Introduction
The word for nature in Greek is physis. It means that into which things grow; it’s a process. The character one possesses is his growth becoming. This is why we might say that someone with poor character is unbecoming. Aristotle referred to the first philosophers as those who discuss our nature. This is meant to be an allusion to the thinkers’ ability to step away from the religious ideology of the day. Prior to the great classical philosophers, the common person did all he could to appease the god, but his primary interest was to avoid persecution from religious zealots.
The Homeric period of great warriors is known as the Heroic age. This was the time of the wily Odysseus and his fateful adventures. It was followed by the Archaic period, and then the by the Classical Period. After these was the Hellenistic period launched by the audacious Alexander the Great. Young Alexander was fortunate to have the imminent Aristotle as his tutor. The Greek tragedies still bear important messages. I think it’s no coincidence that the period of Classical philosophic development occurred between the Persian wars and the death of Alexander.
Amid the feuding, it was discerned by these great minds that laws (nomos), such as those the religious zealots wished to uphold, and nature (physis) fit into two distinct categories. The basic idea is that nature presupposes any human conventions. This includes the stern ritual upkeep of myths at the detriment of man. Another interesting fact is that this period of great reflection coincides with the emergence of Buddhism in India. Both the Greeks and Indians arrived at very similar views independently, but at the same time in history.
The significance, of course, is that we’re beginning to narrow in on the truth of our own human existence. We’re starting to not only ask the big questions, but to be okay with questioning in general. Plato said philosophy begins in wonder. This quote is attributed to Socrates, his teacher, in his dialogue Theaetetus. It is an inquiry into the nature of knowledge. The conversation ends with the announcement by Socrates that he’s going to court to face criminal charges. In fact, Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth.
Questioning the authority of the gods was a most serious offense. It was one Plato made sure not to repeat. He omitted himself from all of his writings. This was an intelligent move. Self-preservation is nothing to be balked at. Even though Plato’s theory of the forms was something his student, Aristotle, couldn’t support in the long run, his contributions to philosophy are undeniable. He got us thinking. Philosophy is an open invitation to explore the world of our ideas, and to make sense of our lives. Even Sigmund Freud draws heavily on Plato for his psychological model.
Philosophy can teach us a lot about ourselves. It’s part divine and part absurd, depending which philosopher you ask. I’ve taught philosophy, and I’ve practiced it. I really enjoy them both. There is a quote that floats around college campuses: those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. This is actually an unfortunate play on a quote by Aristotle who I consider to be perhaps the most formidable thinker in history. He said, “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach. I encourage you to know more about yourself, and if life permits, pass on your valuable lessons. Do it in song. Do it through research. Doodle. It’s beautiful, and it’s meant to be shared.
Origin Story
In logic, the three mental acts are understanding, judging, and reasoning. Are you judgmental? If so, you might be a natural philosopher. We will learn how two ideas create an argument which is either valid or invalid, based on the premises provided. Philosophy empowers us to challenge weak assumptions. In studying philosophy, we will look not only at the historical context, but the actual practice of philosophy such as Socratic dialogue to solve an issue or argue a point of view.
Philosophy asks the big questions like How do you define who you are? How do you grasp where you came from? Do we come from a form, a predetermined idea? Are there limitations to our free will? Do we have a social responsibility to care for others? Where does the world come from? How do we know what is ‘good’? Is curiosity a helpful or a harmful psychological force? Could anything have always existed? Do we have obligations to preserve familial relationships? Is evil real?
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Philosophy was a completely new way of thinking developed by the Greeks. A philosopher’s search for truth resembles a detective story or myth. “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher” (Plato, Theaetetus). Certain philosophers view virtues as embodied dispositions to act toward the good which over time becomes a habit. These habits are not innate but must be acquired from education and experience.
Until that time, people found answers to their questions in religion. These religious explanations were handed down in the form of myths. A myth is a story about the gods which explains man and his place in the world including the narratives of Homer and Hesiod. Myths provided reasons for the rain, agricultural and hunting tactics, and the movement of the sun across the sky by attributing natural phenomena to supernatural entities. Myths conveyed the importance of fertility, valuable rites of passage, and offerings.
Western philosophy appears to have originated along a wealthy seaport near modern day Turkey. The earliest Greek philosophers are referred to as the natural philosophers because they were primarily concerned with the natural world and its processes. Ancient Greeks marveled at life in all of its manifestations. They were also consumed with the idea of a basic substance from which everything is made. The natural philosophers saw that nature was in a constant state of transformation. They wondered how these changes occurred.
These earliest philosophers shared the belief that there had to be a certain basic substance at the root of all change. They thought this basic substance is hidden cause of all changes in nature since there had to be something that all things came from and returned to. These philosophers were looking for the underlying laws of nature. They wanted to understand what was happening around them without having to turn to the ancient myths. They accomplished this by studying nature itself.
Slowly, philosophy began to liberate itself from religion. The natural philosophers took the first step in the direction of scientific reasoning. We only have fragments of what the natural philosophers said and wrote. The first philosophy project we will examine is the question or problem of a basic constituent substance and the changes in nature. Our journey beings with Thales.
Thales
The first philosopher, Thales, came from Miletus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor. He has traveled to many countries including Egypt where it is said that he calculated the height of a pyramid. He also predicted a solar eclipse.
Thales thought the source of all things was water. He said, “All things are full of gods.” He was objective, and concerned about the problem of change. “The many relate to the one,” which, for him, was water. Thales alsosaid, “The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.”
It is likely that he observed how the crops began to grow as soon as the floods of the Nile receded from the land in the Nile Delta during his travels in Egypt. It is also likely that he was aware of that fact that water can be ice or vapor before returning to water again.
One can only surmise that Thales associated water with life. He noticed that frogs and worms appeared wherever it had just been raining. He saw a majesty of flowers and crops spring forth from the earth. Thales imagined soil was teeming with “life-germs” which is similar to our idea that bacteria performs important services including water dynamics, nutrient cycling, and disease suppression.
Anaximander
A student of Thales, Anaximander thought that our world was only one of a myriad of worlds that evolve and dissolve in something he called the boundless. His work influenced Pythagoras among other philosophers.
Anaximander thought the substance out of which all things are made had to be something other than the things created; the basic stuff things were made of and returned to could not be as ordinary as water, he proposed.
He was an early proponent of science, and is sometimes considered to be the first true scientist, and to have conducted the earliest recorded scientific experiment. He is often considered the founder of astronomy, and he tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe and its origins.
He suggested the basic stuff was the “indeterminate boundless.” He came up with “eternal motion.” He thought things were specific and finite.
Anaximander thought the universe originates in the separation of opposites in this primordial matter, and dying things are merely returning to the boundless element from which they came. He saw the universe as a kind of organism.
Anaximenes
There was another philosopher from Miletus who was a student of Anaximader. His name was Anaximenes. He thought the basic stuff was air. He reasoned that water was condensed air 2,600 years ago.
Anaximenes was the first Greek to distinguish clearly between planets and stars, and he used his principles to account for various natural phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, rainbows, and earthquakes.
He observed that when it rains, water is pressed from the air. When water is pressed even more, it becomes earth, or so he thought.
He also thought that fire was rarefied air, and he developed the ideas of condensation and rarefaction—changes in quality lead to changes in quantity.
