A brief overview of the development of Western Philosophy

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Yiuel Raumbesrairc
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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Makerowner wrote:You can't even really say that he's a poor narrator: all he does is copy what other people said about the philosopher in question, and most of the time he doesn't even say who he's quoting (a common practice in the Classical era). How reliable is he? Since nothing else survives on many of the philosophers he discusses, there's no way to tell for sure, but there are lots of reasons to be suspicious. For example, just about every philosopher dies a bizarre, dramatic death: Empedocles by jumping into a volcano, Diogenes by holding his breath till he suffocates (is this even possible?), Heraclitus being eaten by dogs after covering himself with cow-dung, etc. The accuracy depends on who he's talking about as well: for Epicurus, he quotes three long letters, one of which contains a summary of his entire treatise On Nature; for others, especially for earlier ones, he often just quotes legends about them. But he is the source of all of our best stories about philosophers: Thales falling into the well, Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his light, Heraclitus saying that Homer deserved to be beaten.
Thank you for all this. I laughed hard at his dramatics you quote, as if there was some trope of "Great People Shall Die of Great Deaths" and couldn't simply die naturally.

Is there a point where his legends about ancient philosophers get more substantiated with longer, more "reliable" quotes?

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It's also a bit depressing.

Well, I fell into philosophy with the Apology, and I loved the text. Yet, I also studied it a little bit (all students in French Cégep have philosophy classes, and my class got a special focus on said Apology), and the most annoying bits is that we don't know if the text is fully reliable. To me, Socrates, at least in how he is pictured in that dialogue, but even more in the smaller Crito, is a far better model than those I had been proposed in life. How much can we trust Plato, and later accounts, on Socrates?
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Post by Aurora Rossa »

Damn, what happened? I was hoping to learn all about how Platonic idealism led to the rise of Romantic antidisestablishmentarianism or what have you.
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Post by Salmoneus »

I got bored. But yeah, you're right, should get back onto it. Got most of the next post done, so it'll be up later.
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Post by Delthayre »

Salmoneus wrote:*feels sad and ignorant now*
Welcome to every moment of every day of my adult life.

I'm still quite eager for your summary of Epicureanism.
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Post by BettyCross »

This has been a fascinating thread. Keep it up.

To state my own bias: I don't care for Plato at all. I much prefer Aristotle, as long as you're talking about Classical philosophers. At heart I'm an empiricist. I don't trust any idea that can't be verified by human experience of the world. I would be more at home philosophically in 18th century Scotland.

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Post by Salmoneus »

Both Cynics and Cyrenaics expressed an important need in society – for a philosophical answer to the questions of ethics that religion was increasingly abandoning. Yet both schools suffered the same flaw: they were too extreme to gain many followers. The Cyrenaic pursuit of momentary pleasure was too exhausting and destructive to appeal; the Cynical independence appealed to many, but the hardship and unpopularity that it entailed kept followers away. What was needed was clearly something that could bring this philosophy to the people. To fill the void, two schools emerged. The Stoics descended directly from the Cynics – their founder, Zeno of Citium, was a pupil of Crates, husband of Hipparchia, and so they could claim unblemished apostolic descent from Socrates (whose wisdom and martyrdom had by now made him a powerful figure in the popular imagination). Their rivals, the Epicureans, did not directly descend from the Cyrenaics, although their influence is clear – nonetheless, Epicurus could claim apostolic descent from Plato’s Academy, although the students of Democritus were clearly more important to him.

Both schools shared a key development – they saw eudaimonia not as attaining something difficult, but avoiding something. The implication is that eudaimonia is natural for all men, and can be restored to them all. Furthermore, both schools use the same term for this new goal – ataraxia, typically translated ‘tranquillity’, or more directly ‘freedom from disturbance’. This was not novel to these new schools – the term aochlesia, with almost exactly the same meaning, had already been used by the Megarians, and promoted to primacy in ethics by Speusippus (the successor to Plato), who used it to mean the absence of the twin evils of pleasure and pain. The Stoics and Epicureans had their own interpretations.

The Stoics evolved from the Cynics; their founder, Zeno, is sometimes counted a Cynic, and much of the school’s doctrine was created by his student, Chrysippus. Arguably the greatest Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, did not live until many centuries later; the most famous is the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Their prime principle is to live in accordance with nature.

The Stoics believed that virtue was sufficient for eudaimonia, that virtue was the sole good, and that virtue meant living according to reason. Everything else was evil (if it was contrary to virtue) or indifferent. Because only virtue was good, and virtue meant reason, and reason is unitary, everything virtuous was equally virtuous – either it was or it wasn’t. Likewise, all evil things were equally evil. This could be extended to people, as there was only one virtue, which could not be possessed in degrees: the world was divided into the absolutely good (Socrates, Diogenes, perhaps a handful of other ‘sages’ in history) and the absolutely evil (everybody else). Here they use the analogy of drowning: a man drowning five feet from the surface is drowning in exactly the same way as a man on the sea floor. You are either drowning or you aren’t.

