Relating to or denoting the speculative philosophers active in the ancient Greek world in the 6th and 5th centuries BC (before the time of Socrates), who attempted to find rational explanations for natural phenomena. They included Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Heraclitus.
Example sentencesExamples
- The first group of Presocratic philosophers were from Ionia.
- He re-evaluated the Presocratic philosophers, who had been criticized by Aristotle.
- A just account has to see these Presocratic figures as transitional, with an intellectual impulse to render our world explicable which has much in common with later philosophy and science.