According to Anaximenes, earth, air, and fire were all necessary to the creation of life, but that the source of all things was vapor.
Like Thales, Anaximenes thought an underlying substance was the source of all natural change.
Parmenides
The Eleatics were a group of philosophers in southern Italy around 500 B.C. Among them was Parmenides. He thought that everything had always existed, and that the world was everlasting.
This worldview was familiar to the ancient Greeks. They assumed that everything in existence had always been as fixtures of the landscape. Furthermore, Parmenides thought that nothing could become anything other than it was.
“Nothing comes from nothing,” was his basic argument. Since nothing can become nothing, he deduced that change must be an illusion. Change created contradiction.
In denying the reality or even the possibility of change as part of his philosophy, Parmenides presented a turning point in the history of Western Philosophy, and sparked a philosophical challenge that determined the course of inquiries of subsequent philosophers.
He was held in high esteem by his fellow citizens for his excellent legislation, to which they ascribed the prosperity and wealth of the town, and it is suggested that he had written the laws of the city of Elea. He was also admired for his exemplary life, i.e. a “Parmenidean life.”
Parmenides realized nature is in a constant state of flux. He chose to trust his reason over his senses. He was a rationalist; reason was the primary source for his knowledge. For Parmenides:
1) Being is absolute; there is only one kind of being
2) Every change involves a “coming-to-be”
3) Everything that comes to be much come-to-be out of being or non-being
4) It cannot come from non-being (nothing comes from nothing)
5) It cannot come from being, for in that case, it already was
6) Therefore, change is impossible
7) Since change is impossible, it must be an illusion
He said, “All that is left to say about reality is ’It is.’”
1) There are no empty spaces
2) There is no difference
Heraclitus
Heraclitus argued that there was an objective truth about everything, an underlying current flowing across a time, and on to the next one which he called logos.
He was opposed to the naïve belief prevalent in his own time that knowledge comes from sensory experience, and pleaded that men come to discover the ‘depth of the soul’s own logos.’
He said, “If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not recognize it when it arrives.”
Heraclitus is also well known for saying, “You cannot step into the same river twice,” and he also said, “All things are in flux.” He was from Ephesus. He thought constant change, an ebb and flow, was the most basic characteristic of nature.
He held the opposite stance as Parmenides who thought:
1) Nothing can change, and
2) Sense perception is illusion
Heraclitus thought:
Everything changes, and
Sense perceptions are real and reliable
Heraclitus said, “Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.”
He thought that when fire stopped, change stopped, and earth, wind, and water would become static.
He introduced logos, the idea that God’s reason permeates all things which reflects natural law.
Heraclitus was a pantheist which means he thought that logos was everything. “To God, all things are fair and true and right. Fire is its many tensions.”
He used logos for ‘how we reason through the world.’ Logos is the language of the source of everything. Reflecting the conservation of mass and energy, his ‘universal law’ was fire is change.
He said the world is characterized by opposites, i.e. happy vs. sad; good vs. bad. He also believed the most basic stuff was fire, and that change was the central reality. “The world is an ever-living fire.”
Empedocles
In one way, Parmenides and Heraclitus were the direct opposite of each other. Parmenides’s reason made it clear that nothing could change. Heraclut’s sense perceptions made it equally clear that nature was in a state of flux.
Empedocles was from Sicily, and he believed that both Parmenides and Heraclitus were wrong because they assumed the presence of one element. He rejected the single basic substance ideas for a four element natural process.
Empedocles saw earth, air, fire and water as the four basic elements. Fire disintegrates wood to earth. Water vaporized into air. He used love and hate, harmony and discord as the engine for his idea. Love binds things together. Hate tears them apart.
He distinguished between substance and force, like the elements and natural forces. He thought to four elements were combined and separated, only to be combined again. Thales and Anaximenes had pointed out that water and air are essential elements.
Heraclitus, among other Greek thinkers, believed that fire was also an essential element. With the addition of earth, Empedocles referred to these as the four “roots.”
Empedocles also believed the eyes consisted of the four elements as well, such that the earth part of the eye perceived things made of earth, and so on.
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras thought the world was composed of an infinite number of minute particles that are invisible to the eye, and he held that everything can be divided into even smaller parts, much like a hologram or the way a seed or DNA contained the code or blueprint for the construct.
He was very interested in astronomy. He believed all heavenly bodies were made of the same substance as Earth, and that human life on other planets was possible.
He pointed out that our moon has no light of its own; its light comes from the Earth, or so he thought. He also had an explanation for solar eclipses.
Anaxagoras saw the whole in each part. He introduced nous meaning force mind or intelligence. He moved to Athens from Asia Minor, and was accused of atheism and forced to leave; however, he imagined an intelligible order with his idea of nous.
He maintained that the original state of the cosmos was a thorough mixture of all its ingredients, although this mixture was not entirely uniform, and some ingredients are present in higher concentrations than others and varied from place to place.
At some point in time, this primordial mixture was set in motion by the action of nous, and the whirling motion shifted and separated out the ingredients, ultimately producing the cosmos of separate material objects that we perceive today.
Democritus
Democritus, also from the Aegean coast, was the last great natural philosopher. He thought everything was made of tiny, invisible blocks, each being eternal, immutable, and indivisible. Atom translates as “uncuttable.”
His view was mechanistic; he thought mind reduced to matter without any force or soul. He came up with the basic ideas of the void, a partially full receptacle, and atoms, the smallest material bodies.
Democritus believed that nature consisted of an unlimited number and variety of atoms, some round and smooth, others irregular and jagged. And precisely because they were so different, they were able to join together in all kinds of different combinations.
These atoms moved around in space because they had “hooks” and “barbs” so they could form any conceivable figure. Even after death and disintegration, Democritus believed that atoms dispersed to be used again to form new bodies.
He did not believe in any force or soul that could intervene in natural processes. He was a materialist, and he thought that reality consisted solely of atoms and the void. He did not subscribe to the idea of a conscious design. He proposed we had “soul atoms” that formed new souls after we passed, but no immortal souls existed.
Democritus distinguished two types of knowledge: bastard (subjective /sense), and legitimate (by inductive reasoning).
He pursued a type of early Hedonism or Epicureanism. He was one of the earliest thinkers to explicit posit a supreme good or goal, which he called cheerfulness or well-being (Eudaimonia,) and identified with the untroubled enjoyment of life. He saw this as achievable through moderation in the pursuit of pleasure, through distinguishing useful pleasures from harmful ones, and through conforming to conventional morality. He is quoted as saying, “The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.”
Democritus was also a pioneer of mathematics and was among the first to observe that a cone or pyramid has one-third the volume of a cylinder or prism respectively with the same base and height.
He devoted many of the later years of his life to researching the properties of minerals and plants, although we have no record of any conclusions he may have drawn.
He was always cheerful and ready to see the comical side of life, and he was affectionately known as the “Laughing Philosopher” (although some writers maintain that he laughed at the foolishness of other people and was also known as “The Mocker”).
His knowledge of natural phenomena (such as diagnosing illnesses and predicting the weather) gave him the reputation of being something of a prophet or soothsayer.
