Philosophy - Lecture notes 1,4-5 PDF

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Philosophy POWERPOINT 1 -

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Philosophy literally means the love of wisdom or a friend of wisdom. It was coined by Pythagoras. Metaphysics deals with what things are really like (reality). Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Ethics: moral philosophy. The distinction between right and wrong, and the nature of virtue and character. Investigates what the good life is. Ethics studies is not what is but what ought to be. Political: an extension of ethics. Ethics is how to live the good life. Political is what the nature of a good society is. Aesthetics: investigates what the nature of beauty is. Plato: Beauty participates in the metaphysical realm. Philosophy of History aka Speculative History: does history have a meaning? What’s the direction of human history? Concerns notions of progress, evolution, the structure and if history is moving towards a specific goal. Teleos- goal/end/purpose. Teleology- the study of ends/purpose. The First Philosophers  Philosophical vs Poetic view of the world.  Myth vs Scientific  Homer: world of Gods and Heroes. What the hierarchy looks like in terms of Goddesses. (Illiad and Odyssey)  Hesiod (Theogony) The Presocratics (1ST WAVE)  Did not want to rely on myths but wanted scientific/natural explanations.  Preceded Socrates.  First philosophers were from Miletus (Milesians or Ionians). This was a thriving center of commerce and cosmopolitan ideas. Thales (624-526 BCE)  First presocratic.  Asked what everything was essentially made up of.  Everything is made up of one substance  The Physis (essential stuff)  Thales believed water made everything.  Thales shifted the focus from myth to scientific/ natural explanation about the nature of reality. Anaximander (610-546 BC)  Thales’ student.  Believed Thales was wrong and to concrete.  Needed a more abstract/general answer.  There was a basic substance to the universe called a-peiron. (a: without, perion: form/end/ boundary). Therefore, the substance that connects all the universe is called the boundless.

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 First notion of infinity. Anaximenes (585-528 BC)  Student of Anaximander.  Third and the last of the Milesian philosophers.  Found the Anaximander’s answer too vague and mysterious.  Proposed that the essential material of reality was air.  Air contracts and expands to give form to reality. Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (570-495 BC)  The world has a metaphysical structure which is perfectly organized by mathematical numbers.  Samos around Asia Minor.  Invented the word Philosophy.  Deeply interested in music and as reading harmonies in all of nature.  Harmonies are composed of opposites. Attempts to explain change (2ND WAVE)  Heraclitus (535 – 475 B.C)  From Ephesus  Known as the dark philosopher, or the obscure.  What is the meaning of is? Concerned with that reality is.  Thought the world was made up of fire and constantly changing or in flux.  Change is unity in diversity.  Change is part of the order of divine reason or Logos.  Parmenides (early 5th century B.C) and Zeno (disciple- ibid)  Philosophers from Elea in Southern Italy.  Rejected the notion of change.  Being is one. Only being exists.  Whatever is, simply is, and cannot be another thing, cannot have come into being and cannot have gone out of being.  Non-being does not exist.  Zeno’s Paradoxes  Zeno tried to show that one cannot demonstrate the reality of change, motion, or plurality.  Motion is an illusion.  He came up with four paradoxes. He tries to prove Parmenides right with these four paradoxes of motion.  Achilles (the hare) and the tortoise.  The case of the arrow.  They both need to go through midpoints before reaching their endpoint and that’s why motion is logically impossible.  He says space is infinitely divisible and if so, you could never move.

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Empedocles (490-430 BC) (3RD WAVE)  Thought he was Godlike so he jumped into a crater at Mt. Etna to prove his divinity.

