POST ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHERS
After Aristotle,ancient Greekphilosophylost itsoriginalityand vigour, andentered a phase of decay. Political, social and moral environment no longer sustained the creative impulses in philosophical thought. Greek city States with the exception of Sparta came under the rule of Macedonia. They
never recovered their former independence. Greece later became a province of Rome. In any case, the ‘delicate and beautiful’ Greek civilization had lost its internal moral and social vitality.
In this period, philosophy is mainly concerned with helping the individual in escaping from the travails of life. It revolves around man in his personal capacity — around his destiny and spiritual welfare. Philosophy became a source of consolation for the troubled mind, a safe mooring for men escaping from the storms of life.
Because of their exclusive interest in the individual subject, philosophers became obsessed with ethical questions. Earlier, philosophers like Xenophanes and Anaxagoras made bold speculations about the origins and nature of the universe. But philosophers who followed Aristotle showed little interest in cosmogony. This approach narrowed their thought. For no individual who worries too muchabout himselfandwho is unable to losehimself in reflectionsaboutuniverse orin largercauses can produce original ideas. Thus the later Greek thinkers could not produce anything comparable to the all-embracing, great metaphysical systems of Plato and Aristotle.
The post-Aristotelianphilosopherssubordinatedother branches of knowledge such as physics, metaphysics and logic to ethics. These areas merely provided the premises for their moral arguments, and held no intrinsic interest to them. They advocated, as we shall see, extreme and one-sided moral doctrines. Even in the central branch of philosophy or theory of knowledge, they introduced subjectivity. Truth was no longer considered objective and independent of one’s personal desires or aspirations. Truth became an expression of personal opinion: nothing is true or moral in itself but opinion makes it so. In a similar vein, a group of philosophers known as sceptics denied the possibility of acquiring knowledge. This is another instance of one-sided philosophy. For it is one thing to recognise the difficulty of acquiring knowledge. But it is a totally different thing to deny the possibility of any knowledge. The irrationality of philosophical thought of this period is also illustrated in Neo-Platonism, “with its fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons and demi-gods.” In what follows, we shall outline the two famous Post-Aristotelian philosophies, namely Epicureanism and Stoicism.