Great Minds - Introduction to the Problems and Scope of Philosophy

[Music] the lectures you're about to see cover the last three thousand years of western intellectual history they cover most of the important problems in western thought and high culture and they will involve a kind of thinking that most people don't spend most of their time doing it's called philosophy the word philosophy comes from two greek words the words for love and wisdom or knowledge and philosophy is more or less a a love of wisdom a sort of passion for knowledge which goes beyond what we can get from it which goes beyond practical concerns and the intellectual tradition of the west forms a more or less coherent philosophic tradition with a common set of problems a roughly similar set of issues under consideration and a similar set of vocabulary words that we use to inquire into philosophical topics and we might as well consider these vocabulary this this term these set of terms that we use now in order to prevent misapprehensions later on in the first case we're going to talk about physics and metaphysics physics might be thought of as our theory of nature and roughly speaking what it means is it's our way of explaining the world around us the world of sense perception the world of tables and chairs and of the component parts of tables and chairs and of the larger things that we encounter suns galaxies worlds things like that our general theory of the the world of space and time around us might be described from a philosophical standpoint as being physics another set of philosophical issues another philosophic problem or topic that comes along with our consideration of physics is metaphysics metaphysics comes from greek words meaning above or beyond physics or nature what we mean by metaphysics is a set of ideas or entities that exist independently of the world of space and time that aren't the kind of things that tables and chairs and rocks and stars are examples of metaphysics are pure ideas or spiritual entities like god or the angels things like that for religious believers in every case though metaphysics suggests that there's something to the world that there's something real and existing that exists independent of and somehow outside of our immediate everyday experience so metaphysics is the inquiry and the consideration of things that exist outside of nature itself pure ideas and religious objects of religious thought in addition to physics and metaphysics we'll also be considering two related questions ontology and logic now ontology is not the kind of word you're going to see on an everyday basis it's not the kind of thing you're most likely going to find in the newspaper but ontology is not a terribly hard thing to comprehend it's speech about beings in other words ontology is a kind of philosophical discipline which allows us to analyze and think about the kind of existence that things have for example we might say that god exists in a different way and on a different plane from everyday human beings we might be inclined to say that human beings have a sort of stat a status and a set of rights and a kind of dignity that everyday objects don't have in other words when we distinguish between human beings and physical objects or between god and human beings we're making what might be called ontological distinctions we're distinguishing between the kinds of beings that they are we're attributing to them different status in a sort of hierarchy perhaps and we're distinguishing the kind of speech that we can make about them the kind of reasoning that we can do about them and the kind of thing that they are there are differences in the way we apprehend different ontological classes of beings so ontology is just going to be speech about beings it sounds simple early on it won't be too bad i'll come back to this topic of ontology later because it's pregnant with many important philosophic questions in addition to ontology we're going to talk about logic a little bit logic is a kind of formidable term it's a little bit intimidating when you first encounter it it's nothing as quite as complicated as you might think logic is a system of rules for deriving true inferences in other words logic is a series of rules which says that if you start out with true premises if you follow the rules of logic you will always draw true inferences so it's nothing very complicated nothing is intimidating as you might have suspected logic is just a set of rules for organize our think organizing our thinking so that we always get the right answer if we start out with true assumptions it's not as bad as you might have thought well in addition to questions of logic and ontology we also have questions of epistemology now epistemology another large kind of intimidating word but it isn't it's simpler than you might suspect comes from two greek words episteme and logos meaning speech or reasoning about knowledge itself when we inquire into epistemology what we're doing is thinking about thinking thinking about knowledge trying to account first of all for what sort of things we can know about and second of all we're trying to account for what kind of knowledge we can have of different kinds of things so for example our knowledge of arithmetic may be different from our knowledge of the boiling point of water our knowledge of the boiling point of water may be different from our knowledge of right and wrong our knowledge of right and wrong may be different from our knowledge of political theory or the way that governments ought to be organized in every case different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of thinking involve epistemological distinctions and epistemological thinking it involves thinking about thinking when philosophers do this they are trying to clarify their own thoughts and clarify the thoughts of other people to eliminate confusions that have crept into people's thinking by providing a specific and detailed analysis of how thinking works what thinking can do and then giving examples of the appropriate sort of thinking so all through this long series of lectures that we're going to be doing on the