Publisher's Synopsis
An Overview on the Conceptions of Man from the Early Greek Philosophy Up To the Enlightenment Man is a peculiar and many sided being. Similarly with all other beings of nature, he has a physical body composed of the basic essence which grows decays and interact with other processes. In addition, like animals, man's body is animated by a moving principle that sustains and reproduces itself. He is also endowed with sensory organs which enable him to direct his acts by cognizance of the external phenomena along with his own pleasure and pain. Man also possesses freedom which enables him to be the master of his own life by deliberation and choice. The very uniqueness of man also lays on his ability to examine and question about himself and the surrounding environment. In fact, human nature can be analyzed and portrayed through various ways in different perspectives. For instance, the biological view of man presents him as a living being and regards him as the last stage of a protracted planetary evolution; religious view of man describes him in terms of a relation to eternal and transcendental spirit; astronomical view of man considers him as a tiny physical body in the vast encompassing space of the galactic universe and alike. As a matter of fact, most of these views were originated from the Greeks. The greatest Hellenic philosophers forwarded several conceptions of man to the last detail. This is their distinctive contribution to the history of western philosophy and to the world of anthropology. At this point, the subsequent parts of this chapter provide an overview on the chronological development in which man began to emancipate from the collective self-understanding to valuing and examining the individual self regardless of any hegemonic social context. In so doing, it provides an overview on how philosophers from the early Greek philosophy up to the enlightenment conceptualized man from the individual and the totality. In addition, it explores the shift made from dealing with cosmological issues to the matters in human life.
