Discussion Week 1

Please, assist me with Discussion assignment 

Modern Philosophy:

The Enlightenment

Dr. C. George Boeree

The 1600’s were among the most exciting times for philosophy since
ancient
Athens.  Although the power of religion was still immense, we
begin
to see pockets of tolerance in different places and at different times,
where a great mind could really fly.  England was fairly tolerant,
if only because of its diversity.  Holland was the best place to
be.
A small country fighting off attacks, military and economic, from every
side, needed all the support it could get, whatever your religion,
denomination,
or even heresy.

The central issues were the same as those of the ancient
Greeks: 
What is the world made of?  How do we know anything for
certain? 
What is the difference between good and evil?  But they are now
informed
with centuries of science, literature, history, multicultural
experiences,
and, of course, written philosophy.  Perhaps we have to admit that
the modern philosophers are only elaborating on the ancient Greeks, but
what elaboration!  Was Rembrandt only doodling?

I will approach this era philosopher-by-philosopher, showing, I
hope,
the “battles” between materialism (e.g. Hobbes) and idealism
(Berkeley),
between empiricism (Locke) and rationalism (Spinoza), and between faith
(Leibniz) and atheism (Bayle).

Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1678)

Thomas Hobbes was born on April 5, 1588.  His father, an
Anglican
clergyman, left the family when Thomas was still young. 
Fortunately,
his older brother did well for himself, and sent Thomas to
Oxford. 
He served for a while as secretary to Francis Bacon. Travelling around
Europe, he paid a visit to Galileo.  He spent eleven years in
Paris,
and was tutor there to the exiled Prince of Wales (who would become
Charles
II).

In 1651, he wrote The Leviathan, a book presumably
concerning
politics, but covering much else besides.  The book is named for a
sea monster in the book of Job in the Bible.  It was meant to be a
symbol of God’s power, but Hobbes used it to symbolize the state.

Hobbes thought of himself as a scientist, but he was really more of
a rationalist:  Truth can be had if we only make sure to define
our
terms well and reason logically!  But his conclusions were
empiricistic: 
Nothing is in the mind that isn’t first in the senses.  This in
turn
led him to a pure materialism:  All qualities are really matter
in
motion.  Things “of the mind,” such as memories and imagination,
are
just sense images decaying, and all in the form of matter in motion in
the brain.

Will to Hobbes is just the last desire you have before you take
action
on it — hence free will is an absurdity.  All motivation is
selfish,
and ultimately tied to survival.  The basic negative emotion is
fear,
the basic positive emotion is desire for power.  Good and bad are
purely subjective matters.  And so he goes beyond Descartes: 
Not only are animals just machines, so are we.  B. F. Skinner was
an admirer of Hobbes.

Because good and bad are subjective and we are selfishly motivated,
we will do whatever we need to do to satisfy our needs.  Society
must
therefore control the individual if we are to have any peace at
all! 
So society develops systems of rewards and punishments, social approval
and social censure.  Leviathan — the commonwealth — is that
necessary
evil.

Presaging Rousseau, he suggested we submit to society in order
to avoid a purely primitive life, which he characterized as “nasty,
brutish,
and short.”  But, in contrast to Rousseau, he felt that society is
an arrangement made between ruler and ruled, not among equals. 
Ultimately,
the king must have absolute power for civilization to survive. 
Democracy,
he says, is just rule by orator-demagogues who easily manipulate the
mob.

Religion, too, is a device for keeping the peace.  It is
nothing
more than a fear of invisible powers that the mob has accepted as
legitimate.
Superstition is the same thing, just not accepted as legitimate! 
I
should note that Hobbes was not an atheist:  He was a deist,
meaning
that he believed in a creator, an intelligent prime mover who started
all
this, but one who does not need to intervene once his mechanical laws
of nature
take effect.

When he returned to England, he found himself confronted with many
critics. 
Fortunately for Hobbes, his old pupil, now King Charles II, took him in
and set him up with a nice pension.  He died December 4, 1679, at
the age of 91.

Benedictus Spinoza (1632-1677)

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24, 1632.  His
parents were Portuguese Jews who had escaped from the persecution they
suffered in their homeland.  Sadly, his mother died when Baruch
was
only six.

He received a religious education, but his father instructed him in
various secular subjects in the hopes that Baruch would take on a
business
career.  Baruch became fluent in many languages, and had a
particular
love for math, especially geometry.  His father died in 1654, when
Baruch was 22.

Discussing his beliefs with his friends, he admitted to doubting
many
of their religious traditional beliefs, such as life after death. 
They reported him to the synagogue soon after.  After trying to
persuade
him to keep his opinions to himself, the rabbis excommunicated him in
1656. 
At that time, excommunication (Jewish or Christian) including the
practice
of shunning — i.e. no one in the community was to speak or correspond
with him in any fashion.

But Baruch — now called Benedictus (“blessed,” the Latin for the
Hebrew
baruch) — had many friends outside the Jewish community, and they
would
protect him all his life.  Nevertheless, he was forced to move to
Rijnsburg, a small town, in 1660 after a death threat, and again in
1663
to Voorburg near the Hague, and finally to the Hague itself.

He supported himself throughout as a lens-maker.  At this time,
that occupation included not only the making of glasses, but of lenses
for telescopes and microscopes — the latest thing in technology! 
He conducted a variety of experiments as well.  Unfortunately, the
constant exposure to glass dust was to take a toll on Benedictus’
lungs.

He published, anonymously, the Treatise on Theology and Politics
in 1670.  This was a devastating critique of Biblical literalism,
and was immediately condemned by the religious community of Holland.

His most important work, Ethics,
was begun all the way back in 1662. 
He tried to publish it in 1675, but was frightened off by rumors that
his
life would be in jeopardy if he did so.  He died of tuberculosis
two
years later, February 20, 1677, at the age of 45.  His friends
published
Ethics
and other unpublished works in his honor in that same year.

The full title of the book was Ethics, Demonstrated in the
Fashion
of Geometry, because he laid out his arguments in the same way that
a mathematician might lay out a geometric proof.  This is
certainly
a rigorous way of writing philosophy, but it does make it hard to
read. 
(Dagobert Runes edited The Ethics of Spinoza in 1957 so that it would
be
more readable for modern students.)

According to Spinoza, Substance (that which underlies all reality,
also
known as Existence or Being) has two attributes (sides or
aspects). 
If we look at reality from one angle, through the senses, we see it as
matter. 
But if we look at it within ourselves, we see it as thought.  He
suggested
that there were an infinite number of aspects, but those two are the
only
ones evident to human beings.

So, the body (or brain) and the mind (or soul) are one and the same
thing seen from two different perspectives.  Where there is
material activity,
there is thought.  Where there is thought, there is material
activity. 
Not all thought is available to what I perceive as myself:  Much
of
it remains unconscious.  But it goes on nonetheless.

This “double-aspectism”
sounds great, but it does bring us to panpsychism. 
Panpsychism is the idea that every material thing has a mental side to
it (and vice versa).  People have minds, animals have minds,
plants
have minds, even rocks and houses have minds.  The earth itself
has
a mind.  Of course, as we move away from people, those minds are
increasingly
unconscious and lacking in a sense of self, but still….

It also leads to Spinoza’s most famous concept, the one he actually
based the rest of his theory upon:  God and Nature are one and the
same, and identical with all of Existence, mental and physical. 
God
is the mind of the universe; the universe is the body of God. 
This
is often called pantheism — God is everywhere and in everything — but
in his day, it was called atheism.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza is a mechanist.  He believes only in
determinism,
not free will.  For us as humans, this determinism comes in the
form
of desires, which derive from our need to survive.  All things, he
says, have the motive of self-preservation, all things are “selfish.”

He says that we strive to increase our power, that is, our capacity
to preserve ourselves.  Then he identifies this power with
virtue! 
So the good is defined as what is useful to us, and the bad as what is
damaging to us. Good advances our well-being, bad decreases our
well-being. 
Good we perceive as pleasure, bad is perceived as pain.

But, we have many desires.  Usually, one outweighs the others
and
we do what we desire most. But often they conflict.  This conflict
itself decreases our well-being and so is painful.  What do we do
to make our lives less painful then?

Society helps to some extent.  By providing rewards and
punishments,
praise and blame, it adds new items to our list of desires that may
outweigh
certain desires and support others.  Ultimately, society instills
a conscience in most of us.  Spinoza saw conscience as learned,
not
innate.

Ultimately, we must rely on ourselves:  First, Spinoza says, we
have to gain some control over our desires.  When they are out of
our control, when they instead control us, he calls them
passions. 
They are out of our control because they operate unconsciously and so
are
not available to reason.  By getting a “clear idea” of them, we
turn
them into simple emotions, which are amenable to reason.  Freud
would
say, three centuries later, that we must “make the unconscious
conscious!”

One way to turn a passion into an emotion, incidentally, is to trace
its roots.  If you can see where it came from, its operations
become
clear — conscious — and you can better deal with it.

