AP World: Greek Rationalism

Greek religious inheritance

Greek religious inheritance

none except for the long lasting city state Greek gods religion

Those gods are all over the place and had very different gods than a traditional religion

Greece: separation reason/philosophy

Philosophers willingly abandoned, the mythological framework of ancient Greek gods, and instead wanted to affirm that the world was a physical of reality governed by laws into a certain human rationality

Separating science and religion made a confusion thought of secularism

Why Greece?

It is very difficult to say

MAYBE BC

1)Diverse and coherence of Greek religious mythology presented intellectuals with a challenge to bring order to the world

2)Geographic margins of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, which provided intellectual stimulation

Reductionism

Process of taking something complex and putting it into simpler terms to provide a sufficient explanation

Socrates

Athenian philosopher, who walked about the city, engaging others in conversation about the good life

Wrote nothing and preferred a constant questioning of the assumptions and logic of his students thinking

Conventional ideas about import of wealth or power and pursuit of wisdom and virtue

ETHICS> RULES

Socratic Method

teaching method that would be asking questions such as “what is..?”

these would be very complex

Socrates Trail and Death

Socrates was critical of Athenian democracy and occasionally said good things about Sparta(Greece enemy)

This brought him into conflict with city authorities, who accused him of corrupting the youth, and they sentenced him to death

On his trial, he defined himself as the “gadfly” of Athens (person whose interferes with states by posing questions directed at authorities)

Thales

Early classical Greek thinker drew on Babylonian astronomy and predicted an eclipse in argued moon reflected the sunlight

Asked about the fundamental nature of the universe and came up with this:

Water is the basic composition of the universe in all else comes from it because it could be solid liquid and gas

First scientist/philosopher

Democritus

Suggested atoms collided in various configurations to form invisible matter

atoms did not contained anything else and they had hooks on them, which could connect them

Pythagros

Believed beneath chaos in complexity of visible world lay a simple, unchanging, mathematical order

Pythagorean theorem

Hippocrates

Came to believe the body was consisted of four fluids, or “humors”, which caused various ailments when out of proper balance

Traced origins of epilepsy to hereditary causes, not a possession by the gods

Herodotus

What about the Greco-Persian war and wanted to find a reason why people fought each other

The assumption that it was humans, not gods, who made wars happen made him a historian

Thucydides

Athenian historian and general who wrote of the history of Peloponnesian war, which recorded the war between Athens and Sparta

Father of scientific history and school of political realism

Plato

Student of Socrates, who wrote the Republic

Believe nothing is truly as it seem and believed in forms

The Republic

I designed for a good society written by Plato

Ruled by a class of highly educated” Guardians” With leader “ Philosopher king”

Those “ Guardians” And “ Philosopher Kings” able to penetrate many illusions of the material world to grasp the world of forms

If we build a just state, we can discover justice

The utopia consisted of three classes: Worker soldier and ruler

Justice is when each of the classes do what they’re supposed to do and rulers were basically communists so they do not have biases

Forms

Ideas such as goodness, beauty and justice lived a real and unchanging existence where only “guardians” and “philosopher kings” were fit to grasp and rule

Beyond material world

EXAMPLES

1) circles do not truly exist and a circle is a form that only exists in a metaphorical world

2) people are imitations of an ideal human being

Aristotle

Student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great who represents the most complete expression of the Greek way of knowing because he wrote or commented on everything

Had emphasis on empirical observation and cataloged 158 Greek city states constitutions, identified hundred species of animals, and wrote about logic, physics, astronomy weather, etc.

Ethics of Aristotle

Argued virtue was product of rational training and cultivated habit to be learned

Familiar for reflections on his writings

Politics of Aristotle

Urged mixed system, combining philosophy of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy

Allegory of the Cave

Philosophical concept presented by Pluto in the Republic, which compares people untrained forms to prisoners chained in a cave as they watch shadows which become their real reality; when one of the prisoners chained to the wall escapes and goes to the real world, he is shocked and soon comes back to tell the other prisoners, but the other prisoners reject him and ridicule him

DOCTRINE OF FORMS

DEEPER MEANING

-The prisoners of the cave= Every day, Athenians, who don’t understand reality

-People only look at the shadows, but do not look at the deeper thing

-People only used to individual physical beauty

The Greek Legacy

Greek rationalism art literature in theater all persisted long after Athenians, even if not clearly whole of Greek culture

SPREAD- alexander’s Empire and Romans within Mediterranean and beyond; Some Roman figures sent kids to a Plato founded Athenian school

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CHRISTIANITY+ GREEKS

Emerging Christian theology expressed in terms of Greek philosophical concepts

After western Roman Empire collapsed, Classical Greek texts were preserved in the Byzantine Empire

— in West access to Greek text was difficult and Greek scholarship was neglected in favor of Christian writers, but was subsequently rediscovered after 12 century when access was gained again

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Long before European recovery, Greek culture entered Islamic world

Translation of Greek words of science and philosophy into Arabic with Indian/Persian learning, stimulating Muslim thinkers

-largely from Arabic translation of Greek that the Europeans rediscovered Greek culture

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Greek tradition has remained in the west as inspiration for those who celebrate powers of human mind to probe mystery of universe and to explore domain of human life