The key development of Stoicism is that reason was no longer seen as merely dictated BY nature – it now dictated TO nature. Stoics believed that the universe was governed absolutely by Reason (‘the Logos’). Accordingly, living according to reason is living according to nature. Yet, if nature is, as the stoics believed, deterministic and unchangeable, and includes everything that happens, how is it possible to NOT live according to nature? The key is that there is a shift in emphasis from action to attitude. What matters is not whether the actions are rational, but whether the attitude is rational. The rational attitude is to select those actions that are rational – and that means choosing whatever happens. This is not simply an acceptance of events, but a positive willing prior to events.

In practice, this proceeds by the principle of ‘appropriateness’. Some actions are appropriate to our natures; as we grow older and wiser, we gain a better grasp of what these things are. Eventually, we realise that it is virtue, and virtue only, that is our sole good – this must be the case, because the ultimate good must always be good, and only virtue is always good for us. But although only virtue is necessarily appropriate to us, some things – health, wealth, friendship – are in general likely to be appropriate to us. Thus, we should in general select these things, not because they are good, but because they are likely to be what Reason (ie fate) chooses for us. If fate chooses that we are instead sickly and poor, we should not be disappointed – because all we wanted was whatever was chosen for us. If we are upset by, for instance, the death of our child, it is because we inappropriately desired it to live NOT because, as is proper, we assumed that that would be what Reason intended for it, but instead because we actually were so foolish as to think that its survival was itself a good thing. And if we happen to know that our child is about to die, we should positively desire that it happen – even if we ourselves are sure to die, we should want to die. We are only one part of the universe, and should accept our place in it – just as, Chrysippus says, his foot, if it had a will, would desire to get muddy, because that is its function in his body. The whole universe is one body, with a single will. The Stoics here express an idea propounded by Socrates himself: “no harm may come to a good man”.

So, our practice should be to select in our minds what we prefer. If it is clear that only one course is virtuous, we must choose it, and that choice outweighs all others. If it is clear what is going to happen, we must select that, as that is what is rational to happen. If, however, as is usually the case, virtue does not seem to be at issue, and we have no knowledge of the future, we must simply guess at what is likely to prove to be rational – and this guesswork proceeds by the principle of what is most appropriate to us, which can be associated with various instinctive and learned desires (food, water, warmth, company, friendship, health, wealth, freedom, and so forth). If the guess is wrong, we should not be disheartened, if we made it in good faith to the best of our knowledge. The concept of ‘appropriateness’ may be linked to Aristotle’s discussions of telos – the Stoic ‘appropriate to our nature’ means ‘appropriate to our form’, or ‘appropriate to our characteristic functions’.

The chief obstacles to virtue are four terrible evils: pleasure, distress, appetite, and fear, which the Stoics considered the four passions. Two, appetite and fear, arose in considering things to come; the other two, pleasure and distress, were a reaction to things that had occurred. It is commonly thought that the Stoics believed in suppressing all emotions, but this is untrue – only the passions had to be suppressed. A variety of other positive emotions were acceptable, including positive versions of three of the passions: joy, watchfulness and wishing. These are distinguished from passions in that they are entirely the servant of reason; the passions, on the other hand, may have a rational cause, but swiftly run out of control, like a man running downhill who cannot stop himself. The virtuous man, therefore, is in a state of ataraxia, or tranquillity, unperturbed by such disturbing emotions.

Unlike the Cynics, the Stoics also made positive statements about the nature of the world – indeed, these may be central to their ethics. Fundamentally, they divided the world into two parts – matter (the insensate, immotile universe) and Reason, which motivated and directed it (although at a higher level they recognised that these two were in fact the same). Reason was omnipotent, invariate and immanent – essentially a monotheist God. Earlier we said that Plato took Heraclitus as his model for the apparent world, and Parmenides as his model for the world of Forms; the Stoics repeated this synthesis, only now they placed the Parmenidean perfection not above the world but active within it. They were even more explicitly Heraclitean than Plato, however, in their descriptions of the natural world – not only was the world composed of Fire, but the whole world would be engulfed in flame in a final destructive event. This event, however, was only one of an endless sequence – in other words, they said that not only did all objects exist in flux, but the universe as a whole did likewise.

