A History of Ancient Philosophy

Ancient philosophy—the philosophy of ancient Greeks and ancient Romans—began in the 6th century BCE in Greece and lasted until the 6th century CE (when Emperor Justinian closed, in 529, the last Greek philosophical school, the Platonic Academy).

Thus, ancient philosophy existed for about 1,200 years. However, it is impossible to define it only by territorial and chronological terms. The most important question is the question of the {essence} of ancient philosophy.

According to the doctrine that the process of historical development is the replacement of socio-economic formations, and that a formation is «a society that is {at a certain stage of historical development}, a society with a distinctive {character}» (1), and to study how thought functions in the era of ancient culture, it is necessary to understand what is a communal-tribal formation and what is a slave-owning formation. Ancient philosophy in the 6th century BCE is precisely born together with the slave-owning formation, but the communal-tribal formation never disappeared entirely in antiquity, and in the last century of its existence it turned out to be even a direct restoration of precisely communal-tribal worldview. The persistence of communal-tribal elements throughout the entire millennium of ancient slave-owning society makes a striking impression. Therefore, the pre-philosophical foundation of ancient philosophy—manifesting itself as a communal-tribal and slave-owning formation—must be taken into account first of all.