Chapter 5: Part 1

Philosophers & Their Ideas

The move away from the pre-philosophical world of irrational storytellers; reason (logos) became the means by which the Greeks liberated themselves from mythological explanation.

What does the shift from 'mythos to logos' describe in Greek philosophy?

Socrates. He identified virtue with knowledge and treated knowledge as equivalent to wisdom — the 'symmetry of knowledge and virtue.'

Who was the first Greek thinker to link knowledge and virtue, and what did he claim?

He bifurcated the self into body and soul — the body knows through sensation, while the soul grasps the real being through reasoning.

What was Plato's central dualism?

An eternally unchanging substance; because it has constancy, it is considered real (unlike the changing, deceptive sensibles).

For Aristotle, what is the 'nous' (rational soul)?

Happiness (eudaimonia) — the highest good. The best life combines morally good actions with excellent theoretical study.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, what does Aristotle say is the highest good for man?

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Bonus

The synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology; Aristotle's thought dominated Western philosophy until Copernicus in the 16th century.

What is Scholasticism?

The epistemological position that truth and knowledge are ascertained solely by reason, not by experience.

Define rationalism.

René Descartes, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.

Who were the three leading continental rationalists?

His revolutionary, 'truthful' methodology — using methodical doubt to find a certain foundation for knowledge — was so influential. He distinguished thinking substance (mind) from extended substance (matter).

Why is René Descartes called the 'Father of Modern Philosophy'?

Doubting everything until reaching a point that cannot be doubted. The result: 'I think, therefore I am' (Cogito, ergo sum) — the most fundamental, indubitable truth.

What is Descartes' method of 'methodical doubt' and its famous conclusion?

Reality has only one substance, which is God; everything that exists is an aspect ('piece') of God. This is pantheism — Nature was God.

What was Spinoza's view of substance and God?

The fundamental elements of the world — independent centers of force or energy that do not interact, coordinated instead through a 'pre-established harmony.' He held God chose the best of all possible worlds.

What are Leibniz's 'monads'?

The view that sense experience is the basis of truth and knowledge. It developed primarily in Great Britain.

What is empiricism, and where did it develop?

He set the initial pace of British empirical philosophy, advancing an empirical/experiential theory of knowledge and aiming to eliminate metaphysical and theological difficulties.

What was Francis Bacon's role in philosophy?

All knowledge comes from sense experience. The mind at birth is a 'tabula rasa' (clean slate) — there are no pre-existing ideas before experience.

What was John Locke's view on the source of knowledge?

'To be is to be perceived.' Berkeley argued there is no material reality — things exist only as ideas in minds, and God perceives everything at all times (absolute idealism).

What is Bishop George Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi'?

Cause and effect is only habit or custom, not a necessary connection. No empirical data gives us real knowledge of substance, mind, or God — the core of his skepticism.

What was David Hume's view of cause and effect?

It awakened Kant from his 'dogmatic slumber.' Kant argued that while knowledge begins in experience, the mind supplies the forms and categories that make experience possible.

What did Hume's skepticism 'awaken' Kant from, and what was Kant's response?

Phenomena are things as they can be experienced; noumena are things-in-themselves, which lie beyond all possible experience and cannot be known.

What is Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena?

A new metaphysical idealism: the individual mind contributes the form of all possible experience. He held that universal reason reveals itself through history (dialectics); reality is 'The Real.'

What was Hegel's major contribution?

A barometer for measuring the consequences of an action by quantity of pleasure and pain — the route toward happiness in Utilitarianism.

What is Jeremy Bentham's 'felicific calculus'?

Mill rejected measuring pleasures by quantity alone, proposing that pleasures and pains also differ in quality.

How did John Stuart Mill modify Bentham's utilitarianism?

The Vedic hymns are the seed; the Brahmanas and Upanishads are commentaries on them. Buddhism was founded by Gautama, and Hinduism became the most influential.

What is considered the oldest and seed of Indian philosophy, and what are the major traditions?

Taoism and Confucianism. Confucius is the latinized name of Kung Fu Tze. Taoism is described as a 'way of life' and a 'protest of the rural section against the more advanced civilization of the towns.'

What are the two great schools of Chinese philosophy, and who is Confucius?

Occidental (Western) philosophy is structured and unitary; Oriental (Eastern) philosophy lacks that structured unity. As Francis Grant said, all men — whatever their race or creed — 'may pluck the same flowers in the Plain of High Heaven.'

How does the text contrast Occidental and Oriental philosophy?