Ancient Egyptian Philosophy : or a chimaera of the popular significance

Abstract: The thesis investigates a continuously held assumption, within the field of Egyptology, that undertakes to derive classical Hellenic philosophy from a previous philosophical tradition, initiated centuries before in ancient Egypt. The study will proceed with an initial clarification of ancient Greek philosophy, and a brief outline of some topics from its main research fields: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of mind. The essential properties that signifies Greek philosophy, and indeed modern philosophy, will be formalised in a model appropriate for textual analysis. The Egyptian texts, that have been characterized as philosophy by the Egyptologists, will then be analysed, and the concluding result will be compared against the model of philosophy, to ascertain if the selected Egyptian texts can be classified as philosophy, or not.