ABSTRACT
Greek philosophy, which is really the first to deserve the name, and which was later linked with physics—although Aristotle was right in designating his predecessors as near relatives of Philomythos—shows in its origin among the Ionian Nature philosophers the naive counterpart to the idealizing tendency which was stretched to its. These early Western thinkers from Thales to Socrates seem to form the transitional stage between the cosmic world view of the ancient East and our natural scientific point of view, and are, therefore, the fore runners of our present-day Western European mentality. By logical deduction Parmenides then arrived at the first criticism of our instrument of knowledge through which we can only recognize appearances, and thus prepared the way for that philosophical separation of “mind and body” which still continues to exist in our scientific thought.