Socrates
Socrates was born in Athens. He was reportedly very ugly, but he has a wife and kids unlike most noteworthy philosophers. The trade-off is that he never wrote down any of his teachings. Most everything we know about him is through his student Plato’s dialogues. He followed the law and what he believed was right.
Socrates said, “The unexamined like is not worth living.” He didn’t lecture; he discussed with dialectics, an ongoing discussion or analysis. He promoted intellectual midwifery, or birthing ideas which came to prominence in response to the skeptic, relative Sophists.
His wisdom came from the fact that he could feign ignorance. He considered himself the gadfly “trying to sting [Athens] into life.” He thought the order behind the things we see is revealed by analysis. Socrates said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” and “Strong minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; weak minds discuss people.”
His moral philosophy was that knowledge is virtue, and he sought to expose the appearance of good, which leads to disappointment, for a true good. He thought the good life came from being temperate, having enough plus a remainder to be generous to others; virtue was interdependent on happiness.
Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock 399 BC for “introducing new gods and corrupting the youth.” Like Jesus, Socrates was a master of discourse, and they both believed they were the mouthpiece for some greater good. They were both sentenced to death for challenging the accepted political ideas of the day.
“Know thyself” was inscribed over the entrance of the temple at Delphi. Socrates was known as both the wisest mortal and the buffoon of Athens because he knew that he “knew nothing.” His ideas went on to influence politics and democracy, economy and history, ethics and psychology, theory and method.
Plato
Plato formed the first university, the Academy, in Athens. He founded epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and asked if man had an immortal soul. Plato’s first work, Apology, is an account of Socrates’s plea to a large jury. The death of Socrates exposed the conflict between society as it really is and the ideal society.
Plato was concerned with the eternal and immutable in both nature and in regards to morals and society. He thought everything that belong to the material world dissolved, and everything is made after a timeless “form” that is eternal and immutable. He argued there was a limited number of forms behind everything we see, and called them ideas.
Plato said, “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” Plato also said, “Mankind will never see an end of trouble until… lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power… become lovers of wisdom.”
Plato’s moral theory has three parts: 1) Knowledge is virtue; 2) 3 parts of the soul: Reason that sets goals and builds wisdom, Spirit that drives action and develops courage, and Appetite that desires but makes one temperate; When all three parts of the soul are in harmony and are fulfilling their respective functions, a fourth virtue, justice, is attained. 3) Virtue as fulfillment of function. Plato describes a utopian state with a philosopher king as the ruler over auxiliaries and laborers.
His idea of the divided line is that a world of ideas, an invisible world, is behind the visible material world. He thought we can only have opinions about material things, and only have knowledge of things we understand with our reason. The four modes of thought or levels of knowledge in Plato’s metaphor are: 1) Knowledge;
2) Believing; 3) Thinking; 4) Imaging.
In his allegory of the cave, there are two worlds: the world of light, the intelligible world, and the dark world of the cave, the visible world. People sit with their backs to the mouth of the cave and hands and feet bound. Behind them is a high wall. On the other side, human-like creatures pass by holding up various figures that cast shadows on the back wall of the cave. A cave dweller breaks free, climbs the wall, passes the fire to see colors and clear shapes, flowers and animals that the shadows represented.
Plato thought “forms” were changeless, eternal essences of which the things we see are mere copies. 1) Forms have separate existence; 2) The cause of material objects we see; 3) things participate in or copy the forms. Forms are hierarchically arranged for good. His beliefs were a powerful response to the materialists.
Aristotle
Aristotle was a student of Plato, and was fascinated by change. He was the last great classical philosopher, and was Europe’s first biologist. He was preoccupied with the natural process. He and his students compiled 170 titles. He attended Plato’s Academy for 20 years before starting his own university, the Lyceum.
Aristotle argued that Plato’s forms didn’t exist since it was a concept formed after seeing the material object. He thought the object and its form were inseparable, like body and soul. He argued that we perceive with our senses particulars about the object.
Our reason is empty until we sense something so man has no innate ideas. He referred to the form as an “accident” meaning its quality, and called what’s left when the form dies the substance. Substance contains potentiality to realize a specific form, that which is gained. Substance exists independently; form is dependent on the substance.
Aristotle pioneered the science of physics. He broke change down to being-in-act, meaning fully actualized being, and being-in-potency, meaning potential being. He achieved this with a 3-part model: 1) Privation is the lack of property; 2) Form is what is gained, its property;
3) Matter is potentiality.
His four causes are a central philosophy idea. 1) Formal cause is the substantial form; 2) Material cause is what it’s made of; 3) Efficient cause is how it came to be;
4) Final cause is its function or purposes for being made.
Aristotle founded logic. The basic structure of Aristotelian logic is: 1) Major premise, a general statement which needs to be understood or defined; 2) Minor premise, a particular which is judged as true or false; 3) Conclusion, the reason that leads the argument which is valid or invalid.
Aristotle departure from Plato is articulated in the saying, “Lest the Athenians sin twice against Philosophy.” He also tutored Alexander the Great.
Aristotle’s grades of life begins at the vegetative level. In this level, the primary facets are: 1) Nutrition;
2) Growth; 3) Reproduction. The next level in nature’s scale is the sensitive. This level deals with: 1) Sensation; 2) Sense appetites; 3) Locomotion. The third and final level of existence for Aristotle is the rational which concerns: 1) Intellect; 2) Will.
Life, he concluded, works from the substantial toward the idea of perfection, simplicity, and being as rest. He characterized this emotional state as happiness, the very driver of a fully actualized society. Aristotle said, “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”
Aristotle’s political view was that man is a political animal by his very nature. He thought the three good forms of government were: 1) Monarchy which is at risk of becoming a tyranny; 2) Aristocracy which risks becoming an oligarchy; 3) Democracy/Polity which can breakdown to a frantic and irrational mob rule or anarchy.
Aristotle also developed a system of thought on ethics. He believed in a soul, and asked how we as a society can achieve “human flourishing.” He thought everything we do aimed at some good or end, telos.
Like his logic, Aristotle’s ethical system was built on three parts: 1) Humans as we would be if we fulfilled our potential; 2) Humans as we are now;
3) How to get from scenario (2) to scenario (1).
His ethical system was achieved by either instrumental means or intrinsic ones. Instrumental or extrinsic goods are a means to an end or goal toward something further. An intrinsic motivation, like an ideal, is a final good or an end-in-itself. The intrinsic goal, for man, is happiness.
Aristotle’s rule for navigating ethics dilemmas was to operate with the golden mean or average of excess or deficiency. For Aristotle, virtue was a disposition one chose to adopt and refine; it was the average between two extremes. Virtue is also: 1) Relative to the individual; 2) What a wise person would choose to do.
Diogenes
The natural philosophers including the great classical thinkers, Socrates. Plato and Aristotle set the foundation for European philosophy. Socrates is a powerful example of a person who managed to free himself from the prevailing views of his time by virtue of his intellect.
Athens lost its dominant role around the time Aristotle died, largely due to the political upheaval resulting from the conquests of Alexander the Great. The empire the king build carried with it Greek culture and language. This period lasted about 300 years. Hellenism refers to this period of time.
Soon after, Rome, which had been a Greek colony expanding, sharing their culture and the Latin language. Late Antiquity was generally characterized by religious doubts, cultural dissolution, and pessimism. It was said that “the world has grown old.”
