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According to Philostratus [Life of Apoll. 3.20], Indians founded sixty cities in sub-Saharan Africa 1500-1100 BCE, and according to Juba of Numidia [Plin. Nat. 2.34.97], there was an Indian colony in West Africa before 50 BCE. According to Cornelius Nepos [Geog. 3.5], an Indian tribe had sailed to Germania to do commerce, and according to Scymnus [Perieg. 167], the land of the Indians was located west from Sardinia, which would locate Indian colonies into Iberia.
Were these ancient writers referring to people who originated from India, or was the word "India" just a confused term to refer to all dark skinned people? If the latter interpretation is correct, who were these Africans who were claimed to have populated also western Europe before 150 BCE?
P.S. If you have good comments to these questions, you are warmly welcome to participate to the peer review of the India-Africa-Europe theory, which has been published at https://agilepublishing.fi/books/atlas-and-herakles
Homer's Iliad is full of brief references to named individuals, describing for example how those individuals kill or are killed in battle. Many of these individuals seem to appear only in these particular references, and are never referred to again in other, extant, ancient Greek literature (at least not in literature that is well known). The tendency is to skip over these names and forget about them. My guess is that these are not invented, fictional characters but actual people who lived somewhere in the ancient Greek world, possibly during a wide variety of different time periods. Has any research been published that seeks to explain the origins of this wide-ranging collection of little-known characters?
Professor E.R. Dodds suggested the fascinating idea that Plato's exposure to Pythagorean ideas contributed to his notion of Philosopher-Rulers, that is, that we might think of them as "rationalised shamans". I have not, however, been able to find any subsequent writing that develops this idea as a way of framing the Philosopher-Ruler as a leader. I would be most interested in any references to work that develops this idea.
The binary nature of the computing process, was presumably inspired by the philospher/scientist, Liebniz, who was apparently familiar with the "I Ching" , The Book of Changes. This ancient Chinese classic gives a description of events using Hexagrams, that have their basis the interplay of two primary forces, the binary combination of Yin and Yang.
What then could be another architecture? The ancient Indian text, "The Bhagavad Gita", refers to events being the interplay of not two, but three forces: namely, active, passive and neutral (or passion, ignorance and purity). Could this ternary combination also be the basis for a computing architecture?
i am to answer a question about how the rapsodies where named ( from greek alfabet from α-ω) and why they where separated this way .. if anyone has any idea ...
John Burnet's book on Plato's Phaedo (1911) is the kind of work I'm looking for.
I am editing a text written in greek (polytonic) language and I would like to locate specific words such as nouns, mostly names. Can I find something that could help? I could try also anything adjustable or "trainable" software... Thank you all!
Cosmology is a matter of philosophical and scientific knowledge that studies the material structure and the laws governing the universe conceived as an ordered set. The cosmology of the universe is interested in reference to space, time and matter and excludes from its survey questions concerning the origin and ultimate end of the universe to which try to respond both the physical cosmogony and theology. In particular, the doctrine that deals with the origin of the universe, from the mythological or religious point of view is called cosmogony.
You can distinguish two subclasses of cosmological arguments: deductive and inductive cosmological arguments.
The first subclass has a long tradition in the history of philosophy (proposed by great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, R. Descartes and Leibniz GW, and criticized by philosophers as great as D. Hume, Immanuel Kant and B. Russell), while the latter has been formulated more recently by philosophers like R. Swinburne, who usually refer to the inference to the best explanation. Because in the history of philosophy cosmological deductive topics are more frequent and more discussed than inductive, when it comes to matters of cosmological, it means especially the first.
Cosmology aims to study the world being able to explain it in its totality, which is impossible from the fact that it is impossible doing experience of all phenomena in their entirety, but only of some of them. Therefore metaphysicians, when they try to explain the universe, they fall into contradictory rational procedures with themselves (antinomies).
With Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) the Earth loses its privileged position of the center of the universe and is replaced by the Sun: a scandalous novelty but this still tied to ancient Greek heliocentric cosmology of Aristarchus of Samos, according to which planets move with orderly harmony making uniform circular motions with the Sun at the center of the cosmos.
Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), once called also in Italian Tycho, tried to overcome these limitations of the Copernican system by advancing the idea of a system, which took the name of tychonic system, in which the planets revolve around the Sun, that in turn rotates around an immobile Earth.
