Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, Cynics

These groups came about in the Roman Age, after Alexander the Great conquered the whole of the Mediterranean (including Greece) and beyond. All were concerned with leading the good life.
Epicureans give me the impression of plain happy-go-lucky sorts. They were called ‘Garden Philosophers’ because they were convinced that peace and tranquility of mind was all that was needed to be happy. Personal contentment could be achieved by retreating from the nasty and violent world of politics (reminds me of Taoism).
Stoics went in somewhat the opposite direction: the good life was to be found by trusting in Reason. They were distrustful of human feelings as they felt feelings always made people unhappy – stuff like rejecting human pride and not being too emotionally attached to others. The universe, however cruel social and political life was, was held to be rational.
Stoicism was mainstream philosophy, attracting vast groups from all backgrounds, slaves to Emperors. Some of them: Cicero, Seneca and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Sceptics and Cynics: I can’t tell the difference ha. :) Sceptics taught not to believe in anything. I guess they didn’t trust their senses very much. Too much of Heraclitus’ observer-relative world maybe? Sextus Empiricus (I wonder who he is – a sceptic?) apparently was quoted saying that scepticism produces happiness because having no dogmatic beliefs frees one from worry. Really? The problem was that sceptics have a dogmatic doctrine: Scepticism.
Diogenes the Cynic was an anarchist who was lived in a barrel and was rude to everyone, including Alexander the Great. Eccentric figure. Something about ‘no need to rebel because everyone is already free’.

Socratic era?, Plato, Aristotle

More than just Socrates…

Protagoras, a Sophist, probably shifted the tide of philosophy from the One Big Question to something more concerned with ethics… He introduced the concept of cultural relativism by questioning how, in a world of diverse beliefs, anyone would know their own beliefs were right. He claimed that ‘Man is the measure of all things’ – no objective truths, only subjective beliefs.

Socrates vastly differed from him. I kind of admire this guy, if he’s even real… Nicknamed the Gadfly, he was an Athenian old man who was popular with the youngsters. His trademark was the Socratic dialogue, which consisted in asking questions about everything, sometimes in a way that pointed out the other party’s logic flaw, which no doubt would have agitated many parents. To Socrates, true moral wisdom lay in the self, thus ‘know(ing) thyself’ was very important, and he believed that virtue is knowledge. He met a tragic end though, accused of corrupting young Athenians and made to drink Hemlock (a poison). But he met his death bravely, a believer in the eternity of the soul.

Plato was his student, who founded the school the Academy. Plato believed in Innatism, that knowledge was found in everyone and learning was recollection, or Anamnesis. He demonstrated this by questioning a slave about whether he recognised a triangle. I think it bears strange resemblance to this article I read somewhere about a group of researchers going into the jungles of central or south america to see if tribesmen had an innate understanding of mathematics. Turned out they did. I kind of believe this without the research anyway so it looked redundant and suspiciously condescending to me.

Plato also formulated this (dubious?) theory of the Ideal Forms. Forms are like perfect templates, and the particular things we see here on earth are imperfect copies of the Ideal Form. An example:
Particular thing: Chair
Ideal Form: Chairness (whatever this means)
To Plato, only specially trained people called Guardians can see these forms. To me it sounds like Mysticism. Plato illustrated this with his Cave theory about a coupla men who were enslaved since a young age in a cave, their backs towards the opening where sunlight streamed in, with no knowledge of the world outside apart from the shadows (ie particular things) that moved on the wall of the cave. One day one of them had the courage to break free and experienced firsthand the real substance (Ideal Forms) of which the shadows were just reflections.
Plato’s most famous work was The Republic, in which he expounded his concept of a Plutocracy, a society ruled by philosopher-kings, because unless a society had wise rulers, evil would continue in existence. His main goal was to create a utopia. Nice intentions, but for us living in the 21st century, we know where that sort of authoritarian superior elite kind of dictatorial rule gets us to.

Aristotle studied in Plato’s Academy. It strikes me as strange how this pair of teacher-disciple can be so utterly different, yet Aristotle seems to have loved being in the Academy, as he spent 20 years there until Plato’s death.