Another way to deal with passions is to see the necessity of
things. 
Nature is what it is, God wills what he wills, and no one can change
that.
Surrender to the inevitable, and you will be much more peaceful, at
least. 
A wise person, for example, sees that getting angry at unpleasant
people
isn’t going to change them.  In fact, it only hurts you. 
Being
kind to others, on the other hand, is usually rewarded, and it takes
much
less out of you.  Along with Buddha and Jesus, Spinoza said that
love
can conquer hate.

He also said that wise people “desire nothing for themselves which
they
do not also desire for the rest of mankind” (Ethics, iv, 48). 
This
presages Kant’s categorical imperative by a century.

But only an emotion can overcome another emotion.  Therefore,
reason
must itself become an emotion — a powerful one — in order that it may
outweigh others.  He calls this powerful emotion “the intellectual
love of God,”  which of course means love of nature as well. 
It also includes the acceptance of God’s will — or natural law. 
Knowledge of God/Nature is the ultimate virtue, and the ultimate
pleasure!

Dismissed by the English as an atheist and by the French as too
religious,
Spinoza would have great influence on upcoming German philosophers,
including
Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.  And it is in Germany
where psychology was to flourish.

John Locke (1632-1704)

John
Locke is sometimes called “the father of the enlightenment.”  He
was
born August 29, 1632, the same year as Spinoza.  His father was an
attorney and a Puritan, who taught young John the value of
representation
and religious freedom.  John’s father died of tuberculosis when
John
was 29, leaving him with a small inheritance.

John went to Oxford, received his Masters degree, and taught there.
He later studied medicine and became the personal physician to the Earl
of Shaftesbury (grandfather to the philosopher of the same title).

Beginning in 1675, Locke studied in France.  When he returned,
he found the political climate under James II less than congenial, and
so moved to Holland.  It was there that he wrote his great
psychological
work, Essay concerning Human Understanding.

In 1689, he returned to England after William and Mary took the
throne
from James II.  There he published his works — the Essay, his two
Treatises
on Government, and two letters concerning the need for religious
tolerance. 
In 1691, he retired to a friend’s mansion, and died in 1704 at the age
of 72.

His Treatises alone would assure him a place in history near
the top.  In them, he outlined the basics of representative
government,
including natural rights, consent of the governed, the protection of
property,
religious tolerance, separation of church and state, and the checks and
balances between executive and legislative branches.  His ideas
would
become the foundation of the Declaration of Independence, the American
Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration
of the Rights of Man.  Not bad.

Unlike Hobbes, Locke sees people as having a positive nature, one
that
contains instincts for social good and the ability to reason. 
Since
our nature is positive, we should allow ourselves and others the
freedom
to develop that nature.   For this reason, we must each
surrender
some degree of freedom in order that others may likewise be free to
develop
their potentials.

Laws are created, not to keep us from destroying each other, but to
allow us to express our positive, rational natures. And so a government
is legitimate only if its laws promote that which is our nature — to
be
free and rational.  And it can do this only if is based on the
consent
of the governed!  If Hobbes reminds you of Skinner, Locke should
remind
you of Carl Rogers.

His Essay concerning Human Understanding attacked another
popular
idea of his time:  Many scholars believed that the idea of God and
the ideas of good and evil are planted in our minds at birth, perhaps
by
God himself.  It was said that these ideas were innate.  But
when Locke looked at the variety of beliefs, non-beliefs, and
moralities,
he concluded that these things could not possibly be innate.

He admits, of course, that there are reflexes and instincts and the
like, but these are just physiological sequences of movement, not
ideas!  There are some ideas, learned from experience, that are
learned so
early and reinforced so consistently, that they have the appearance of
being innate.  But that’s only an appearance!

In the course of arguing that there are no innate ideas, he also
sets
the stage for two future arguments, taken up by Berkeley and
Hume. 
First, he notices that if we try to find matter, we see nothing but
qualities
that we attribute to matter — but never matter itself.  The idea
of matter is not empirical!  This would be elaborated by Berkeley.

Second, he notices that if we try to find mind, all we see are the
qualities
we attribute to mind.  Never do we see, empirically, a mind at
all! 
This would be elaborated by Hume.

Locke doesn’t make the leaps that Berkeley and Hume will,
however. 
He is too practical for that.  He says we are no doubt correct in
believing in matter and mind.  Life makes little sense without
them. 
And yet, they are not empirically verifiable.  He is sometimes
called
a metaphysical agnostic:  He believes that there is mind and
matter
(and that they do interact, somehow), but no one can prove their
existence.

Locke’s ideas were adopted enthusiastically by French philosophers
as
well as English (and American) thinkers.  They would translate him
into a revolutionary, and his philosophy of human nature into
Sensationism
and Mechanism.

George Berkeley (1685-1753)

George
Berkeley was born March 12, 1685 at Dysert Castle in Ireland.  He
went to Trinity College in Dublin, where, among other things, he
studied
John Locke.

In 1709, he wrote An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. 
He asked, if a man, born blind, recovered his sight, what would he
see? 
Berkeley reasoned he would see a meaningless array of qualities, which
he would interpret as in his mind, and certainly not extended further
than
his eyes.  Only repeated connection between the sights he sees and
those same objects touched would lead him to learn shapes, distances,
and
so on. Later operations actually restoring people’s sight supported his
theory.

Space (extension), therefore, is a mental construct, a matter of
coordinating
the relationships between what we see and what we experience through
touch.
We will see this idea of space as a mental thing again in Kant’s
theory.

In 1710, he wrote The Principles of Human Knowledge. 
If,
as Locke said, all knowledge comes through the senses, then we can know
nothing that does not come through the senses.  Extension in
space,
the shapes of things, their resistance to touch, their colors, tastes,
smells,… all these do in fact come through the senses.  But when
does matter come through the senses?  When do you see matter, or
feel
it, or taste it?  All you ever experience through the senses are
qualities,
never a substance!

Matter is therefore a theory without evidence.  Since the
atheism
of Berkeley’s day relied a great deal on materialism, he felt he had
laid
a knock-out punch!

Of course, it’s not just atheists who believe in matter — nearly
everyone
does.  It’s “common sense.”  Dr. Johnson thought he gave the
perfect rebuttal to Berkeley’s idea when he kicked a rock as hard as he
could:  The pain that rock caused him could hardly be
denied! 
But Berkeley would (and did) note that all anyone could know about the
rock was its shape, location, color, i.e. information of the senses,
including
the sense of pain if you are stupid enough to kick it.

Esse est percipi, Berkeley said:  To be is to be
perceived.

So what happens to things when we are not looking at them, touching
them, or kicking them?  Do they vanish every time we turn
around? 
Berkeley said of course not!  Things — as collections of
qualities
— always remain, but in God’s mind, which encompasses everything.

When a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one to hear it, does
it make a sound?  Berkeley would say it does, because God hears
it. 
This is perhaps the purest, and most eloquent, version of idealism
ever. 
Only the Mahayana (northern) Buddhists have a similar idea in their
“mind-only”
philosophy.  In their case, they refer not to God but to
Buddha-mind.

Berkeley went on to spend some time in Rhode Island, waiting for a
grant
to start up a college in Bermuda, which never arrived.  Berkeley
in
California was named for him.  He became (Anglican) Bishop of
Cloyne
in 1734, and died at Oxford in 1753 at the age of 68.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

Leibniz was born June 21, 1646.  His father was a professor of
philosophy at the University of Leipzig.  Little Gottfried was a
boy
genius (of course) and received his doctorate at the age of 20. 
He
spent some time gallivanting around Europe, tasting just about every
philosophy
the continent had to offer.

In 1672, he went to France as a diplomat.  There he would begin
to invent calculus, as well as a calculator that could multiply and
divide. 
In 1676, he visited Spinoza in Holland (where he read the manuscript
for
Ethics), and then went on to Hanover to serve the prince there. 
In
1700, he founded the Berlin Academy.

His major life’s project was to reconcile Catholicism and
Protestantism. 
He failed, obviously.  It will take a lot more than genius to
reconcile
those two!

His major work, as far as psychology is concerned, is New Essays
on Human Understanding, a refutation of Locke written in 1703, but
not published until 1765.

His basic point was that the mind is not a passive “tabula rasa”
(clean slate or piece of paper) upon which experience writes, as Locke
and Aristotle suggested.  The mind is a complex thing that works
on
and transforms experience.  “Nothing is in the mind that has not
been
in the senses,” he said, paraphrasing Locke, “except the mind
itself.” 
This would inspire Kant, and many psychologists in more recent times.

Leibniz also suggested that while we are alive, the mind is never
entirely
at rest, even in deep sleep.  In fact, it is often functioning
even
when we are not conscious of it doing so.  It was this conception
of the unconscious that would most influence Schopenhauer and, later,
Freud.

Leibniz had a very unusual metaphysics.  He started with the
same sort of skeptical approach as Descartes.  But he ended with
an idealistic metaphysics called monadology
that outdoes even Berkeley’s metaphysics.  Monads are souls.  Each soul contains
within it the “perception” of the entire universe.  It’s not that
there is an entire universe outside our souls which we all perceive as
an object — souls are all there is!

We often experience ourselves as interacting with others — “monad a
monad,” you might say. But Leibniz makes it clear that we are only apparently interacting, each within
our own internal universe.  Monads, he tells us, are “window-less.”

