Greek cosmos questions met Vedas and Confucians
History of philosophy maps rational argument’s development—though some include myth and proverb. Western lines start with Greek cosmos inquiry; Arabic–Persian thought peaked in the Islamic Golden Age on reason versus revelation; India fused reality, knowledge, and enlightenment via the Vedas; China weighed conduct and self-cultivation.
Avicenna built a comprehensive system under Greek influence. Indian schools split orthodox and otherwise around scripture. Confucians sought social harmony through virtue; Daoists tuned humans to nature.
Medieval Europe leaned theological; later centuries widened to mind, ethics, and knowledge theory. The field itself aims at chronological exposition of concepts, authors, and schools.
Historians of philosophy also study their own methods, a field called historiography, and they divide the story into periods defined by dominant tendencies; traditionally they have focused mostly on the West. Western philosophy is conventionally dated from sixth-century BCE Greece to 529 CE, when Emperor Justinian I shut the Platonic Academy and other Athenian schools to suppress non-Christian teaching. The first phase, Presocratic philosophy, lasted until about the mid-fourth century BCE and survives largely in fragments quoted by later authors. Its big innovation was to explain the whole cosmos rationally rather than through myths such as that of Uranus and Gaia.
Thales, often called the first philosopher, named water as the origin of all things, while Anaximander proposed a more abstract eternal substance. Heraclitus saw the world in constant flux, insisting nobody steps into the same river twice, and stressed an underlying order he called logos; Parmenides argued the opposite, that true reality never changes. Democritus held that everything is built from indivisible atoms. Socrates, who lived from 469 to 399 BCE, wrote nothing and is known chiefly through his influence on others, above all Plato, who lived from 427 to 347 BCE and carried the Presocratic legacy in new directions.
Source: History of philosophy
