Well, let me give you a general periodization of
Western philosophy so that you can see where
Hellenistic Philosophy fits into the overall
scheme of Philosophy..
Essentially the term
'Philosophy' is introduced and invented by Greek philosophers.
That's what we take to origin of the field and the study to be from roughly the Fifth
Century BCE. This is a Roman numeral V and this stands for Before the Common Era.
These are negative dates and when I use a capital
Roman numeral like that, it means that
century, 5th century,
499 to 400 BC.
That
period of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, Greco-Roman philosophy lasts about a thousand years. From about the Fifth century
BC to the Fifth century of the Common Era AD.
After that, we have what we call Medieval
Philosophy about another thousand year period from about the Fifth century
AD or CE to the 15th century.
Then Renaissance and early modern philosophy in the 15th century through about the 18th
century.
Finally, modern philosophy - 19th century, 20th century,
the present. We offer courses in all of these periods of
Philosophy, but I'm going to expand this now to talk about a period.
Break down Greek and Roman philosophy into several
periods beginning with an archaic period where we don't really have a philosophy proper yet but that we have what we call 'Wisdom
Traditions'.
This includes even works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, the so called 'Seven Sages',
Lawgivers, people like Solon, etc.
The
earliest people that other Greek philosophers
called Greek
Philosophy. Although they themselves didn't use the term people like Thales,
Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes (and a bunch of other Anax -  people),
Parmenides, and Empedocles, Democritus, etc. This the period of classical Greek philosophy where the term is invented, used and
considered. This
activity centers around Socrates and the Socratic circle. People like Anthisthenes,  Aristippus and so on. Then Plato,
who founds a school of philosophy
called the Academy.
Among the pupils in that school are Aristotle.
It's at the death of Aristotle that we start the Hellenistic age of
Greek philosophy, that's 322 BC. So if you need an exact state we say, it starts
322 BC
and
goes to roughly in the Greek period, the 1st
Century BC. This includes figures like Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynics, the Stoics, Cyrenaics,
Epicurus and other Epicureans, Zeno of Citium, the founder of the School of Stoicism itself.
Pyrrho, the founder of the Skeptical School called
Caronian
Skepticism,
Academic Skepticism, Carneades and so on.
I'll make all these slides available to you. So you don't have to copy out all these names,
dates and so forth.
Then we have another phase of Hellenistic philosophy when this Greek philosophy is absorbed by and
translated into
Roman thought and the Latin
language. Here we have figures like; Lucretius, a didactic epic poet writing about
Epicureanism,
Philodemus, Cicero, Seneca - whose works Cicero and Seneca,
some of whose entire works we will be reading.
Epictetus,
that
Stoic slave I mentioned. Marcus Aurelius, that Stoic Emperor I mentioned, and then people like Plutarch.
Then after the period that this course deals with there is still
more ancient philosophy with; late ancient philosophy
Neo-platonism, Neo-aristotelianism, Neo- pythagoreanism and essentially revival and commentary on the older schools
before we get into the period that you called the medieval philosophy.
