Philosophy - Part 1 Chapter 2

These are just my personal notes. I am studying Philosophy as a hobby.
The information shown on this blog may not be accurate.
(I may misunderstand what books say.)
Don't read my blog to learn about philosophy.


Part 1: The Nuts and Bolts of Philosophy

Chapter 2: Being There


The Myth-Math of Existence

Before formal schools of philosophy got started, people were inventing myths to help explain reality. These myths usually portrayed natural forces as people or gods. By thinking about natural forces in human terms, people made sense of the strange and mysterious things going on around them: rain, thunder, sunshine, the seasons, birth, death.

These myths did not attempt to explain what reality is physically made of, they were concerned with explaining how reality affects human activities and relationships.

The first philosophers differed from the mythmakers by explaining reality in more general, less familiar terms.

Thales
624BC - 546BC
This ancient Greek philosopher, (sometimes is considered the first philosopher) said the all things were made out of water - everything that exists is really water in a more or less complicated form.

Other early philosophers believed that everything was made of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Others thought the world was made of a single substance that could be broken down into tiny, indivisible particles called atoms.

These early theories about reality are not scientific as the word is used today - that is, they do not result from experimental tests or controlled observation. But they are impersonal and suggested rules for the makeup of reality and how it is organized. They wanted to know not only what reality is, but also how it is shaped and how it works.

To Order is to understand

Technological developments helped philosophers learn to think about reality in terms of impersonal rules of order.

Practical arts like geometory, navigation, and medicine, for example, were developing in ancient Greece at about the time of the first philosophers.

Pythagoras
is also know as an important mathematician.

Math and other technological arts helped people stop thinking about reality as a big family of gods and start seeing the world as being made of things you can use to make more things, arranged according to mathmatical rules. Craftmen and artisans started it all by inventing technical temrs for their work. Philosophers went further. Many of these terms refer to physical reality, like atoms and the elements.


Enter metaphisics

Metaphysical terms
refer not to what relality is physically made of, but to how it is organized and how it works.
ex) forms, substance, essence, categories, spirit, monads and moumena are metaphysical terms.
God, too, is a metaphysical concept.

Metaphysics
is a branch of philosophy that studies the makeup, function, and organization of reality in general.
is also used more specifically to refer to those aspects of reality that cannot be observed and measured, such as God and virtue.

Is There a God?

Throughout the middle Ages in Europe and the Middle east, a philosophical battle was waged between religious authorities, who felt doctorine should be accepted on faith alone, and philosophers who were interested in combining religious ideas with the teaching of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle.

Meister Eckhart
Germany
God is nothing more than nature itself and that this God/nature created itsels.
His attempt  to square philosophy with religion resulted in charges of heresy.


Perfection Is Truth

One argument goes that because the world exists, it must have a cause, namely, God. Might the whole thing have been an accident? No, reasoned the medieval philosophers, because reality seems so well organized and able to support life that God must have planned it.

But maybe what seems planned was still just accidental, and maybe the organization that seems to indicate the existence of God is really due to the way people think. Maybe order is just an idea in people's minds.

To this objection the medieval philosophers offered their most imaginative idea of all: They reasoned that the idea of God is the most perfect idea possible. They also argued that one characteristic of perfection is existence. God must therefore exist. This argument is known as the "ontological proof" of God's existence.


Being Leads to Knowing

Whether of not you accept any one explanation of reality depends partly on the question of how you know things, and how the ability to know things fits in with the question of being.


Being and Thinking

Some said human beings are not capable of understanding God, so we have to take his existence on faith. Others said that knowledge reveals God's nature.

Baruch Spinoza
Portuguese-Dutch philosopher. A vialist. He said matter itself could think, all of reality are alive and capable of knowing, reality itself is God. god and nature, for Spinoza, are two sides of the same coin.

Vialism
A vialist. Everything that makes up reality is alive and capable of thinking.

Dualism
A dualist. Everything can be separated into two components: material and spiritual. The spiritual part of reality makes thinking and knowledge possible. Material aspect cannot think.


Dualism vs. Materialism

Rene Descartes
French philosopher, the most famous dualist of the 17th century.
He believed that a spiritual portion of the mind allows us to understand perceptions that are conveyed to us phisically by our senses. Spiritual portion of reality was confined to God and the human mind alone. the rest of reality was simply physical.

Descartes's dualism made a neat separation between physical and metaphysical reality. An important result of this separation was that it allowed philosophers and scientists to study the natural world without having to worry about supernatural questions.

Since Descartes's time, many philosophers have argued that we should stop asking metaphysical questions - questions about God and anything else that we cannot verify through observation.

Even so, other philosophers continued to see knowledge itself as metaphysical, much as Descartes did. Starting Descartes's time - the seventeenth century - philosophers began arguing for or against two distinct ways of relating being to knowing. These ways are known as rationalism and empiricism.

Rationalism
sees knowledge as metaphysical, existing independently of physical reality.

Empiricism
sees knowledge as based on observable, physical reality.

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Plato
Perfect, unchanging, ideal forms lend order and understanding to physical reality.

Aristotle
Each identifiable thing has an essence that supplies it with a purpose culminating in the prime mover.

Thomas Aquinas
Reality ws created by God according to his plan (confirmed by the "ontological proof").

Spinoza
Reality is all one substance, including God and nature; everything taht exists is a part of this one substance, which is capable of thought (vialism).

Decartes
Physical reality works according to mechanical principles. In addition, there is spiritual reality, including God and the mind, that can think (dualism).
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■  The first ancient Greek philosophers made a distinction between physical reality and human social reality.

■  Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies how reality functions. The term is also used to refer to whatever cannot be verified through observation, including God.

■  Idea about God often depend on ideas about knowing.　

■  Descartes theorized a clear separation of physical and metaphysical reality in the 17th century.