Age of the Great Philosophers - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 20
About This Presentation
Title:

Age of the Great Philosophers

Description:

The issue is not so much philosophy itself as the type of philosophy. ... they have seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:96
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 21
Provided by: liamat
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Age of the Great Philosophers


1
Age of the Great Philosophers
  • Especially the fourth century.
  • I am so close to Socrates that I find myself
    always doing battle with him.
  • -- Friedrich Nietzsche

2
Why philosophy? Why now?
  • The issue is not so much philosophy itself as the
    type of philosophy.
  • The earliest philosophers were much more like
    curious natural scientists than they were like
    what we think of as philosophers.
  • But a new way of doing philosophy went hand in
    hand with the emergence of the new kind of Greek
    polis that began to develop in the fifth century.
  • Excellence (areth) was a valued commodity in
    Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries. In
    aristocracies excellence was seen in wealth and
    family.
  • In democracies excellence was seen in one who had
    the ability to turn a crowd to his point of view.

3
Sophists
  • The skill of speaking was highly valued in a
    democratic leader.
  • During this time talented people appeared who
    could not only speak well, but offered to teach
    others these skills.
  • These people tended to travel around and were
    respected by political leaders who valued their
    expertise.
  • They also charged fees for their services.
  • They came to be known as sophists.
  • The father of sophistry was a man from Abdera
    named Protagoras.

4
Protagoras
  • Protagoras (480-410) traveled around plying his
    trade for forty years.
  • They loved him at Athens and he was honored by
    Pericles.
  • He taught grammar and rhetoric, particluarly
    eloquence.
  • Plato pictures him as a full-blown celebrity with
    his own following, revered for his wisdom.
  • Plato also gives us a glimpse of Socrates
    nettling the sophist in his Protagoras.
  • Pericles invited him to be the Lawgiver for the
    new Italian colony of Thurii in 443.
  • Athenians eventually accused him of impiety,
    banished him from the polis, and burned his
    writings.

5
Man is the measure?
  • Protagoras uttered the famous saying, man is the
    measure of all things of existing things, that
    they exist of non-existent things, that they do
    not exist.
  • He meant by this the individual is judge of
    what is best.
  • Platos Socrates says that this was nonsense
    because it made all beliefs true.
  • Protagoras motto was embraced by the Italian
    Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth
    centuries.

6
Sophists and Sophistry
  • Other sophists were Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus
    of Keos, and Hippias of Elis.
  • Eventually their teachings, which were offered
    because of a general thirst for knowledge among
    the many gave way to the expression of that
    knowledge.
  • Later, Plato and Aristotle did not consider these
    people to be philosophers at all they rehashed
    thinking of the past often uncritically.
  • The peripatetics attacked sophistry for
    exaggerated style, absence of reason, and
    mercenary tendency of charging fees.
  • Sophistry has come to us as a word that means
    deceptive and confusing style.
  • The greater philosophical contribution lay
    elsewhere

7
Socrates 470-399
  • Socrates was the gadfly of Athens, considered a
    busybody by the respectable and admired by the
    young for nettling the establishment and his
    bravery in battle.
  • A friend went to the oracle of Delphi and asked
    who the wisest person was and was told that
    Socrates was wisest Wise is Sophocles, wiser
    Euripides, wisest of all Socrates.
  • This bothered Socrates, so he devoted his life to
    discovering what wisdom was. He did so by
    interviewing others with what has come to be
    known as the socratic method.
  • Socratic method is an intense line of questioning
    aimed at defining objects and ideas and refining
    propositions by considering their logical
    outcomes.

8
Running afoul of the elites.
  • In his search for wisdom, Socrates made the
    leading men of the city appear foolish and
    inspired the young to follow his example. It led
    to his death.
  • Socrates decided that the reason the oracle
    thought he was wisest was because he admitted he
    knew nothing.
  • One of Socrates students, Critias, became an
    infamous tyrant. Socrates was blamed for that,
    and for corrupting another youth, the son of
    Anytus, the most powerful person in Athens.
  • Socrates was tried for impiety and corruption.
    The jury voted 281 to 200 for guilt. Allowed to
    propose the penalty he opted for a fine saying
    the city ought to pay him for rendering and
    important service.
  • Finally, he could choose exile or execution, he
    chose the latter.
  • He didnt say the unexamined life is not worth
    living. He said, A life without examination is
    not worth living.

9
Plato (428-348)
  • His real name was Aristocles. Socrates named him
    Plato (platon) which meant broad.
  • To understand him better we must remember he grew
    up during the worst part of the Peloponnesian War
    for Athens.
  • He also came from an aristocratic family.
  • As a teenager he devoted himself first to the
    study and composition of poetry.
  • He then took up philosophy, first studying under
    Kratylus a follower of Heraclitus (all is
    flux).

10
Following Socrates
  • At age 20 he entered study under Socrates.
  • Socrates death in 399 (which Plato didnt
    witness) embittered him further against the
    democracy that killed his mentor.
  • He left Athens and lived for a time in Megara
    with his friend Euclid (not the geometrician).
  • Restless, he began to travel widely (ancient
    hippie?) studying for a time with the
    Pythagoreans in Italy (a puritan community that
    believed crunching numbers as the universal
    principle of harmony) and visited Syracuse at the
    invitation of that citys tyrant, Dionysius.
  • He soon ran afoul of Dionysius, who may have had
    him sold into slavery, but he was redeemed by a
    friend.

