A Brief Guide to Philosophy

Todd Daley

• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781647495459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book deals with western philosophy - its concepts and applications to our world. The basic ideas of philosophy are discussed from the ancient Greeks and Romans like Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus to philosophers of the Middle Ages, like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In the 17th and 18th centuries, ethics is analyzed by Spinoza and Kant. God's existence and causality are seen through the eyes of Pascal, Berkeley, and Russell. Existentialism, with its emphasis on one's subjective experience, is discussed by Kierkegaard and Sartre. In the 20th century, philosophers stressed language and the meaning of statements. Key issues such as economic justice, good vs evil, the certainty of knowledge and the meaning of life are examined.

Chapter 1 — The Ancient Philosophers

One cannot overestimate the contribution of ancient Greece to our civilization especially in regard to its emphasis on reason. The hallmark of Greek philosophy was two-fold — the search for knowledge and the desire for virtue. Plato said wisdom is knowledge of the good. The aims of Greek philosophy were to understand the world and to determine the purpose of life.

Pythagoras (569 BC – 500 BC), born on the island of Samos, had a great influence on Greek learning in mathematics, science, and philosophy. Mathematics in the sense of the deductive argument, began with him. Though known as a man of science, Pythagoras’s philosophy was more mystical than rational. Pythagoras believed in reincarnation — specifically the transmigration of the soul after death to other species. He claimed to recognize in the howls of a stray dog the voice of a departed friend. Like St. Francis of Assisi, Pythagoras preached to animals. He also declared that he knew people who could remember what happened to them ten generations earlier. His doctrine of recollection stated that the things we perceive with the senses remind us of things we knew when the soul was out of the body and could perceive reality directly.

Pythagoras believed in an ordered universe governed by precise mathematical laws. In his “harmony of the spheres” theory, he asserted that the planets move in circular paths about the earth in which their distances from the earth correspond to musical intervals — ratios of the first four integers. Pythagoras played the lyre himself and applied mathematics to music. He noticed that vibrating strings whose lengths are the whole number ratios produce harmonious tones.

Pythagoras believed that each number has its own personality — masculine or feminine, beautiful or ugly, perfect or incomplete. At the deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature and all relationships can be reduced to simple ratios. Pythagoras described the soul, located in the brain, as a self-moving number. He is best known for his Pythagorean Theorem of right triangles in which the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other sides. This theorem was known to the Babylonians 1,000 years earlier, but Pythagoras was the first to prove it. He stated that the sum of the angles of any triangle equals two right angles (180º). Pythagoras also developed a geometrical solution of quadratic equations using areas.

In ethics, Pythagoras drew sharp distinctions between right and wrong, stressed responsibility, self-reliance, contemplation, and intellectual freedom. He was a strong believer in the work ethic, which gave direction and order to a person’s life. Pythagoras said three questions should be asked of oneself every night: In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I should have done? Pythagoras’s ethical system was tied to his theory of transmigration of souls. A person must progressively purify himself in various lives through virtue, contemplation, and orderliness in order to escape the cycle of birth-death-rebirth to attain immortality.

It has been said that all philosophy begins and ends with Plato, who lived in Athens during the 4th century BC. Plato was a student of Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC), the creator of the Socratic method in which one seeks to clarify opinions and beliefs. Socrates said “Virtue is knowledge” and “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates was concerned with ethical matters and the control of bodily passions — remaining “platonic” throughout his life. He urged his pupils to forsake bodily pleasures for intellectual pleasures.

Plato (428 BC – 348 BC) sought answers to basic questions like: Who am I? What should I do? What is the nature of reality? What is wisdom? What is the good? What is a just society? Using the format of dialogues between Socrates and his pupils, Plato searched for the ultimate reality existing beyond the everyday world of appearances. He arrived at a dual theory of reality — the world of ideas vs. the world of objects. For Plato, ideas are real, perfect, and eternal — the source of knowledge — whereas material objects are illusive, imperfect, and changeable — the source of opinions. The idea of a chair, created by God, is the only real chair because it represents the essence or form of a chair. In contrast, particular chairs are imperfect, contingent, and variable.

