In fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greece, especially Athens, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle developed systematic enquiry into ethics, politics, metaphysics and logic. Socrates pioneered argument by questioning; Plato founded the Academy and in works such as the Republic imagined an ideal, justly ordered polis; and Aristotle, his pupil, examined actual constitutions in the Politics and argued that humans are by nature political animals who flourish in the city. Their writings established methods of reasoning and a body of concepts that long outlasted the classical city-states. Aristotle also laid foundations for the empirical study of the natural world.
They founded the Western philosophical and scientific tradition and supplied an enduring vocabulary for thinking about the city as a political community and about the good ordering of collective life.