Zeno of Elea was a student of Parmenides , and is best known for his famous paradoxes of motion the best known of which is that of the Achilles and the Hare , which helped to lay the foundations for the study of Logic. However, Zeno 's underlying intention was really to show, like Parmenides before him, that all belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion. Although these ideas might seem to us rather simplistic and unconvincing today, we should bear in mind that, at this time, there was really no scientific knowledge whatsoever, and even the commonest of phenomena e.
Their attempts were therefore important first steps in the development of philosophical thought. They also set the stage for two other important Pre-Socratic philosophers: Empedocles , who combined their ideas into the theory of the four classical elements earth, air, fire and water , which became the standard dogma for much of the next two thousand years; and Democritus , who developed the extremely influential idea of Atomism that all of reality is actually composed of tiny , indivisible and indestructible building blocks known as atoms , which form different combinations and shapes within the surrounding void.
Another early and very influential Greek philosopher was Pythagoras , who led a rather bizarre religious sect and essentially believed that all of reality was governed by numbers , and that its essence could be encountered through the study of mathematics. Philosophy really took off, though, with Socrates and Plato in the 5th - 4th Century B. Unlike most of the Pre-Socratic philosophers before him, Socrates was more concerned with how people should behave , and so was perhaps the first major philosopher of Ethics.
He developed a system of critical reasoning in order to work out how to live properly and to tell the difference between right and wrong.
His system, sometimes referred to as the Socratic Method , was to break problems down into a series of questions , the answers to which would gradually distill a solution. Although he was careful to claim not to have all the answers himself, his constant questioning made him many enemies among the authorities of Athens who eventually had him put to death. Socrates himself never wrote anything down, and what we know of his views comes from the "Dialogues" of his student Plato , perhaps the best known , most widely studied and most influential philosopher of all time.
In his writings, Plato blended Ethics , Metaphysics , Political Philosophy and Epistemology the theory of knowledge and how we can acquire it into an interconnected and systematic philosophy.
He provided the first real opposition to the Materialism of the Pre-Socratics , and he developed doctrines such as Platonic Realism , Essentialism and Idealism , including his important and famous theory of Forms and universals he believed that the world we perceive around us is composed of mere representations or instances of the pure ideal Forms, which had their own existence elsewhere, an idea known as Platonic Realism.
Plato believed that virtue was a kind of knowledge the knowledge of good and evil that we need in order to reach the ultimate good , which is the aim of all human desires and actions a theory known as Eudaimonism. Plato 's Political Philosophy was developed mainly in his famous "Republic" , where he describes an ideal though rather grim and anti-democratic society composed of Workers and Warriors , ruled over by wise Philosopher Kings.
The third in the main trio of classical philosophers was Plato 's student Aristotle. He created an even more comprehensive system of philosophy than Plato , encompassing Ethics , Aesthetics , Politics , Metaphysics , Logic and science , and his work influenced almost all later philosophical thinking, particularly those of the Medieval period.
Aristotle 's system of deductive Logic , with its emphasis on the syllogism where a conclusion, or synthesis , is inferred from two other premises, the thesis and antithesis , remained the dominant form of Logic until the 19th Century. Unlike Plato , Aristotle held that Form and Matter were inseparable , and cannot exist apart from each other. Although he too believed in a kind of Eudaimonism , Aristotle realized that Ethics is a complex concept and that we cannot always control our own moral environment.
He thought that happiness could best be achieved by living a balanced life and avoiding excess by pursuing a golden mean in everything similar to his formula for political stability through steering a middle course between tyranny and democracy. In the philosophical cauldron of Ancient Greece , though as well as the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations which followed it over the next few centuries , several other schools or movements also held sway, in addition to Platonism and Aristotelianism :.
