Greek Materialism

These new thinkers still had their roots in stable agricultural civilisations. However at the same time in the dynamic mercantile settlements on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek philosophers were providing an entirely new materialistic and reductionist explanations of the phenomenal world, which they called “Natura”, stripped of magical and religious dynamics. This early stage of the Greek revolution in consciousness had little interest in transcendental reality though it shared with the others the characteristics of universalism and individual agency. A few decades later this secular interpretation of the world matured into major schools of philosophy in Athens. The subtle Stoic metaphysics which, through Pneuma, united all aspects of the universe into an organic whole was however politically repressed and replaced by the rival dualism of Platonic Idealism emphasising the untrustworthy nature of subjective reality and Aristotelian phenomenalism which emphasised trustworthy observation of objective reality. This became the foundation of the modern Dualistic cosmology of Science. Non-reductionist values based on divinely-inspired written codes and those based on process were gradually undermined by this materialistic ideology.