Evidence of the development of an answer to this question comes from tomb paintings c. 4000 BCE instructing people on where they came from, why they existed, and how to live well and attain paradise. Far from simply being concerned with running a government, however, politikos also has to do with how to be a good citizen and neighbor and what one should contribute to one’s community. The traditional understanding of Tian (heaven) as maintaining order through a mandate which legitimized a monarch’s rule could no longer be sustained as the monarchs of different states fought each other for supremacy. The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern Europeanphilosophy. License. "Philosophy." More broadly understood, it is the study of the most basic and profound matters of human existence. A long, largely German, tradition of thought looks athistory as a total and comprehensible process of events, structures,and processes, for which the philosophy of history can serve as aninterpretive tool. Necessary: must happen, cannot nothappen 2. In India, philosophy developed in response to the Vedas, the scriptures of Hinduism (known as Sanatan Dharma, “Eternal Order”, to adherents), in the form of the Upanishads (the earliest written c. 800-500 BCE). The early texts of Confucianism are thought to have been composed during the Zhou Dynasty and later developed by the sage Confucius (l. 551-479 BCE). Ancient History Encyclopedia. Save 50% off a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. by Trustees of the British Museum (Copyright). Stoicism would travel to Rome via the philosopher Diogenes of Babylon and would influence the thought of Epictetus (l. c. 50 - c. 130 CE), the most famous Stoic philosopher, whose works would establish Stoicism as the most popular philosophy of ancient Rome, even to the point of informing the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180 CE). Ethics – The Study of Behavior/Action (from the Greek ta ethika, on character), a term popularized by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, which he wrote for his son, Nichomachus, as a guide to living well. Epistemology asks how one knows what one knows, what exactly is 'knowledge’, how can it be defined, and how can one know that the meaning one defines a word by will be the meaning another person will understand. Philosophy of history, the study either of the historical process and its development or of the methods used by historians to understand their material. The belief that history conforms to a linear development in which the influence of providential wisdom can be discerned, rather than to a recurrent cyclical movement of the kind implicit in much Greco-Roman thought, was already becoming prevalent early in the Common Era. It developed in Mesopotamia at some point before the time The Epic of Gilgamesh was committed to writing between c. 2150-1400 BCE. In more recent times, a comparable attitude was discernible beneath Arnold Toynbee’s uncompromising repudiation of the idea that history is “a chaotic, disorderly, fortuitous flux, in which there is no pattern or rhythm of any kind to be discerned.” Thus, it has been the object of a long line of theorists, representative of widely divergent outlooks, to demonstrate that such pessimism is unjustified and that the historical process can, when appropriately viewed, be seen to be both rationally and morally acceptable. 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