history of western philosophy questions of epistemology will be central to our concerns and when you hear the word epistemology it's nothing to get excited about the philosophy in question is just doing a little thinking about thinking he's just doing a little talk about what it means to be reasonable about what it means to think clearly in addition to talking about epistemology every philosophy every philosophy that talks about knowledge also has to talk about a theory of the knower because whenever there's knowledge there's also some person doing the knowing and a theory of knowledge and a theory of the knower always lead to a sort of philosophical psychology either explicitly or implicitly all of the philosophers in the western tradition have a particular conception of the human mind and the human consciousness which is characteristic of and cognate to their entire philosophical project different sorts of philosophical psychologies different conceptions of the mind will be characteristic of different philosophers and will come to light when we have different kinds of questions to consider plato had one particular philosophy of mind and he organized his philosophy of mind or of the soul with particular reference to the problems of justifying mathematical knowledge the philosophers of the 17th and 18th century who were at the heyday of the rise of modern science put together different and alternative conceptions of philosophical psychology based upon different concerns with regard to epistemology their concerns in the 17th and 18th century were primarily with justifying the rise of modern natural science and their philosophy of mind correspondingly differs in the sort of emphasis that they place upon different topics beyond the philosophy of mind we're also going to have three related disciplines and the first will be aesthetics what we mean by aesthetics is a theory of the beautiful a series of reasoning a reasoned conclusions or reasoned thoughts about what it is that human beings find beautiful whether this beauty that they apprehend is in the object that they're looking at or observing or whether it's in the psyche whether it's in the mind itself and what the role of beauty is in the rest of our judgments for example in our judgments of right and wrong our judgments of political order and change and our judgments of the way that we ought to live our own particular lives aesthetics will be a way of formalizing and making rigorous our everyday perhaps odds and ends not terribly well organized things feelings about beauty aesthetic brings aesthetics brings together our series of common everyday thoughts about what's beautiful and attractive and formulates them into a philosophical whole that connects them to other philosophical questions like ethics ontology epistemology two other topics or philosophic questions will be discussed repeatedly in the course of this lectures of these lectures on the history of philosophy the first is ethics and the second is politics or more precisely political theory ethics is the theory or the philosophic branch of inquiry which talks about right and wrong which talks about our moral obligations which inquires into our certainty of what we ought and ought not to do ethics asks what is it to be a human being and to engage in actions that are appropriate to a human being how can we improve the way we behave and how can we make adequate or satisfactory judgments of the behavior of other people ethics investigates the part of human beings that are not animals that are not specifically completely part of nature it indic it investigates the element in human beings which make choices which are free which in the ancient intellectual tradition have souls ethics inquires into the sort of activities we undertake the sort of judgments of value that we make and the sort of people we are or could become now connected with these concerns is the philosophy of politics or political theory the reason why politics is connected to ethics is because at least in the ancient tradition of politics and ethics one is directly connected to the other because the city or the human collectivity is seen as being like an individual human soul only raised in size increased in proportions so if it is true that the human individual is like human society in some respects or for some purposes then at its basis political theory the theory of political science the theory of how we ought to organize societies of how governments ought to be organized of how justice ought to be dispensed will all be connected with our theories of ethics and will our conceptions of proper human behavior in other words both ethics and politics investigate the theory of what is good or what is righteous ethics investigates what is good or righteous at the level of the individual politics investigates what is good or righteous or praiseworthy or justifiable at the level of society so at the level of the individual ethics tells us what we ought to do at the level of society political theory or political science or political philosophy will investigate the way society is organized the way they ought to behave the kind of laws they ought to create and the kind of political order the kind of connections between human beings that ought to establish and justify so the concerns of the history of philosophy are remarkably small given the vast variety of thinkers in the history of philosophy the enormous diversity and richness of the traditions they represent and the vast amounts of time that we're talking about when we consider the history of philosophy we must always consider the fact that we are dropping back 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 centuries so on our part it will require an imaginative leap we are going to have to think our way back to the position of early philosophers of early thinkers of early cultures that don't have the advantage of the historical experience that we do that don't have the advantage of the sophisticated technological advances that we do that don't have any of the presuppositions that we bring to questions of right and wrong the questions of justice and injustice to