THREE MINUTE PHILOSOPHY is an animated web series designed to explain philosophical ideas in a way that even your Mum can understand them. Each video will explore the ideas of one or two philosophers and their impact on the tradition of thought in approximately three minutes. We're working chronologically here so if you're still holding out for Nietzsche then it's probably wise to defer your degree and take a holiday in Scotland or somewhere.
Two guys who butted heads in really ancient Greece about the nature of time and physical reality. Heraclitus thought that everything was fluid and in constant flux while Parmenides thought the universe was really just a big block of unchanging stuff. They didn't know it yet but they were setting the stage for a much later argument about something called determinism.
These guys tried to figure out how the world worked back in the really old days before Socrates came along and told them how to do it properly.
Pretty much the most influential philosopher of all time. Best friends with Socrates, Plato set forth to shovel words hand over fist into the great thinker's mouth for the rest of his life. His magnum opus was the theory of forms with which he posited that we were all living in a metaphorical cave and true reality was unknown to us because we were all too fat and lazy to turn around. Also had some pretty objectional political beliefs.
Greece during and after Socrates, and before the Romans pushed in and ruined everything. Plato and Aristotle tag-teamed to set the stage for literally all the philosophy that would happen for the next thousand and a half years or so.
Certifiable nutcase, wannabe cult leader, and unknowingly the precursor to the entire history of science until pretty much this day. Empedocles may have thought that he was actually pulling ideas straight out of his butt for attention, but oddly enough he formulated a somewhat workable, if primordial, theory of atomism, forces and even evolution. Spoiler alert he died in a volcano.
Epicurus and Zeno were the competing leaders of the two most influential moral systems of all time, Epicureanism and Stoicism. While Epicurus preached that you should try to be happy with the minimum you need to survive, the Stoics allowed for a little more wiggle room but warned against harboring unrealistic expectations. Neither lives up to the Charlie Sheen recipe for happiness but people lived with what they had at the time.
