Age of the Great Philosophers

1
Age of the Great Philosophers

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

2
Why philosophy? Why now?

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

3
Sophists

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

4
Protagoras

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

5
Man is the measure?

• Protagoras uttered the famous saying, man is the
  measure of all things of existing things, that
  they exist of non-existent things, that they do
  not exist.

• He meant by this the individual is judge of
  what is best.
• Platos Socrates says that this was nonsense
  because it made all beliefs true.
• Protagoras motto was embraced by the Italian
  Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth
  centuries.

6
Sophists and Sophistry

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

7
Socrates 470-399

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

8
Running afoul of the elites.

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

9
Plato (428-348)

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

10
Following Socrates

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

11
The Academy

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

12
Aristotle (384-322)

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

13
Tutor of Alexander

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

14
Samples of Great Philosophy

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

15
Platos Theory of Forms

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

16
The Form (idea) of roundness

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

17
The Cave from The Republic

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

18
The Cave from The Republic

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

19
Aristotles categories break with Plato

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

20
Aristotles empiricism

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