questions of truth and falsehood the ancient world that philosophy originated from was a world full of myths a world full of imaginative stories which took the place of rational explanations of things so when we treat the history of philosophy we have to come to it with an open mind and a willingness to think ourself back out of the level of sophistication that we happen to be in today back to the level of the problems and the level of the perplexity of the ancients if you're willing to make that sort of intellectual leap and perform that kind of intellectual kind of sympathy or empathy with earlier thinkers your chances of absorbing and appreciating these philosophical debates increases dramatically now i spoke earlier about ontology about the question of what is and that topic is going to be very important in our analysis and are breaking down our consideration of the entire history of western philosophy there are basically only two answers to the questions of to the question what is it's such a simple question that you can see how it wouldn't provide a great many alternatives at the most fundamental level there are two basic answers to the question of what is in the western tradition the first answer to the question is that what is is nature that is simply tables and chairs and objects of sense perception that there are no gods or spirits or demons or anything mystical anything non-physical anything non-sensible in other words there's a whole school of philosophy dates all the way back to the ancient greek pre-socratic physicists which treats the world as simply made up of atoms and the void or matter and space there is no room for a second world there's no room for god or angels or spirits or anything that's independent of human sense perceptions so for those philosophers who believe that the world is basically natural who approach nature from as being ontologically fundamental these people will be the origins of materialistic interpretations of the world those people who take nature to be fundamental and exclusively the only thing that exists are going to end up being the kind of ancestors of the philosophical materialists now there's a second group of philosophers and a second answer to the question of what is in the western intellectual tradition an alternative to insisting that only nature exists is the possibility of saying that nature plus something else exists some second world some world outside of our immediate sense perceptions some world that's external to space and time and in the western intellectual tradition this world is usually called heaven or hell or some transcendent realm where divine things are kept outside this profane world of space and time that we encounter on an everyday level for all believing christians and jews the answer to what exists has to be the world around us which is nature but also god and the saints or the the souls of those who have gone on before us and also things like angels in other words for those who are religious believers for example there is a second world independent of the world of space and time that has an ontologically distinct set of things within it things like god the angels moral virtue perhaps for some philosophers there will be abstractions there will be things independent of our senses it's like that line in hamlet where hamlet says there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy horatio well it may well be that those naturalistic philosophers are mistaken and perhaps there is a second world where things that are not objects of sense perception which do not exist within the realm of space and time are kept and connect somehow to our world in addition to the tradition of religious belief in western thought there's also a greek tradition of metaphysics a greek otherworldly tradition which says that the world is broken into two pieces there's a world of nature a world of immediate sense perception the world of space and time and a second world the world of the forms in many respects this respect the second world is like the christian or or jewish heaven it's an extra world where something divine something of superlative importance rains down its significance and its will on this world of space and time that human beings happen to live in in the case of plato the metaphysic the and the greek metaphysical tradition this second world is called the realm of the forms and the realm of the forms is a place of pure ideas of pure thought that's somehow more real more permanent more everlasting than this world of becoming this world of change this world of flux that we inhabit so there are basically two answers in the western intellectual tradition to the question of what exists answer number one to the question is nature nature exists the world of space and time the pre-socratic physicists were the first and most important examples of the of people who held the view that the only real thing is the world of space and time the world of nature in addition modern science particularly the modern science that develops in the renaissance and then in the enlightenment is very much beholden to this tradition of secular knowledge that comes to the west from the pre-socratic physicists so this naturalistic approach to knowledge and this naturalistic approach to what is leads to some of the most fruitful and important elements in the western intellectual tradition and it's about half of the significant thinkers i would say in the entire tradition have made that ontological assumption the other half of the centrally important thinkers in the western tradition adopted the two worlds position adopted what we would call a metaphysical set of assumptions about ontology for people that hold this view there is a world of space and time there's a world of sense perceptions but there's also some other world it's this and this view is something that both platonists and christians can agree upon there's some world external to our sense perceptions external to the world of change and flux around us which is permanent which is of supreme importance and which it is the obligation of every human being to somehow connect themselves to insofar