History Midterm Part 2

Where did we and everything else come from?

Is there a God?

What are we here for?

Why is there so much suffering?

How can I be happy?

How should I relate to other people?

Is there truth, and is it knowable?

What happens to us after we die?

Great Questions

Epistemology, logic, philosophy of science

What is truth?

Ontology, metaphysics

What is?

Theology

What is God?

Anthropology, psychology

What is man?

Cosmology, science

What is the world?

Philosophy of history, eschatology

What is going on?

Soteriology, psychology, ethics

What is happiness?

Ethics

What is virtue?

Politics, ethics, economics

What is justice?

Aesthetics

What is beauty?

Philosophy is newer than religion, Religion is embodied in myths, and philosophy shows that myths are unreliable.

3 important points about myth, religion, and philosophy

Arche

Greek word meaning beginning, origin, first cause, source of action

Is material (undefined mass), has no borders in space (limitless), has no borders in time (eternal), has no qualities (no color, smell, hot nor cold, no features of any kind), and an undefined, limitless mass.

What are all the contents of Apeiron?

Logos

like a form of cosmic justice, maintaining balance and regulating the continuity of change

Rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience, took logical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of truth, they opposed the main doctrines of the physicalist philosophers, and the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal unity of being.

What are the Eleatic School’s beliefs?

Thales

Aristotle considered him the first real scientist, he was in search of arche, and the source of all things in water.

Anaximander

Disagreed with Thales that water or any 1 physical element could be the 1st principle, he looked for a universal originating substance (Arche) not bounded by physical characteristics, and came up with notion of “Apeiron” meaning boundless or without limits.

Anaximenes

1st to use scientific evidence

Xenophanes

His main question: How can any of us claim to know the truth about things we haven’t seen for ourselves? That question deconstructed mythology.

Parmenides

Considered any change we think we see is an illusion.

Heraclitus

“All is in flux” or everything flows (you can’t step in the same river twice) and believed the unifying principle was not matter but logos.

Democritus

Everything is made of atoms, eternal and indivisible microscopic particles, and the laws of necessity determine all that happens.

Protagoras

“Man is the measure of all things.”

A form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions.

What is the Socratic Method?

Clarification: Why did you say that?

Probe assumptions: What could we assume instead?

Probe reason and evidence: What would be an example?

Question viewpoints and perspectives: What would be an alternative?

Probe implications and consequences: What are you implying?

Question the question: What is the point of this question?

Name the 6 types of Socratic Questions.

Only what is eternal and unchanging is real, the realm of eternal, unchanging forms are the blueprint for the ephemeral (lasting for a short time) phenomena we encounter thru sense experience, and we know a dog because they are made in the image of the perfect form.

Describe Plato’s forms.

If the activity is consistent with the purpose it is good.

Ethical implication of Aristotle’s teleology

Material Cause or what a thing is made of, formal cause or the arrangement or shape of a thing, efficient cause or how a thing is brought into being, and final cause or the function or purpose of a thing.

Four Causes

Gorgias

If reason can prove nothing exists then it can prove anything. SO no point in seeking objective truth.

Thrasymachus/Callicles

Might makes right. Teach people religion so you can control them.

George Berkeley

“To be is to be perceived.”

Diogenes

True happiness is found by not being dependent on uncertain things


1. Material possessions
2. Power
3. Health

Zeno of Citium

There exists a natural law - a universal standard of right and wrong.

There are reciprocal relationships of the persons of the Godhead to each other, and God’s aseity is the attribute that makes Van Til’s claim philosophically rational.

Van Til’s Ontological Trinity

God is the Creator

The world is His creation

Humans are made in His image

Sin and its consequences is our predicament

Christ’s atonement saves us

Christ returns as the consummation of all things

Christian Metanarrative

Interaction of His power, authority, and presence

Nature of God’s lordship

Situational Perspective

God controls all of nature and history by His providence, or as we explore our individual situation, and we are seeking to know God from this perspective.

Normative Perspective

As we consider the world as standing under His authority, and we learn that everything in creation reveals Him and His will.

Existential Perspective

When we consider the world as the locus of God’s presence, both inside and outside of us.

Believed Jesus’ claim to be God was blasphemous, and apologists sought to prove that Jesus was the Messiah and God in the flesh.

What did the Jews believe, and what did the apologists do?

They thought Jesus’ claim to be King was an insurrection against the emperor’s authority, so they persecuted Christians as potential revolutionaries. In response, the apologists tried to show that Christians were good citizens, and that Jesus’ kingdom was not of this world. Further, the Christians had to refute popular charges that they engaged in cannibalism (a misunderstanding of the Lord’s Supper), and incest ( a misunderstanding of Christian references to “the holy kiss” among “brothers” and “sisters”).

What did the Romans believe, and what did the apologists do?

