Plato and the “free tinkers”

Te author of this article considers the reasons for the rise of religious scepticism and free thinking in ancient philosophy in the 5th century BC. Te author proposes that the teaching of Plato was not only a reaction to the views of Anaxagoras, Democritus, the sophists, and the Athenian authors of tragedy on the topic of the gods, but also an atempt to create something like a normative “theology” (in the later sense of this term), which would satisfy the need for social cohesion. It is for this reason that Plato critiques traditional mythology and creates in its stead his own, “correct”, mythology. Te later is complete, describing both the nature of the traditional gods, the structure of the universe, supercosmic essences, history, the creation of man, and religious ethics. In this sense it can be said that Plato, and in his steps Aristotle and the subsequent hellenistic schools of philosophy, played the same role as the Councils in the history of the Christian Church. However, their systems of thought were canonical only within the boundaries of the concrete schools, and did not influence the overall religious spirit of the Ancient World.