All he left was his shoe. He wrote his philosophy in the form of poetry. His unique contribution was to argue that reality was four indestructible elements that composed reality: earth, water, wind and fire and two essential forces of the universe: love and hate.  He was a pluralist (he thought reality was not one but composed of many elements and forces) vs monists which believe reality is of one.  Love causes elements to attract. Hate causes them to separate. Anaxagoras (500-428 BC)  Born in Asian Minor  First presocratic to travel to Athens and introduced Philosophy  Athens became the intellectual epicenter of the Greek world and had its golden age under the democratic leadership of Pericles, the famous general and statesman.  Pericles protects Anaxagoras from the mob and other anti-intellectual forces in Athens.  Anaxagoras gave materialistic accounts of natural phenomena, and claimed that the sun wasn’t a divine celestial sphere, but a fiery rock.  His philosophical and scientific ideas made him vulnerable to the change or impiety (the act of being impious, or disrespecting or denying the existence of Gods or God.)  He was charged with impiety during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC)  Pericles tried to save him but his political fortunes were reversed as Athenians blamed him for the War.  Anaxagoras fled into exile to Lampsacus, another Greek city-state (polis).  He argued that the nature of reality consisted of the divine mind and matter.  Nous- mind; the active force in the universe that give order, purpose or direction to the universe.  Before the intervention of nous, the world was composed of an undifferentiated blob of matter.  Nous acted to separate and move this mass into something more distinct and into parts.  Unlike Heraclitus, the divine mind or logos in Anaxagoras is separate from the world.  Homoiomereity each part is made up of the same stuff as the whole. Each piece of something contains piece of everything else. Atomists  Last of the Presocratics.  Leucipppus was the founder of the atomist school, and Democritus succeeded him.  For both, reality is only composed of space (vacuum) and atoms.  Space is only a receptacle or a container for the movements and combination of infinitely small particles called atoms.  For Democritus, atoms are indestructible, invisible, many, eternal.  Because they are eternal, have and always will exist in motion.  Atomists had a mechanical conception of nature, where things were explained through the collision of atoms moving through space. Socrates (469-399 BC)  Shifts the focus of philosophy from describing the nature of the universe to asking questions about human beings.   

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Instead of cosmological and metaphysics questions, he asked about human knowledge, ethics, the good life and whether it’s possible to know the truth. Sophists are those who are interested in practical affairs and excelled in matters in rhetoric, law and politics. They taught wisdom for a price, particularly in matters of rhetoric and persuasive speech. Their reputation declined in Athens des to their relativistic and skeptical ideas. They didn’t believe in the truth. They were taught to be atheist. Pythagoras, a famous sophist, argued that man is the measure of all things because everything is relative. Sophists say you can make bad things look good, they could make you famous, rich, smarter etc. Socrates was often accused of being a sophist but he was not because he never changed anyone for their conversations and he cared about truth, not success. He believed in truth and with that, he was allowed to argue with people. He knew that he did not know everything. Socrates was confused with being a sophist in Aristophanes’ play, The Clouds. Aristophanes was a rival of Socrates. Socrates was born in Athens around the time of Pericles and at the time of the great Attic dramatists. Most of our knowledge of Socrates comes from Plato. Socrates is typically the leading character in Plato’s dialogues (the Apology, Republic, the Symposium) Socrates is found discussion what the meaning of a particular concept is in these dialogues. E.g. He askes about piety, friendship, courage, beauty and justice.

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Plato (429-347 BC) Plato’s Dialogues  Early: ti esti or what is..?  Socrates trial and death. (the Apology)  Middle: beauty and justice (the Republic).  Late: Epistemology/metaphysics/logic, cosmology, wisdom/ethics, politics, legal constitutions. Socrates divine mission  He claims that he had a daemon (a good or benevolent spirit) that spoke to him and told him what to do.  During his trial in the Apology, Socrates recounts what the Delphic Oracle told his friend Chaerephon: that no man was wiser than Socrates himself.  Socrates decided to see if the oracle was right, and tried to look for men that were wiser than himself. This was his divine mission.  After speaking to all the so-called experts in Greece, he concluded that while he know nothing, those who pretended to know everything, was worse off than him since he admitted his ignorance to himself. Excursus on Irony

Dissimulation Tragic (Dramatic) Irony The spectators know something the characters don’t. When we are the actors, we have the irony of fate.  Verbal Irony  When the words you say literally mean something different from what you intend.  Socratic Irony  In earlier dialogues, Socrates encounters people who claim to be experts in everything. He then confesses complete ignorance on the subject, and asks them to teach him what they know. Through questions Socrates discovers that they too know nothing.  The irony lies in Socrates manner of accepting the expert’s word. Example, the Euthyphro dialogue.  Euthyphro claims to be an expert on matters of religion and piety, while Socrates says he knows nothing about the meaning of piety. Socrates’ Trial and Death  When Athens was secure under Pericles, Socrates could pursue his career as a gadfly in relative peace, and purse his divine mission to question his fellow citizens.  After the defeats of Athens by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, the Government of the thirty was installed to rule Athens.  The thirty was a violent oligarchy that killed many of the Pericles’ supporters.  Socrates was associated with two members of the oligarchy: Critias and Charmides. He was also friends with Alcibiades, a famous Athenian commander who defected from the Athenian side to the Spartans.  After the 30 was overthrown, the democracy restored, Socrates was considered suspect through the associations with the thirty tyrants and with Alcibiades.  Socrates irritating habits of questioning authority and his bad associations, led him to being charged with impiety and corrupting the young.  The charge of impiety, was not just for not worshiping the gods whom the state worships but introducing new and unfamiliar religious practices.   

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