Aristotle invented the syllogism, a deductive argument that goes like this:
All men breathe. (Premise)
Socrates was a man. (Premise)
Therefore Socrates breathed. (Conclusion)
The powerful thing about syllogisms is, if you follow certain rules, like not letting your conclusion fit in more than your premises, and if your premises were true, the conclusion is guaranteed.
I did attend a lesson where we saw a syllogism go wrong though:
All cows eat grass.
All sheep eat grass.
Therefore all cows are sheep.
Where did it go wrong? Squeezing in more than the premises in the conclusion??? Is it even a syllogism anyway?

Aristotle didn’t agree with his teacher on Ideal Forms, and thought that Forms were only ‘natural kinds’, or ‘species‘. This guy was quite into science – he believed that the scientist’s job was to find out what the special properties of these kinds were. This was where he recognised the importance of Induction, a form of argument which allowed people to make generalisations of the whole (say, of species – eg, frogs in general) based on premises that were observations of the part (the specific – eg, a frog). So something like… These frogs can swim… Therefore all frogs can swim. The thing about induction is that, unlike deductive reasoning, it cannot guarantee that the outcome is true. Just because a part of a whole behaves in a certain way does not guarantee that the whole will behave in like way. In other words, inductive reasoning allows room for exceptions to occur, but deductive reasoning, reasoning from whole to part, necessitates that the part follows the whole.

Aristotle thought that only individual things existed, not forms. He also believed that everything had a final cause or potential function, like fire having the constant potential to move upward and heavy objects to fall downward.
Bringing this argument to its ultimate, he argued that everything has a cause, and so there must be a prime cause, a first mover… forming the Teleological argument.
This argument has its own attackers, from the book, the Darwinian theory of evolution seems to have dealt it a big blow.

Aristotle also felt that everything had essential and accidental properties. Essential properties defined a person, whereas accidental ones did not. This was in response to the question of what the world was made of, Aristotle’s answer was, everything was made of ‘unique ’substances”, some having essential, some accidental, properties.

As for morality, Aristotle felt it was a practical skill taught by parents to offspring… for the benefit of harmonious living in society perhaps. He did believe that humans had to access their moral ’software’ sometimes to choose the Golden Mean, though, the moderate path between extremes. Aristotle’s morality was somehow linked to happiness, he believed that the main pursuit of life was happiness, though not in the hedonistic way that we tend to associate happiness with, for happiness was to be gained in living a moral life, in the way of the Golden Mean.

Lastly, he disagreed with Socrates that Virtue is Knowledge. Being a moral person to Aristotle didn’t just mean knowing what the right thing was, but in choosing to do it as well, and accepting responsibility for one’s choice.

At the close of this era, the book borrowed a quote from A.N. Whitehead (a 19th Century philosopher) who suggested that all of Western philosophy after this ultimately consists of no more than ‘footnotes’ to Plato. For the rest of western philosophy, there was to be two tendencies:
Platonic tendencies – seeking for a mystical truth through the use of reason, or
Aristotelian tendencies – methodical and empirical

The early philosophers (continued)

Parmenides took a similar view about the observer-relative world: empirical knowledge was ultimately subjective and unreliable, thus mankind should rely on their reason if they wanted to discover truths about the world. (A passing mention: It is quite funny that reading on developments in art to the modern art period artists first abandoned reason, trusted their senses, then felt them to be unreliable and painted abstract art instead.) He made an interesting claim about Time – only the Present has any real existence, and the past and the future are but talk.

Zeno, Parmenides’ student, was famous for his paradoxes. I loved the one about Achilles and the Tortoise. Achilles and a tortoise had a race. As Achilles is such the great and able runner, he lets the tortoise have a headstart. But through the race Achilles finds he can never catch up with the tortoise because, every time he reaches the point (A) where the tortoise is, he realises that the tortoise would have moved on to a further point (B), and when he finally reaches B, the tortoise would have moved on to (C)… This never really happens in life, so the point is: real motion and change are impossible. (To be honest I don’t quite get it – real motion and change? Isn’t that supposed to mean rather absolute motion and change? Isn’t real motion and change what happens in real life?)