We consciously perceive
only a small piece of this internal universe — our “point-of-view,” we
could say.  I am not aware, however, of what the insides of my
stomach look like, or what thoughts you are having at this moment, or
what’s happening on some planet circling Alpha Centauri.  All that
and more is “in” me, but is only perceived unconsciously.

Although each soul has its own “point-of-view,” all souls contain
the same total perception of the universe.  This is what he called
harmony.  But some souls
have a clearer, more complete, more conscious,
view of the universe within than others do.  Only one soul is
totally conscious, or, if you like, contains all
“points-of-view.”  That soul is God.

Leibniz became increasingly isolated and impoverished over time,
being without a
political
sponsor.  He died alone in 1716, and his funeral was attended only
by his secretary.

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)

Pierre
Bayle was born November 18, 1647, the son of a Huguenot (Protestant)
minister
in southern France.  He was sent to a Jesuit college in order to
get
the best education, and was converted to Catholicism there.  When
he returned, he converted back to Protestantism!  This made him a
relapsed heretic, a very dangerous thing to be at the time.

So his father sent him to Geneva to study, where he discovered
Descartes. 
He taught for a while in France, but then found it necessary to escape
to Rotterdam, in Holland, where he eventually became a professor. 
He suffered from headaches and depression and never married.

In 1682, he anonymously published Diverse Thoughts on the Comet. 
Referring to a recent comet that had everyone abuzz, he wrote against
the
various superstitions of his day and the belief in miracles.  In
the
book, he noted that as far as actions and morality are concerned, he
could
see no difference between Catholics and Protestants, Christians and
Jews
and Moslems and pagans and even atheists!

In Amsterdam in 1684 he began a magazine called News of the
Republic
of Letters.  He wrote all the articles himself!  In the
meantime,
both his parents and his brother were killed during the persecution of
the Huguenots.  So he wrote a book on tolerance.  But
tolerance
was not on the Protestant agenda, either, and he lost his
professorship. 
“God preserve us from the Protestant Inquisition!”  he wrote.

His major work was The Dictionary, which was really more of
an
encyclopedia of philosophy, religion, literature, etc.  Writing 14
hours a day, he wrote 2600 pages.  In this massive work, he
“deconstructed”
(as we would say nowadays) a great number of Biblical stories,
religious
beliefs, and philosophical theories, including such tidbits as the
doctrine
of original sin and the trinity.  He even suggested that, if God
and
Satan actually exist, Satan is winning!  He would always add,
after
making these extreme statements, that of course no good Christian would
ever believe such a thing!

After years of condemnation by the religious establishment, he died
of tuberculosis on December 28, 1706.  But The Dictionary
would
become immensely popular among intellectuals throughout Europe, and
have
a great influence on thinkers for more than a century.

As we enter the 1700’s, we find religion fighting a losing battle
against
the forces of reason and science.  While average people still went
to church, baptized their babies, and prayed for forgiveness, the
educated
elite turned to deism, pantheism, and even atheism.  This included
the intellectuals of Catholic France as well as future “founding
fathers”
in colonial America:  Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and even George Washington were deists, and John Adams was a
Unitarian.  Scientific discovery and invention would
steamroller
traditional society for the next 300 years.  Psychology would
attempt
to follow, but would lag behind for some time to come!

© Copyright 2000, C. George Boeree

The Middle Ages

Dr. C. George Boeree

In Georgian:

შუა საუკუნეებში

(translated by Ana Mirilashvili)

The Dark Ages

Sometime after the fall of Rome, we come to the
Dark Ages. 
Most of Europe
was decentralized, rural, parochial.  Life was reduced to the
“laws
of nature:” The powerful ruled, while the powerless looked only to
survive. 
There was no sense of  history or progress.  Superstition and
fatalism prevailed.  Belief in the imminent end of the world was
common
every century.  You can get a fair approximation to European life
in dark and early middle ages by looking at some of the developing
nations
of the world, although you would have to take away all signs of 
the
past thousand years of technological development!

Alcuin (735-804) — Charlemagne’s head scholar — is one of
the
few names that come down to us from this period.  Other than his
Christianity,
a glimmer of his view of reality can be gleaned from this quote: 
“What is man?  The slave of death, a passing wayfarer.  How
is
man placed?  Like a lantern in the wind.”

Nevertheless, Charlemagne (768-814) provided a political
unity in the form of the Frankish Empire,
and the Pope a religious unity, and a new era slowly began. 
Eventually,
the Church took over Europe, and the Pope replaced the emperor as the
most
important figure. By 1200, the Church would own a third of the land
area
of Europe!  The power of the church and its common creed meant
enormous
pressures to conform, backed up by fear of supernatural
sanctions. 
But on the positive side, the papacy helped establish stability and
ultimately
prosperity.

We now turn to what are called the Middle Ages, roughly the period
from 1000 to 1400 ad.

The Universities

Universities developed out of monastery and cathedral schools —
really
what we would call elementary schools, but attended by adolescents and
taught by monks and priests.  The first was in Bologna,
established
in 1088 (see map below).

In  these schools and universities, students began (with the
always-present
threat of flogging!) with the trivium — grammar (the art of
reading
and writing, focussing on the psalms, other parts of the Bible, and the
Latin classics), rhetoric (what we would call speech), and logic. 
Trivium, of course, is the origin of the word trivia — the stuff
beginners
deal with!

Beyond that, they would study the quadrivium: 
arithmetic,
geometry, music, and astronomy.  All together, these subjects make
up the seven liberal arts.  Liberal referred to the free
man,
the man of some property, and liberal arts were in contrast to the
practical
arts of the working poor.

 

The problem of universals

The major philosophical issue of the time was the nature of
universals.
This concerns the meaning of a word.  What in the real world does
a word refer to? This is easy with proper nouns (names): George, for
example,
refers to this person here, me myself.  But what about other, more
general words?  What does cat refer to?  This was by no means
a new issue, but the scholars of the middle ages began without the
benefit
of nice Greek sources!

St.
Anselm of Canterbury(1033-1109) was a neoPlatonist, and
he
is best known for his efforts at coming up with a logical proof of
God’s
existence — the famous ontological proof:  Since we can think of
a perfect being, he must exist, since perfection implies existence.

In regards to the question of universals, he was a proponent of realism.
This is not to be confused with the modern sense of realism as being in
touch with reality. 
Realism was Plato’s perspective:  There is a real universal or
ideal
(somewhere) to which a word refers.  This usually fits in well
with
Christianity.  If humanity is real beyond being just the
collection
of individual human beings, we can talk about a human nature,
including,
for example, the idea of original sin.  If there were no such
thing
as humanity, if each person were a law unto him or herself, then we
could
hardly lay the sins of Adam and Eve on anyone but Adam and Eve!

Likewise, if God is a real universal, then there is no logical
incongruity
about saying he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all at once.

Mind you, the argument isn’t without problems.  For example,
the
ultimate universal — All — is then logically greater than God,
because
All must include God and creation!  But Christianity says that God
and creation are separate and fundamentally different.

Anselm’s motto was Augustine’s  “I believe in order that I may
understand” (credo ut intelligam):  Faith is an absolute
requirement,
and is the standard for all thinking.  Truth is revealed by God,
so
submit yourself to the church.

Nominalism

Roscellinus of Amorica in Brittany (1050-1121) was the
founder
of nominalism, another
approach to universals.  A universal, he
said,
is just a “flatus vocis” (a vocal sound — i.e. a word).  Only
individuals
actually exist.  Words, and the ideas they represent, refer to
nothing.  This is quite compatible with materialism and
empiricism,
but not, really, to Christianity.

It, too, is not without problems:  If words are nothing but
air,
then reason (and philosophy), which is the manipulation of these words,
is nothing but blowing air (as many students in fact believe). That
includes,
of course, the reasoning it took to come to the nominalist conclusion!

Regarding the church,  nominalism means that the church is
nothing
but the people that compose it, and religion is just what individuals
think.
And, if God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, then we can’t be
monotheists.

Abelard

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was a student of both Anselm and
Roscillinus. 
A brilliant thinker and speaker and a canon (priest) of the Cathedral
of Notre
Dame,
he became a popular teacher at the University of Paris.

In 1117, he (now 38) met a sixteen year old girl named
Heloise.  An
orphan,
she was being raised by her uncle Fulbert.  She was particularly
intelligent,
as well as beautiful, and so her uncle asked Abelard if he would tutor
her in exchange for room and board.  Abelard himself commented
that
this was like entrusting a lamb to a wolf!

His teaching suffered a bit.  He was more
likely to compose
love
poems than lectures!  But Heloise became pregnant and had a son
they
named Astrolabe (after an instrument for measuring the position of the
stars!).  Her uncle was furious, but Abelard promised
to marry Heloise, if Fulbert would keep the marriage a secret. 
The
only way he could become a priest while married would be for her to
become
a nun, which was unacceptable to either of them.  She was willing
to be his mistress, but he convinced her to marry him in secret.