The three great Athenian philosophers were a source of great inspiration to a number of ideas including ethics, and the pursuit of a life well-lived.
Alexandria became the new center for science with an extensive library filled with works on mathematics, astronomy, biology, and medicine.
Antisthenes was a student of Socrates. He emphasized that true happiness is not found in material luxury or external gratification. He argued that true happiness lies in not being dependent on frivolous belongings.
The best known Cynic is Diogenes, Antisthenes’s student. He lived out of a barrel and owned nothing besides a cloak, stick, and bread. Cicero, another Cynic, formed the concept of “humanism.”
The Cynics believed that people did not need to be concerned about their health. They considered the concern of sickness and death to be an additional burden to shoulder.
Today, this ideology is known as cynicism. Being cynical generally implies insensitivity or empathy for the concerns of others. The Cynics were instrumental in the development of Stoic philosophy.
Epictetus
Zeno joined the Cynics in Athens after being shipwrecked and went on to establish the Stoic school of thought. Stoicism went on to have great significance for the Roman Empire.
The Stoics considered the human laws as incomplete imitations of natural law, rules embedded in nature. They discard the conflict between spirit and matter for a singular idea called monism.
Roman philosopher and teacher of stoicism, Epictetus said, “No man is free who is not master of himself.”
Epictetus was born a slave and was crippled from repeated torture. Through philosophy, however, he enjoyed greater freedom of mind than most. Epictetus admonished refraining from attachment to things beyond your full control. Epictetus said, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you reach to it that matters, and “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
Epictetus also said, “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Epictetus said, “You became what you give your attention to… If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.”Tutor of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus admonished we keep away from sensual pleasure altogether, but also cautioned against allowing our aversions to have power over us.
Aurelius
The most notable Stoic philosopher is the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He thought we created our own good fortune by maintaining a favorable disposition, and imbuing our lives with positive emotions rather than negative ones.
Aurelius is almost the prototypical philosopher. He is Plato’s philosopher king embodied. He said, “Even in a palace it is possible to live well,” as if he was wholly indifferent to worldly pleasures and human pains. “
As far as the Stoics, Aurelius is difficult to ignore. His Meditations is revealing of that fact that he was practicing the ideas he proselytized. Marcus Aurelius said, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find your strength.” He also said, “Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.”
He urged us to examine our own “ruling faculty” and questions the validity of our emotional reasoning. Aurelius thought that we exist for the sake of one another, and it was better to teach someone than quarrel with them.
Epicurus
Aristippus was a student of Socrates. He believed that the aim of life was to attain the greatest possible sense pleasure. He wished to create a way of life whose aim was to avoid all forms of pain, as opposed to the Stoics who believed in enduring all forms of pain.
A student of Aristippus, Epicurus, developed his teacher’s pleasure ethics and combined it with the atom theory of Democritus.
Epicurus believed that a pleasurable result in the short term mist be weighed against the possibility of a greater, more lasting, or more intense pleasure in the long term.
His ideas were not limited to sensual pleasure. He thought that friendship and art appreciation were of great value.
Epicurus’s four medicinal herbs were: 1) The gods are not to be fears; 2) Death is nothing to worry about; 3) Good is easy to attain; 4) The fearful is easy to endure.
He taught that contemplation was a greater tool for living than hedonistic tendencies, yet his philosophy continues to be confused to hedonism based on his famous rallying cry, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
Epicurus found that philosophy provided of remedies for diseases of the mind, and was, therefore, the medicine of the mind. He thought philosophy could act as a practical guide to life.
Though he was opposed to the Hedonists of his time, his ethics are understood as hedonistic compared to Western values today. He was the main opponent of Stoicism and put emphasis on pleasure, not as mindless hedonism, but as reasonable indulgence in the good things in life. He valued intellectual pleasure and recommended the cultivation of friendship.
Epicurus does not deny the gods; he disregards them as beyond our power and therefore beyond our concern. He thought we had no other recourse than to retreat into the citadel.
He thought that we should all be enjoying ourselves as it is absurd to postpone enjoyment. He said, “We spend our lives in waiting and we are all condemned to die.”
Plontinus
Plontinus spearheaded the later end of the Hellenism period. It is referred to as Neoplatonism. Plontinuswas from Alexandria, and he brought with him to Rome the doctrine of salvation that was to compete with Christianity.
Plontinus was familiar with ideas similar to those professor by Plato and prior Greek thinkers, that of the division between the sensory world and the world of ideas, i.e. body and soul, which originated from Asia.
He believed the world is a span between two poles. At one end is the divine light which he calls the one, or God. At the other end is absolute darkness which receives none of the light from the one.
His objective with this argument was to show that darkness has no existence; it is simply the absence of light. He thought the soul was illuminated —“a spark from the fire”—and that forms in nature also have a faint glow of this light.
Plontinus used the metaphor of a great burning fire to explain his position. A fire burns in the night from which sparks fly in all directions. A wide radius of light from the bonfire turns night into day in the area immediately surround it, but the glow from the fire is even visible from a vast distance.
From an even greater distance, the fire would appear as a speck of light. At some point, the light would no longer be visible, and consequently so, shapes and shadows vanish. Plontinus’sidea is characterized by an experience of wholeness.
Their school of thought adopted these tenets:
1) Our goal is happiness, but it is not attainable in this life.
2) We seek happiness because we are incomplete.
3) Because we’re incomplete, we inevitably love.
4) The problem is how we love.
5) We employ disordered love.
6) We have an infinite spiritual need.
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth collected a small following from his spiritual teachings. He called himself the “son of man,” but he proclaimed a message of redemption.
The Romans took notice of the buzz that surrounded him despite the fact that his ideas were concerned with character development, not political revolution.
Jesus put human law in the context of natural law, and placed natural law within the context of eternal law, timeless universal rational orderliness, and divine law, that which is revealed as God’s design.
In the Christian tradition, Jesus died for our sins so that we can live with Him in the Kingdom of Heaven. With its ethos of grace, charity, and forgiveness, Christianity has become an everyday part of life for hundreds of millions of people.
Man also feels guilt when he does wrong and pleasure when acts virtuously. Therefore, he feels responsible to someone, namely God. To this extent, we are wayfarers; we are all trying to find our way back to God. The Beatific Vision is unique for every wayfarer.
Natural law is an internal moral compass. It is also said to be the set of instructions written on our hearts. In natural law, there is an absolute right.
Natural law is the participation of reasoning creatures in eternal law. Logic informs us that we have an opportunity to embrace the divine through human law.
By aligning the intellect and will, we evolved beyond our current state. Our moral evolution doesn’t require further divine intervention. We need only embrace the law of the land—the natural universal order of things inscribed on our very hearts.
Natural law supplies an absolute moral right. It squares with that which is eternal and fortifies a moral position beyond seeking perfection in this temporal realm alone.
Augustine
Augustine examined several religions before settling on Christianity. He traveled to Rome and Milan before moving to Hippo. For a time, he was a Manichaean, a sect from late Antiquity that was half religion and half philosophy. According to the Manicheans, our world is dualistic, i.e. good and evil, light and darkness. With his spirit, man could rise above matter and prepare his soul for salvation.
