Pre columbian: Did you mean...?

The ancient Celtic pantheon consisted of over 400 gods and goddesses who represented everything from rivers to warfare. With perhaps the exception of Lugh, the Celtic gods were not universally worshipped across Iron Age Europe but were very...

In Norse belief, the soul of the deceased might wind up in any one of a number of afterlife realms. There was Valhalla, the realm of Odin where the dead warriors drank, fought, and told stories, Folkvangr ('the Field of the People'), the...

Xenophanes of Colophon (l.c. 570-c.478 BCE) is known as one of the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, so-called because they pre-date Socrates (l. c. 470/469-399 BCE), recognized as the Father of Western Philosophy. The Pre-Socratics...

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...

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...

Dogs were an integral aspect of the lives of the people of Mesoamerica regardless of their location or culture and, throughout the region, were recognized as liminal beings belonging not only to the natural world and that of humans but to...

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...

The Mesoamerican civilizations represent a long continuum of complex societies that emerged independently in Central America and southern Mexico from roughly 1500 BCE to the early 16th century CE, prior to Spanish conquest. Rather than a...