Meanwhile, Kepler (1571-1630), a disciple of Brahe, showed the central position of the Sun and Galilei (1564-1642), removed the solar system its centrality in the universe by putting it on a par with endless other systems of the Galaxy.
Newton (1643-1727) explained by the law of gravity movements of the planets around the sun that William Herschel (1738-1822) extended to the whole universe by granting the Sun a movement within the galaxy.
Einstein in the 1917 work, "Considerations on the universe as a whole" considers individual galaxies like the components of a single universe. This monistic and deterministic vision, as the result of the Einstein's adherence to the theology of Spinoza, will be repeatedly thrown into crisis since 1927, when Werner Heisenberg states the Uncertainty Principle.
We can finish this brief introductory part of cosmology quoting Galileo who puts it this way: “If Aristotle saw again the new discoveries into heaven, where he stated it to be unalterable, immutable, because no alteration had hitherto be seen, he certainly, changing opinion , would now say the opposite because alterations had be seen..”
This first part is accompanied by the development of philosophical thought that presents a very important issue, namely the relationship of dependency or less of Greek philosophy from Eastern cultures (Mesopotamia and Egypt in particular). The first literary documents of Greece, in fact, that is the poems attributed to Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), the works of Hesiod [Theogony, Works and Days (Erga kài Hemérai) ]in the seventh century, are imbued with some basic ideas, as ‘food’ for thought, by a whole set of problem that – in short - is close enough to that of the pre-Greek civilization.
Except that, since its first appearance, the Greek "philosophy" looks like a something that, while moving in the cultural ambit of these reflections, is also fundamentally different from them. To take advantage of this diversity, we must not only think of a new historical environment, but we also have to think about a feature of the first Greek literature, which is not properly reflected in the pre-Greek literature.
Those fundamental questions that emerge will also be the basis of philosophical inquiry: the contrast between the fate and man's initiative, between a law absolutely necessary and universal and the human responsibility; the contrast between justice as the supreme law of the universe and of human society and the hubris (arrogance) of those men who want to infringe their limits. The problem of a virtue which is not only that of the warrior, but that gradually widens to encompass a whole range of attitudes and behaviors extremely diversified.
Of a philosophical nature appears the problem of the original state from which things have come out and of the force that produced them. If the problem is philosophical, the answer is legendary. Chaos or yawning abyss, earth, love, etc. are personified in mythical entities. After Hesiod, the first poet of whom we know cosmology is Pherecydes of Syros, a contemporary of Anaximander, born probably around 600 to 596 a. C. He says that before all things and eternally there were Zeus, Cronus and Ctono.
Next to the first flash of philosophy in cosmology of myth and in the mysteries is the first occurrence of moral reflection in the legend of the Seven Sages.
Professor Salvatore Capozziello writing about cosmology and philosophical culture in the book "The Cosmology: From Myth to Science" puts it this way: "In every age, every culture has set basic questions, such as what are the nature, structure and order of the Universe. In particular, one of the highest goals of many philosophical systems was to look for relationships between Man and the Universe
These relationships may be of objective type (for example, Man is a component "conscious" of the Universe), or of a subjective type (as Man perceives and understands the Universe, in other words what man, subject, intends for "Universe"). That Universe which the Greeks, especially Anaximander, called "Kosmos" - with the meaning of "all ruled by law", hence the "Cosmology" - contrary to the "Chaos", that is "the total absence of law." It is clear, from these premises, that split the Cosmological Problem from Philosophy and from the "latest questions" of Man is likely to make this search an intellectual exercise, not to be placed in the broader context of a more general cultural anthropology. In other words, the cosmological survey becomes paradigmatic for any system of knowledge that raises the problem: "Man" and is faced with the cultural tools specific to a given era. Then arises the question of whether we can speak of "Cosmology as Science" or whether we should place the Cosmology in the ambit of philosophical doctrines, not directly related to the scientific disciplines.
The latter viewpoint dates back the late eighteenth century, when Cosmology was considered a "metaphysics" science with negative connotations attributed to this term by the positivist thought. In fact, with the expansion of the scientific method and with the scientistic mentality of nineteenth century, the “latest” questions of the cosmological survey seemed meaningless as unsolvable: Cosmology was being confused with the Philosophy of Nature and, therefore, considered to be of little epistemological value".
Russian prologue of 1313 = GIM. Sin. 239, Russian Historical Museum, Moscow.
Greek verse prologue of 1295 = Sin. Greč. 354, Russian Historical Museum, Moscow.
