Transcript The Garden of Eden - Damien High School

The Garden of Eden
WHO ARE YOU?
WHERE DOES THE WORLD COME
FROM?
Introduction to Philosophy
 Di
Leo’s Introduction
What is Philosophy?
Areas of Philosophy
What you should expect in a philosophy course
What is Philosophy?
 2,500
years ago in Ionia.
 Thales(625-545B.C.E.), first known
philosopher in Western culture.
 The physical world as a sense of wonderhe wanted to know more about it, where it
came from.
 Abandoned divine explanations and
focused on natural observance and
reason.
Philosophy, a reflection on the most
basic features of the world and the
way we ought to conduct our lives in
this world.
In awe of the phenomena presented
through the senses.
Seeking to become as wise and
knowledgeable about them.
Wondering…”What is the nature of
reality?” “What is the ultimate
substance of things?”
WONDER…
WISDOM…
PASSION…
KNOWLEDGE…
What Is Philosophy?
“This sense of wonder is the mark of the
philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other
origin…”
Plato, Theatetus
Philos (love of)
Sophia (wisdom)
The passionate pursuit of Knowledge and wisdom…
“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now and at
first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at
the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and
stated difficulties about greater matters, e.g., about the
phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the
stars, and about the genesis of the universe.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics
Lovers of Wisdom
Pythagoras divided people into
three groups…
1. Lovers of wisdom
2. Lovers of success
3. Lovers of pleasure
Of course, LOVERS OF WISDOM rule!
A Philosophers Goal…
Not just in finding an answer…
But, an answer with the best set
of reasons and arguments
associated with it.
Using reason to think critically about:
The conduct of life
The justification of belief
The nature of the world
Areas of Philosophy
Three distinct areas of inquiry
Metaphysics
The area of philosophy that
studies the nature of reality,
existence, and being.
 Addresses questions
concerning what there is.

Specific Topics
The nature of space and time
Free will and determinism
The nature of causation
The distinction between appearance and
reality
The distinction between the mind and
body
The nature and essence of God
The nature of identity
Epistemology
The area of philosophy that
studies the sources, types,
objects, and limits of knowledge
Specific Topics
Questions concerning what we
can know and how we can
know it.
Logic
The area of philosophy that
studies the methods and
principles of correct reasoning.
Specific Topics
What is coherent thought?
All other areas of philosophy
are somehow dependent on
these three major areas
Other Areas of
Philosophy
Ethics
Philosophy of Mind
Aesthetics
Social and Political Philosophy
Philosophy of Religion
The Top Hat
…the only thing we
require to be a good
philosopher is the
faculty of wonder…
Sophie Receives a
“Course” in Philosophy
Page one…What is
Philosophy?
Is there nothing that
interests us all?
There are questions that
certainly should interest
everyone.
Philosophy seeks to raise and
answer these questions.
What is it that everyone
needs?
Food
Water
Shelter
Love
Care
But, apart from that…
Everyone needs to figure
out who they are and why
they are here.
Is This True?
Are questions such as how the
universe, the earth, and life
came into being more
important than who won the
most gold metals in the last
Olympics?
A Strange Creature
Babies, Martians, a flying dad, and a white rabbit…
THE ONLY THING WE REQUIRE TO BE GOOD
PHILOSOPHERS IS THE FACULTY OF WONDER
Although philosophical questions concern us all, we do not all
become philosophers.
Most will crawl deep into the rabbit’s fur and snuggle comfortably.
So now you must chose, Sophie. Are you a child who has not
yet become world-weary?
Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so?
The Myths
…a precarious balance between the forces
of good and evil…
The Mythological World Picture
By philosophy we mean the completely new
way of thinking that evolved in Greece about
six hundred years before the birth of Christ.
Prior to this, answers derived from religion and
religious belief handed down from generation to
generation in the form of myths.
What is a MYTH?
Myths were attempts at
explaining the world and
its workings…
A Nordic Myth
Thor and his hammer…
Thor rides across the sky in his
chariot swinging his hammer,
causing thunder and lightening
and rain that brings forth the
germination of corn…
He becomes the god of fertility.
Midgard
Kingdom of the middle
Asgard
Kingdom of the gods
Utgard
Domain of the
treacherous giants.
Evil monsters know as
the “forces of chaos.”
Thus, mythology found in
most every culture presents
a precarious balance
between good and evil…
This was the mythological explanation for how
the balance of nature was maintained and why
there was a constant struggle between good and
evil.
This is exactly what the first philosophers
rejected…
The Mythological
Worldview in Greece
Zeus and Apollo, Hera and
Athene, Dionysos and
Asclepios, Heracles and
Hephaestos…
Depicted in mythology written down by
Homer and Hesiod.
Why Greece?
Some possible reasons…

A very productive contact between ancient
Greece and the cultures of the eastern
Mediterranean region – Persia, Mesopotamia,
Phoenicia, Cyprus, southern Italy, and Egypt.

