What Gives these men the right?

Greek Philosophy, Greek Philosophers - All is One and Active (Flux) - Plato - The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

Nietzsche was thinking, I submit, of the whole line of canonical classical Greek philosophers from Thales to Epicurus when he wrote as follows:

"What gives these men the right to be considered philosophers, unlike the other astronomers, geographers and doctors who were active especially in the latter half of the period, was their common assumption that the world possessed some kind of integral unity and determinability which could be understood and explained in rational terms."

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