ABSTRACT
Aristotle's individual remarks on the ideals of internal and external politics and the various kinds of State again testify to his depth of thought, his experience of life and especially his enormous knowledge of the constitutions and laws of the ancient world. Aristotle could consequently claim that the State came before the individual. Genetically, in space and time, the individual and the family came first: society and the State were formed from them. In their logic, the Stoics' main interest was in the principles of human knowledge. For them human knowledge was essentially a matter of sense-experience. Man was a tabula rasa, and all impressions must come from outside. The Stoic was therefore a 'sensualist'; man possessed no a priori knowledge which would enable him to understand or judge his sense impressions; he was their prey, he had no choice but to reproduce them in his mind. Neo-Platonism gave rise to a number of schools.