This sharp distinction between good and evil was problematic for Augustine who had also been influenced by the Stoics, and according to the Stoics, there was no sharp distinction between good and evil. Augustine’s idea of Christianity is largely impacted by Plato’s ideas. For him, the similarities between Plato and the Christian doctrine were so apparent that he thought Plato must have known the Old Testament which is highly probably.
He is best known for Confessions and City of God, and invented the doctrine of original sin. He thought that Aristotle’s works were the best in describing human reason and saw that the triumphs of philosophic reason could be transformed and transcended by faith without negating them. He commended Aristotle for speaking on happiness as the goal, but he also showed that the ancient Greeks were ultimately ineffective in charting a course to achieve it.
Augustine recognized that philosophy could be used to make the Christian faith intelligible to those who were not Christian.
He recognized that the temporal and spiritual realms often intersect in daily life. Augustine saw the deficiency and pride in Aristotle’s claim to self-sufficiency while remaining respectful of the philosophical achievements. He did this by viewing it as a part of the revealed teachings of faith.
Augustine boiled man’s existential dilemma down to choosing between the goods that Aristotle offered and the promises of Heaven. His solution to the problem of human goodness was that it required faith.
Human reason alone, he thought, could not grasp the subtle dimensions of the Christian doctrine. Augustine brought the larger whole of philosophic reason into sharper focus. He spoke of Christian values in terms of their supernatural foundations in charity.
He believed Christianity demanded rigorous civil contribution and positive relations. He positioned the City of God as the highest order, but he acknowledged the value of the earthly city regardless of its temporal nature.
Aquinas
In Thomas Aquinas’s concept of prudence, ethical virtues are the excellence of the appetite—moral desire grounded in thought. Practical knowledge cannot be separated from the concrete action.
Ethics is a practical activity; it cannot persist without the excellence of desire. The moral virtues perfect the appetite, rendering people able to live in harmony with their desires to achieve the best moral good and the highest pleasure.
The moral virtues, which are embodied dispositions to act toward that which is good, require the act of prudence. Prudence sets the proximate ends toward which the moral virtues are properly directed.
Prudence and the moral virtues—justice, fortitude, and temperance—are interdependent. The moral virtues require prudence to specify the goods worth pursuing. These moral virtues cannot exist without prudence, but prudence can also not exist without the moral virtues. These are called the cardinal virtues.
Prudence aims not only at the flourishing of an individual but the flourishing of family and the community.
Aquinas was a prolific writer. He reconciled Greek philosophy and Christianity in a way that Augustine was unable to do. He refined and unpacked the ideas Jesus focused on, namely the theological or supernatural virtues: 1) Faith; 2) Hope; 3) Charity.
Aquinas argues prudence is not innate but must be acquired from education and experience. Prudence requires prior knowledge of proper ends and proper training of the emotions.
The will, according to Aquinas, is the intellectual appetite. A corollary is that the sense appetite is directed by reason. Reason refers to the intellect and the will put together.
Logic informs us that we have an opportunity to embrace the divine through human laws. It still takes the willingness to follow through. Our moral evolution doesn’t require further divine intervention.
He conceived of natural law as a practical guide of moral action. For Aquinas, prudence is an integrative virtue—integrating intellect and will, theory and context, action and agent, reason and emotion. With the reintroduction of Aristotle to the West, Aquinas argued not only that socialization is natural to man, but that it was also necessary for his temporal felicity.
Spinoza
The Renaissance is known for being a period of rich cultural renewal that started in northern Italy but spread rapidly. It was also a revival for art including painting and sculpture. It became fashionable to learn Greek and study the idea of humanism which promoted architecture, music, literature, and philosophy. Leonardo da Vinci was a prominent humanist.
Renaissance humanism is characterized to a greater extent by individualism, the idea that we are not only human, but unique individuals.
This was also an era of invention which gave us the spinning jenny, the refrigerator, and the washing machine, but it also greatly improved methods for agriculture and medicines against new diseases.
During this time, there was tremendous zeal for trying witches, burning heretics, magic and superstition, and religious wars.
In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. He claimed that the sun moved around the earth, and that the earth turns on its own axis. He called this his heliocentric world picture.
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer whose observations showed that the planets move in an elliptical orbit around the sun, and that the farther away the planet is from the sun, the slow it moves.
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was one of the most important scientists of the seventeenth century. He said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. He also formulated the Law of Inertia.
The Renaissance resulted in a new Christian piety developed. It was also the time of the Reformation, a movement started by Martin Luther who argued that it was not from church rituals that we received God’s forgiveness and redemption, but in faith.
He said, “The Scripture alone,” which became his slogan. He translated the Bible into from ancient Greek to German, thereby founding the German written language.
Baruch Spinoza was a Jewish-Dutch philosopher. He is considered one of the great rationalists. He demonstrated ethics his ethics according to geometric order with axioms, self-evident truths.
He thought there was only one substance which he referred to as Dues sive natura, “God and/or Nature.” He denied that there is a final cause, and looked to efficient causes. He thought that nothing happened for a reason.
Spinoza didn’t think God was constrained by any external forces because God is internally compelled. Although people think they’re free, he argued that they are victims of an illusion determined by prior causes.
Leibniz
The church closed Plato’s Academy in 529 AD, the same year the Benedictine order was founded which may have been a way of putting a lid on Greek philosophy. They maintained this dominance of education until Renaissance.
After the Middle East and North Africa were won over by Islam, the Arabs took over Alexandria, and with it, dominance over the sciences such as mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine.
Around 1300 AD, shortly after Aquinas, philosophy and science broke away progressively from the theology of the church. This enabled religious life to attain a freer relationship to reason. Science also continued to develop.
The Baroque is known for being a time of idealism and materialism. Isaac Newton showed that the same laws of motion applied to the whole universe, and that all changes were explained by gravitation and bodies in motion.
A contemporary of Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, independently conceived the ideas of differential and integral calculus. He was a German polymath and philosopher in the history of mathematics. His CharacteristicaUniversalis introduced a language of mathematical logic. It was a forerunner to modern symbolic logic.
He thought there was only one kind of substance which he called monads. Monads are not extended bodies, but rather, they are a force or energy. Monads are “windowless.”
Monads are not affected by the eternal causes.
They have their own internal principle of activity.
He argued there were no efficient causes, just final causes. His ideas were precursors of the contemporary notion of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic means a logical truth while synthetic means it does not result in a contradiction if it is negated.
Descartes
René Descartes was a rationalist; he relied on his reason over religious beliefs or emotional responses. He is perhaps best-known for his philosophical proposition Cogito, ergo sum which usually translates into “I think, therefore I am.”
Like Socrates, he was convinced that certain knowledge was only attainable through reason. Descartes is often considered the father of modern philosophy. He is also considered the father of analytical geometry, and he made important contributions to the science of algebra.
His primary concern was the idea of certain knowledge. He was also greatly preoccupied with the relationship between the mind and body which was also a recurring theme in his Meditations.
Descartes was the first to propose a radical division between the soul and the body since Plato. Descartes said that we cannot accept anything as being true unless we can clearly and distinctly perceive it. Plato said in a similar fashion that what we grasp with our reason is more real than what we grasp with our senses.