as they're capable this second world for those philosophers who believe in such a thing this second world is of enormous significance it contains all our potential for virtue it contains some eternal moral standards by which to judge the good and evil of human actions and it's somehow justifies and punishes good and evil actions down here this will be true for plato this would be true for the god of christianity and judaism this will be true for all constructs which allow for the existence of that second world of that metaphysical realm these two ontological positions the one world view and the two world view the view that everything is physics and everything is space and time and the view that things are space and time plus something else that the world is nature plus something else this is the ontological bedrock of the western intellectual tradition all of the remaining intellectuals that you're going to hear about throughout this this entire series of lectures will have something to say about this ontological question and once they commit themselves one way to one way or another to this ontological position of one world or the alternative ontological position of two worlds all sorts of implications are carried on and entailed in that a certain view of ethics will come from each position a certain view of politics will come out of each position a certain view of aesthetics of the philosophy of mind of epistemology all sorts of profound intellectual decisions will be made on the basis of what school of philosophy we find ourselves connected to so you have to be careful throughout the history of philosophy to get a sense early on of what sort of philosophy you're dealing with once you know whether he's a one-world philosopher or a two-world philosopher much of what he follows in his philosophy will make a great deal more sense because all of philosophy forms one coherent whole at least among the best thinkers now in addition to the questions of ontology there's the question of historical development in the western tradition and if we look at the western tradition as a kind of vast panorama of ideas and thinkers and formulations of old and sometimes new contributions to thought two places and two traditions stand out as being central and fundamental to the western intellectual endeavor and i'd say this is the tradition that comes out of athens and the tradition that comes out of jerusalem the tradition that comes from liberated rationality and human freedom and the tradition that comes from reverence and piety and faith in god these are the sort of the two parts of a braid that intellectual that the intellectual life of the west forms when you step back and look at it over the centuries you if any of you know what the caduceus is the caduceus is the the symbol of pharmacy of the apoca theory of the doctor's art and what it is is a stake with two snakes twined around it forming a sort of a braid well the traditions of athens and jerusalem form that kind of a braid in western culture the mythos of western culture the fundamental myths the fundamental orientation towards right and wrong the fundamental conception of metaphysics that is characteristic of the western tradition comes out of jerusalem it comes out of the stories of the old and the new testament the rational element in the western tradition the tradition of humanism of free unfettered rationality the human-centered element in western intellectual culture comes out of greece and to be specific it comes out of one city it comes out of athens athens is the home of socrates and socrates can be thought of as the sort of patron saint of free and rational inquiry athens is the contributor in the western culture of the idea that nothing human is foreign to us that what is potentially true for one human being is accessible to all that there is one common logos one common rationality which unites all of human beings and which will allow them to dispel the darkness of myth and irrationality which the greeks think hangs over us like a fog the greek tradition is the tradition of free discourse the greek tradition is the tradition of rationality without any reference to mythology without any necessary reference to mythological thinking and the greek tradition is organized around the idea of human beings as opposed to gods there is of course a greek pantheon and there is no shortage of greek myths no one that's aware of greek tragedy would ever hold that sort of a view but what is remarkable and unique about greek about greek culture as opposed to the other cultures that were contemporaneous with it is that in greek culture there is a drive towards secular knowledge and this is a thorough turnaround from the earlier tradition of thought which has been entirely organized around myths secular knowledge is a new and important idea that comes to us from the secular greek thinkers particularly in this case the greek pre-socratic physicists and the greek sophists now two terms are very important when we look at the history of western philosophy both as it comes out of athens and as it comes out of jerusalem the first word is logos and the second word is mythos logos in greek means speech word reason talk it means rational discourse essentially now in greek philosophy rational discourse has a preeminent place the socratic dialogues are works of art which raise philosophical rational discourse to the realm of archetypes of thinking archetypes of approaching knowledge in a particularly rational humane man-centered way the greek view of logos is free unfettered rationality now there's an alternative conception of logos which is no less valid and this is the conception of logos that we find in particularly the new testament the new testament is written in greek and that is a fact of enormous consequences for the history of western thought the old testament is written in hebrew the quran is written in arabic alone of the sacred books in the tradition that comes out of jerusalem the new testament written in greek has the most definite affinities to greek culture and the constant attempt to unify athens in jerusalem to create a rapprochement between