The Stoics were strict materialists – they believed that only material bodies existed, which is to say were capable of action, and of being acted upon. All other things that might be talked about merely ‘subsisted’. They also believed in a ‘plenary’ universe – that is, they denied the existence of vacuum. Consequently, they felt a need to define some reason why objects were distinct from one another –why did the endless friction of movement not tear the universe into an indistinguishable fluid? Their answer was ‘pneuma’, ‘breath’, a fine substance composed of fire and air, that pervaded coarser matter, and provided, by a continuous balance between expansion and contraction, certain tensile structures. There were, however, multiple possible tensile structures, which the Stoics identified with different species of object – replicating the hierarchy of beings composed by Aristotle, and explaining why different things had different fundamental natures.





The chief rivals to the Stoics were the Epicureans, followers of Epicurus. They too were strict materialists – stricter than the Stoics, as they discounted the significance of many subsisting things. To the Epicureans, the soul was material (composed of soul atoms), and could respond to nothing that was not physical – there was nothing mental, not even imagination. Perception was the result of thin films of atoms, laminas, being cast off material objects and hitting the eyes, where the soul detected them; imagination, the result of even finer radiation that was able to penetrate through to the chest, where the mind (a part of the soul) was located, and be perceived there. All imaginative thoughts are only the soul's representation of the laminas all around us in the air – what appears to be creative, voluntary thought is merely the soul attending to the floating laminas in a different order. Errors in perception occur when laminas become distorted or bedraggled in the air. The mind was concerned solely, not with perception, but with reason – which in practice means the endeavour to maximise pleasure and minimise pain – that was the ultimate striving of all things, and accordingly the goal of life (whether or not we admit it).

Unlike the Cyrenaics, Epicurus divided pleasures into two species: kinetic and katastematic. Kinetic pleasures are those that are pleasurable in the instant: pleasures, he believed, that were only the removal of a pain. In this way, pleasure from food or drink was only the relieving of pains of hunger or thirst. Epicurus did not say that these pleasures were bad, but he believed it was unwise to pursue them - as greater pleasure could only come from greater pain. Therefore, for instance, sexual constancy was to be recommended, as excessive indulgence became habit-forming - and although more sex meant more pleasure, this was only so because the pain of lust was increased proportionally. Moreover, kinetic pleasures often had side-effects - eating, for instance, could lead to indigestion. As pain followed pleasure followed pain, the individual could be lead down a path of increasing volatility and disturbance. Katastematic pleasures, on the other hand, were continually enjoyable, and did not require a contrary pain. Indeed, the highest pleasure was held to be simply an absence of pain, which occurred in two forms: aponia, the absence of physical pain, and ataraxia, the absence of mental pain, or tranquillity. Epicurus' advice therefore has two branches: first, a life of constancy and health to minimise physical pain; secondly, the avoidance of fear and anxiety.

Ataraxia could, in general, be broken by two things: disturbance from the past, and from the future. Disturbance from the past came from the memory of painful times - this was to be avoided. Contrariwise, current pain could be minimised by the recollection of past pleasures and the contemplation of future ones. A greater threat, however, was disturbance from the future: fear and anxiety. Much of Epicureanism is therefore a fight against fear.

Firstly, false cures to fear were to be abandoned. In this, Epicurus placed a great many desires, such as those for fame and wealth, which he believed masked deeper desires for security. He repudiated all such desires - no amount of wealth could buy safety, for instance, and greater wealth resulted in greater temptation to thieves, and hence more fear. Instead, he advocated humility, a partial withdrawal from society, and the cultivation of close friends as the best way to avoid hardship. Moreover, he stressed how few the true needs of a man were, and how low he would have to fall to fail to meet them.

More famously, however, he discarded the old fears of death and the gods. Of death, he said that no harm came to the dead, as nobody existed beyond death, and so could not be subject to pain (the only possible harm). Hence no harm could come from death, either before death (when one was not yet dead), or after death (when one was not dead, because one was not anything). "Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not." Of the gods, he affirmed their existence as material, physical beings - but said that they were located a very long way away and clearly had no interest in human affairs.

Accordingly, he (or his followers) formulated what is known as the Four-Part Cure, or Tetrapharmikon:
"Don't fear the gods;
Don't worry about death;
What is good is simple to get;
What is terrible is easy to endure."











Stoicism and Epicureanism were rivals, but were quite different sorts of movement. Stoicism (which later became the doctrine of the Roman aristocracy and politicians) was always a fertile movement, more a tendency than a formal school. As Seneca said of his philosophical forebears: "I go where they lead, not where they send me". Epicureanism, on the other hand (partly because of its professed simplicity), was known for its conservativism and its reverence for the words of its founder. Accordingly, Epicurus is the only Epicurean philosopher of note - although his physical theories are poetically expressed by the Roman poet Lucretius. Epicurus became the doctrine of the Roman military.