Well, Uncle Fulbert remained upset by all this, and eventually sent
some
men
to teach Abelard a lesson:  They cut off his genitals!  The
people
of Paris (being French, even in the Middle Ages) had complete sympathy
with their hero Abelard, but Abelard himself was mortified. 
Heloise
became a nun, and Abelard a monk in order to pay for their sins. They
exchanged
letters for many years, and her first to him can be seen by

clicking
here

.

Abelard was, however, persuaded to continue teaching and
writing. 
Arguing, among other things, that the trinity referred not to the
Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, but to God’s power, wisdom, and love, he began
to 
irritate some of the people with power in the church. The Pope issued
an
order condemning Abelard to perpetual silence and confinement to a
monastery
(the usual for heresy at this time).  On his way to Rome to defend
himself, he died at 63.  Heloise convinced his Abbot to bury him
at
her convent, and twelve years later, she died and was buried next to
him.

Abelard invented “sic et non” — yes and no, pros and cons — in a
book
by the same name.  “Sic et non” is a Socratic method that lays the
arguments
of two opposing points of view side by side for comparison. 
Abelard
is very much the rationalist, and he made his motto “I understand in
order
to believe” (intelligo ut credam).  He believed that the truth of
faith and reason must still agree, as did all his teachers, but reason
has precedence.  It is faith that has to adapt, i.e. the church
must
re-evaluate the meaning of its teachings when they fail to measure up
to
reason.

For Abelard, ethics is a matter of conduct inspired by a good heart,
good will, good intentions.  If you have a good conscience, you
can
do no wrong (sin).  You can only be mistaken. He had said, for
example,
that when Romans killed Christians (including Christ himself), they
were
only acting according to their conscience, and therefore were not
guilty
of sin!

He is best known, however, for conceptualism, his attempt to
synthesize
nominalism and realism.  Although the thing and its name have a
reality
of their own, universals exist in the mind as ideas, he said, which
refer
to groups of things and are represented by words. The mind creates
abstractions
out of real things by detecting similarities, so the meaning of the
word
cat is the mental abstraction we created by looking at individual cats
and noting that they all have four legs, fur, pointy ears, two eyes
with
funny pupils, meow, etc. etc.  This is still an important
perspective
in modern cognitive psychology.

This answer to the question of universals is, as you might have
guessed
by now, still not without problems.  Notice that we are assuming
that
we can use words like legs, ears, eyes…. But what do they
refer
to? 
They can only refer to the mental abstractions we make of individual
legs,
ears, eyes….  So how do you tell you are looking at a leg? 
Well, it’s a mental abstraction we make out of flesh with a hip joint,
a knee, and a foot at the end.  So what is a knee?  Well,
it’s…. 
At what point do we reach a unique thing?

[Personally, I believe that these abstractions or characteristics
are
based on errors, that is, when individual things are easily mistaken
for
each other!]

The Moslems

The Near-Eastern and North African remnants of the Roman Empire fell
as far as any other parts.  Mohammed (570-632) brought Islam —
“Surrender”
— into the world, and it spread like wildfire, both by sword and by
persuasion. 
So, with Islam and reunification under a series of Arab caliphates, the
dark of the dark ages lifted a bit earlier there.  In Baghdad,
Damascus,
Cairo, even Seville in newly-conquered Spain, scholars turned to the
ancient
Greeks and began again to reason and observe.  The security,
stability,
wealth, and relative tolerance of their society inspired them to
produce
literature, including philosophy, that by the millennium, nearly
equalled that
of ancient Greece.

Avicenna of Baghdad (Ibn Sina, 980-1037)
was one of these
great
thinkers.  Thoroughly familiar with Aristotle, he was
nonetheless
a neo-Platonist and a gnostic, as it seems all Moslem philosophers must
be in order to remain Moslem.  Generally, he felt that reason and
faith could not conflict, as the Christian thinkers had concluded as
well. 
But he hints at heresy by suggesting that such items of faith as the
physical
paradise after death that Mohammed promised his followers, were
necessary
in order to win over the masses, but are just stories to the mature
believer.

Averroes of Cordova (Ibn
Rushd, 1126-1198) is the greatest of
the Islamic philosophers.  He began as a lawyer, and was chief
justice
of Seville and later of Cordova.  He was also a physician, and
served
as the court physician in Marrakesh. He was the first to recognize that
if a person survived smallpox, they would be immune thereafter. 
He
described for the first time the purpose of the retina.  He wrote
an encyclopedia of medicine used in both Moslem and Christian
universities.

Averroes begins, of course, with God.  God is what sustains
reality. 
God is the order of the universe.  But, he says, creation is just
a myth.  The universe has always existed, and will always exist.

The human mind has two aspects.  There is a passive intellect,
which is composed of the potential for thought and carries the details
that make one personality different from another, both physically and
psychologically. 
It is a part of the body and dies with it.  And there is an active
intellect, which energizes the passive intellect.  It is actually
the same in each person, is the only part of us that survives death,
and
is, in fact, God.

But Islam’s openness to philosophy was not to last.  The Emir
of
Baghdad ordered Averroes’ books burned, and his example was followed by
other leaders all the way back to Averroes’ homeland of Spain. 
The
world of Islam had achieved what the Christian world failed to
achieve: 
complete domination by religion.

By means of Moslem Spain and Sicily, Avicenna and Averroes and
others
would come to inspire, in turn, the Christian scholars of the new
universities
of Europe.  These scholars would consume the writings of Greek,
Jewish, and Arabic scholars.

St. Thomas

In the late Middle Ages (the 1200s), Aristotle excited a lot of
thought
in the monks and scholars of the universities.  These
neo-Aristotelians
were called schoolmen, or scholastics.  By studying
Aristotle
and his Arab and Jewish commentators, they learned to think more
logically, but
their goals were still essentialy theological.

The scholastic par excellence was St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274).

Of German stock, he was the son of the Count of Aquino, a town
between
Rome and Naples.  He went to the University of Naples, where there
was great interest in Arab and Jewish philosophers — and, of course,
Aristotle. 
He became a monk of the Dominican order and went to Paris to study.

His mother was so upset by this turn of events that she sent his
brothers
to kidnap him and bring him home.  (Contrary to what we might
assume,
families were seldom happy when sons or daughters went off to become
monks
or nuns.  They often grieved for them as if they had died!) 
He escaped and continued his studies in Paris and elsewhere.

He was known to be a very pious and modest man, with no ambitions
for
church promotions — unlike the ambitious Abelard!  He wrote a
great
deal, but is best known for the Summa Theologiae, usually just
called
the Summa, a work of 21 volumes in which he uses Abelard’s Sic et Non
method
to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity.

Thomas believed that the soul is the form of the body, as Aristotle
said, and gives it life and energy.  But the soul and the body are
totally linked together.  This flies in the face of the Platonic
and
neo-Platonic ideas of the church fathers, and irritated the mystical
Franciscan
monks most of all.

Thomas added that the soul without the body would have no
personality,
because individuality comes from matter, not spirit, which represents
the
universal in us.  For this reason, resurrection of the body is
crucial
to the idea of personal immortality.  Averroes’ idea that only an
impersonal soul survives death was, in other words, quite wrong.

Thomas saw five faculties of the soul:

1.  The vegetative faculty, which is involved in food,
drink, sex, and growth.
2.  The sensitive faculty, i.e. our senses, plus the common sense
that binds sensations together.
3.  The locomotor faculty, which permits movement.
4.  The appetitive faculty, which consists of our desire and will.

5.  The intellectual faculty, i.e. thought, reason.
For St. Thomas, reason or intellect is man’s greatest treasure, that
which
raises him above the animals. In keeping with conceptualism, he felt it
was the intellect that abstracts the idea (form or universal) from its
individual appearance, so that, even though day-to-day experience can
tell
us about the particulars of reality, only reason or intellect can lead
us to universal laws of the physical, or the human, world.

Ultimately, we do need direct, intuitive knowledge of God. Reason
depends
on sensory experience, and sensory experience is of matter, not
spirit. 
So reason, like all things human, is imperfect, and cannot comprehend
the
perfection that is God.  Faith is our ultimate refuge. 
Nevertheless,
he insisted, faith and reason do not conflict, since God would not have
made a world that did not ultimately match up with revealed truth.

In spite of his obvious brilliance, St. Thomas (like all
philosophers
in all ages) was a man of his time.  For example, he was as
chauvinistic
as any of his predecessors regarding women:  He considered women
inferior
by nature (and God’s design), and saw them as a serious threat to the
moral
progress of men.  He also devoted a significant portion of the
Summa
to angels and demons, which he thought of as every bit as real as
anything
else.  Among other things, he believed that the angels moved the
planets,
that they had no bodies, that they moved instantaneously, and that each
person had his or her very own guardian angel.

His ideas threatened many in the church, most especially the
Franciscans. 
His works emphasized reason too much and faith too little.  He put
too much stock in pagans like Aristotle and Averroes.  And he
taught
that the soul and the body were unified!  After his death (at the
age of 49), the Franciscans convinced the Pope to condemn him and his
writings. 
But the Dominicans rallied to his defense, and in 1323 Thomas was
canonized.

(In 1879, Pope Leo XIII made Thomism the official philosophy
of the Catholic church.  It is, with Marxism, positivism, and
existentialism,
one of the four most influential philosophies of the 20th century).