1. Greek philosophy was an intellectual revolt against religious ways of explaining the world.
2. In the view of the Greek philosophers, reason was sacred, and intellectual autonomy the new ultimate.
3. In the apologists’ writings there is little warning about the “wisdom of the world” or the spiritual warfare of Colossians 2:8.
4. Rather, the apologists approach is to seek common ground with philosophy, to wear the philosopher’s mantle, to seek intellectual respectability as defined by the philosophical community. (This is a mistake).

What are the four points to Greek Philosophy?

Docetism

The view that Jesus had no material body, but only “seemed (dokeo in Greek) to have one.

Marcion

identified this inferior aeon with the Creator God of Genesis. He taught that this god had been replaced in the NT by the Father of Jesus Christ.

Liberalism in theology

What, to some degree, would be a result of the academic movement?

Compromise with non-Christian thought

What impact did the quest for academic respectability lead theology?

Biblical metaphysics (absolute-personality theism, creation), Biblical epistemology (based on revelation and the working of the Spirit), and Biblical ethics (God’s law applied to God’s creation by redeemed subjects).

Name three ways in which the Reformation marked the rebirth of Christian thought.

Autonomous, self authenticating, and the chief arbiter of all philosophical controversies.

During the Post Reformation, philosophers saw human reason as:

The ancient and the modern

From a present day perspective, the Christian dominance of philosophy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance must be seen as a parenthesis between what two people?

Biblical worldview and Greek Philosophy

During the Medieval period, Western philosophers tried to combine what two systems of thought?

Dante, Chaucer, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Cervantes, and Shakespeare

Which people had impressive achievements in literature and arts?

Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Bruno, Kepler, Francis Bacon

Which people were empirical scientists?

Columbus, Magellan, da Gama, Polo, Cabot, Champlain, Drake

Which people were explorers?

Traditional Catholic Christians

What faith were most philosophers during the Renaissance era?

Michel de Montaigne

Was a notable Renaissance thinker who was also something of a skeptic, wondering aloud whether we can be sure of anything.

Pico Della Mirandola

He tried to bring all human knowledge together into a large Neoplatonic system.

Marsilio Ficino

He became the first head of a Platonic Academy in Florence and translated a number of Plato’s dialogues into Latin.

Pietro Pomponazzi

He lectured on Aristotle, adopting the position of some Averroists that a proposition could be true in philosophy, but false in theology.

Denied the role of absolute morality in the administration of the state and said that a prince should be prepared to deceive and otherwise violate moral standards in order to preserve order (and, of course, to preserve his own power). In holding that in politics the ends justify the means, he revived the position of the Greek Sophists and anticipated Marx, Lenin, Hitler, together with many other thinkers and politicians. He regarded religion as a tool at the disposal of the political ruler.

What was Niccolo Machiavelli’s political philosophy?

Renaissance thinkers put a great emphasis on recovering ancient (primarily Greek and Roman) culture: not only philosophic and literary texts, but also styles of architecture and art, and forms of government.

What is Antiquarianism?

To the sources

In Antiquarianism philosophy what is suggested by the phrase “ad fontes”?

Political realities (Machiavelli) and existential subjectivity (Pomponazzi, Montaigne).

Renaissance philosophy sought to get beyond traditional abstractions to understand the world in which we live; they focused on two types of philosophy:

It is antiquarian in the sense that it returns ad fontes, to the Scriptures and the older church fathers, particularly Augustine, and it is humanistic in that it is concerned in a fresh way with the individual’s relation to God.

The Reformation is a Renaissance phenomenon in two ways:

Not the secular humanism we see today, which is really the deification of man, instead it is a serious Christian preoccupation with man as God’s image. In the Middle Ages, earthly life was typically considered only a prelude to heavenly existence.

How was humanism defined during the Renaissance?

The righteousness of Christ Himself is imputed by God to us and received by faith. By this righteousness, God forgives our sins for Christ’s sake. Christ has borne their punishment in our place. Therefore, we are justified, or declared righteous by faith in Christ alone. Salvation is God’s gift (“by grace alone”) apart from our works.

Biblical ground for 5 solas

Sola Gratia

Sola Fide

Solus Christus

Sola Scriptura

Soli Deo Gloria

5 solas

Turning away from the nameless One of gnosticism and neoplatonism, and grace is not an impersonal, metaphysical substance that trickles down to people thru the sacraments, as in Catholicism. Grace is an irreducibly personal category.

Luther’s metaphysical observations

He bases his whole theology on divine revelation, Sola Scriptura

Luther’s epistemological observation

Scripture provides an ethical or moral framework for life.

Luther’s axiological observation

Philosophers sought for the first time to understand the world by reason alone, the same may be sad of the 17th century revival of secular philosophy, and although influenced by past philosophical and religious movements, they resolved not to view them as authoritative.

3 points for rebirth of secular philosophy