The Stoics wrote at unprecedented length. Chyrsippus alone wrote over 165 volumes of philosophy - none survive, although we do posses fragments. Nor have we any works by Zeno, their founder, nor by Cleanthes, the third head of the "Old Stoa". For these, and for most of the theoretical basis of the school, we must rely on hostile witnesses, and on Cicero, a sympathiser though not a follower himself. The Roman philosophers Epictetus and Seneca have left surviving works, which tend to the exhortatory, rather than the theoretical.
Epicurus has left a little more, thanks to scrolls unearthed from Herculanaeum, including fragments of On Nature, his main work. However, the most accessible (if unsystematic) source for his ethical views are the numerous sayings preserved by his followers: the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings. Lucretius provides a literary account of his physics and psychology.



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Betty: that, of course, is begging the question. If you asked Descartes, or Plato, what was verified by "human experience of the world", they'd give you the conclusions of reason and logic, and say that you couldn't trust the physical senses. And they'd have a point - we DO experience reasoning. For them, the certainty that attaches to some forms of reasoning is paradigmatic of 'verified' knowledge, as opposed to the mere opinions formed by touch and sight. Of course, if you asked Hume, he'd give you physical sensation instead, and tell you not to trust all that reasoning business.
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Post by Makerowner »

Yiuel: I think it's best to read Plato's "Socrates" as a fictional character, and not to worry about how accurate a representation Plato's "Socrates" is of the historical person Socrates. Which isn't to say that there wasn't a historical person Socrates, but that the historical person's effect on subsequent history was essentially to be the inspiration for a legendary figure "Socrates". I don't think Socrates' value as an example is lessened by "bracketing" the question of historical accuracy, any more than Odysseus' by his being fictional. (Whether Socrates should be an example is another question...)

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I want to make one small note about Epicurus' physics. It shows clearly what I said earlier about not taking the Greeks as failed Newtons or Einsteins. Epicurus' physics is based on the principle of multiple explanations: his goal is not to explain how things do happen, but to give several plausible explanations of how they could happen. People fear solar eclipses because they think they're signs from the gods of impending disaster; but they could just as well be caused by something coming between us and the Sun, by the emanations from the Sun being diverted (like refraction in water), etc. Therefore there's no reason to be afraid. Investigating nature is not an end in itself, it's a means towards happiness.

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BettyCross: Aristotle was certainly not an empiricist either. Perception for Aristotle meant the thing's form/essence literally entering into the "mind" (a rather misleading translation of 'nous', which is not at all a psychological entity like our 'mind'), and that included all kinds of things like numbers and virtues that empiricists generally aren't fond of. For Plato, the forms are verified by human experience of the world: geometry (which was cutting-edge science at the time) is the experience of the forms of the equal, the triangle, etc. (And I don't want to jump ahead, but the extent to which British empiricism was based on actual experience is at least questionable.)
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Post by BettyCross »

I didn't mean to imply that Aristotle was an empiricist, only that I like him better than Plato.

Some good points about the nature of empirical thought have been made, worth much pondering. Thanks to all who have contributed.

And please keep it going.

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Post by Salmoneus »

Next post! And wow, this post is longer than I intended it to be, or thought it was. In my defense, it does cover nearly two thousand years.

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Although the Stoics and the Epicureans were the dominant schools throughout the Roman Empire, they were not unopposed. The two most significant opponents were in many ways very similar: the Skeptics and the Academics. The former are a curious movement of unknown origins, although they traced themselves apocryphally to a certain Pyrrho of Elis, for which reason they are also called Pyrrhonists; the latter are the descendants of Plato's Academy. Both criticised the surety of the Epicureans, and particularly of the Stoics.

The Academy had always had a sceptical element - Plato's Theory of Forms, after all, emphasised how little knowledge could be gained from physical experience, and many of his dialogues end with no conclusion. After the rise of Stoicism, Academics increasingly emphasised this skepticism against Stoic certainty. Most famous is Carneades, who seems to have preached an almost Sophist gospel: he infamously roused the ire of the Romans by arguing publicly for the virtue of Roman society on one day, and the next day, in the same place, arguing the exact opposite. He believed that all philosophical positions should be argued against. The Stoics believed that knowledge was necessary for virtue, and defined this as assent to a true perception whose truth was guaranteed by the causal process by which it was created; Carneades and his colleagues argued that this guarantee was impossible, and thus that the wise man would assent to no beliefs at all. This raised the question of how any action was possible; several answers were given, until Philo of Larissa finally revolted against the Stoic concept of knowledge itself, arguing that it was possible to know things even if they might be false. This opened the path for Middle Platonism, which would eventually transform society.