Empedocles was a doctor, and his answer to the One Big Question was: The Four Elements – Earth, Air, Water and Fire. The world is ruled by two opposing forces – Love (Attraction) and Strife (Repulsion).
To be honest I never quite liked the four elements, I couldn’t understand why people would have held these beliefs to be true until medieval times. That was, until the book clarified that the introduction of these forces (love and strife) was an attempt to explain how compounds were made and destroyed. So, the four elements didn’t come out of nowhere (I thought Empedocles just chose 4 things most common in his environment and claimed the whole world to be made of them), but was rather an honest (though failed) attempt at trying to find individual elements that composed the many compounds in our universe, much like present science. Apparently, Empedocles’ philosophy made him believe in a constant cycle of destructive and constructive reincarnation, and he claimed to have been ‘a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a sea-fish’ before he was Empedocles. (Sounds similar?) He ended his life by leaping into a volcano, perhaps to demonstrate his philosophy.

The atomists! Democritus was the first to have conjectured the presence of atoms, small, indivisible (uncuttable) substances from which everything was made of.
This marks the end of the pre-Socratic age (at least for the book), and the book made a point that struck me as pretty awesome:
‘What is remarkable about these conjectures is how close some of them got to 20th century scientific theory. They got to this stage, not by using particle accelerators, but just by thinking very hard.’

Philosophy… an Introduction – The early philosophers

Here I attempt to summarise an already rather condensed book, Introducing Philosophy. Yes, from the Introducing series. I own Julian Marias’ History of Philosophy, which examines Philosophy from a historical perspective (duh) similar to Introducing Philosophy, but I think the Introducing series of books have a way with making difficult concepts clearer. So I do recommend it, though depth is lacking due to Introducing’s primary emphasis on brevity.

For a start, the categories:
– Epistemology (theory of knowledge)
– Metaphysics (Time, Space, God, Cause and Reality)
– Ethics
– Aesthetics
– Political philosophy

A dip into history: Philosophy seems to have started with the Greeks. Earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilisations were theocracies that used mythological ways to explain phenomena and the world around them. According to the book, (which I feel is pretty biased in this sweeping statement… but then again I am a Christian) this kind of thinking is mystical, and the societies formed are static and monopolize thought. For me I’d only venture to say that it is mystical, and there seems an absence of rational thought in the formation of such myths.

Therefore a scientific method of trying to explain the world came about with the Greeks. Thus the first Greek ponderings were not strictly philosophical, but more scientific – as opposed to religious. From records the first ones to have any philosophical inclinations were the Milesians, a group of Greeks living in Miletus, a colony that is now on the Turkish Coast. 6th century BC.

The One Big Question they asked: ‘What is reality made of?’ Then comes all the funny answers:
Thales: Water.
Anaximenes: Air.
Anaximander: A fundamental stuff from which all is created and which all will return. A bit like a large stone column.
Pythagoras: Mathematics! (great shift here… I like a phrase used to describe this crazy mathematician: ‘number mysticism’. Interesting facts: he thought Justice was the number 4, as it was a square number, discovered irrational numbers like pi and square root 2 and was astonied, to the point of drowning his student Hipparsus for revealing the secret to outsiders.)
Heraclitus: Fire – Heraclitus believed that the world was in a constant change of flux. He illustrated this by a famous saying: ‘You can never step into the same river twice.’ Yet he also believed that the universe was one of underlying unity and consistency. His belief in flux is due to his belief in an observer-relative world: the knowledge that we get from our senses changes according to different perspectives and viewpoints, just like how a mountain road can be the path up the mountain and the path down the mountain, depending on which end (the foot or the peak) you happen to view it. Therefore, Fire is the substance reality is made of: constantly changing, but ever the same. His student Cratylus moved it still further by saying that one cannot step into the same river even once.