After about the 4th or 5th Century A. This period also saw the establishment of the first universities , which was an important factor in the subsequent development of philosophy. Avicenna tried to reconcile the rational philosophy of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism with Islamic theology , and also developed his own system of Logic , known as Avicennian Logic. He also introduced the concept of the "tabula rasa" the idea that humans are born with no innate or built-in mental content , which strongly influenced later Empiricists like John Locke.
The Jewish philosopher Maimonides also attempted the same reconciliation of Aristotle with the Hebrew scriptures around the same time. The Medieval Christian philosophers were all part of a movement called Scholasticism which tried to combine Logic , Metaphysics , Epistemology and semantics the theory of meaning into one discipline, and to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers particularly Aristotle with Christian theology.
The Scholastic method was to thoroughly and critically read the works of renowned scholars, note down any disagreements and points of contention , and then resolve them by the use of formal Logic and analysis of language.
Scholasticism in general is often criticized for spending too much time discussing infinitesimal and pedantic details like how many angels could dance on the tip of a needle, etc.
Anselm best known as the originator of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God by abstract reasoning alone is often regarded as the first of the Scholastics , and St. Thomas Aquinas known for his five rational proofs for the existence of God, and his definition of the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues is generally considered the greatest , and certainly had the greatest influence on the theology of the Catholic Church.
Each contributed slight variations to the same general beliefs - Abelard introduced the doctrine of limbo for unbaptized babies; Scotus rejected the distinction between essence and existence that Aquinas had insisted on; Ockham introduced the important methodological principle known as Ockham's Razor , that one should not multiply arguments beyond the necessary; etc.
Roger Bacon was something of an exception, and actually criticized the prevailing Scholastic system, based as it was on tradition and scriptural authority. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of Empiricism the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience and of the modern scientific method. The revival of classical civilization and learning in the 15th and 16th Century known as the Renaissance brought the Medieval period to a close.
It was marked by a movement away from religion and medieval Scholasticism and towards Humanism the belief that humans can solve their own problems through reliance on reason and the scientific method and a new sense of critical inquiry.
Among the major philosophical figures of the Renaissance were: Erasmus who attacked many of the traditions of the Catholic Church and popular superstitions, and became the intellectual father of the European Reformation ; Machiavelli whose cynical and devious Political Philosophy has become notorious ; Thomas More the Christian Humanist whose book "Utopia" influenced generations of politicians and planners and even the early development of Socialist ideas ; and Francis Bacon whose empiricist belief that truth requires evidence from the real world , and whose application of inductive reasoning - generalizations based on individual instances - were both influential in the development of modern scientific methodology.
The Age of Reason of the 17th Century and the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th Century very roughly speaking , along with the advances in science , the growth of religious tolerance and the rise of liberalism which went with them, mark the real beginnings of modern philosophy.
In large part, the period can be seen as an ongoing battle between two opposing doctrines , Rationalism the belief that all knowledge arises from intellectual and deductive reason , rather than from the senses and Empiricism the belief that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience.
His method known as methodological skepticism , although its aim was actually to dispel Skepticism and arrive at certain knowledge , was to shuck off everything about which there could be even a suspicion of doubt including the unreliable senses , even his own body which could be merely an illusion to arrive at the single indubitable principle that he possessed consciousness and was able to think "I think, therefore I am".
He then argued rather unsatisfactorily, some would say that our perception of the world around us must be created for us by God. He saw the human body as a kind of machine that follows the mechanical laws of physics, while the mind or consciousness was a quite separate entity , not subject to the laws of physics, which is only able to influence the body and deal with the outside world by a kind of mysterious two-way interaction.
This idea, known as Dualism or, more specifically, Cartesian Dualism , set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the "mind-body problem" for centuries after. Despite Descartes ' innovation and boldness, he was a product of his times and never abandoned the traditional idea of a God , which he saw as the one true substance from which everything else was made.
Today philosophical thought is applied to almost every component of life, from science to warfare, politics to artificial intelligence.
