Lecture 2 The emergence of philosophy The Antique

Lecture 2 The emergence of philosophy. The Antique philosophy 2. 1 Forms of cognitive activity and the emergence of philosophy 2. 2 The Antique philosophy. The first Greek philosophers 2. 3 Sophists and Socrates as a turning point in the development of the Antique philosophy 2. 4 The philosophy of Plato 2. 5 Aristotle’s philosophy 2. 6 The Hellenistic and Roman philosophy

Lecture 2. 1 Forms of cognitive activity and the emergence of philosophy What does “cognition” mean and what forms of cognitive activity exist? Cognition may be determined as a reflection by human of the world around, a mental mastering the reality. Usually we bind cognitive activity with science but this view is too superficial to be accepted in philosophy. According to it, many different forms of cognitive activity exist, such as myth, religion, science, philosophy (as quite an independent cognitive activity) and so on.

Lecture 2. 1 The primary among them is myth. In philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias it’s determined sometimes as an invented (in some degree) telling of some events, heroes, phenomena etc. , in ground of which something really existing lies. This definition is too perfunctory as well, for it doesn’t concern the innermost of myth. A lot of other definitions exist, we shall stop at the following. Myth is a telling based on associations and identifications (отождествление) of some objects with other ones. The pristine, primordial myth is primary to any other knowledge and experience, it’s simply an associative form of living in the world and this world’ reflection.

Lecture 2. 1 A primitive man yet knew no logic and could ponder on (i. e. arrange his experience data) but only in an associative way. That was the mythical mode of thinking that didn’t discern the inner and outer, the real and imaginable yet and mended them together, creating a specific closed system which united elements of future science, religion, philosophy, literature and other arts in itself. The primitive myths were very contradictory but men who lived in their frame didn’t notice it because the norms of logic were unknown to them yet. Gradually with accumulating more experience people discovered the logical norms that allowed them to arrange elements of reality in some other, more objective mode. Man acquired possibility to look at his myths from aside and noticed their contradictions. The necessity of most evident discrepancies arose. So renewed and well-developed mythological systems appeared. In order to tell something it’s necessary to keep it before mental gaze, i. e. to look at from aside. The latter needs some kind of logic analysis yet inaccessible to the man.

Lecture 2. 1 Later religions emerged on their ground. Having removed main discrepancies and got these new systems of views, people had a choice either to accept (to believe) or not to accept (not to believe) them. Thus, religion contains a new element absent in the proper myth, this element is belief. The people could easily see that phenomena and entities the renewed mythology being told of, are absent in usual world. Therefore, they should be transported somewhere into another world. So the religious faith means belief in this another transcendent world. Religious is a system providing a link between the usual and transcendent realities.

Lecture 2. 1 The division of the united mythical outlook gives the beginning not only to religion but as well as to philosophy, science, art etc. , which shared between themselves the primitive myth’s functions. Religion takes sphere of the inner (spiritual) life, so the science is engaged in the sphere of outer (material world) exploration, and the philosophy deals with both spiritual and material lives and can be defined as free mental activity concerning some or other sides of existence. Philosophy appears only there where some correspondent conditions are present. Historically it appeared approximately in the same time (7– 6 th centuries B. C. ) in three places independently on each other: • in the ancient Greece; • in the ancient India; • in the ancient China.

Lecture 2. 1 The ancient Greek (Antique) philosophy gave birth to all future European philosophy. Its emergence was conditioned by that the ancient Greeks unlike the ancient Egyptians or Babylonians were the nation of travelers and navigators and constantly encountered other nations representatives with habits different from their own. Probably, that’s why free-thinking necessary for the emergence of philosophy could spread among them (ancient Greeks).