The Beginning of the End of the Middle Ages

The Franciscans, as I said, were the primary critics of St Thomas. Roger
Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan monk and scientist, pointed out
that
reason does actually need experience in order to have something to
reason
about — a hint of modern empiricism in the Middle Ages!

But St. Thomas’ severest critic was John Duns Scotus
(1265-1308),
a Franciscan monk and professor at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne.  He
believed that the authority of the church was everything.  The
will
is supreme and intellect is subordinate to it. Although a conceptualist
(like Thomas), of the thing, the idea, and the name, he felt that it
was
the individual thing that was the most real.  His student William
would take that and run with it.

William of Occam in England
(1280-1347) was another
Franciscan
monk. Like Roger Bacon, he believed that, without sensory contact with
things, the universal is inconceivable. In fact, he said universals are
only names we give groups of things — a return to the nominalism of
Roscellinus.

William is best known for the principle that is named for him: Occam’s
razor. “Don’t multiply causes unnecessarily.” usually interpreted
to
mean that the simplest explanation is the best.  Over time, this
came
to mean “if you don’t need a supernatural explanation, don’t use it!”

The result of William’s thinking is skepticism:  Without
universals,
there are no generalizations, categories, classifications, theories,
laws
of nature, etc.  All we can have is an accumulation of facts about
individual entities. We will see this again in the philosophy of David
Hume.

William of Occam, although he was a devout Christian, is often
considered
the turning point from the religious worldview of the Middle Ages to
the
scientific worldview of the Renaissance and the Modern era.

You could say that philosophy rested a while around this time, not
for
a lack of ideas, but because of over a hundred years of Troubles. 
There was a great famine in Europe from 1315 to 1317.  The economy
spiralled downward and the banks collapsed in the  first few
decades
of the 1300s. The Hundred Years War began in 1337 and lasted about 120
years (despite the name).  The Black Death, a plague carried by
the
fleas on rats, came from the Near East and killed over one third of the
population between 1347 and 1352.  Peasant revolts in England,
France,
and elsewhere were cruelly suppressed between 1378 and 1382. 
The Church was split between two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon,
between 1378 and 1417.

But these events, horrible as they were, turned out to be temporary
setbacks, and an even greater explosion of intellectual activity was
about to begin!

© Copyright 2000 by C. George Boeree

The Ancient Greeks, Part Two:

Socrates, Plato, and

Aristotle

Dr. C. George Boeree

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” —

Socrates

In Ukrainian:

Сократ, Платон і Арістотель

(translated by Olena Chervona)

In Russian:

Сократ, Платон и Аристотел

ь

(translated by Olha Fiodorova)

In Macedonian: Сократ, Платон и Аристотель (translated by Katerina Nestiv)

In Chinese:

前蘇格拉底時代

(translated by Liu Yu)

In Spanish:

Sócrates, Platón y Aristóteles

(translated by Laura Mancini)

In Polish:

Sokrates, Platon i Arystoteles

(translated by Marek Murawski)

In French:

Socrate, Platon et Aristote

(translated by Mathilde Guibert)

In Filipino:

Socrates, Plato, at Aristotle

(translated by Jessica Higgins)

In Serbian: Сократ, Платон и Аристотел (translated by Branca Fiagic)

In Mongolian:

Сократ, Платон, Аристотель

(translated by Batar Ulanov)

The Athenians

When we think of ancient Greece, we think right away of
Athens. 
Several of the philosophers we have already discussed considered it the
pinnacle of their careers to come and teach in this great city.

But Athens wasn’t always great.  It began as a collection of
villages
in some of the poorest agricultural land in Greece.  Only
carefully
tended grapes and olives provided early Athens with a livelihood, that
and trade.

The distance between the haves — the ruling aristocratic trading
families
— and the have nots — peasants working the land — and the
accompanying
feudal oppression, grew so great that it looked like the city and its
surrounding
area would collapse under the weight.

In 594 bc, the leaders of the middle class recruited a merchant
named
Solon
to accept leadership of the city and restore some peace and
prosperity. 
He began by canceling all debts and freeing all who had been enslaved
on
account of debt.  Then he proceeded to draft a constitution in
which
the population was divided into four classes based entirely on economic
worth, with the highest retaining the greatest power, but the lowest
being
exempt from taxes.

After a difficult transition, the world’s first democracy was
established 
under the leadership of Cleisthenes in 507 bc, when he decreed that all
free
men would be permitted to vote.  This, of course, falls short of a
complete democracy, but don’t judge them too harshly:  Slavery
would not outlawed until 1814, when Mexico would become the very first
sovereign nation to permanently ban slavery.  The US wouldn’t free
its slaves until 1865 with the 13th amendment.  And women didn’t
get to vote until New Zealand gave them the vote in 1893.  It
would take the US until 1919 and the 19th amendment.

Unfortunately, at about the same time the democratic experiment
began,
the great Persian Empire to the east decided to expand into, first,
Ionia,
and then Greece proper.  But in 490 bc, 20,000 Greeks defeated
100,000
Persian troops at Marathon, north of Athens.  (A messenger named
Pheidippides
ran the 26 miles — 42.195 km — to Athens to give them the good news,
hence the sport of marathon running!)

In 481, the Persian emperor Xerxes sent an army of over two million
men, assisted by a fleet of 1200 ships, to attack Greece again. 
The
army ravaged the north of Greece and prepared to attack Athens. 
They
found the city deserted.  The Persian navy, however, found the
Greek
fleet waiting for it in the Bay of Salamis.  The Greeks won the
day
against enormous odds.  By 479, the Persians were forced back into
Asia Minor.

If this seems like just a little piece of history, consider: 
This
victory allowed the Greek adventure to continue to produce the kind of
thinking that would set the tone for the next two millennia in Europe
and
the Mediterranean.

During the time period we are looking at in this chapter, Athens had
as
many as 300,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in the
world.  About half were free, one third were slaves, and one sixth
were
foreigners (metics).  The
free adult males who could vote numbered about 50,000.

Socrates

Socrates  (470-399) was the son of a sculptor and a
midwife,
and
served with distinction in the Athenian army during Athens’ clash with
Sparta.  He married, but had a tendency to fall in love with
handsome
young men, in particular a young soldier named Alcibiades.  He
was,
by all accounts, short and stout, not given to good grooming, and a
lover
of wine and conversation.  His famous student, Plato, called him
“the
wisest, and justest, and best of all men whom I have ever known” (Phaedo).

He
was irritated by the Sophists and their tendency to teach logic as a
means
of achieving self-centered ends, and even more their promotion of the
idea
that all things are relative.  It was the truth that he loved,
desired,
and believed in.

Philosophy, the love
of wisdom, was for Socrates itself a sacred
path,
a holy quest — not a game to be taken lightly.  He believed — or
at least said he did in the dialog Meno
— in the reincarnation of an
eternal
soul which contained all knowledge.  We unfortunately lose touch
with
that knowledge at every birth, and so we need to be reminded of what we
already know (rather than learning something new).

He said that he did not teach, but rather served, like his mother,
as
a midwife to truth that is already in us!  Making use of questions
and answers to remind his students of knowledge is called maieutics
(midwifery),
dialectics, or the Socratic method.

One example of his effect on philosophy is found in the dialog Euthyphro. 
He suggests that what is to be considered a good act is not good
because gods say it is, but
is good because it is useful to us in our efforts to be better and
happier people.  This means that ethics is no
longer
a matter of surveying the gods or scripture for what is good or bad,
but
rather thinking about life.  He even placed individual conscience
above the law — quite a dangerous position to take!

Socrates himself never wrote any of his ideas down, but rather
engaged
his students — wealthy young men of Athens — in endless
conversations. 
In exchange for his teaching, they in turn made sure that he was taken
care of.  Since he claimed to have few needs, he took very little,
much to his wife Xanthippe’s distress.

Plato reconstructed these discussions in a great set of writings
known
as the Dialogs.  It is difficult to distinguish what is Socrates
and
what is Plato in these dialogs, so we will simply discuss them
together.

Socrates wasn’t loved by everyone by any means.  His unorthodox
political and religious views gave the leading citizens of Athens the
excuse they
needed
to  sentence him to death for corrupting the morals of the youth
of
the city.  In 399, he was ordered to drink a brew of poison
hemlock, which he did
in
the
company of his students. The event is documented in Plato’s Apology.

Socrates’ final words were “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius (the
god of medicine). Pay
it and do not neglect it.”

Plato

Plato (437-347) was Socrates’ prized student.  From a wealthy
and
powerful family, his actual name was Aristocles — Plato was a
nickname,
referring to his broad physique. When he was about twenty, he came
under
Socrates’ spell and decided to devote himself to philosophy. 
Devastated
by Socrates’ death, he wandered around Greece and the
Mediterranean and was taken by pirates. 
His friends raised money to ransom him from slavery, but when he was
released
without it, they bought him a small property called Academus to start a
school — the Academy, founded in 386.

The Academy was more like Pythagoras’ community — a sort of
quasi-religious
fraternity, where rich young men studied mathematics, astronomy, law,
and,
of course, philosophy. It was free, depending entirely on donations.
True
to his ideals, Plato also permitted women to attend!  The Academy
would become the center of Greek learning for almost a millennium.