Want to learn about Eastern Philosophy? You may also enjoy: A History of Eastern Philosophy. Find Your Degree! In the Statesman , Plato turns his attention to precisely the topics identified at the end of the last section above. The discussion is interrupted but ultimately enriched by a story or myth in which politics is shown to be a matter of humans ruling other humans in place of living under divine guidance.
That human expertise of statecraft is ultimately distinguished by its knowledge of the correct timing kairos as to when its closest rivals should be exercised: these are three forms of expertise that in fact corresponded to key political roles, some of them formal offices, in Greek cities at the time, namely, rhetoric, generalship, and judging Lane , Lane c.
The statesman is wholly defined by the possession of that knowledge of when it is best to exercise these and the other subordinate forms of expertise, and by the role of exercising that knowledge in binding or weaving the different groups of citizens together, a knowledge which depends on a broader philosophical grasp but which is peculiarly political El Murr Here, political philosophy operates not just to assimilate politics to a broader metaphysical horizon but also to identify its specificity.
The Statesman also raises an important question about the nature and value of rule by law, as opposed to rule by such expert knowledge as embodied in a rare and likely singular individual. By contrast, the Statesman analyzes law as in principle a stubborn and imperfect substitute for the flexible deployment of expertise e—c. However, the principal interlocutors of the latter dialogue go on to agree that if the choice is between an ignorant imitator of the true political expert who changes the laws on the basis of whim, and a law-bound polity, the latter would be preferable, so bringing law back into the picture as an alternative to the ideal after all.
For an alternative argument, that the second-best city is not meant to be Magnesia, see Bartels In this second-best city, the legislation for which is sketched out in speech by the three interlocutors of the dialogue, politics still aims at virtue, and at the virtue of all the citizens, but those citizens all play a part in holding civic offices; the ordinary activities of politics are shared, in what is described as a mixture of monarchy and democracy.
Another influential aspect of the Laws is its positive evaluation of the nature of law itself as a topic proper to political philosophy. Some scholars have found that to be a distinctively democratic and liberal account of law Bobonich ; see also the entry on Plato on utopia. That arguably goes too far in a proceduralist direction, given that the value of law remains its embodiment of reason or understanding nous , so that while adding persuasive preludes is a better way to exercise the coercive force of law, no agreement on the basis of persuasion could justify laws which departed from the standard of nous Laks Nevertheless, the emphasis on law as an embodiment of reason, and as articulating the political ideals of the city in a form that its citizens are to study and internalize Nightingale b, , is distinctive to this dialogue.
The Statesman however reserves a special extraordinary role a higher office, or perhaps not a formal office as such for the statesman whenever he is present in the city Lane b. Has Plato in the Laws given up on his earlier idealism which rested on the possibility of the philosopher-king, or on the idea of the perfectly knowledgeable statesman? If so, should that be interpreted as disillusionment or pessimism on his part, or as a more democratic or liberal turn?
Or are there more fundamental continuities that connect and underlie even these seeming shifts? These questions structure the broad debate about the meaning and trajectory of Platonic political philosophy for an overview, compare Klosko to Schofield Living much of his life as a resident alien in Athens, with close familial ties to the extra- polis Macedonian court which would, near the end of his life, bring Athens under its sway, Aristotle at once thematized the fundamental perspective of the Greek citizenship of equals and at the same time acknowledged the claim to rule of anyone of truly superior political knowledge.
Biological creatures work to fulfill the realization of their end or telos , a specific way of living a complete life characteristic of the plants or animals of their own kind, which is the distinctive purpose that defines their fundamental nature—just as human artifacts are designed and used for specific ends.
While every human being, in acting, posits a particular telos as the purpose making that action intelligible, this should ideally reflect the overall natural telos of humans as such. Here, however, arises a problem unique to humans. Whereas other animals have a single telos defining their nature living the full life of a frog, including reproduction, being the sole telos of each frog, in the example used by Lear , humans both have a distinctive human nature—arising from the unique capacity to use language to deliberate about how to act — and also share in the divine nature in their ability to use reason to understand the eternal and intelligible order of the world.