The Greeks were well-traveled and extremely
adept at borrowing ideas from cultures they
encountered.

There existed no priestly class of censors in
Greece. Greek thinkers were able to get away
with quite a bit that went against prevailing
religious opinion.

Greek imagination was fertile in its concern with
intimate detail. Eg. Homer’s descriptiveness.

The socioeconomic structure of Greece
produced a whole leisure class of people with
time on their hands that could be spent
meditating on philosophical issues.

Greek drama and poetry show an intense awareness of change,
of the war of opposites – summer to winter, hot to cold, light to
dark, and life to death.

This sensitivity to the transitory nature of all things sometimes
led Greeks to pessimism…however, this also led them to
demand an explanation of things.

The human mind operating on its own devices is able to
discover ultimate truths about reality.

This separation from religious explanation did not mean a
move to atheism.

In fact, atheistic views were quite rare in ancient Greece.

It did however, open up a new way of thinking about reality…a
focus on cosmology (theories about the nature of the world)
rather than cosmogony (theories about origins of the world).
Apposing the gods
Xenophanes (570 B.C.E.)
Suggests that men have
created the gods in their own
image believing that the gods
were born and have bodies and
cloths and language just as we
have.
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

What all pre-socratic philosophers have in
common is their attempt to create general
theories of the cosmos (Kosmos is the Greek
term for “world”), not by using myth but by using
observation and reason.

Something else common among them was that
they all stemmed from the outlying borders of
the Greek world: islands in the Ionian Sea,
Greek colonies in southern Italy, or along the
coast of Persia (modern Turkey).
 Today’s
understanding of the pre-Socratics
is based mostly on the summaries of their
ideas by Aristotle.
The Natural Philosophers
Three Philosophers
From Melitus
Thales
Anaximander
Anaximenes
Thales
 From
the region of Ionia, the colony of
Miletus, on the coast of Asia Minor
(modern Turkey).
 Approx.
580 B.C.E.
Major thoughts of Thales
 If
there is change, there must be some
thing that changes, yet does not change.
 There
must be a unity behind the plurality
of things… a Oneness.
 Without
oneness the world would be a
disjointed grouping of unrelated fragments.

Thales, familiar with the four elements: air, fire,
water, and earth, assumed that all things must
ultimately be reducible to one of these four – but
which one?

Of the four, water seemed to him to be the most
obvious in its transformations: rivers turn to
deltas, water turns to ice and then back to water,
which can turn to steam, which becomes air,
which forms wind that fans fire.
 Thus,
the first principle and basic
nature of all things is water!
Thales
 Traveled
widely, including Egypt.
 Calculated the height of the pyramids by
measuring their shadow.
 Predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C.E.
 Source of all things is water.
 “All things are full of gods.” Possibly tiny
life germs.
Anaximander
 Contemporary
of Thales.
 Thought our world to be one of many that
evolve and dissolve into “the boundless.”
 Rejected Thales’ notion of one single
element.
 All things had to come from something
other than the things created.
Because all created things are limited, that
which comes before and after them must
be..
“BOUNDLESS”
Anaximenes








The source of all things is AIR or vapor.
Familiar with Thales’ idea of water…
But, where does water come from?
Water is only condensed air.
When pressed even more it becomes earth.
Fire is rarefied air.
Air, thus, is the origin of earth, water, and fire.
The source of all natural change.
 But
how could one substance suddenly
change into something else?
 This
is…
The Problem of Change
All things Flow
Heraclitus
 From
Ephesus
 The basic stuff is fire.
 “There is an exchange of all things for fire
and of fire for all things.”
 Reality is composed not of a number of
things but of a process of continual
creation and destruction.
“You cannot step into the same
river twice”
 Everything
flows and nothing abides;
everything gives way and nothing stays
fixed.
 The only thing that does not experience
change is change itself.
The unobservable logos

Hereclitus believed that this constant change
was not chaotic or arbitrary, but governed by
logos – a universal logic or reason- that made
change a rational phenomenon.
 This logos would be taken up by Plato to explain
the laws of nature.
 Christianity would also use the concept of logos
equated with God and Jesus, especially found in
the Gospel of John.
The Eleatics
 A group
of philosophers in the Greek
colony of Elea in Southern Italy.
 From
 They
about 500 B.C.E.
were concerned with the problem of
change.
Nothing Can Come From
Nothing
Parmenides (540-480 B.C.E.)
 Thought
that everything that exists had
always existed.
 A common Greek understanding that
everything that existed in the world was
everlasting.
 Thought that there was no such thing as
actual change.
He perceived with his senses that
nature was in a constant state of
flux…
 But he could not equate this with
his reason.
 Chose reason over his senses.
 Did not believe things that he saw
 Our senses give us incorrect
picture of the world.
 Sought to expose all forms of
perceptual illusion.

