Pre-Columbian: Did you mean...?

The creation of the art of dialectic is credited to Zeno of Elea, the philosophical champion of Parmenides’ claim that the essence of reality is One and unchanging. Zeno was Parmenides’ student and protégé and, in defending and defining his...

Parmenides (l. c. 485 BCE) lived and taught in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy and is known as the founder of the Monist School (though it may have been founded by Xenophanes of Colophon, l. c. 570-478 BCE) which claimed all of reality...

The sophists in ancient Greece were a class of teachers who, for a fairly high fee, would instruct the affluent youth in politics, history, science, law, mathematics and rhetoric as well as the finer points of grammar and history. They professed...

In this collection of 20 biographies of ancient Greek philosophers, we examine the thoughts and lives of some of the most important thinkers in history. We look at the pre-Socratic philosophers and the titan trio of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle...

The Greek philosopher Plato (l. 424/423 to 348/347 BCE) is recognized as the founder of Western philosophy, following his mentor, Socrates. He founded the Academy in Athens, traditionally considered the first university in the Western world...

European explorers began to probe the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s, and they found to their utter amazement not only a huge landmass but also a world filled with several diverse and populous indigenous cultures. Among their most...

The word 'plague', in defining a lethal epidemic, was coined by the physician Galen (l. 130-210 CE) who lived through the Antonine Plague (165 - c. 180/190 CE) but the disease was recorded long before in relating the affliction of the Plague...

Aristarchus of Samos (l. c. 310 - c. 230 BCE) was a Greek astronomer who first proposed a heliocentric model of the universe in which the sun, not the earth, was at the center. Although his theory was noted by other thinkers of his time...

Ragnarök is the cataclysmic battle between the forces of chaos and those of order in Norse mythology, ending the world and killing most of the gods and their adversaries, leading to the birth of a new world. It has been claimed, however...

The history of astronomy in the Ancient World can be traced back thousands of years, and well before the Ancient Greek philosophers famously worked on it. It is generally agreed that the discipline of astronomy began in the region of Mesopotamia...