Practical reason is the domain of ethics and politics, the uniquely human domain. Yet the political life is not necessarily the best life, compared with that devoted to the divinely shared human capacity for theoretical reason and philosophical thinking compare Nicomachean Ethics I with X.
In fact he closes his Nicomachean Ethics by remarking that for most people, the practice of ethics can only be ensured by their being governed by law, which combines necessity compulsion with reason.
Because, for most people, the ethical life presupposes government by law, the student of ethics must become a student of political science, studying the science of legislation in light of the collection of constitutions assembled by Aristotle and his school in the Lyceum. At the beginning of Book IV b1—39 , Aristotle offers a fourfold account of what the expertise regarding constitutions must encompass. The second, the best relative to circumstances, starts with the material cause and organizes political inquiry around the best that can be made out of given material.
The third, the best on a hypothesis, starts not from the true end of politics, but any posited end, and so looks for means and devices that will preserve any given constitution. In defective regimes, the good citizen and the good man may come apart.
The good citizen of a defective regime is one whose character suits the particular regime in question whether oligarchic, or democratic, say and equips him to support it loyally; hence he may be deformed or stunted by a role of holding or a role of holding accountable offices defined on incorrect terms. Here the limitations and exclusions among actual humans licensed by the principled formulation of the possibility—requiring actual realization—of human virtue become apparent.
Or the wealthy? Or the good? Or the one best man? Or a tyrant? He develops in particular detail the arguments that might be made on behalf of the many and the knowledgeable one respectively. Aristotle uses the image of a collectively provided feast to illustrate the potential superiority of such collective judgement; how to interpret this image whether as a potluck, Waldron , Wilson , Ober , or in a more aggregative way, Bouchard , Cammack , Lane a and other images that he uses is a matter of some renewed controversy for a recent review, see Bobonich But the lesson Aristotle draws from the various images is clearly limited to vindicating a role of the many in electing and holding accountable incumbents of the highest offices rather than in holding such offices themselves III.
The many can contribute to virtuous decision-making in their collective capacity of judgment—presumably in assemblies and juries—but not as individual high officials Lane a, b, Poddighe In the contrasting case of the one supremely excellent person, Aristotle argues that such a person has, strictly speaking, no equals, and so cannot be made justly to take a turn in rule, holding office for a time, as one citizen among others.
Instead it is right that such a person should rule without the term limits that political office would ordinarily require:. If, however, there be some one person, or more than one, although not enough to make up the full complement of a state, whose excellence is so pre-eminent that the excellence or the political capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal of those who are so far inferior to him in excellence and in political capacity.
Such a man may truly be deemed a god among men …. On one recent reading, this implies that virtuous monarchy does indeed count as a political regime, albeit one in which only one or a few of the citizens are eligible to hold the highest offices Riesbeck Yet this argument is left at the hypothetical level. In the absence of such a superlatively virtuous, even godlike individual, the formulation of political rule as involving some kind of turn-taking by a large body of sufficiently virtuous citizens remains preeminent though even this should not be read to imply that all should in fact alternate in office, or even that all should necessarily be eligible for all offices.
As Aristotle turn to consideration of the best constitutions relative to particular and imperfect circumstances, the major issue is conflict between rival factions over the basis for defining equality and so justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, Aristotle had identified two types of equality: geometrical, or proportional to merit; and arithmetical, or proportional to mere numerical counting. In Politics III. Whereas that Platonic text had distinguished monarchy from tyranny, aristocracy from oligarchy, and good from bad democracy on the basis of obedience to law all these regimes being conceived as lacking the genuine political knowledge of the true statesman , Aristotle instead makes the dividing line the question of ruling for the common advantage as opposed to ruling for the advantage of a single faction.
Aristotle augments this analysis with appeals to historical narrative, overlapping with the narrative of Athenian political history offered in the Constitution of Athens compiled by him or, more likely, by members of his school. On his telling in the Politics , Athenian democracy had degenerated from an aboriginal democracy of non-meddling farmers VI.