Meanwhile, however, the Skeptics (who in reality likely originated with the Academics) were more directly concerned with knowledge, and its role in ataraxia. They argued that it is confusion over which belief to accept that destroys tranquillity - the sage (of whom they took Pyrrho to be the paragon) was the one who did not believe anything at all, and so was immune to anxiety over the truth of his beliefs. This lack of beliefs was accomplished by demonstrating how all beliefs were false, or at least unjustified. Nonetheless, the Skeptics did not state conclusively that all beliefs were false (which would have undermined their own beliefs), but rather that they should search for true beliefs, but withhold assent from them all until they were known to be true - which they did not belief (though did not claim to know) would ever be possible. In practical terms, rather than specifically arguing against the Stoics, as the Academics did, the Skeptics tried to argue against all beliefs, by creating 'antitheses' - arguments designed to show that each question could be argued either way, and hence to create confusion, and ultimately equanimity. Following Socrates himself, the Skeptics sought to argue ad hominem - that is, they judged their arguments, like a doctor, to cure the illness of dogmatism in each patient individually, rather than attempting to make any objective claims - even objective claims of ignorance. We know about later Skepticism (and indeed much about other philosophy of the time) from Sextus Empiricus.


In the long run, however, neither Stoic empiricism nor Academic/Pyrrhonist scepticism proved the victorious school. Instead, the world came to be dominated by Middle Platonism and its successors.
The originator of Middle Platonism is held to be Antiochus of Ascalon (died 68 BC), the student of Philo of Larissa. His tutor's rejection of the Stoic epistemology that had dominated philosophy freed the Academics to go back to talking about Plato, escaping from the sterility and restrictions of scepticism. For Antiochus, the most important parts of Plato were the Unwritten Teachings, and the Timaeus, which seems closest to them of the published dialogues in content, and yet incompatible with them. Middle Platonism therefore had two principle concerns: reconciling the Timaeus with the Unwritten Teachings (themselves subject to debate, as they were not codified), and reconciling both with popular beliefs, both Stoic and religious. The resultant doctrines differed in many details, but had a common shape:

- The world has two fundamental substances: Material and Ideal

- The physical world is divided into two parts: the 'sub-lunar' world
(where we live), and the 'super-lunar' world (where God lives). The sub-lunar world was Material; the super-lunar world, Ideal. This is clearly an acceptance of the folk cosmology where the gods inhabited a world beyond the planetary bodies - but crucially, although the physical interpretation fell away in the end, the implication of a continuum remained: if God is merely up in the sky somewhere, there is a continuum of places between Him and us, rather than a sharp division
- Some theorists posed a variety of beings and places between God and humanity - many such beings were called 'demons'.

- The Forms, or Ideas, that material matter imitates, are 'thoughts in the mind of God'

- The material world is ever-changing and inconstant. Periodically, it is consumed utterly by fire and remade. The Ideal world, however, remains eternally

- The efficient cause of all events in the material world is the Logos, or Word. This is also called World-Soul (from the Unwritten Teachings) or the Demiurge (from the Timaeus).

- The Demiurge is an intellectual being, a craftsman, and created the material world; he may choose to destroy it at any time. The Demiurge/Logos itself is the third principle of the world, after God, and an opposing, perhaps evil, principle named the Dyad. The Logos and Dyad, however, are both emanations of the One, God.

- The creation of the world may have been a temporal event, or may have been outside, or before, time. Either way, time did not exist before that point, just as it does not exist in the super-lunar world (or 'Heaven' as we call it now). Accordingly, although the Logos comes from the One and the Dyad, they always existed together as a trinity - the temporal idea of 'comes from' is just a way of explaining the priority and fundamentalness of the One. As a later Platonist put it: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".

- Because we are able to grasp the Ideal through reason, there is a part of us, the soul, that is itself Ideal. This Soul thus entered the world from Heaven; it either may, or will, return to Heaven on our death, where it will become divine itself, and re-unite with God.

- Because the Ideal is unchanging and original, and the Material is in in flux, inconstant, and cannot be trusted, as well as being the cause of all suffering, there is something superior and preferable about the Ideal, rather than the Material.

This Middle Platonist schema gradually outflanked both Stoicism and Epicureanism - the former, with its empiricist reticence, could not compete with the certainty of knowledge of Platonism, and was in any case rather too hostile and difficult to be appealing to everybody. The latter, meanwhile, found that its protestations that death was nothing to worry about could not in the end compete with Platonism's reassurance that physical death was not the death of what really mattered, the Soul.