Descartes claimed that the idea of a perfect entity could not originate from one who was imperfect; therefore, the idea of a perfect entity must originate in that perfect entity itself.
In order to jump to this conclusion, he has to eliminate the proposition that God is a deceiver or evil genius, or that He does not exist whatsoever.
He considered the idea of God as innate. For Descartes, this meant that God was self-evident. Others, however, argued that his logic was circular.
Descartes countered, explaining that it is just as certain as it is inherent in the idea of a circle—that all points of the circle are equidistant from the center.
Descartes believed there were two substances:
1) Res cogitans, thought or mind;
2) Res extensa, extended, unthinking matter.
This dualistic thinking presents the mind/matter problem which is also present in Plato’s philosophy. He saw the mind can operate independent of the body, and that the body was like a perfect machine.
Locke
John Locke responded to Descartes using Aristotle’s words, “There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses.” Locke admonished Descartes just as Aristotle had rebuked Plato for his extreme realist views.
Locke was an empiricist meaning he believed that all knowledge was derived from the senses. The classic formulation came from Aristotle. This view implied a pointed criticism of Plato who held that man has innate ideas.
Locke was the first contemporary empiricist. George Berkeley and David Hume were too. And they were all British. Locke wanted to know where we get our ideas and whether we can rely on what our senses tell us.
He said that before we perceive anything, the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Locke thought there were two kinds of ideas:
1) Simple ideas such as color or tone;
2) Complex ideas such as harmony or justice.
He thought there were primary and secondary qualities. A primary quality is that which the object really has. A secondary quality is that which has the power to produce in us sensation.
Locke thought there were two kinds of experience:
Sensation, brought about by the senses;
Reflection, metal reflections or recollection.
He thought that knowledge was restricted to ideas, and that all ideas are generated by experience. This was in contrast to Descartes idea of certain knowledge. Yet Locke conceded to the truth of intuitive or “demonstrative” knowledge.
Locke is also an important political philosopher. He believed in the idea of a natural right which are inalienable rights.
He advocated for the separation of powers, much like the system we have adopted in the United States. He also believed in the right to revolution, should the government become detrimental to the social good.
Locke lived in the time of Louis XIV who was notorious for a ruthless power grab. “I am the State,” he exclaimed. Locke was concerned with the way in which laws could protect the nation’s citizens.
Hume
According to David Hume, all knowledge concerns 1) relations of ideas, or 2) matters of fact. – Any claim that is neither an analytic truth (a logically true statement about the relationship between certain ideas) nor a matter of fact (which can be confirmed by direct sense experience) is ultimately nothing but “sophistry and illusion.”
The criticism is this: Hume’s “fork” is itself neither an analytic truth nor a statement about our sense experience. Therefore, if Hume’s theory is right, then his theory is nothing but “sophistry and illusion.” In other words, his theory undercuts itself; it is “self-referentially inconsistent.”
Hume thought that sometimes people use fancy words that sound impressive, but are ultimately meaningless. Hume suggested that whenever we have a suspicion that a word or concept is being used without any meaning, we need “but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion.”
Hume said the mind is “really confined within very narrow limits.” The contents of the mind can all be reduced to the materials given us by the senses and experience, and those materials Hume calls perceptions.
According to Hume, the perceptions of the mind are of two kinds: 1) Ideas such as memories; 2) Impressions, sense experiences and emotions. Hume thought that there is no empirical basis for our idea of causality. He suggested at the idea of causality can be analyzed or broken down into three component ideas. One component is the notion of contiguity between cause and effect (the cause and effect must be close to each other).
Another component is the notion of temporal priority (the cause always precedes its effect). We have sense experience of both of these components, so they have an empirical basis. But contiguity and temporal priority by themselves cannot fully explain our idea of causality. Lots of things happen near each other, one right after the other, that we don’t consider to be related as cause and effect.
Since we have no impression that supports this final component, we have no true knowledge of causality based on Hume’s premise.
Berkeley
George Berkeley was an Irish bishop and philosopher. He felt that popular philosophies, science, and material excess were a threat to the Christian way of life and faith in God.
He thought the world was perceived through the senses, and that it was impossible to know more. He questioned the belief shared by Spinoza, Descartes, Locke that the material world is a reality.
He said the only things that exist are those we perceive. He saw that his predecessors were jumping to the conclusion that what they perceived had its own underlying substance or matter, and that there was no experience on which to base such a claim.
Berkeley believed in a ‘spirit.’ He thought all our ideas have a cause beyond our consciousness, but that this cause is not of a material nature; rather, it is spiritual.
For Berkeley, the soul was the cause of ideas, and only another will or spirit can be the cause of the ideas that make up the ‘corporeal’ world.
He thought everything is due to spirit which is the cause of ‘everything in everything’ and which ‘all things consist in.’
Berkeley said, “Esse est percipi” which means “to be is to be perceived.” For him, what existed was: 1) God (infinite mind); 2) humans (finite mind); 3) ideas of God and humans.
Berkeley argues that Locke’s secondary qualities are only subjective ideas. For example, the color of an object exists only in our minds, not in the object itself.
He goes on to argue that primary qualities are just as subjective as secondary qualities, and that an object is nothing more than the sum of its perceived qualities (all of which are ideas in the mind). Hence to say that an object exists means only that someone is having a certain kind of perception.
When you mentally abstract away all of the qualities of a rose, what’s left? Nothing, according to Berkeley. A rose consists of all the qualities we perceive; it is a complex of sensations, a bundle of perceptions, and nothing more.
Berkeley thought that he was merely following Locke’s theory of knowledge to its logical conclusion. But that’s not correct.
Locke said that a red apple isn’t really red. There is, undeniably, a subjective element to secondary qualities. But he also said that we see red because the apple has the power to produce in us the sensation of redness. He believed that there is an objective basis for our perception of red.
Kant
Immanuel Kant was part of a deeply pious family, and his religious convictions formed a significant background to his philosophy. Like Berkeley, he felt it was essential to preserve the foundations of Christian belief.
He was very familiar with the whole history of philosophy including the rationalists, Descartes and Spinoza, and the empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
He thought the rationalists went too far in their claims as to how much reason can contribute, and he also thought the empiricists placed too much emphasis on sensory experience, though he agreed with the empiricists that all our knowledge of the world comes from sensation.
However, to the credit of the rationalists, he also thought that there certain conditions in the human mind that are contributive to our conception of the world.
Kant claimed that it is not only the mind which conforms to things but things also that conform to the mind which he referred to as the Copernican Revolution in the problem of human knowledge.
Kant’s philosophy states that it is inherent in us. He agreed with Hume that we cannot know with certainty what the world is like ‘in itself.’
His great contribution is the distinction he draws between things in themselves and things as they appear to us.
Kant believed that reason operates beyond the limits of what we humans can comprehend. Since the material of our knowledge comes to us through the senses, it must conform to the attributes of reason.
For Kant, knowledge was:
1) A priori which comes before the experience and is independent of the senses that’s analytic meaning the predicate is contained in the subject; or
2) A posteriori which comes after the experience and is depended on the senses that’s synthetic meanings the joining together of concepts.
Kant also proposed a third type of knowledge: synthetic a priori in which the predicate is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori.