Plato’s metaphysics is best illustrated by the parable of the cave dwellers. Several prisoners who are tied up in a cave observe their shadows cast by a fire behind them. These shadows are all the prisoners ever see. One of the prisoners escapes from the cave and observes real objects by the light of the sun for the first time in his life. Plato said that the shadows represent the world of appearances and the real objects illuminated by the sun represent the world of ideas — ultimate reality. For Plato this perfect, timeless world of ideas was the good. At death, the soul is separated from the body and obtains wisdom — the pure knowledge of ideas. The fact that the soul has a priori (innate) knowledge of ideas and essences is proof that the soul exists before and after life. The downside of Plato’s metaphysics is that only the souls of philosophers can go to his platonic heaven.

Related to Plato’s idea of the good is his notion of justice. For Plato justice is a social concept in which everybody does the job in life for which he was trained. The Platonic ideal of justice is realized through Plato’s Republic, a utopian society consisting of three classes — workers, soldiers, and guardians. People are selected into these classes based upon their particular interests and abilities. The guardians would rule the Republic after a rigorous educational program emphasizing reason — the ability to understand ideas — and wisdom — knowledge of the good. Plato’s Republic reflected his concept of the good: virtue, wisdom, temperance, physical fitness, personal austerity, economic equality, and authoritarian rule by the philosopher-kings (guardians). Plato’s concern with ethical matters can be traced to Socrates. His concept of an ethical universe can best be summed up by his assertion that “no evil can happen to a good man either in life or after death.”

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), a student of Plato, had an enormous influence on western philosophy and science. He invented the deductive argument, called the Aristotelian syllogism, fundamental to logic:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

In deduction one goes from a general premise to a specific conclusion. Mathematical and scientific theories abound in deductive inferences. Aristotle also defined induction as a generalization from specific instances of observations. Virtually all cause-and-effect statements in science are inductive inferences. Later on, philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Russell questioned the validity of scientific induction. Aristotle’s physics in regard to the laws of motion and free-falling bodies was subsequently disproved by Galileo in his famous experiment of dropping two stones from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Aristotle’s earth-centered theory of the universe was also opposed by Galileo, for which he was forced to recant by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. In science, Aristotle relied on teleological explanations — the behavior of an object is due to its nature or purpose in the world. Such teleological explanations led to some misconceptions about the motions of celestial bodies.

Aristotle’s theory of ideas is similar to that of Plato’s — except he referred to ideas as forms or universals. Aristotle explained the matter vs. form dichotomy in the following way. If one observed a marble statue, the material of the statue, marble, is matter, whereas the shape of the statue is form. Universals represent a type of form applied to classes of objects — cat, dog, man. Universals can also be adjectives — hard, soft, round — applied to particular things or substances. Aristotle talked about essences — what something is by its very nature. Since essence implies uniqueness, it is not the same as a universal, which is a general concept. As with Plato, Aristotelian forms are perfect and timeless — existing independently of matter — comprehended by man through reason. Since ideas are eternal, so too is the rational soul or mind of man. In Aristotle’s theory of universals, descriptive universals such as shape, color, texture, and density can only exist in particular things or substances. His epistemology relating universals to substances would be questioned by 20th century philosophers because of syntactical errors.

In metaphysics, Aristotle identified God as the first cause or prime mover, who originated all events and motions in the universe. He characterized God as form without matter. In ethics, Aristotle identified two types of virtue — intellectual virtue, which involves teaching ethical ideas and moral virtue, which is the acquisition of good habits. As with Plato, Aristotle believed that the objects of thought (ideas) are more real than the physical objects of sense. Hence, the meta...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 — The Ancient Philosophers
• Chapter 2 — Ethical Philosophy of Judaism, Christianity, & Islam
• Chapter 3 — Philosophers of the Middle Ages
• Chapter 4 — Proofs of God’s Existence
• Chapter 5 — Renaissance Philosophers
• Chapter 6 — Dialectical, Irrational, & Pragmatic Philosophers
• Chapter 7 — The Existentialist Philosophers
• Chapter 8 — 20th Century Philosophers
• Chapter 9 — Some Philosophic Issues
• Quotations
• Summary Questions
• Sources
• About the Author