particularly from the Pythagoreans onwards, developed a systematic theory of numbers; and if the Babylonians made use of particular astronomical observations to plot the routes for ships, the Greeks transformed them into organic astronomical theory.
Philosophy, as a term or concept, is considered by almost all scholars to be the creation of Hellenic genius. In fact, while all the other components of Greek civilization can be found in the other peoples of the East who reached a high level of civilization before the Greeks (religious beliefs and cults, artistic manifestations of various kinds, technical knowledge and skills of various kinds, political institutions, military organizations, etc.), when it comes to philosophy, we are faced with such a new phenomenon that not only does it not have a precise correspondence with these peoples, but it also has nothing closely and specifically analogous.
In this way, the superiority of the Greeks in relation to other peoples on this specific point is not purely quantitative, but qualitative, since what they created by instituting philosophy is an absolute novelty.
Anyone who doesn't take this into account won't be able to understand why, under the impetus of the Greeks, Western civilization took a completely different direction from the East. In particular, they won't be able to understand why Easterners, when they wanted to benefit from science and its results, also had to adopt certain categories of Western logic.
In fact, science is not possible in every culture. There are ideas that make the birth and development of certain conceptions structurally impossible, and even ideas that prevent science as a whole, at least as we know it today.
Well, because of its rational categories, it was philosophy that made the birth of science possible and, in a sense, generated it. And recognizing this also means recognizing the Greeks as having made a truly exceptional contribution to the history of civilization.
•The impossibility of deriving philosophy from the East
Naturally, especially among orientalists, there was no shortage of attempts to locate the origin of philosophy in the East, especially based on the observation of generic analogies between the conceptions of the first Greek philosophers and certain ideas typical of oriental wisdom. However, none of these attempts were successful. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, rigorous criticism produced a series of truly overwhelming proofs against the thesis that the philosophy of the Greeks had derived from the East.
In classical times, none of the Greek philosophers or historians even hinted at the supposed Eastern origin of philosophy.
It has been historically proven that the Eastern peoples with whom the Greeks had contact did indeed possess a form of Wisdom based on natural theological and cosmogonic myths, but not a science based on pure reason.
In other words, they possessed a type of Wisdom analogous to that which the Greeks themselves possessed before creating philosophy.
In any case, we have no knowledge of the Greeks using any oriental writings or translations of these texts. Before Alexander, it is not clear that the doctrines of the Hindus or other peoples of Asia reached Greece, nor that, at the time philosophy arose in Greece, there were Greeks in a position to understand the discourse of an Egyptian priest.
In fact, from the moment it was born in Greece, philosophy represented a new form of spiritual expression, in such a way that, by taking in contents that were the fruit of other forms of spiritual life, it transformed them structurally, giving them a rigorously logical form.
Author:Giovanni Reale
who, for reasons of bias, prefers to strongly insult and deny the East.
Everything about him must be observed carefully, just as Maxine did by reading semi-corrupt texts.
Philosophy was the brainchild of the Hellenic genius: it didn't come to the Greeks from precise stimuli taken from Eastern civilizations; from the East, however, came some scientific, astronomical, mathematical and geometric knowledge, which the Greeks knew how to rethink and recreate in a theoretical dimension, while the Orientals conceived them in a predominantly practical sense.
Thus, if the Egyptians developed and passed on the art of calculation, the Greeks, particularly from the Pythagoreans onwards, developed a systematic theory of numbers; and if the Babylonians made use of particular astronomical observations to plot the routes for ships, the Greeks transformed them into organic astronomical theory.
Philosophy, as a term or concept, is considered by almost all scholars to be the creation of Hellenic genius. In fact, while all the other components of Greek civilization can be found in the other peoples of the East who reached a high level of civilization before the Greeks (religious beliefs and cults, artistic manifestations of various kinds, technical knowledge and skills of various kinds, political institutions, military organizations, etc.), when it comes to philosophy, we are faced with such a new phenomenon that not only does it not have a precise correspondence with these peoples, but it also has nothing closely and specifically analogous.
In this way, the superiority of the Greeks in relation to other peoples on this specific point is not purely quantitative, but qualitative, since what they created by instituting philosophy is an absolute novelty.
Anyone who doesn't take this into account won't be able to understand why, under the impetus of the Greeks, Western civilization took a completely different direction from the East. In particular, they won't be able to understand why Easterners, when they wanted to benefit from science and its results, also had to adopt certain categories of Western logic.
In fact, science is not possible in every culture. There are ideas that make the birth and development of certain conceptions structurally impossible, and even ideas that prevent science as a whole, at least as we know it today.
Well, because of its rational categories, it was philosophy that made the birth of science possible and, in a sense, generated it. And recognizing this also means recognizing the Greeks as having made a truly exceptional contribution to the history of civilization.
•The impossibility of deriving philosophy from the East
Naturally, especially among orientalists, there was no shortage of attempts to locate the origin of philosophy in the East, especially based on the observation of generic analogies between the conceptions of the first Greek philosophers and certain ideas typical of oriental wisdom. However, none of these attempts were successful. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, rigorous criticism produced a series of truly overwhelming proofs against the thesis that the philosophy of the Greeks had derived from the East.
In classical times, none of the Greek philosophers or historians even hinted at the supposed Eastern origin of philosophy.
It has been historically proven that the Eastern peoples with whom the Greeks had contact did indeed possess a form of Wisdom based on natural theological and cosmogonic myths, but not a science based on pure reason.
In other words, they possessed a type of Wisdom analogous to that which the Greeks themselves possessed before creating philosophy.
In any case, we have no knowledge of the Greeks using any oriental writings or translations of these texts. Before Alexander, it is not clear that the doctrines of the Hindus or other peoples of Asia reached Greece, nor that, at the time philosophy arose in Greece, there were Greeks in a position to understand the discourse of an Egyptian priest.
In fact, from the moment it was born in Greece, philosophy represented a new form of spiritual expression, in such a way that, by taking in contents that were the fruit of other forms of spiritual life, it transformed them structurally, giving them a rigorously logical form.
Author:Giovanni Reale
![NakedPluto [JG]](/data/avatars/s/21/21004.jpg?1723141422){kind=avatar}