Kant thought there were two realms:
1) Phenomena meaning the world is dependent on human perception;
2) Noumena meaning that world as it really is.
Kant opened up a religious dimension by showing that both reason and experience fall short—a vacuum that can be filled with faith.
He believed that it is essential for morality to presuppose that man has an immortal soul, that God exists, and that man has a free will. He called these practical postulates.
Kant said, “Because I must, I can,” meaning that moral obligation implies freedom. He also said, “Two things fill the mind… the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
He thought that good will was the only thing that was good without qualification, and that the intention to action “from duty” or “for the sake of duty” shows good will, and furthermore, that only actions done “from duty” have moral worth, as opposed to having the inclination to act.
His Categorical Imperative is: act only on that maxim such that you could will it to become a universal law of nature.
Kant said we should “always so act that the will could regard itself at the same time making universal law through its own maxim.
Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel united and developed almost all the ideas that had surfaced in the Romantic period. Hegel was sharply critical of many of the Romantics, particularly Schelling.
Schelling as well as other Romantics had said that the deepest meaning of life lay in the ‘world spirit.’ Hegel also used the term, but meant the sum of human utterance, because only man has a ‘spirit.’
When he speaks of progress throughout history, it is in the context of human life, human thought, and human culture.
Hegel thought that truth was subjective, and rejected the existence of any ‘truth’ above or beyond human reason. He said, “All knowledge is human knowledge.”
He didn’t subscribe to the idea of ‘eternal truths.’ He thought reason was ‘progressive,’ meaning that human knowledge is constantly expanding.
Hegel said reason is dynamic; it’s a process. He thought truth was the same process, since there are no criteria beyond the historical process itself that can determine what is most true and most reasonable.
Hegel’s point is that you cannot detach any philosopher, or any thought at all, from the philosopher’s or that thought’s historical context.
He said history is the story of the ‘world spirit’ gradually coming to consciousness of itself. He saw that humanity is moving toward greater rationality and freedom.
His dialectic process goes: A thought is proposed on the basis of previously proposed thoughts; and as soon as one thought is proposed, it will be contradicted by another. A tension arises between these two opposite ways of thinking, but the tension is resolved by the proposal of a third thought which accommodates the best of both points of view.
He called an extremely contradictory thought a negation. The compromise between two opposing school of thought was the negation of the negation.
He called these three stages of knowledge the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. A synthesis will also be contradicted by a new antithesis.
World spirit becomes conscious of itself in the individual. Hegel calls this subjective spirit. It reaches a higher consciousness in the family, civil society, and the state. Hegel calls this the objective spirit because it appears in interaction between people. The final stage is absolute spirit, the highest form of knowledge, such as art, religion, and philosophy, in which it meets itself.
Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist.
Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes individual existence, freedom and choice. It is the view that we each define our own meaning in life.
Existentialism promotes rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. An existentialist draws his entire existence into his philosophical reflection.
Kierkegaard thought that both the idealism of the Romantics and Hegel’s ‘historicism’ had obscured the individual’s responsibility for his own life.
He thought truth was subjective in the sense that really important truths are personal. He argued that if you content yourself with a proof for the existence of God then you suffer from a loss of faith.
What mattered, for Kierkegaard, is no whether Christianity is true, but whether it was true for the individual. If Christianity had appealed to our reason, it would not be a question of faith.
His three stages of life are: 1) Aesthetic; 2) Ethical; 3) Religious.
Aesthetic refers to living in the moment and grasping every opportunity of enjoyment, but also experiencing angst, a feeling of emptiness, or dread.
He frames angst as a positive because it expresses the existential situation wherein one can elect to make the great leap to a higher stage.
The ethical person considers the effects of his actions and promotes social welfare over personal gain. He doesn’t simply enjoy things for the novelty of it; he makes ethical choices because they employ a higher set of principles.
the religious stage includes the ethical. Whereas living in the ethical sphere involves a commitment to some moral absolute, living in the religious sphere involves a commitment to and relation with the Christian God.
Kierkegaard says it doesn’t help to be on the verge of making the leap if you don’t do it completely. It is a matter of ‘either/or.’
Marx
Karl Marx wrote his Doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus, the materialists of antiquity. Marx is known as a ‘historical materialist.’
Both Marx and Kierkegaard took Hegel’s philosophy in their as their own point of departure. Both were influenced by Hegel’s thought but rejected his idealism.
This marked a significant turning point in the history of philosophy. Instead of speculation, Marx and Kierkegaard promoted philosophies of action.
Marx said, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Marx’s thought had a political agenda as well. Marx was also an economist. Marx thought it was the material factors in society which determined the way we think.
Whereas Hegel thought the ‘world spirit’ or reason drove history forward, Marx wished to show that material changes affected history and created new spiritual relations. For Marx, this included economic forces in society that create change and move history forward.
Marx’s view was that society had lost interest in progress because of the way the economic life of the community was organized. He thought that slave labor had become the basis for production, so the citizen had no need to increase production with practical innovations.
He called these material, economic, and social relations the basis of society. In addition to this basis, Marx argued that society had a superstructure which included political institutions, legal statutes, religions, moral, art, philosophy, and science.
He believed that society’s superstructure is a reflection of the bases of that society, like the roof of the temple is built onto the foundation. Marx said there is an interactive effect of society’s basis on its superstructure.
Because Marx realized there was an interactive or dialectic relation between bases and superstructure, he is considered a dialectical materialist.
Marx’s three levels in the bases of society are: 1) Conditions of Production, the available natural resources; 2) Means of Production, the various types of equipment, tools, and machinery; 3) Production Relations, the division of labor or distribution of work and ownership.
He thought there was a great disparity between the aristocrat or capitalist which he called the bourgeoisie and the citizens who made up the working class, the proletariat.
Darwin
Charles Darwin was a biologist and natural scientist, but he was also the scientist of recent times who has most openly challenged the Biblical view of man’s place in Creation.
His On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Race in the Struggle for Life explained his theory of evolution.
He proposed that all existing vegetable and animal forms were descended from earlier, more primitive forms by way of a biological evolution.
He claimed the impetus for this evolutionary process was ‘natural selection,’ or “survival of the fittest.”
The Biblical doctrine of immutability of all vegetable and animal species was strictly adhered to in both ecclesiastic and scientific circles.
Furthermore, this Christian view was in harmony with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Plato presupposed all animal species were immutable because they were made after forms, and the immutability of animal species was one of the cornerstones of Aristotle’s philosophy.
Darwin was familiar with French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theory that proposed that different species developed the characteristics they needed.
Darwin rejected Lamarck’s idea that the characteristics each individual acquired thought its own efforts are passed on to the next generation.
Instead, Darwin proposed that nature selects the most strong and swift of the bunch for reproduction much like a dog breeder chooses mates with the best traits.
He modeled his natural selection mechanism around a theory from a specialist in population studies, Thomas Malthus. Malthus said mankind’s ability to procreate will always outpace the resources necessary to sustain life, and the weak don’t survive.
The result is that the species best adapted to a particular environment will perpetuate their race.
Darwin also published his theory that humans descended from animals. The Church protested vehemently and the scientific community was sharply divided.
Freud
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna. He specialized in neurology and developed psychoanalysis, a description of the mind as well as a therapy for nervous and mental disorders.