Lecture 2. 2 The Antique philosophy. The first Greek philosophers Main periods of the Antique philosophy I. Pre-Socratics II. Classic Greek philosophy III. Hellenistic and Roman philosophy the Greek philosophers before Socrates Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle After Alexander the Great (Macedonenian’s) conquests

Lecture 2. 2 I. Pre-Socratics (600 year B. C. – 400 year B. C. ) The Milesian school Thales, Anaximander, Anaximene Ionian philosophy The Ephesus school Heraclitus of Ephesus The School of Pythagoras Italiot philosophy Elia School Parmenides, Zeno Atomism Demokritus The School of Athens Anaxagoras

Lecture 2. 2 The works of the pre-Socratic philosophers have come to our time in fragments contained in the works of later philosophers (Aristotle, Diogenes of Laertes, Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch etc. ) and, therefore, it’s difficult sometimes to reconstruct their teachings. The pre. Socratic philosophers were interested in the study of the being, which they thought to be an ascending (at Greek phusis, where the word physics comes from). Therefore, they were called physiologists or, at our usual mode, physicists. They saw the being in the world around, that is in nature. In nature they tried to find out a primal source, a cause of all, the so-called arche (beginning). Different ones of them thought arche in different ways. Many of them connected it with one of the four prime elements: water, fire, earth and air.

Lecture 2. 2 The Milesian school 1. Thales – was materialist , believed the arche is water. All the things are born out of water; the water is the beginning and the finish of any things. Our earth is a disk swimming by the surface of water, asserted he. All living creatures and even inanimate things have souls (hylozoism); one’s soul is one’s god, all the nature is full of gods, said Thales. “Know thyself (yourself)!”

Lecture 2. 2 2. Anaximander - reconsidered the teaching of his teacher (Thales ) and came to the opinion that arche is no element of the mentioned four but an especial beginning called apeiron (the word means an indefinite, formless, endless, limitless, chaotic). Apeiron is eternal and omnipresent (вездесущий) in any possible worlds (our one is only one of them). From apeiron four elements (water, fire, earth, air) emerged; every one of them aspires to widen its own sphere, that engender a struggle (a war) between them that gives origin to all existing things and worlds.

Lecture 2. 2 3. Anaximenes - asserted that the prime substance is air, for the spiritual precedes the material and our soul (the spiritual) is air. The fire is the rarefied (разреженный) air; the water arises by way of the air’s condensing, the further condensing (сгущение) gives the earth and still the further a stone. 4. The School of Pythagoras – the first idealist, he taught that all consists of numbers which he comprehended as geometrical figures, he saw the world as being compounded of regular geometrical elements. All things consist of them and therefore, some sorts of mathematical harmony may be found everywhere. The whole Universe is built in accordance with the mathematical harmony’s principles. The task of philosopher is to see them. The Pythagoreans called this harmony the music of Heaven, which is given to see only to the true wises

Lecture 2. 2 5. Parmenides – according to him, two worlds exist. The first one is the world of the true, eternal, unchangeable, perfect, immovable, indivisible and wonderful being. This being is the only one to be really true. The second world is that of opinions. 6. Zeno - in order to develop further the teaching of his teacher (Parmenides), he tried to prove that movement doesn’t exist. For it he elaborated the so-called aporias (paradoxes, impediments) of movement. They are as follows: • A flying arrow moves neither where it’s flying nor where it isn’t flying. • A movement can’t finish, because to pass some distance it’s necessary to pass the half of it, to pass the half it’s necessary to pass the half of the half and so forth. The movement, therefore, can neither finish nor even begin.

Lecture 2. 2 7. Demokritus (the Laughing Philosopher) – (together with Leucippes (Левкипп) the founder of atomic theory. He said everything was composed of "atoms", which were physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between atoms lay empty space; that atoms were indestructible; had always been, and always would be, in motion; that there were an infinite number of atoms, and kinds of atoms, which differed in shape, and size.

Lecture 2. 3 Sophists and Socrates as a turning point in the development of the Antique philosophy Sophists (5 th century B. C. ) - educated men, the first professionals in the intellectual sphere who used their knowledge for earning their living by compounding and keeping speeches in courts or before audience, by teaching and so forth. From the sophists originates also the word sophism (dodge or a dishonest trick in reasoning). For example, a sophism originating as early as from that time:

Lecture 2. 3 • • • Say us, please. Do you have a dog? Yes, I do. I have a very fierce he-dog. Does your dog have puppies? Yes, he does. Are you sure these puppies are his? Yes, I am. I saw myself his copulating with their mother. Does it mean, he’s a father to the puppies? It does, of course. He is yours, isn’t he? Yes, he’s mine. He’s yours and he’s a father. That means he’s your father, you are a son of the dog and a puppies’ brother.

