Tarnas, R. (1991). The passion of the western mind: Understanding the ideas that have shaped our world view. New York: Ballantine Books.

Pythagoras established his school of thought around 525 BC. He attempted to rationalize scientific observation of the natural world with human spirituality. To the Pythagoreans, the perfection of mathematics and other intricacies of the world such as musical harmony and planetary motion were steps towards a synthesis of the human and world souls.

Meanwhile other Greek philosophers were becoming more circumspect as they moved away from superstitions and mysticism. Soon the Sophists appeared with a brand of sceptical pragmatism.

According to the Sophists such as Protagoras, man was the measure of all things, and his own individual judgments concerning everyday human life should form the basis of his personal beliefs and conduct—not naïve conformity to traditional religion nor indulgence in far-flung abstract speculation. Truth was relative, not absolute . . . The Sophists recognized that each person had his own experience, and therefore his own reality (Tarnas, 1991, p. 27)

Some of the ancient Greeks went so far as to postulate that “a reality could not be said to exist outside of human conjecture” (p. 28). This appears to be the root of current educational theory such as Individual Constructivism and Radical Constructivism in which learners gather existing facts along with their own toolbox of experience and create personal meaning (Smith & Regan, 1999, p. 15).

Socrates is credited with critical reasoning. His technique involved subjecting a topic to a series of questions with the goal of illuminating logical flaws. He criticized the other schools of though for lack of “sound critical method” (p. 36). He began to employ the testing of hypothesis to determine the value of propositions. Hypothesis testing has continues in our scientific communities to this day. Neuman (2003) defines a hypothesis as a “statement from a causal explanation or a proposition that has at least one independent and one dependent variable, but has yet to be empirically tested (p. 536).

Tarnas refers to Plato as having “posited the providential design of divine wisdom” (p. 44).  Plato married rationalism to the earlier ideas of forms or archetypes. He reasoned that the organization of the world resulted from a divine or “transcendent” intelligence. The work of Socrates and Plato paved the way for Aristotle, who would later be revered by early Christians including St. Augustine.