Middle Platonism itself, however, was too vague and disparate a movement to become dominant. Instead, the first few centuries AD are marked by the emergence of multiple strains of Platonist thought, varying by how they interacted with popular religion:

- Some proposed Middle Platonism as a truth that underlay the religions of the day. Plutarch, for instance, syncretised Greek religion with Egyptian, and interpreted both as expressions of Platonism. More importantly, the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, imposed Platonist doctrines onto Hebrew religion. In the following decades, Paul of Tarsus extended Philo's work to interpret a new Jewish cult he had joined, and his followers continued the effort, creating a Platonic-Jewish branch of the cult that eventually outcompeted the non-Platonic branch lead by the surviving original leaders of the cult. The focus of their interpretation was the claim that a certain Yeshua the Nazarene was a bodily incarnation of the Logos. The claim, most notably forcefully made in the Gospel of John, was originally controversial among Christians (as followers of the new religion came to be known) - John was not only the last gospel to be written, but also by far the last to be universally accepted, precisely because it was the most Platonic, and the most thoroughly Pauline. Some of the more completely Platonist doctrines, such as the immortality of the soul, were not fully accepted for centuries - as late as Constantine, there was still disagreement on the matter, and only through the efforts of avowed Platonists like Origen and Augustine did the Platonic vision win out. [Many Platonist doctrines were temporarily discarded in early Protestantism - Luther and Tyndale both decrying, for instance, the 'heathen' concept of 'Heaven' (as a destination of souls, rather than simply the residence of God) that the Platonists had introduced - but by then such ideas were too strongly established in the populace, and it wasn't long until Plato snuck back in again]

- Others 'mysticised' Middle Platonism, through the detailing of many of the features left vague by the official doctrine, and often by translating it into more human terms, and often by co-opting elements of existing religions. Most famous of these groups were the various Gnostic sects, that combined Platonism with Semitic religions, including the new cult of Jesus, and focused on detailing the nature of the intermediary emanations between God and the material world. Others include the Hermetic and Chaldean traditions - the latter of which epitomises the eclecticism of the movement by relabelling the Trinity (One, Dyad and Demiurge) as Father, Power and Intellect, and personifying the 'membrane' that it posited between the divine and the material as the goddess Hecate. This mystic tradition typically stressed the evil of the material world and the importance of escape, through special knowledge or practice, to higher realms. In doing so, these thinkers typically made the Demiurge evil (as in much Gnosticism), or divided the Demiurge (as maker of the material world) from the World-Spirit (from which emanated Nature and Fate, rulers of the material world), as in the Chaldean Oracles.

- A third group emerged that were in essence merely prophets, Messiahs and miracle-workers who co-opted Platonic terminology and theology. Examples are Apollonius of Tyana and Simon Magus.

These three groups interacted with mainstream Platonist philosophers in a complicated and productive way.


----


Eventually, two main Platonist doctrines emerged in the Roman Empire: the Plato-Antiochus-Philo-Paul tradition (Pauline Christianity) and the Plato-Antiochus-Numenius-Plotinus tradition (Neoplatonism). The former became the dominant European belief system, while the latter provided inspiration to mystics, with its belief that the cosmos was the self-expression of a contemplative God, and that its apparent division in matter was only a momentary stage toward its complete actualisation - and its depiction of the individual soul as undergoing the same journey. Enlightnment (gnosis), for Plotinus, comes when the Soul views Nature, not as an objective 'other', but as its own act - just as Intellect (or 'essence') arises when the One (or 'existence') views itself as 'other', and 'Being' is the realisation of Intellect's self-division into observing self and observed other, or into subject and object. Life is to be celebrated as the Soul's creative act; death is to be celebrated as the Soul's repose, and its return to contemplation of that act.

More than a century after Plotinus, the final scholarch of the Academy, Proclus, advanced and crowned Neoplatonist doctrine. At the same time, there was a final recombination of the two Platonist religions, through such figures as the Christian Neoplatonists Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius (who claims to be St Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of Paul of Tarsus, but who in reality wrote many centuries later, and was probably a student of Proclus).



The West therefore became dominated, one way or another, by Plato. In the Middle-East, however, the picture was somewhat different - although the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus (and lesser figures, such as Porphyry and Iamblichus) was initially hugely influential (particularly in the development of Sufism), Islamic attention turned early to Neoplatonic accounts of the work of Aristotle, and by the ninth century the entire Aristotelian corpus was translated into Arabic, having been lost almost entirely in the West. For many centuries, Islamic philosophy, while acknowledging Plotinus, was primarily based upon Aristotle - which is likely a reason for the greater scientific advancement of Islamic society during that time.

The Aristotelian tradition in Islam culminated in the great philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (known at the time in the West as Avicenna and Averroes). It is through translations of these two, and in particular through the cultural intermingling of Iberia at that time, that Aristotle was re-introduced to Europe, and in particular to a certain Thomas Aquinas. The 'Thomist' introduction of Aristotelian thought into the Platonist core of Christianity created the basis for modern Christian thought - in particular, Catholic theology [theories of telos and form still shine through Catholic teaching on controversial topics like gay marriage and contraception] - and is often held to be the first spark of the Renaissance.




