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Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
THE SCHOOLS
If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272 b.c., on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he would hardly have recognized it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched for much of his life. He would have found there new philosophies far more diverse and more self-consciously systematic than those on offer in his own day. Some of the central issues, and much of the technical terminology in which they were being discussed, would have seemed unfamiliar.
How had this change come about? Aristotle might have perceived it as one aspect of the radical transformations effected throughout the greater part of the known world by the conquests of his delinquent pupil Alexander the Great. Alexander's hellenization of the east Mediterranean and beyond had generated a new excitement about Greek culture among people with primarily non-Greek backgrounds. For those who were attracted by Greek philosophy in particular, Athens was their natural Mecca, both because it still housed the schools founded by Plato and Aristotle, and because such literary masterpieces as Plato's Socratic dialogues, which will have afforded many their first taste of the subject, lent Athens an unfading glamour as the true home of philosophical enlightenment. Thus in the new Hellenistic age philosophy flourished at Athens as never before. And many of her new breed of philosophers hailed from the eastern Mediterranean region.
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- The Hellenistic Philosophers , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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