The philosophy of the Pre-Socratics can be viewed as one big intellectual conversation. We can see the historical development of their ideas and a kind of progress in their thinking over time if we consider them in (more or less) chronological order. A pattern was thus developed as each generation of students carefully examined and criticized the ideas of their teachers, as well as the rivals of their teachers. Ever since the Pre-Socratics, philosophers have thought about the ideas of their predecessors and tried to perfect or disprove them.