Medieval Christian philosophy is frequently characterised as a long period of darkness and silence - and certainly it is less lively than what preceded it. It may seem to have more in common with Chinese philosophy under Neoconfucianism than with the vitality of the Greece, or even the temporary confusion of Platonist doctrines at the end of the Roman Empire. This is likely due to the religious homogeneity of the day - philosophy as we know it thrives in conditions of dissent, not those of unanimity. In the Middle Ages, the fundamentals of philosophy were known with certainty - philosophy is reduced to 'scholastic' interpretations and commentary on previous writers, and painstaking detailing of precise points of theological questions. There is no need for great argument about validity of arguments, for instance, as the works of the church fathers, and ultimately the word of God in scripture, are the ultimate authority of truth and falsity.

Notwithstanding this, some progress was made in matters of logic, mathematics and science - John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham are the principle philosophers.



---------------


Plotinus' Enneads survive thanks to his student, Porphyry, and have been immensely influential. Until the nineteenth century (when 'Neoplatonism' was invented), Plotinus was regarded as the authoritative version of the views of Plato himself. In the nineteenth century, Plotinus was given a new significance as the prototype for opposition both to Pauline Christianity (both from mystical traditions within the religion and from outside) and to modern scientism; his significance is seen in Hegel, and later in Continental Philosophy. It is there that most attention has been paid to lesser Neoplatonists as well - Derrida, for instance, has written repeatedly on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Plotinus is often called the third great philosopher of the Ancients, after Plato and Aristotle. Similarly, Ibn Sina has been called the greatest pre-Modern philosopher, while Christianity looks to Augustine and Aquinas.

At this time, the literary challenge to philosophers reverses: where previously we have been scrambling for fragments, now huge seas of text are available - the collected works of Plotinus, for instance, fill seven volumes.
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ts come to my attention that perhaps a sense of time has been lost from this brief sketch. Accordingly, I present... a timeline! Or, at least, a list of dates (of the birth of each philosopher; some historical background provided as well):

624 BC: Thales of Miletus
530 BC: DEATH OF CYRUS
520 BC: Parmenides of Elea

495: BIRTH OF PERICLES
490 BC: Protagoras
480 BC: BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE

469 BC: Socrates
431 BC: PELOPENNESIAN WAR BEGINS
428 BC: Plato
412 BC: Diogenes of Sinope (Diogenes the Cynic)
404 BC: PELOPENNESIAN WAR ENDS
384 BC: Aristotle
371 BC: BATTLE OF LEUCTRA (end of Spartan hegemony)

341 BC: Epicurus
334 BC: Zeno of Citium
323 BC: DEATH OF ALEXANDER
280 BC: Chrysippus
264 BC: PUNIC WARS BEGIN
214 BC: Carneades
159 BC: Philo of Larissa
146 BC: PUNIC WARS END
130 BC: Antiochus of Ascalon
86 BC: SULLA DESTROYS THE ACADEMY

44 BC: JULIUS CAESAR MURDERED
20 BC: Philo of Alexandria
4 BC: Seneca
10 AD(?): Paul of Tarsus
50 AD: GOSPEL OF THOMAS (early date - may be as late as 150)
55 AD: Epictetus
70 AD: GOSPEL OF MARK
150 AD: ALL FOUR CANONICAL GOSPELS COMPLETED (the last is John)

204 AD: Plotinus
354 AD: Augustine
412 AD: Proclus

801 AD: Al-Kindi (begins translations into Arabic)
980 AD: Ibn Sina
1225 AD: Thomas Aquinas
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Post by Aurora Rossa »