Rationalism vs. Empiricism
 For
Parmenides, reason made it clear that
nothing could change.
 For Heraclitus, perception through the
senses made it clear that nature was in a
constant state of change.
 Who is right?
 Should we let reason or our senses
dictate? Which can we trust?
Four Basic Elements
Empedocles
 From
Sicily
 Seeks to solve the problem of change and
the seeming contradiction between
Parmenides and Heraclitus.
 They’re both right, but also wrong.
 The problem lies in the belief of there
existing only one element.
How can water turn into a fish?
 It
cannot.
 In fact water cannot change. Pure water
will continue to be pure water.
 So Parmenides is right: nothing changes.
 But, our senses do tell us that nature
changes.
 Empedolces
insisted that in order to bridge
the gap between Parmenides and
Heraclitus, one must reject the notion of
monism – the idea of a single basic
substance.
 Nature
does exist of the four “roots” water,
air, fire, earth.
 All natural processes were due to the
coming together and separating of these
four root elements.
 All things are a mixture of air, water, fire,
and earth in varying proportions.
 So
it is not correct to say that everything
changes.
 Nothing changes really.
 The elements never change, they merely
come together and separate as the same
elements.
What makes these elements
combine so that new life can
occur?
 The
forces of love and strife.
 Love binds together and strife separates.
 All natural processes can be explained as
the interaction of elements and natural
forces.
Something of Everything in
Everything
Anaxagoras
Nature is built up of an infinite
number of minute particles
invisible to the eye.
 Not
only that…but, everything can be
divided into even smaller parts.
 And,
in these smallest parts are fragments
of all other things.
 If
skin and bone are not transformed out of
other things…parts of them must exist in
the milk we drink and the food we eat.
 Thus,
there is something of everything in
every single cell.
 The
 The
whole exists in each tiny part.
nucleus of a skin cell from my finger,
for example, contains information of my
skin as well as my eyes, my hair, etc…
Seeds

Anaxagoras called these minuscule particles,
seeds

Empedolces believed that is was the force of
love that brought elements together.

Anaxagoras believed “order” as a force that
brought elements together to form things.

He called this force mind or intelligence (nous)



The first Athens
Philosopher
Accused of Athiesm
Kicked out of Athens
Believed the sun not as a
god but as a big hot rock


Very interested in Astronomy


The moon has no light of its
own
Life possible on other planets
“Understanding will always
require some effort Sophie…”
Democritus
– 370 B.C.E.
 Abdera…Northern Aegean coast
 460
 Agreed
with those before
him…transformations in nature could not
be due to the fact that anything actually
“changed.”
 Assumed that everything was built up of
tiny invisible blocks…each eternal and
immutable.
 Democritus called these “atoms.”
The Atom Theory
Atom
A–
tom
 Un-cuttable
 Democritus
thought that it was very
important to understand that these tiny
particles could not be divided indefinitely
into smaller parts.
 If
atoms could be eternally broken
down…nature would begin to dissolve…
 These
blocks, legos, atoms had to be
eternal…because….why?
 Nothing
 Thus,
can come from nothing…
Democritus agrees with Parmenides
and the Eleatics.
 All
atoms are firm and solid
 But,
were not identical
 Nature
consists of an unlimited number
and variety of atoms…some round and
smooth…others irregular and jagged.
 Because
of these differences they could
join together into all kinds of different
bodies.
 Infinite
in number and shape, but eternal,
immutable, and indivisible.
 When
things died or disintegrated, the
atoms dispersed, to be used again in new
things.
 Atoms
 But
move around in space…
because of “hooks” and “barbs” they
could join together to form new
things…Like….?
 They
are like….
 Indivisible
 Different
shapes and sizes
 Solid and impermeable
 “hooks” and “barbs”
 They connect to form every conceivable
figure
 Can be broken apart and reused to make
other things.
 They are eternal
According to today’s
knowledge, Democritus’
Atom Theory was more
or less correct.
Democritus was a
materialist
What does this mean?
He did not believe in
any “force” or “soul”
behind these atoms…
The only thing that
exists is atoms and the
void…only material
things.
There is no conscious
design in the movement
of atoms…
…Everything happens
mechanically
…but, not randomly…
Everything follows the
laws of
necessity…natural
laws…a cause inherent
in the thing itself…
When we sense
something we are
sensing the movement
of atoms…
You’ve Got Soul
…Believed that even
the human soul was
made up of “soul
atoms”
When we die these
“soul atoms” disperse
in all directions coming
together to form new
souls…Thus, humans
possess no immortal
soul..
Since the soul is
connected to the brain,
when we die and the
brain disintegrates we
cannot have any form
of consciousness.
This is the last word of the
Natural Philosophers…
All things flow, but behind
this flow are
atoms…eternal, immutable,
un-flowing…
Pythagoras
From the island of Samos, near
Miletus
 All
things are numbers.
 A correct description of reality must be
expressed in terms of mathematical
formulas.
 We learn that the laws of nature can be
written out in mathematical formulas.
 He was also a numerologist; he was
interested in the mystical significance of
numbers.