How Do You See Ancient Greece In Today's World Essay

How Do You See Ancient Greece In Today's World - Essay Example We must, then, think of Greece as having influenced the West, and also consider that the West has influenced much of the rest of the world: to withhold talk of gods and goddesses for now, it was the Greeks who created today’s world of reason, logic, and understanding, where cause and effect are supreme, in place of a chaotic, mysterious universe, incomprehensible to humankind. We have, however, in early Greece itself, a division fundamental to Western philosophy. Platonists believe the truth is to be searched for in Plato’s well-known â€Å"world of ideas†; the Aristotelians’ belief is that truth must be deduced, induced, or otherwise gleaned from observation of the outside world. In Platos Theory of Creation, as in Timaeus, God creates from his blueprints, called the Forms, for which Matter is the receptacle. This is similar to the Indian conception of God as the masculine force and the Earth as the feminine—which, indeed, gives us one of several links between the Greek conception of the universe and the Oriental. Now here is the poet Heine: â€Å"Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems, but rather two types of human nature, that stand, since time immemorial, in hostile opposition. Across the entire middle ages, to the greatest degree, and up to the present day, this battle was waged†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Heine) Seen in this light, we in the West are all Aristotelians; our marriage to technology proceeds directly from the view that the external world is to supply us with all our truths. Despite all of Aristotle’s classic mistakes, the man and his views live on: we with our machines are the proof. From Aristotle, we turn to a phenomenon called Hippocrates – the first ever physician to have considered medicine as science rather than sorcery. Hippocrates is rightly called the Father of Medicine, believing, as he did, that