Classical greek philosophy

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– Palmer, Donald, Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 162-163.

Slide 46

“Aristotle’s universe was composed of a plurality of real beings that fell into an orderly hierarchy of perfection. Prime matter and substantial form were the principles of every physical body. The simplest bodies occurring in nature were the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. These combined to produce the various types of inanimate objects. Living things were more complex bodies which were united by a higher type of substantial form, called soul. Aristotle distinguished three types of souls, vegetative, sensitive, and rational, corresponding to the degrees of perfection found in plants, animals, and human beings.”

— Langford in Galileo, Science and the Church

Slide 47

Socrates

Socratic Method

Posed questions and then questioned the answers

Searched for the ultimate nature of qualities

What is Duty?

What is Truth?

What is Evil?

Slide 48

Socrates taught:

Happiness is the consequence not of physical or external circumstances, of wealth or power or reputation, but of living a life that is good for the soul. Yet to live a genuinely good life, one must know what is the nature and essence of the good.

— Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind

Slide 49

"The works of Homer had embodied the aristocratic values that Plato wished to support, but Homer had offered no defense of those values except an appeal to the emotions through his poetic discourse. If Plato was to defend values rationally, he had to replace the power of poetry (as manifested in Greek myth and drama) with that of philosophy, the spokeswoman for reason."

–Palmer, Donald, Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 60.

Slide 50

From the Pythagorean perspective, the fundamentals of existence are the archetypal Forms or Ideas, which constitute the intangible substrate of all that is tangible. The true structure of the world is revealed not by the senses, but by the intellect, which in its highest state has direct access to the Ideas governing reality. All knowledge presupposes the abstraction or imaginary metaphor for the concrete world, is here considered to be the very basis of reality, that which determines its order and renders it knowable. To this end, Pythagoras and later Plato declared direct experience of the transcendent Ideas to be the philosopher’s primary goal and ultimate destination.