Ancient Philosophy Handouts PDF

Handouts for Introduction to Philosophy Midterm Period Lesson 2: History of Philosophy – Ancient Philosophy HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Ancient Philosophy Ancient philosophy encompasses the Pre-Socratics, who discovered the...

Handouts for Introduction to Philosophy Midterm Period Lesson 2: History of Philosophy – Ancient Philosophy HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Ancient Philosophy Ancient philosophy encompasses the Pre-Socratics, who discovered the existence, beginnings, and origins. There are emphases in various ancient philosophies in Ancient Greece with prominent figures like that of the pre-Socratics, sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Thus, this section aims to present particular conceptions on man and how he sees himself as a person and his own existence in the world. A. PRE-SOCRATICS Most of the pre-Socratics concern themselves towards nature and how changes occur around them. Moreover, their primary concern is towards the first principle from which everything emanates. They are considered thinkers who hold that ‘matter (hyle) is living (zoe) or that universe (pan) is animate (psyche).  Anaximander - believes the “boundless” to be the origin of all.  Anaximenes - believes air to be the origin of all things.  Heraclitus - believes on fire as origin of cosmos, and does believe in change.  Parmenides - believes in permanence and denies change.  Pythagoras - believes in numbers as means of truth, transmigration of the soul &immortality in accord with virtuous life. Pre-Socratics are considered to be the “first philosophers” because they were the thinkers before Socrates, inquiring on the arche of cosmos by naturally observing what and how it manifests in the lives of the people. B. SOPHISTS & SOCRATICS Apart from the pre-Socratic thinkers whose primary concern was about the natural origin of the cosmos, there emerges the Sophists or the itinerant educators. Sophism is a movement in early Greek society that can be describe as a humanist agnosticism. It centers on man and everything that belongs to him. The word sophist formed from the word sophia which means wisdom. They are concern about ethics, politics, religion, education and liberal arts. They do not emphasize the speculative knowledge but rather, they engage on the practical one. Protagoras One famous sophist is Protagoras who presented an account of the development of human civilization, with the aim of showing that the essence of good citizenship consists in justice and self-restraint, which are natural to humans in that the preservation of the social order, and ultimately the survival of the species, depend on their being universally inculcated. “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.” In the Theaetetus, this is interpreted as a claim of the relativity of the truth of all judgments to the experience or belief of the individual making the judgment, i.e., as subjectivism. On that interpretation, the way things seem to an individual is the way they are in fact for that individual. First illustrated by Socrates, who quotes this sentence, as a claim concerning sensory appearances, e.g., that if the wind feels cold to me and warm to you then it is cold for me and warm for you, in the course of the dialogue Socrates expands it to apply to all judgments, including itself, yielding the result that every belief is true for the person who holds it (and only for them), and hence that there is no objective truth on any matter. Handouts for Introduction to Philosophy Midterm Period Socrates Socrates’s lifework consisted in the examination of people’s lives, his own and others. He believes that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being,” (Plato, Apology 38a). Socrates pursued this task single-mindedly, questioning people about what matters most, e.g., courage, love, reverence, moderation, and the state of their souls generally. He had a reputation for irony, which consisted in his saying that he knew nothing of importance and wanted to listen to others yet keeping the upper hand in every discussion. He believes that man’s business is to take care of his soul, to make it good as possible. For him, it is the responsible agent in knowing and acting rightly or wrongly. Thus, soul is the center of moral life and hence, man’s nature is determined by his soul. This is solely because the nature of human existence is good. Goodness for Socrates entails becoming virtuous and evil on the other hand is vice. C. PLATO & ARISTOTLE PLATO An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities called “forms” or “ideas”. For Plato, man is made of soul who is imprisoned in the body which is imperfect and just a vessel. Thus, he believes that man should pursue a more perfect life by releasing the soul from the body, leaving the body behind and just focusing on the soul. ARISTOTLE Aristotle was born in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian regions of northeastern Greece in the small city of Stagira (whence the moniker ‘the Stagirite’, which one still occasionally encounters in Aristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the age of seventeen to study in Plato’s Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world. For Aristotle, a human being is a rational animal. He is composed of a body and a soul which is compared to that of matter and form. (body: matter; soul: form). he strikes the balance between the high emphasis of the pre-Socratics of the material world to that of Plato’s emphasis on the soul or world of forms. Both body and soul should be taken good care of in order to achieve happiness or the bonum of man. Yet he did not directly point out what happiness means.