Plato can be understood as idealistic and rationalistic, much like
Pythagoras
but much less mystical.  He divides reality into two:  On the
one hand we have ousia, idea or ideal.  This is ultimate reality,
permanent, eternal, spiritual.  On the other hand, there’s
phenomena,
which are a manifestation of the ideal.  Phenomena are appearances
— things as they seem to us — and are associated with matter, time,
and
space.

Phenomena are illusions which decay and die.  Ideals are
unchanging,
perfect.  Phenomena are definitely inferior to Ideals!  The
idea
of a triangle — the defining mathematics of it, the form or essence of
it — is eternal.  Any individual triangle, the triangles of the
day-to-day
experiential world, are never quite perfect:  They may be a little
crooked, or the lines a little thick, or the angles not quite right….
They only approximate that perfect triangle, the ideal triangle.

If it seems strange to talk about ideas or ideals as somehow more
real
than the world of our experiences, consider science.  The law of
gravity,
1+1=2, “magnets attract iron,” E=mc², and so on — these are
universals,
not true for one day in one small location, but true forever and
everywhere! 
If you believe that there is order in the universe, that nature has
laws,
you believe in ideas!

Ideas are available to us through thought, while phenomena are
available
to us through our senses.  So, naturally, thought is a vastly
superior
means to get to the truth.  This is what makes Plato a
rationalist,
as opposed to an empiricist, in epistemology.

Senses can only give you information about the ever-changing and
imperfect
world of phenomena, and so can only provide you with implications about
ultimate reality, not reality itself.  Reason goes straight to the
idea. You “remember,” or intuitively recognize the truth, as Socrates
suggested
in the dialog Meno.

According to Plato, the phenomenal world strives to become ideal,
perfect,
complete.  Ideals are, in that sense, a motivating force.  In
fact, he identifies the ideal with God and perfect goodness.  God
creates the world out of materia (raw material, matter) and shapes it
according
to his “plan” or “blueprint” — ideas or the ideal.  If the world
is not perfect, it is not because of God or the ideals, but because the
raw materials were not perfect.  I think you can see why the early
Christian church made Plato an honorary Christian, even though he died
three and a half centuries before Christ!

Plato applies the same dichotomy to human beings:  There’s the
body, which is material, mortal, and “moved” (a victim of
causation). 
Then there’s the soul, which is ideal, immortal, and “unmoved”
(enjoying
free will).

The soul includes reason, of course, as well as self-awareness and
moral
sense.  Plato says the soul will always choose to do good, if it
recognizes
what is good.  This is a similar conception of good and bad as the
Buddhists have:  Rather than bad being sin, it is considered a
matter
of ignorance.  So, someone who does something bad requires
education,
not punishment.

The soul is drawn to the good, the ideal, and so is drawn to
God. 
We gradually move closer and closer to God through reincarnation as
well
as in our individual lives.  Our ethical goal in life is
resemblance
to God, to come closer to the pure world of ideas and ideal, to
liberate
ourselves from matter, time, and space, and to become more real in this
deeper sense.  Our goal is, in other words, self-realization.

Plato talks about three levels of pleasure.  First is sensual
or
physical pleasure, of which sex is a great example.  A second
level
is sensuous or esthetic pleasure, such as admiring someone’s beauty, or
enjoying one’s relationship in marriage.  But the highest level is
ideal pleasure, the pleasures of the mind.  Here the example would
be Platonic love, intellectual love for another person unsullied by
physical
involvement.

Paralleling these three levels of pleasure are three souls.  We
have one soul called appetite, which is mortal and comes from the
gut. 
The second soul is called spirit or courage.  It is also mortal,
and
lives in the heart.  The third soul is reason. It is immortal and
resides in the brain.  The three are strung together by the
cerebrospinal
canal.

Plato is fond of analogies.  Appetite, he says, is like a wild
horse, very powerful, but likes to go its own way.  Spirit is like
a thoroughbred, refined, well trained, directed power.  And reason
is the charioteer, goal-directed, steering both horses according to his
will.

Other analogies abound, especially in Plato’s greatest work, The
Republic.  In The Republic, he designs (through
Socrates)
a society in order to discover the meaning of justice.  Along the
way, he compares elements of his society (a utopia, Greek for “no
place”)
to the three souls:  The peasants are the foundation of the
society. 
They till the soil and produce goods, i.e. take care of society’s basic
appetites.  The warriors represent the spirit and courage of the
society. 
And the philosopher kings guide the society, as reason guides our
lives.

Before you assume that we are just looking at a Greek version of the
Indian caste system, please note:  Everyone’s children are raised
together and membership in one of the three levels of society is based
on talents, not on one’s birth parents!  And Plato includes women
as men’s equals in this system.

I leave you with a few quotes:

“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher,
and philosophy begins in
wonder.”

“…(I)f you ask what is the good of
education in general, the
answer
is easy; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly.”

“(I) do to others as I would they should
do to me.”

“Our object in the construction of the
State is the greatest
happiness
of the whole, and not that of any one class.”

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322) was born in a small Greek colony in
Thrace
called
Stagira.  His father was a physician and served the grandfather
of Alexander the Great.  Presumably, it was his father who taught
him to take an interest in the details of natural life.

He
was Plato’s prize student, even though he disagreed with him on many
points. 
When Plato died, Aristotle stayed for a while with another student of
Plato,
who had made himself a dictator in northern Asia Minor.  He
married
the dictator’s daughter, Pythias.  They moved to Lesbos, where
Pythias
died giving birth to their only child, a daughter.  Although he
married
again, his love for Pythias never died, and he requested that they be
buried
side by side.

For four years, Aristotle served as the teacher of a thirteen year
old
Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon.  In 334, he returned to
Athens and established his school
of philosophy in a set of buildings called the Lyceum (from a name for
Apollo).  The beautiful grounds and covered
walkways
were conducive to leisurely walking discussions, so the students were
named for the peripatoi (“covered walkways”).

First, we must point out that Aristotle was as much a scientist as a
philosopher.  He was endlessly fascinated with nature, and went a
long way towards classifying the plants and animals of Greece.  He
was equally interested in studying the anatomies of animals and their
behavior
in the wild.

Aristotle also pretty much invented modern logic.  Except for
its
symbolic form, it is essentially the same today.

Let’s begin with metaphysics:  While Plato separates the
ever-changing
phenomenal world from the true and eternal ideal reality, Aristotle
suggests
that the ideal is found “inside” the phenomena, the universals “inside”
the particulars.

What Plato called idea or ideal, Aristotle called essence, and its
opposite,
he referred to as matter.  Matter is without shape or form or
purpose. 
It is just “stuff,” pure potential, no actuality.  Essence is what
provides the shape or form or purpose to matter.  Essence is
“perfect,”
“complete,” but it has no substance, no solidity.  Essence and
matter
need each other!

Essence realizes (“makes real”) matter.  This process, the
movement
from formless stuff to complete being, is called entelechy, which some
translate as actualization.

There are four causes that contribute to the movement of
entelechy. 
They are answers to the question “why?” or “what is the explanation of
this?”

1.  The material cause: what
something is made of.

2.  The efficient cause: the motion or energy that changes matter.

3.  The formal cause: the thing’s shape, form, or essence; its
definition.

4.  The final cause: its reason, its purpose, the intention behind
it.

1.  The material cause:  The thing’s matter or
substance. 
Why a bronze statue?  The metal it is made of.  Today,
we find an emphasis on material causation in reductionism, explaining,
for example, thoughts in terms of neural activity, feelings in terms of
hormones, etc.  We often go down a “level” because we can’t
explain
something at the level it’s at.

2.  The efficient cause:  The motion or energy that
changes
matter.  Why the statue?  The forces necessary to work the
bronze,
the hammer, the heat, the energy….  This is what modern science
focuses on, to the point where this is what cause now tends to mean,
exclusively. 
Note that modern psychology usually relies on reductionism in order to
find efficient causes.  But it isn’t always so:  Freud, for
example,
talked about psychosexual energy and Skinner talked about stimulus and
response.

3.  The formal cause:  The thing’s shape, form,
definition,
or essence.  Why the statue?  Because of the plan the
sculptor
had for the bronze, its shape or form, the non-random ordering of its
matter.  In psychology, we see some theorists focus on structure
—
Piaget and his schema, for example.  Others talk about the
structure
inherent in the genetic code, or about cognitive scripts.

4.  The final cause:  The end, the purpose, the teleology
of the thing.  Why the statue?  The purpose of it, the
intention
behind making it.  This was popular with medieval scholars: 
They searched for the ultimate final cause, the ultimate purpose of all
existence, which they of course labeled God! Note that, outside of the
hard sciences, this is often the kind of cause we are most interested
in: 
Why did he do it, what was his purpose or intention?  E.g. in law,
the bullet may have been the “efficient” cause of death, but the intent
of the person pulling the trigger is what we are concerned with. 
When we talk about intentions, goals, values, and so on, we are talking
about final causes.

