![]() ![]() 507 b.c.e.) are quite late, dating to the fifth and ninth centuries c.e., respectively. Unfortunately, it is impossible to reconstruct their thinking in much detail, and clear references attributing the doctrine to Democritus (c. The idea may have begun as an archetypal theme of mythology that the pre-Socratic philosophers reworked into a more systematic form. The most fully developed version of the idea in antiquity was made by Plato (427? –347 b.c.e.), but fragmentary evidence indicates that philosophers before him articulated some version of it. The ideas were commonplace during the Renaissance and early modern times but lost their plausibility when a mechanistic model of the universe became dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These analogies enjoyed a long life, first in the Mediterranean region during antiquity and later throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. Comparisons between society and the human being, as well as society and the universe, were varieties of microcosmic theory. Kosmos at this time meant "order" in a general sense and implied a harmonious, and therefore beautiful, arrangement of parts in any organic system hence it also referred to order in human societies, reflected in good government. These early thinkers viewed the individual human being as a little world ( mikros kosmos ) whoseĬomposition and structure correspond to that of the universe, or great world ( makros kosmos, or megas kosmos ). Microcosm and macrocosm are two aspects of a theory developed by ancient Greek philosophers to describe human beings and their place in the universe. ![]()
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