Lecture 2. 3 But not all the antique sophists were merely dodgers ready for anything for money. Many of them were the real philosophers looking sincerely for truth but the better education, they got, made them less naive in comparison with other philosophers. Therefore, the sophists saw quite clear the conditional (условный) character of all truths existing at that time and were inclined to relativizing (accentuating the relative character of any truth and knowledge. Thus, Protagorus the most famous philosopher-sophist expressed this common for all sophists view in the next dictum: Man is a measure for any things as the existing ones in their existence so the non-existing in their nonexistence.

Lecture 2. 3

Lecture 2. 3 Socrates - (470 B. C. - 399 B. C. ) - preached views similar in many points to those of sophists, didn’t write books and taught exclusively in oral form. He was accused in atheism and corrupting the youth, sentenced to death and executed. He was the first who had turned the philosophy attention from the study of nature onto the study of human. Nothing reliable and trustworthy can be said of physics (nature), and all that remains for a philosopher is to study himself (to practice a self-cognition) and to investigate the human nature. “Cognize yourself and you will cognize the world” (i. e. all the rest around) I know that I know nothing (others don’t know even that).

Lecture 2. 3 Socrates’ dialectic method (maieutic) - is the method of teaching or reasoning by leading a conversation, that allows to take into consideration different points of view and making therewith a result more overall and thorough. Socrates was an antagonist to sophists in spite of his own relativism and proximity of their views. The cause, he blamed them for, was that they took money for their service. He compared them with whores for it, asserting that they sold their wisdom for money as well as the whores sold their body for it.

Lecture 2. 4 The philosophy of Plato

Lecture 2. 4 Plato - the disciple of Socrates. the importance of his philosophy can be reduced to the three moments. They are: dialectics, theory of ideas and theory of ideal state. using the form of conversation, but consisting in real in taking into consideration of different opposite points of view that allows to make analysis more profound all-round (overall, thorough). He very often gives no final conclusion but only represents possible variants leaving to the readers possibility for finding out a conclusion by themselves

Lecture 2. 4 The Plato's theory of ideas can be regarded as a straight continuation of the Parmenides's conception of true, eternal, unchangeable, unmovable being. Plato asserts that two realms (царство) or worlds exist: the one of ideas and the other of material things. The ideas according to Plato are wonderful, perfect, eternal images abiding in their own world (the so-called ideas' realm). The material things are ugly and imperfect incarnations of the ideas which are primal to them. The things are like their reflection in rough amorphous matter. For example there exist material terrestrial horses. They all are reflections of one single ideal horse abiding beyond our usual world in the realm of ideas and embodying in itself all the perfect and essential inherent to material horses. About the latter Aristophanes the ancient Greek comedian jested “I can see a horse but no ‘horseness’”.

Lecture 2. 4 Soul of a man is the idea of his. Before its incarnation in body it lived in the ideas world communicating with all other ideas and therefore has knowledge of them. Having incarnated it loses this knowledge and any cognition being a cognition of ideas is the process of the soul's recollection of that it knew abiding the world’s ideas. As a proof for it Plato put a case of a slave-boy who with help of according questions Plato with his friend Meno had put had been able to infer some basic laws of geometry about which he had no notion before. According to Plato the slave-boy's soul could recall these laws because it had known them abiding in the world’s ideas.

The Image of Cave The philosophy on Plato's view being cognition of ideas begins from a wonder of discovery of eternal and wonderful ideas exceeding all existing on the earth. Plato depicts it with the help of the image of a cave. Let us imagine a cave within unhappy prisoners chained at their necks to its wall and living there from their births. At the entrance the fire burns throwing shadows onto the walls. The prisoners can see only these shadows thinking they are all the reality that only exists. Let us pretend somebody of them could tear himself out into the external world. At first he would be perplexed by the picture and could realize nothing. Then however gradually he will accustom himself to the new discovered world and having realized all will never wish to come back. He'll not even be able to live there again. If a bad luck brings him back into the cave he'll die there. And if before he tries to tell his comrades of the seen beyond the cave they won't understand him or even having understood won't believe. In the same way the ideas cognition, i. e. philosophy goes.

The Image of Cave

Lecture 2. 4 The theory of the ideal state follows from the ideas theory. The ideas are eternal, perfect, unchangeable and the same ought to be the ideal state. Describe the ideal state according to Plato