greek culture and the culture of biblical faith in large part stems from the fact that christian intellectuals by virtue of being able to read scripture in the original also have access to the greek intellectual tradition which is something that comes packaged with the greek language that we don't see in the tradition of rabbinic judaism and we don't see in the tradition of exegesis that comes out of the quran it has to do with the language that these scriptures are written in now in the tradition of biblical faith logos does not mean free untrammeled reason it has that connotation because it's taken from the greek but in fact logos means word the gospel of john the first passage the first verse in the first chapter says in the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh the word for word here is logos and what we mean by in the beginning was the word is that the beginning the primary or stuff of the world the fundamental reality is the word of god nothing comes prior to that nothing is more fundamental nothing is more basic the authoritative fundamental divine word of god is the logos in the sense in which logos is used in the greek tradition the fact that both those who are devotees of athens and those who are devotees of jerusalem have both been using the same word for one of their favorite things has been the source of an endless amount of confusion and difficulties in the history of western philosophy so just to take some of these confusions out early on there are two ways of thinking about the logos and perhaps they're not entirely separate perhaps there is a divine element a universal element to free unfettered human discourse and perhaps there is some element of the mythical or of the divine or of the more than human in either god's revelation or even in the thought that god might reveal his will to us in either case devotees of athens and jerusalem have been gerrymandering and playing with the greek language with a poor dead language for many generations now and it's just as well as you get used to it early on if you do it will perhaps remove some of the perplexities that may emerge in the course of our discussions we have quite a ways to go in our history of western philosophy now there's a second a second important word in our consideration of athens and jerusalem and that word is mythos and mythos just means story or at least if i want to be a little over simple about it it just means story it's the word from which we derive our term myth and it's a story but it's more than a story it's somehow an archetypical story it's a story about we assume fictional people doing fictional things yet it's a lie that tells the truth because this story has a universal applicability independent of the person that is alleged to have done these things we will find examples of such universally applicable myths if we look at something like oh the myth of oedipus right in greek tragedy or the oristia in greek tragedy or for that matter the iliad the odyssey and homer these myths are not just rousing adventure stories they mean to tell us some moral truth about the human condition or some truth about the human condition regarding the fact that there is no morality but either way you are being told something fundamental about the human condition in these myths which is not to be despised and not to be disdained simply because it doesn't appear in the form of mathematical equations it still has something to say but it says it in an indirect and perhaps ambiguous way now both the athenian tradition and the tradition that comes out of jerusalem have their characteristic myths they have an archetypical myth which describes what it means to be the perfect athenian what it means to be the perfect man of jerusalem another way of stating it is that it has a set of myths which describe heroes heroes with perhaps different conceptions of heroism but heroes who exemplify some virtue which is taken to be fundamental and enormously significant in each of these two intellectual traditions let's think about these or these two exemplary myths and see if we can't fish out some qualities of the tradition of athens in the tradition of jerusalem while we think about these let's start with the tradition of jerusalem now there are lots of of possible choices because the books of the bible are so rich and profound that you would be hard-pressed to cover any of the important books of the bible and not find some figure there whose moral status is such that this myth has something to say to us today but in going through the bible i'm going to go straight to one of the my real favorites and he has a book all to himself this is the story of job and job is god's faithful servant job in some respects represents the high point of religious faith job is the perfect example of the true religious believer the man who understands his relationship to god who understands his relationship to things of this world and who shows only the deepest and most profound virtue in the biblical sense in his relationship to god for those who haven't read the bible either lately or ever let me briefly tell you what the story of job is job is god's faithful servant he's a real good guy he constantly does all the things that god requires of him god has given him a good bit of favor given him a wife children giving him wealth giving him land giving him flocks made him a happy man a man of this world a man of many pleasures and many diversions constantly job performs the appropriate sacrifices job praises god job shows the appropriate humility and obedience in the face of god's awesome majesty job is thankful and job praises god and god is well pleased with job now at some point it's not exactly said when and that's in some place it's not exactly said where the devil starts talking to god and the devil says to god the only reason job really likes you and the only reason he sacrifices to you and praises you is because you've done all these good things for him if you hadn't sent him a lovely wife and a lovely family and flocks and wealth and land and all the things that a man can have in this world he would never be faithful to you