He is credited with discovering human drives. He said there is a constant tension between these drives, or basic human needs, and the demands of society.
Instead of thinking of man as being led solely by his reason, Freud argued that irrational impulses often determine what we think, dream, and do.
These irrational impulses were an expression of basic human needs. He thought these needs were disguised or ‘sublimated,’ thereby steering the actions without our awareness.
He developed a therapy wherein the analyst discovers unhappy experiences that have been repressed many times since childhood. By bringing the trauma into the conscious mind, the analyst, or therapist, helps the patient to ‘be done’ with it.
His deterministic method is purely medical. Freud took a pathological view of mental activity.
He discovered the existence of sexually preceded criminal fantasies which are “wholly incompatible with the conscious outlook of civilized man. A person who adopted the standpoint of these fantasies would be less than a rebel, a criminal, or a madman.”
For Freud, the psyche has to be broken to conform to more suitable thought and behavior patterns. His idea of treatment involved clearing out old thought patterns and an adaptation to healthier behaviors. Freud named sexuality as the controlling psychological force.
His model of the psyche consists of: 1) the id, or pleasure principle, completely unconscious and impulsive; 2) the super-ego, a moral compass; and
3) the ego—attempting to balance between 1) and 2).
He developed a technique called ‘free association’ in which reclined patient is allowed to say whatever may come into his or her mind—however irrelevant, random, unpleasant, or embarrassing it might sound.
Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche called Socrates a valetudinarian, one who is obsessively concerned about his own ailments. Socratic morality with its dialectical process of reasoning wasn’t enough for Nietzsche. Value, Nietzsche countered, is the key to morals.
He says, “Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously,” and the Socratic pathology is the symptomatic concern of philosophical judgments.
Ressentiment, the French version of the word resentment, is for him the desire of the impotent for revenge against the strong. This desire rails against authority and projects his ideas of evil while rejecting the strengths inherent in economic and personal success. He thought this impotence drives the intellect in reverse.
Backwards thinking is the psychological pathology to which Nietzsche is referring. It seeks to justify weakness and tear down glory. This has far reaching implications for traditional philosophy as well as religious traditions such as Christianity.
Nietzsche enlists values in the cause of nihilism which, traditionally, have been considered as restraints on nihilism—principally morality. Moral conduct, as explained by Socrates, or as recommended by Christianity, is in itself a sign of decadence. It wants to substitute the mere shadow of a man for a man of flesh and blood.
Nietzsche was known for his extravagant nonconformity and unapologetic take on antiquated moral dogmas. Instead of whining about your misfortune, triumph over it by turning your suffering into something positive. He said, “Instead of looking to others for approval, think of yourself as an independent, autonomous, creator of values.”
Nietzsche said, “Not one of the ancient philosophers had the courage to advance the theory of the non-free will (that is to say, the theory that denies morality);—not one had the courage to identify the typical feature of happiness, of every kind of happiness (“pleasure”), with the will to power: for the pleasure of power was considered immoral;—not one had the courage to regard virtue as a result of immorality (as a result of a will to power) in the service of a species (or of a race, or of a polis); for the will to power was considered immoral.”
After Rousseau’s natural man was in service to society in the second wave of modernity where his thought of man as an end in his being compassionate and his romanticism looked to history which gave his work a phenomenological perspective. His ideas led arguably opened the door for communism. In the third wave however, Nietzsche’s view of the end of man looked rather cruel.
Nietzsche says, “Judgments, valuations with regard to life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they only possess value as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms, in themselves such judgments are follies.”
Nietzsche said, “To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed, that is the law.” According to Nietzsche, he who wants to be a creator of good or of evil must first of all destroy all values. “Thus, the supreme evil becomes part of the supreme good, but the supreme good is creative.”
He distinguished between master morality which says good is noble and strong and evil is common or vulgar, and slave morality, everything that alleviates suffering.
He promoted the idea of an ubermensch, a superman, who would transcend moral convention; however, he appeals to postmodernists whose politics tend toward the other extreme.
He thought each person had a duty to evolve, to strive to be a superman. One way to look at this is as a call to be your own best self, or to lift yourself up above the common standard.
Nietzsche himself had an unhealthy contempt for the average person; he believed that rising above meant rejecting conventional morality, and his ideas were badly abused by the Nazis.
He believed that we are too easily satisfied with mediocrity and that most of us don’t bother to be all that we can be—a warning many people find worth heeding.
He thought exploitation was the nature of living beings, as a primary function. ‘The will to power’ is the will to life, and the will to overcome it.
Sartre
French philosopher and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre, studied with Husserl the founder of phenomenology and Heidegger the leading German figure in existentialism. Heidegger said, “Death is the most certain possibility.”
Sartre said, “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself.”
He said, “Man is nothing else hut that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.”
Sartre said, “The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.”
His work largely consists of themes like angst and despair but also authenticity through which we affirm our values and choices.
Existentialism is often considered more of a mood than a philosophy, and some of its leading texts are in fact novels rather than treatises. They were on a moral quest bereft of divine authority. Instead, the existentialists admonished that we do the right thing with courage and integrity—doing the right thing for its own sake.
He labeled any efforts to deny that we are responsible for our actions, and he saw religion, or religious faith, as one of the leading culprits as ‘bad faith.’ In calling existential angst nausea, Sartre also connected the mind and the body on some level, acknowledging that the disorienting effects of existentialism can be physically discomforting.
According to Sartre, we must always choose, notwithstanding the ambiguity and uncertainty of the future. “Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift that’s nausea.”
If we waited to be sure about what to do about problems of everyday living, we would never act. Moreover, according to Sartre, there are no hard-and-fast standards that can save us from the inevitability of having to choose in the face of uncertainty.
He said, “You’re free, therefore choose, that is, invent.”
Conclusion
Philosophy is a tool to critically examine personal beliefs and assumptions. Philosophy is useful in understanding culture and improving reasoning skills. A philosopher is one who loves wisdom. Philosophy is about ideas. Instead of thinking of every philosopher trying to solve the same problem, think of each philosopher’s project from the standpoint of the inquiry itself. Philosophers contribute to law, politics, religion, science, business, art, and entertainment.
We learn about our own minds by following the train of thought the philosopher employs to answer his particular question or conflict. This can spin off in a number of directions concerning existence, knowledge, and values. Philosophy asks questions like Who am I? Where does the world come from? What is a moral principle, is it real, or just justification for personal opinions? What is the nature of reality? Are we free to choose? To what degree should the government be able to make choices for us?
In studying philosopher, we will look not only at the historical context, but the actual practice of philosophy such as Socratic dialogue to solve an issue or argue a point of view. The world and our experience of it are inseparable. We will study great thinkers and how their ideas shaped our technology and way of relating to one another. Philosophy explores the implications of dualistic thinking, asking Is there an objective right? Is there a subjective truth?
The original intent of philosophy was to move from the realm of myth to the world of knowledge. It affords us clear insights about ourselves. Without these, we are shackled to our own ignorance. If you love yourself, you have a duty to feed your intellect so that you can continue to grow. We are all in this together even if that perspective is difficult to maintain. I hope this short foray into philosophers and their big ideas serves to open doors and wipe away dust form the windows that compose your reality. Freedom awaits the truth seeker.
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