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| | Cultural/Historical Sketch--5th Century Greece |
 | | Early in the 5th Century, Athens, Sparta, and other of the Greek city-states joined together to defeat powerful Persian invaders, a conflict from which Athens emerged as the central political force of the Greek confederacy. |
 | | 5th Century Greek rationalism—a belief that the world was ordered logically by laws of continuity, linear sequence, and causality, and therefore ultimately “knowable”—led to the emergence of new systems of thought that included science, history, mathematics, rational philosophy, and more. |
 | | Thus, in the 6th Century, Democritus proposed the first scientific conceptions of atomic structure and the natural elements; Pythagoras developed the first mathematics based on logical deduction from first principles or axioms. |
| www.selu.edu /Academics/Faculty/jwiemelt/classes/engl230/classical_greece_sketch.htm (1298 words) |
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