this faith is really a sham it's really a way of his get him getting more favors from you now it becomes kind of strange here apparently god and satan make a bet now it never gets explained why anyone would want to make a bet with god since he knows everything already nor does it is it clear why anyone would make a bet with satan or how satan got into it but bracket that for a while i think they're trying to tell you a different story here the key issue in job is this that god gratuitously sends down to job a terrible series of catastrophes his family gets stricken with diseases and with invasion and they're killed and his possessions are scattered and his house is burnt down and he loses all the lovely things he has and he's afflicted with boils and pains and diseases and all the evils of the human flesh and all through this job is completely faithful and constantly praises god saying i know my status god whatever you send is right god is god man is man i will never transgress the boundary and blame god because that's the ultimate blasphemy that man should judge god the point here being that whatever god sends a human being doubtless if there is a god a providence running the world there's a reason for it and we ought not to dispute with the deity telling him how to run the universe because we are as earthworms to god we do not have the same level of consciousness and for us to inform god that we don't think he's running the world properly is the height of impertinence and would be the last and most vicious of actions within the framework of religious faith job is the man who holds back who constantly has faith in god and constantly praises god despite the ills that beset him which he knows somehow come from god but which he does not blame god for job's friends tell him you ought to blaspheme job we don't have the same faith that you do job's wife tells him look job curse god and die that's all that's left for you job says to his wife he says to his friends you don't understand the nature of real religious faith i'm job that's god i'm going to be god's faithful servant so what he ultimately decides to do is to just sit there and take it and constantly praise god well at the end of the story oddly enough this has a happy ending god is very well pleased with job why because job as a human being has shown the greatest of human virtues which is religious faith under the burden of all disenchantment under the burden of all anxiety under the burden of all misery the point of job's patience the point of job's faith is to teach us that the perfect virtue of the person who adheres to biblical religion is faith in god under all circumstances job is god's faithful servant and that's the mythos that's the central virtue and the central good person in biblical religion or one of the central good people now let's take an alternative to that the man who shakes his fist at god the man who wants to be like god the man full of greek hubris let's take the perfect greek man and there are again a lot of choices here we could choose achilles from homer great heroic figure we could choose odysseus because he was smart as well as being tough that's another alternative but my choice for the perfect greek man is prometheus the man who's not quite at the level of the gods but would like to be and although he knows that he's somehow subordinate to the gods he's still the man who wants to move himself up instead of having the humility and the faith that was characteristic of job prometheus is the man who shakes his fist at the gods the man who disobeys the gods knowing he's going to be punished and doesn't care he's the man who wants to be something more than human prometheus is a titan who felt sorry for the human beings when they were being created because they weren't given the advantages of the animals they didn't have claws and teeth they didn't have this swiftness of deer they didn't have the coloration of chameleons they didn't have anything going for them prometheus liked human beings and despite the fact that zeus says that you can't bring the fire of the gods you can't bring this divine spark down to human beings prometheus deceives zeus prometheus goes against what the greatest of the greek gods tells him to do prometheus says i'm going to do what i will it's pure satanic will those of you who have read paradise lost and who know understand what what it means to say that i would rather serve i would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven understand what the promethean element is prometheus is an important greek myth because it says what the greeks really are if you think of the greek pantheon as not being an enormous and omnipotent creator god but in fact being personifications of the forces of nature when prometheus shakes his fist at the gods and says to the greatest of the gods i will master you i will defy you i will see the day that you die what the greeks are saying is that the day will come when the drive to make human beings divine when the day that the day will come when the drive to make human beings more than they are will succeed we will conquer not just the pantheon of the mythological gods we will conquer the forces of nature we will conquer blind chants and we will somehow be more than men this is the heroic temptation in greek tragedy this is called hubris this is that pride this is that overweening desire to be something more than you ought to be to break out of the bonds of nature and to become something more this megalomaniacal pride this desire to be something more than merely human is the essence is the core of the greek approach to the world it defies god it defies nature all in the name of increasing and enlarging and improving the world of human will and the world of human action the world of job is an entirely god-centered world men are but insects within such a world they don't count for very much within the greek approach to things the gods are fictions or if they're not fictions they're at least the kind of nature forces that we can somehow get around that we can somehow supplant and make ourselves superior to them if we but have sufficient daring and