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Philosophia, as the ancient Greeks imagined it, was an exploration of all things, the whole cosmos, by a person who loved wisdom and wished to live a life in which that philia was uninhibited by any lack of internal psychophysical balance (harmonia) or any external oppression. Philosophia always included a therapeutics to resolve any internal imbalance—“moderation in all things” was a common prescription—and to overcome external obstacles, particularly obstacles to political freedom. For example, among the earliest Greek philosophers who left written texts were the followers of a doctor, Hippocrates of Cos, whose therapeutics included dream interpretation to diagnose imbalances, exercise, a dietary regime to adjust the body's four humors, and dramas (tragic and comic) performed at their spas to purge extreme disbalancing emotions and teach lessons in preventing tyranny in family life and in the political realm. Hippocrates' moral wisdom was very succinct; it consisted of the imperative “Do no harm.”
Aristotle seems to have been the first philosopher to make an orderly catalogue of all the areas of exploration the philosopher should take up, viewing each area as a microcosm of the macrocosmic “all things,” and viewing each area as an instance of the principle he thought universal: that all things evolve or mature from potentiality to actuality, from simpler to more complex (but also more orderly) forms. At his school, the Lyceum, Aristotle lectured on all the types of study he had catalogued, from metaphysics through practical philosophy—ethics, politics, rhetoric—and on to particular sciences. He ranged over all the areas we associate with the natural sciences (displaying intense love for biology and zoology), the social sciences, and the humanities. The Greek philosophers thought of their own minds-and-bodies and all they studied around them as microcosmoi through which they could explore the macrocosmos, which was, to