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Aristotle on his predecessors, being the first book of his Metaphysics
Aristotle on his predecessors being the first book of his Metaphysics Author:Aristotle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE PRE ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHERS REFERRED TO IN METAPHYSICS A. Thales floruit c. 585 (he foretold the solar eclipse of this year) ... more » Anaximander born c. 610 Anaximenes floruit c. 546 Xenophanes " c. 536 [Pythagoras " c. 532 (is said to have left Samos from disapproval of the tyranny of Polycrates) Heraclitus " c. 500 Parmenides " c. 470 (accepting the statements of Plato in his Parmenides) Empedocles " c. 455 Anaxagoras born c. 500 d. c. 428 Melissus defeated an Athenian navy 441 Diogenes of Apollonia floruit c. 423 (he is satirized in the Clouds of Aristophanes produced that year) Democritus born c. 460 floruit c. 420 Socrates " c. 470 died 399 Plato " 427 died 347 Where a floruit is given without any further explanation it is taken from the notices of the Alexandrian chronologists as preserved to us by such writers as Diogenes Laertius and Suidas. A man was conventionally assumed to be forty years old at the date of his "flourishing." Of philosophers mentioned in the present book but not inserted in the foregoing list Hippo is known to have been a contemporary of Pericles; the physician Alcmaeon was, as Aristotle tells us, "contemporary with the old age of Pythagoras," i. e., approximately contemporary with Heraclitus. Of Hippasus nothing can be said but that he was a member of the Pythagorean order, and therefore junior to Pythagoras. Of Leucippus we can only say that he was a predecessor of Democritus and pretty certainly younger than Melissus. As for the "Pythagoreans" mentioned by Aristotle, in the absence of names, we cannot date them precisely. The Pythagorean "Order" was violently destroyed at a date somewhere between 450 and 410, but the survivors continued to exist as a band of scientific ...« less