Aristotle wrote the first book on psychology (as a separate topic
from
the rest of philosophy).  It was called, appropriately, Peri
Psyches,
Greek for “about the mind or soul.”  It is better known in the
Latin
form, De Anima.  In this book, we find the first mentions
of
many ideas that are basic to psychology today, such as the laws of
association.

In it, he says the mind or soul is the “first entelechy” of the
body,
the “cause and principle” of the body, the realization of the
body. 
We might put it like this: The mind is the purposeful functioning of
the
nervous system.

Like Plato, he postulates three kinds of souls, although slightly
differently
defined.  There is a plant soul, the essence of which is
nutrition. 
Then there is an animal soul, which contains the basic sensations,
desire,
pain and pleasure, and the ability to cause motion.  Last, but not
least, is the human soul.  The essence of the human soul is, of
course,
reason.  He suggests that, perhaps, this last soul is capable of
existence
apart from the body.

He foreshadowed many of the concepts that would become popular only
two thousand years later.  Libido, for example:  “In all
animals…
it is the most natural function to beget another being similar to
itself…
in order that they attain as far as possible, the immortal and
divine…. 
This is the final cause of every creature’s natural life.”

And the struggle of the id and ego: “There are two powers in the
soul
which appear to be moving forces — desire and reason.  But desire
prompts actions in violation of reason… desire… may be wrong.”

And the pleasure principle and reality principle:  “Although
desires
arise which are opposed to each other, as is the case when reason and
appetite
are opposed, it happens only in creatures endowed with a sense of time.
For reason, on account of the future, bids us resist, while desire
regards
the present; the momentarily pleasant appears to it as the absolutely
pleasant
and the absolutely good, because it does not see the future.”

And finally, self-actualization:  We begin as unformed matter
in
the womb, and through years of development and learning, we become
mature
adults, always reaching for perfection. “So the good has been well
explained
as that at which all things aim.”

© Copyright 2000, 2009, C. George Boeree

 

 

The Ancient Greeks, Part One:

The Presocratics

Dr. C. George Boeree

“Know thyself.”

    — inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

In Chinese:

前蘇格拉底時代

(translated by Liu Yu)

Psyche, from the Greek psu-khê, possibly derived from a
word meaning “warm blooded:”  Life, soul, ghost, departed spirit,
conscious self, personality, butterfly or moth.  Some words with
similar meanings: 
Thymos, meaning breath, life, soul, temper, courage, will; 
Pneuma, meaning breath, mind, spirit, or angel;  Noös,
meaning mind, reason, intellect, or the meaning of a word;  Logos, meaning word, speech, idea,
or reason.

Psychology:  Reasoning
about the soul.  Probably coined by the German philosopher and
reformation theologian Philipp Melanchthon in the mid 16th
century.  First used to mean “study of the mind” in Christian
Wolff’s Psychologia
Empirica (1732) and Psychologia Rationalis (1734).

The Greeks

Western intellectual history always begins with the ancient
Greeks. 
This is not to say that no one had any deep thoughts prior to the
ancient
Greeks, or that the philosophies of ancient India and China (and
elsewhere)
were in any way inferior.  In fact, philosophies from all over the
world eventually came to influence western thought, but only much
later. 
But it was the Greeks that educated the Romans and, after a long dark
age,
it was the records of these same Greeks, kept and studied by the Moslem
and Jewish scholars as well as Christian monks, that educated Europe
once again.

We might also ask, why the Greeks in the first place?  Why not
the Phoenicians, or the Carthaginians, or the Persians, or the
Etruscans? 
There are a variety of possible reasons.

One has to do with the ability to read and write, which in turn has
to do with the alphabet.  It is when ideas get recorded that they
enter intellectual history. Buddhism, for example, although a very
sophisticated
philosophy, was an oral tradition for hundreds of years until committed
to writing, since the Brahmi alphabet was late in coming.  It was
only then that Buddhism spread throughout Asia.

The alphabet was invented by the Semites of the Mediterranean
coast, 
including the Hebrews and the Phoenicians, who used simple drawings to
represent consonants instead of words.  The Phoenicians apparently
passed it on to the Greeks.  The Greeks improved on the
idea by inventing vowels, using some extra letters their language had
no
use for.

(Click here
to
see how the

alphabet
developed)

Prior to the invention of the alphabet, reading and writing was the
domain of specialized scribes, concerned mostly with keeping government
records.  Even in the case of the Phoenicians, writing was more a
tool
of the merchant class, to keep track of trade, than a means of
recording
ideas.  In Greece, at least in certain city-states, reading and
writing
was something “everyone” did.

By everyone, of course, I mean upper class males.  Women,
peasants,
and slaves were discouraged from picking up the skill, as they would be
and still are in many places around the world.  If you wonder
where
all the women philosophers are, well, there were very few indeed! 
The poet Sappho of Lesbos is the closest we get to a female philosopher
on record
in the ancient world.

(Click here to
see
two of

Sappho’s poems)

Still, the alphabet does not explain everything.  Another thing
that made the Greeks a bit more likely to start the intellectual ball
rolling
was the fact that they got into overseas trading early.  Their
land
and climate was okay for agriculture, but not great, so the idea of
trading
for what you can’t grow or make yourself came naturally.  Plus,
Greece
is practically all coastline and islands, so seafaring came equally
naturally.

What sea trading gives you is contact with a great variety of
civilizations,
including their religions and philosophies and sciences.  This
gets
people to thinking:  If this one says x, and that one says 
y,
and the third one says z, what then is the truth?  Traders are
usually
skeptics.

Still, the Phoenicians (and their cousins, the Carthaginians) had
the
alphabet first, and were excellent sea traders as well.  Why
weren’t
they the founders of western intellectual history?  Perhaps it had
to do with centralization.  The Phoenicians had an authoritarian
government
controlled by the most powerful merchants.  The Carthaginians had
the same.  Perhaps being surrounded by powerful authoritarian
empires
forced them to adopt that style of government to survive.

The Greeks, on the other hand, were divided into many small
city-states,
each unique, each fiercely independent, always bickering and often
fighting. 
It may seem disadvantageous, but when it comes to ideas, diversity and
even conflict can be invigorating!  Consider that when Greece was
finally united under Macedonian rule, the flurry of intellectual
activity
slowed.  And when the Romans took over, it practically died.

The Basics

The ancient Greek philosophers gave us the basic categories of
philosophy,
beginning with metaphysics.  Metaphysics is the part of
philosophy
that asks questions such as “What is the world made of?” and 
“What
is the ultimate substance of all reality?”

In fact, the ancient Greeks were among the first to suggest that
there
is a “true” reality (noumenon) under the “apparent” reality
(phenomenon),
an “unseen real” beneath the “unreal seen.”  The question is, what
is this true reality?  Is it matter and energy, i.e. something
physical?
This is called materialism.  Or something more spiritual
or
mental, such as ideas or ideals?  This is called idealism. 
Materialism and idealism constitute the two extreme answers. 
Later,
we will explore some other possibilities.

A second aspect of philosophy is epistemology. 
Epistemology
is the philosophy of knowledge:  How do we know what is true or
false,
what is real or not?  Can we know anything for certain, or is it
ultimately
hopeless?

Again, the Greeks outlined two opposing approaches to the problem of
knowledge.  One is called empiricism, which says that all
knowledge
comes through the senses.  The other is called rationalism,
which says that knowledge is a matter of reason, thought.  There
are
other answers in epistemology as well.  In fact, empiricism and
rationalism
have never been entirely exclusive.

The third aspect of philosophy that we will be concerned with is ethics. 
Ethics is the philosophical understanding of good and bad, right and
wrong. 
It is often called morality, and most consider the two words
synonymous.
After all, ethics comes from ethos,
which is Greek for customs, and
morality
comes from mores, which is
Latin for customs!

As we shall see, ethics is the most difficult of the three aspects
of
philosophy.  For the present, we might want to differentiate the
extremes
of hedonism and cynicism.  Hedonism says that good
and
bad come down to what I like and what I don’t like, what gives me
pleasure
and what gives me pain.  Cynicism says that world is essentially
evil,
and we can only work at distancing ourselves from it and moving towards
the ultimate good, which is God.

There are many other aspects of philosophy — logic, for example,
and
esthetics, the study of beauty.  But metaphysics, epistemology,
and
ethics are sufficient for now.

The Ionians

Greek philosophy didn’t begin in
Greece (as we know
it);  It
began
on the western coast of what is now Turkey, an area known then as
Ionia. 
In Ionia’s richest city, Miletus, was a man of Phoenician descent
called
Thales
(624-546).  He studied in Egypt and other parts of the near east,
and learned geometry and astronomy.

His answer to the great question of what the universe is made of was
water.  Inasmuch as water is a simple molecule, found in gaseous,
liquid, and solid forms, and found just about everywhere, especially
life,
this is hardly a bad answer!  It makes Thales not only the nominal
first philosopher, but the first materialist as well.  Since
ultimate
nature was known in Greek as physis,
he could also be considered the
first
physicist (or, as the Greeks would say, physiologist).

We should note, however, that he also believed that the whole
universe
of material things is alive, and that animals, plants, and even metals
have souls — an idea called panpsychism.