This Aristotle calls the middling regime: a political, because sociological, mean between oligarchy and democracy, in which the middle classes hold the preponderance of both wealth distribution and political power. Thus it is attainable through reform of either an oligarchy or a democracy, the most prevalent constitutions among the Greeks.
Strikingly, his example of such a regime is Sparta: presented as a case of a characteristically democratic distribution of education among citizens only, of course coupled with the characteristically aristocratic principle of election to offices rather than selection by lot IV. It has been suggested in this article that the final clause of that sentence is important: Aristotelian citizenship counts as a noninstrumental good-in-itself only so long as it does indeed aim at the telos of a perfect life.
That is, while Aristotle indeed valued the possibility of political participation in officeholding and the control of officeholding as part of the best constitution, he saw it as an intrinsic good only insofar as it was an expression of virtue, as it would be in that best constitution whether governed by a collectivity of virtuous citizens as in the regime described in Books VII and VIII, or in the rare and perhaps purely hypothetical case of a superlatively virtuous monarch.
Without virtue, political participation in officeholding and the control of officeholding was rather to be valued on the basis of expedience, though even then, membership in the political community of the polis remains essential to full human flourishing.
Indeed, modern debates over the meaning of Aristotle find him a precursor of or inspiration for a range of intellectual and political positions: Aristotle as a communitarian MacIntyre vs. Aristotle as an exponent of class conflict Yack ; Aristotle as a democrat, or at least as providing the basis for democracy Frank , vs.
Aristotle in opposition to Athenian democracy in his day Ober One interesting development has been the use of Aristotle to articulate an ethics of capability Nussbaum Important developments in political thinking and practice took place under the Hellenistic kingdoms that supplanted Macedon in its suzerainty over the formerly independent Greek city-states.
These included, for example, a genre of rhetorical letters addressed to rulers, and the important analysis of Greek and Roman constitutional change by the second-century Greek historian Polybius Hahm As kingships flourished among the Hellenistic kingdoms until they in turn came under Roman rule, not only the value of political participation, but also the proper domains of politics, were widely debated.
Different authors would orient themselves respectively to still-surviving polis communities and the various leagues which united many of them in the Hellenistic period; to the kingdoms mentioned above; to the Roman constitution, and eventually to the special forms of imperial power which eventually arose therein; and in more philosophical terms, to the cosmos as a whole and all rational beings within it. In addition to the major movements of Epicureanism and Stoicism treated separately below, other schools also persisted and arose in this period.
Those persisting included the Platonic Academy transformed in a skeptical direction and the Aristotelian Lyceum the Peripatetic School. Newcomers, albeit tracing themselves to their own understanding of the figure of Socrates, included the Cynics and the Pyrrhonist skeptics, and we focus on these latter two here. While this generally led them to advocate what might be considered more an anti-politics than a politics, a provocative statement by their founder Diogenes of Sinope c.
Yet the Cynics also manifested some parallels with the Epicureans and even with the skeptics. See the entry on Pyrrho. See the entry on ancient skepticism. BCE sophists. The greatest utility is that of tranquility or security, which is the naturally desired end or goal. For Epicureans, the city serves a legitimate and necessary function in ensuring security. But this does not mean that an active public life is also normally the most rational path to security.
On the contrary, while many people will be attracted to the possible fortune and glory of such a life, and while cities need such people, the Epicurean sage will on the whole refrain from active political participation for discussion of texts, including some exceptions, both in Lucretius and other evidence, see Fowler Instead the insecurities of life are best met by the formation of a community of friends living together and sharing their lives. Whatever the theoretical conundrum, it did not prevent a number of Epicureans from undertaking such risky public service, among them more than one of the assassins of Julius Caesar Sedley ; Fowler discusses a wide range of Roman Epicurean attitudes.