11
The Academy
  • Returning home to Athens, he established a school
    in a garden in northwest Athens near a gymnasium
    named for the mythic hero Academus.
  • He presided over the school for forty years, and
    the Academy remained on that spot for almost a
    thousand years!
  • The Academy was more than a philosophical
    schoolit represented the finest education
    available in Greece.
  • An incipient egalitarian, Plato admitted some
    women to study with the large number of educated
    men.
  • Teaching was a mix of informal tutorials and
    systematic lectures.
  • Platos star pupil, and later lecturer in
    rhetoric, was Aristotle.

12
Aristotle (384-322)
  • Son of a physician at King Amyntas of Macedonias
    court, Aristotle was born at Stageira in Thrace.
  • Having Macedonian connections would prove to be
    blessing and curse.
  • By 367, both his parents had died and he went to
    Athens to study under Plato.
  • A brilliant student, Plato called him a colt who
    kicks his mother, and also called him the
    brain (thinker) and the reader due to his
    disciplined and methodical study habits.
  • He apparently frequently disagreed with Plato,
    both for the forms and the latters hostility to
    natural science.

13
Tutor of Alexander
  • To Platos credit, he allowed dissent, but when
    he died left The Academy to his nephew.
  • In 347 Aristotle left the Academy and went to
    join a philosophers circle in Atarnaeus, Mysia
    where his friend, Hermeidas was tyrant.
  • There he wed his friends sister, Pythias, who
    bore them a daughter of the same name.
  • In 343, he was invited by King Philip of Macedon
    to become tutor to thirteen-year-old Alexander.
  • He stayed at court for eight years, half of the
    time as Alexanders mentor.
  • In 335, Aristotle moved back to Athens where he
    rented a gymansium called the Lyceum. He
    remained almost thirteen years.

14
Samples of Great Philosophy
  • The safest generalization that can be made about
    the history of Western Philosophy is that it is
    all a series of footnotes to Plato.
  • Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

15
Platos Theory of Forms
  • This is crucial to understanding Platos
    epistemology and ethics.
  • He may have modified Socrates theories that
    arose out of a mood of skepticism and relativism
    in Athens.
  • Form means structure, arrangement, order -- how a
    thing must be put together in order to be what it
    is. Every concrete being, insofar as it exists,
    has form. Every organic being, insofar as it
    continues to live and function, possesses order.
  • So Plato, a mathematician as well as a poet, saw
    both structure and the lack of structure in the
    world around him. He determined that a thing is
    good if it possesses appropriate order and
    symmetry.

16
The Form (idea) of roundness
  • Whenever several things are round, there is a
    single form of roundness in which they all
    participate. (That is to say, all these things
    are round in virtue of sharing in the
    characteristics of the form of roundness.)
  • The form of roundness is perfectly round.
  • The form of roundness does not participate in
    itself. (Because whatever participates in
    something is inferior to that thing, and nothing
    is inferior to itself).
  • The form of roundness has all and only those
    characteristics which all the things that
    participate in it (the particulars of the form)
    have in common, in virtue of being round
    basketballs, earth, marbles, etc.

17
The Cave from The Republic
  • Imagine individuals chained deep within the
    recesses of a cave. Bound so that vision is
    restricted, they cannot see one another. The only
    thing visible is the wall of the cave upon which
    appear shadows cast by models or statues of
    animals and objects that are passed before a
    brightly burning fire. Breaking free, one of the
    individuals escapes from the cave into the light
    of day. With the aid of the sun, that person sees
    for the first time the real world and returns to
    the cave with the message that the only things
    they have seen heretofore are shadows and
    appearances and that the real world awaits them
    if they are willing to struggle free of their
    bonds.

18
The Cave from The Republic
  • The shadowy environment of the cave symbolizes
    for Plato the physical world of appearances.
  • Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the
    cave symbolizes the transition to the real world,
    the world of full and perfect being, the world of
    Forms, which is the proper object of knowledge.
  • We can attain this knowledge by the exercise of
    reason.
  • Through dialogue, we can help one another to sort
    out and order the forms and moral truths of the
    kosmos.
  • Dialogue helps point people in the right
    direction the rest is up to them only the
    strong may break free.

19
Aristotles categories break with Plato
  • Like his teacher, Plato, Aristotle distinguished
    between Forms (universals) and Particulars. But
    unlike Plato, Aristotle believed that only
    Particulars have actual existence. Only
    Particulars are truly real.
  • To Aristotle, Platos forms exist not of their
    own (as distinct entities in heaven!) but rather
    are contained within a group of particular things
    nominally common to each other called categories.
  • Round, for instance, is a category. Round
    exists within particular things and gives those
    things part of their defining quality--as for
    instance in round basketballs. But round has no
    meaningful existence in itself apart from its
    place within particulars. There is no such thing
    within existence (even in the heavens) we can
    identify as a round.

20
Aristotles empiricism
  • Aristotle was so focused on the things of the
    earth, its particulars, he had a very strong
    empirical mindset--which delighted in discovering
    new shapes and forms in the world around him. He
    busily observed at every opportunity all physical
    reality around him.
  • His goal was to develop categorical knowledge of
    all the world (grouping all reality into
    different scientific categories)--then employ
    inductive reasoning from such categorical
    observations to develop universal observations
    about life.
  • Aristotle was a great organizer of the world's
    particulars, setting up categories and rules for
    orderly thinking--not only in biology and
    geology, but also in logic, ethics, and politics.
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com