Since the modern era, Plato (427-327 BCE) is considered the first philosopher to formulate and provide answers to the great questions of Western culture. The famous Greek philosopher who was a disciple of Socrates (a sophist) had already expressed his point of view on Nature, Man and his Becoming a fairly determined and affirmative tone that long worried philosophers and clergy.
According to Plato and the defenders of his Academy, the fact that certain propositions can not be subjected to experimentation proved that Nature escaped the Man, thus emphasizing the difference between Men and God: How to know the sensible world which always changes, he wondered, whereas true knowledge can only have as objects intelligible forms which as such are not accessible to human beings?
According to Plato, true knowledge, epistemology was the only intelligible form of truth, postulating the existence of a higher level of divine nature. To this philosophical precept was added a scientific difficulty. It remained indeed a problem to conceive rigorously the principle of inertia. If a body at rest remained there by nature, no one could conceive that a thrown body could maintain its speed. The Earth remained fixed in the center of the World, it was a question of common sense. We will have to wait for the genius of Galileo and Newton to partially solve this problem.
The philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a disciple of Plato but he distanced himself from his too abstract and theological philosophy and founded his own school of thought, the Lycée. Very well versed in logic, politics and physics, Aristotle is often described as the greatest genius of antiquity, so much did his erudition embrace all the disciplines of his time. Only conceiving knowledge through experience and the senses (empiricism), it is Aristotle who taught us that we can understand everything by studying its nature and its cause, formulating the four principles of its natural philosophy. : the material, the form, the efficient cause and the final cause.
It was around this time, around 370 AD, that Hypathia of Alexandria was born. Let's stop for a moment on the character because it was one of the most famous women of antiquity and the only intellectual of this time whose history has kept the memory.