A more modest but still striking example of Epicurean public service is the huge portico inscribed with Epicurean sayings and exegesis in second-century Oenoanda in modern-day Turkey by one Diogenes of that city Smith , Whether or not his fellow citizens appreciated the instruction, modern archaeologists and philosophers are grateful for this unparalleled source of knowledge of Epicurean philosophy. To be sure, the polity in question was invariably figured as a city, according to the account given in Dio Chrysostom But which people?
Whether the members of this city were to be all humans together with the gods, or only human sages and the gods, and whether the city is to be envisaged as a distinct foundation or as identical with the cosmos, has much exercised both Stoic thinkers and subsequent interpreters. And which law? How does or should the law of a particular city relate to the natural law? These questions are canvassed further as this section unfolds.
Both Zeno and Chrysippus wrote works in the Platonic genre entitled Republic , neither of which survives in full. So too, reportedly, had Diogenes the Cynic. His portrait of the republic combines the Stoic idea of a natural law by which human conduct is harmonized with cosmic order, with a classical vision of politics in which a Platonic ideal of friendship through communist and sexual bonding more erotic than familial for Zeno persists following Schofield 22— Yet, in keeping with some tendencies in Platonism and Cynicism, such law might have to be radically different from existing laws if it is to be in full conformity with nature and reason.
Especially for the early Stoics, existing cities remained an accepted arena both for political action in practice—Stoic sages and scholars advising kings and serving in offices SVF 3. Yet the role of natural law already in the early Stoics, and certainly in later ones, came to support an alternative horizon for politics on the scale of the cosmos as a whole Laurand Meanwhile, in the years of the Roman republic, certain affinities between Stoic and republican ideas proved significant, as we shall now see.
Roman aristocrats were especially attracted to the Stoic willingness to countenance the kingly and political lives alongside the scholarly one as equally preferable SVF 3. They began to study the Stoa seriously from the late second century BCE. The affinity between Stoicism and Roman republicanism was enhanced by the second-century Stoic teacher Panaetius, who seems to have argued that the Roman mos maiorum or ancient ways and customs were the best form of government, so burnishing philosophical principle with the ancestral piety dear to the Romans.
Other Romans were strongly attracted to Epicureanism or to Cynicism, and some of these, however paradoxically, likewise played significant roles in political life. Thus the distinctive lineaments of the Roman republic, now to be described, were debated and interpreted by the philosophically minded in terms of Greek political theory. While the founders of the city of Rome were said to be the legendary twins Romulus and Remus, Romans would come to identify the origins of their distinctive liberty in the killing of a tyrannical king, generally dated in BCE, by the ancestor of the Junius Brutus who would eventually kill Julius Caesar.
The position of king was replaced by two annually elected consuls, the royal council became the Senate, and popular assemblies were established to elect magistrates and pass the laws they proposed. An influential account of Rome as such a mixed constitution, in this case combining the three classical regime forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, had already been given by the Greek historian Polybius, who referred to the distinction between the characteristic powers in each kind of regime and their mutual checking and balancing Histories 6.
Whereas in Polybius the achievement of balance between the different powers was portrayed as resulting from mutual rivalrous self-assertion, Cicero would refer to it in more harmonious language, a form of balancing compensatio , De rep.
Atkins Moving eternally through the infinite void, they collide and unite, thus generating objects which differ in accordance with the varieties, in number, size, shape, and arrangement, of the atoms which compose them.
What covered in, and where? And what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? The ONE breathed without air by self-impulse; through the heat of tapas desire was manifest 1 Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.
There is another account on how the universe started, which has no equivalent in any other tradition. The universe is actually the dream of a god who after Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep, and the universe dissolves with him. After another Brahma years, he recomposes himself and begins to dream again the great cosmic dream.
Meanwhile, there are infinite other universes elsewhere, each of them being dreamt by its own god. What might each of these interpretations conclude should their arguments continue to develop? The question is rhetorical. You need not consider it an assignment, but rather keep it in mind as we move to the next Module.
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