Primers

The history of ideas, starting with the first people to ask what everything is made of.

Start here 01 The Presocratics, then read in order.

1. 01
   The Presocratics

   The first Greek philosophers, from Thales to the atomists, the two questions they kept asking (what is everything made of, and how can anything change), and how each answer set up the next.

2. 02
   The Sophists and Socrates

   How philosophy turned from nature to people in 5th-century Athens, the paid teachers of argument who said truth depends on who's judging, and the man who spent his life asking people what they meant by "good."

3. 03
   Plato

   Socrates' student, the writer who turned him into a character so nobody would forget him, his best-known ideas (the ladder of love, the allegory of the cave, and the world of Forms), and the ideal city of the Republic, with philosopher kings at the top and tyranny at the bottom.