An Analysis of the Whatness of the Rise of Philosophy in ancient Greece

A great number of Western historians of philosophy claim that philosophy emerged for the first time in Greece in the 7th-8th centuries BC. The question is why what is presently called philosophy came into being for the first time in ancient Greece and the West. The present paper focuses on the religious defects in ancient Greece as a determining factor in the rise of philosophy in this land. The main argument behind this response indicates that the religious culture of ancient Greece, because of its poverty in terms of worldview, epistemology, ethics, cosmology, and ontology, as well as certain limitations in subject, method, and end, paved the context for the rising and posing of some fundamental questions that were strange to that religion, which was naturally incapable of responding to them. It was at this point that philosophy emerged to answer such questions. The findings of this study indicate that if, instead of that poor and limited religion, there had been another religion there, ancient Greeks would have become needless of philosophy, or that part of philosophy that dealt with those questions. The replacing religion should have enjoyed the following features: 1) possessing a solid worldview and well-founded systems of epistemology, ethics, cosmology, and ontology; 2) being familiar with the raised questions in terms of method, subject, and end, and 3) enjoying the necessary conceptual and judgmental capabilities to deliberate over those questions.