His most famous student was Anaximander
(611-549),
also of
Miletus.
He is probably best known as having drawn the first known map of the
inhabited
world, which probably looked something like this:

Anaximander added an evolutionary aspect to Thales’
materialism: 
The universe begins as an unformed, infinite mass, which develops over
time into the many-faceted world we see around us.  But, he warns,
the world will eventually return to the unformed mass!

Further, the earth began as fluid, some of which dries to become
earth
and some of which evaporates to become atmosphere.  Life also
began in
the sea, only gradually becoming animals of the land and birds of the
air.

Like
Thales, Heraclitus (540-475) was an Ionian,
from
Ephesus,
a little north of Miletus.  And, like Thales, he was searching for
the ultimate substance that unifies all reality.  He decided on
fire,
or energy — again, not a bad guess at all.

The multiplicity of reality comes out of fire by condensation,
becoming
humid air, then water, and finally earth.  But this is balanced by
rarefaction, and the earth liquifies, then evaporates, and finally
returns
to pure energy.

Taking fire as his ultimate substance led to a more dynamic view of
reality.  Change, for Heraclitus, is the only constant. 
“Panta
rhei, ouden menei” — all things flow, nothing abides — is his
most
famous
saying.  He is also known for the saying that we cannot step into
the same river twice, because new water is constantly flowing onto us.

Fire is also associated in his theory with mind or spirit. 
And,
just like any other fire, he points out that our individuality
eventually
dies.  There is no personal immortality.  Only God — the
divine fire
— is eternal.

In many ways, Heraclitus reminds me of a Greek Taoist.  He
believed
that, although ultimate reality is One, the world we know is made of up
dualities, with each pole requiring the existence of its
opposite: 
Up requires down, white requires black, good requires bad, and so on.

And he sees these oppositions as being the source of harmony,
pointing
out that, unless you stretch your harp strings in two opposing
directions,
you cannot play music.

And, again like the Taoists, he believed that the best way to live
one’s
life is in harmony with nature.  But he died alone, at the age of
70, due to his intense dislike for human company!

The Greeks of Italy

Another Ionian was Pythagoras (582-500).  After
travelling
everywhere from Gaul (modern day France) to Egypt and India, he settled
down in Crotona, a sea port of southern Italy.  Southern Italy was
the greatest settlement of Greeks outside of Greece, to the point that
the Romans referred to the area as Magna Grecia (“greater Greece”).
There,
he set up his famous school.

His school was more like a large commune, and his philosophy more
like
a religion.  Because they believed in reincarnation, all of his
followers
were vegetarians.  They avoided wine, swearing by the gods, sexual
misconduct, excesses and frivolity.  For the first five years, a
new
pupil took a vow of silence.  Women were treated as equals — a
true
rarity in the ancient world!

His philosophy was rooted in mathematics, which meant geometry to
the
ancient Greeks.  Pythagoras is credited with a number of geometric
proofs, most notably the Pythagorean theorem:  The sum of the
squares
of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the
hypotenuse. 
He discovered the mathematical basis of music, and saw the same
patterns
in the movements of the planets. He was the first person to realize that
the earth, moon, and planets are all spheres (hence, the “music of the
spheres!”).  He saw the elegant lawfulness of geometry as the
foundation
of the entire universe.

So, rather than look for an understanding of the universe in the
movement
of matter and energy, he looked for laws of nature, the form rather
than
the material.  But, since these laws exist only in the mind as
ideas,
we call Pythagoras an idealist.

Although his life remains mysterious, his school lasted 300 years,
and
had a profound influence on all who followed, most particularly Plato.

In Elea, another Greek seaport in the south of Italy lived Xenophanes
(570-475).  He is best known for his denial of the existence of
the
Greek gods.

“Mortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and
have
voice and form like themselves.  Yet if oxen and lions had hands,
and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the
pictures
and images of their gods in their own likenesses; horses would make
them
like horses, oxen like oxen.  Ethiopians make their gods black and
snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair.” (from
Diogenes
Laertes “Xenophanes,” iii.)
There is only one God, he said, and that is the universe, Nature. 
This perspective is known as pantheism. Nevertheless, said Xenophanes,
all things, even human beings, evolved from earth and water by means of
natural laws. But things and people remain forever secondary to the
ultimate
reality that is God-or-Nature.

Parmenides (540-470) of
Elea, was a disciple of
Xenophanes,
and
would have a particularly potent influence on Plato.  He extended
Xenophanes’ concept of the one God by saying “Hen ta panta,” all things
are One. Ultimate reality is constant.  What we believe to be a
world
of things and motion and change is just an illusion.

One of Parmenides’ disciples was Zeno of Elea (490-430, not
to
be confused with Zeno of Citium, whom we will look at in a later
chapter).  Zeno wrote a book of famous paradoxes,
including the story of Achilles and the tortoise:  Let’s give the
tortoise a head start.  By the time Achilles gets to where the
tortoise
started, the tortoise will have moved a little further.  By the
time
Achilles gets to where the tortoise had moved, the tortoise will have
moved
a little further still, and so on.  Hence, Achilles can never
catch
up with the tortoise.  The point of the story, and all the
stories,
is that motion is an illusion.

In making his point, he invented the form of dialectic argument
known as
“reduction to absurdity.”  Note, however, that his arguments don’t
hold up in the long run, because he mistakenly takes motion, time, and
space as made up of an infinite number of points, rather than being
continuous.

The Abderans

Leucippus (fl. c. 440) was from Miletus in Ionia, home of
Thales
and Anaximander.  He studied with Zeno at Elea, then started
teaching
in Abdera, an Ionian Greek colony on the southern shore of Thrace
(northeastern
Greece).

Although only one sentence of his actual teachings remains,
Leucippus
will always be remembered as the man who invented the ideas of the
atom,
empty space, and cause-and-effect.  Even the soul, he said, is
made
up of atoms!

It
was Leucippus’ student, Democritus (460-370) of Abdera, who
would
take these ideas and develop them into a full-bodied philosophy. He
travelled
extensively, wrote books on every subject, and was considered the equal
of the great Plato and Aristotle.  But he never founded a school,
and so his ideas never had quite the same impact as Plato’s and
Aristotle’s
on later civilization.

Democritus was quite skeptical of sense data, and introduced the
idea
of secondary qualities:  Things like color and sound and taste are
more in your mind than in the thing itself.  Further, he said that
sensations are a matter of atoms falling on the sense organs, and that
all the senses are essentially forms of touch.

He also introduced the idea that we identify qualities by convention
— i.e. we call sweet things “sweet,” and that is what leads us to
group
them together, not some quality of the things themselves.  This is
called nominalism, from the Latin word for name.  This way of
thinking doesn’t show up again till the
late Middle Ages.

The soul or mind, he said, is composed of small, smooth, round
atoms,
a lot like fire or energy atoms, and can be found throughout the bodies
of both humans and animals, and even the rest of the world.

Happiness comes from acquiring knowledge and ultimately
wisdom. 
Sensual pleasure is way too short-lived and fickle to depend on. 
Instead, the wise man or woman should seek peace of mind (ataraxia)
through
cheerfulness, moderation, and orderly living.  His moral theory is
based on the sense of integrity: “A man should feel more shame in doing
evil before himself than before all the world.”

Democritus did not believe in gods nor an afterlife. In fact, he
formed
an atheist organization called the Kakodaimonistai
— “the devils
club.” 
He is sometimes called the laughing philosopher, because he found life
much more cheerful without what he considered to be the depressing
superstitions
of religion.

He took Leucippus’ materialism very seriously, noting that matter
can
never be created nor destroyed, that there were an infinity of worlds
like
our own, and that there was no such thing as chance — only
causation. 
It would be many centuries before these ideas would again become
popular.

A little older than Democrates was Protagoras
(480-411),
also
of Abdera.  He is the most famous of the group of philosophers
known
as the sophists.  The
word comes from the Greek sophistai,
which
means
teachers of wisdom — i.e. professors.  Because some of these
professors
taught little more than how to win arguments in court, and did so for
exorbitant
fees, the name has become somewhat derogatory.  Sophistry now
means
argument for argument’s sake, or for the sake of personal gain. 
But
then, it is also the root of the word sophisticated!

Protagoras, although his teaching fees were in fact high, was a
serious
philosopher.  He can be credited with founding the science of
grammar,
being the first to distinguish the various conjugations of verbs and
declensions
of nouns.  He was also a major contributor to logic and was using
the Socratic method (teaching by question and answer) before Socrates.

He was a skeptic, and
believed that there were no ultimate truths,
that
truth is a relative, subjective thing.  “Man is the measure of all
things,” is his most famous quote, meaning that things are what we say
they are.

Applying this skepticism to the gods, he scared the Athenian
powers-that-be,
and he was ordered to leave Athens.  Apparently, he drowned on his
way to Sicily.

Into this idea-rich environment would come the three Athenians that
would come to dominate philosophy for the next 2000 years: 
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

© Copyright C. George Boeree 2000

Discussion Board Week 1

What was the greatest contribution of the Ancient Greek philosophers to the field of psychology? Why did you choose this contribution as the most influential?

How did the thinkers of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment influence the development scientific thinking?

Articles are attached

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