sufficient will all of greek heroism all of greek epic all of greek tragedy is derived from this essentially satanic pride and here i don't mean satanic in the sense of being evil or devilish i mean satanic like milton satan a man who or a creature who would be more than human but somehow can't quite be at the level of real godhood these are titans these are men who want to be something more than human the whole greek project of creating secular knowledge of mastering nature of reaching the fun the fundamental axioms of mathematics of enlarging the realm of free untrammeled rationality all of these ideas are caught up in the image of prometheus so when we braid together the tradition of athens in jerusalem we are really asking ourselves do we want the virtues of athens or do we want the virtues of jerusalem do we want to be like job or do we want to be like prometheus and there's a problem here this is something worth your consideration as you let the remainder of the lectures wash over you as you think through what you're being told that the human psyche or the human soul is made up of a heterogeneous set of components we have a rational element to us that allows us to do our taxes and allows us to do geometry we have an emotional element in us which allows us to appreciate poetry and allows us to fall in love we have the desire for religious illumination testimony to that is the fact that we have constructed the religious systems the religious art and architecture that we have we have many heterogeneous desires and many heterogeneous elements built into our psyche or our soul or our mind and insofar as we exclusively focus on just job or just prometheus insofar as we wish to be just athenian or just derived from jerusalem we have locked ourselves into an either or alternative that i suspect is not entirely satisfactory different sorts of philosopher different sorts of philosophical discourse different sorts of thinking offer us different sorts of pleasure and different sorts of improvement in other words do not make the mistake of thinking that all edifying philosophies start from the same assumptions and come to the same conclusions i think that is a fundamental error in fact there are alternative sets of assumptions and alternative sets of conclusions which may well be in contradictory between themselves and yet listening to them thinking about them and letting them do something to you by actually engaging with them you may be edified in different kinds of ways it may improve different elements in your soul in other words different kinds of thinking are good for you the great philosopher wittgenstein once said that philosophical illnesses usually stem from a dietary deficiency when a they stem from a situation in which in which our intellectual diet is deficient in examples if we constantly think about religious and religion and religious texts and religious issues we may well have a dietary deficiency that is lacking in scientific or mathematical examples similarly if we were to be extremely positivistic organize our thinking only around physics and mathematics and formal logic it may well be the questions of good and evil questions of human history human destiny what's good for both individuals and societies it may well be that questions like that will escape us if we were exclusively scientific in our orientation so what i would plead for here is first of all an open mind a willingness not just to be edified when you hear a philosopher telling you what you already believe what i'm asking you is to have the courage not just to hold the convictions that you do but the courage to attack your convictions to call your convictions into question to ask yourself suppose i'm completely wrong suppose the other set of assumptions or the other set of conclusions is the real one how would i know am i really certain about what i think i know if you do that seriously if you sincerely apply yourself to the tradition of athens and to the tradition of jerusalem i think you will maximize what a course of lectures in the history of western philosophy can potentially offer you if you don't at least make the attempt to extend the set of your assumptions and to extend the reach of your conclusions to include not just what you believe now but the alternative set of beliefs or the set of beliefs that you've had some doubts about in the past at least think through the possibility of what it would be like to believe that ask yourself what the pluses and minuses are and if you want a kind of formula for intellectual honesty when you confront these and other questions that we'll have to deal with in the next 63 lectures you might want to constantly ask yourself the following question do i believe this issue that's called the issue xyz and then secondarily what would count as evidence either for this proposition or against it if you are willing to look for evidence in favor of what you believe and also evidence in favor of what you do not believe or in favor what you reject the intellectual honesty that you will bring to these issues will benefit you both in your understanding and in your capacity to absorb these works because understanding is just the first stage after you understand you have to absorb and after absorbing the message of both athens and jerusalem then the question is action and that's outside the realm of these lectures what we're going to move to next in the next set of lectures we do will be the pre-socratic philosophers what is important about the pre-socratic philosophers is that they are the earliest example of the greek drive to create secular knowledge we are indebted to these greek physicists for the foundations of the sort of science that was developed in the renaissance and later and for the secular skeptical rational element in greek culture which continues on in the western tradition right through to today thank you

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 40,869

Rating: 4.9632249 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Introduction, Problems, Scope

Id: 8ZoQ7wh9pSQ

Length: 44min 46sec (2686 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020