- The Demiurge is an intellectual being, a craftsman, and created the material world; he may choose to destroy it at any time.
So he also resides in the superlunar realm with God? So if the forms exist as thoughts in the mind of God, does that mean the Demiurge basically works to make those forms manifest in the physical world by building it according to them?
The Demiurge/Logos itself is the third principle of the world, after God, and an opposing, perhaps evil, principle named the Dyad.
What the hell is the Dyad and what does it do? If you say it could be evil, does that mean it sabotages the work of the Demiurge, or brings harm into the physical world?
The Logos and Dyad, however, are both emanations of the One, God.
What exactly is an emanation? Do you mean that God somehow splits off the Logos and Dyad like an amoeba undergoing mitosis?
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Proviso: I'm no expert on Platonic thought!
Eddy wrote:
- The Demiurge is an intellectual being, a craftsman, and created the material world; he may choose to destroy it at any time.
So he also resides in the superlunar realm with God?
I think this varies. There's a lot of disagreement about the details of the system. Where the Demiurge is the Logos, he resides in the sublunar world. However, Numenius makes the Demiurge the Second Principle, and the Logos or World-Soul the third - likewise, the Chaldean Oracles divide Demiurge from Logos. This could free the former to dwell above the moon (ie in heaven). However, others believed the Demiurge was only the greatest of the demons - for instance, most gnostic accounts place the Demiurge, which they call "Yahweh" or "Yaldabaoth" or "Sakla" or "Adonai" or "El", as ruler of the world, yet trapped within the world. On the other hand, others clearly put the Demiurge above the world. Nichomachus even says that the Demiurge IS the One! (The view eventually taken by the Pauline Christians, in calling their One the 'Creator of Heaven and Earth')
So if the forms exist as thoughts in the mind of God, does that mean the Demiurge basically works to make those forms manifest in the physical world by building it according to them?
Some think that. Numenius, for instance, says that the Demiurge is a helmsman who steers the ship of the world by the light of pole star of the One. Others disagree. And the Demiurge himself is often considered to be a Form.
The Demiurge/Logos itself is the third principle of the world, after God, and an opposing, perhaps evil, principle named the Dyad.
What the hell is the Dyad and what does it do? If you say it could be evil, does that mean it sabotages the work of the Demiurge, or brings harm into the physical world?
Well, again, it's complicated. In what we might call 'pure' Platonism, it doesn't 'do' anything, and nor does the One, because both are outside the world. On the other hand, popular interpretations clearly abandoned this - eg Jesus (/insert Messiah here) was often seen as sent by the One.

What is it? It's the opposite of unity. It's 'the Indefinite Dyad', or 'The Big and the Small', or 'The Everflowing'. Essentially, it's the essence of non-one-ness: plurality, continuum, diffusion, difference, otherness, change, etc.

In Plato, it seems likely that he intends the One and the Dyad to be equal and opposite principles, which together produce the Numbers, from which everything else is formed - some people thought this was through a mixture of the two, others saw the number line as a continuum between One and Indefiniteness (the Dyad). Later, many people saw the Dyad as being subordinate to and generated by the One.

Some called it evil because it is from the Dyad that confusion, multiplicity, error, difference, change, and all other evil things arise. Likewise, because these are properties of matter, some said that the Dyad was Matter, and that Matter was evil.
The Logos and Dyad, however, are both emanations of the One, God.
What exactly is an emanation? Do you mean that God somehow splits off the Logos and Dyad like an amoeba undergoing mitosis?
It's hard to say. They didn't mean any sort of change or generation that involved time. Xenocrates, for example, spoke of 'generation', but made clear that the word was a teaching aid.

Perhaps an analogy would be a mirror. When you stand in front of the mirror, assuming that light travels instantaneously, then you and your reflection appear in the mirror at the same time. Nonetheless, the reflection is entirely dependent on you for its existence. Liekwise, Plato's analogy of shadows, which are emanations of their casters.

So I would say that 'emanation' refers to a sort of dependence, where x emanates from y when x entails y but y does not entail x, and x contains nothing that does not exist within y. Moreover, the emanator sustains or preserves the emanated - it is needed not only for its creation but for its continued existence. Emanation is often spoken of (particularly in Islamic and Jewish thought) as a process of 'overflow' from the One, and usually 'emanation' implies multiple tiers, each the emanation of the one above.
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Post by zompist »

Sal, do you know much about the philosophical underpinnings of Eastern Orthodoxy? I read a bit about the Schism, and learned that besides the "filioque" business, there are some serious theological disputes. The Catholics don't have much trouble with the Orthodox, but the Orthodox apparently reject Thomism and have a much more mystical view of God. Where did their philosophy come from?

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Short answer: I don't know.

Long answer:

I think that from the start the East had a different relation to late Ancient philosophy. Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism were, as it were, domestic creations at around the formative time of Christianity. It could be assumed that the Eastern fathers were all Platonists, or at least well-familiar with Platonism; in the West, it had to be imported by figures like Augustine. Likewise, Aristotelianism was never lost in the East - it was always there, hanging around as the epitome of 'old', 'pagan' philosophy.

Accordingly, the East embraced Neoplatonism much more fully, while the West had an uneasy relationship with it; the East rejected Aristotle from the beginning, and did not readopt him when the West finally heard about him.

Later on, there is a backlash against all secular philosophy in the East, in which much of the 'superstructure', as it were, of neoplatonism (things like the detail metaphysical hierarchies of emanations, and the fixation on numbers) were discarded, but much of the, so to speak, 'import' of the system was retained.

----

Sociologically, I think the lack of a strong and authoritative clerical hierarchy (the Patriarch was never as powerful as the Pope, was less able to deal with schisms, and was more tainted by secular oversight and the interference of the Emperors) lead to a greater emphasis on the monastic orders (as began to happen in the West, before the Pope reasserted power). These orders naturally tilted the theology toward the things that monastic orders always like: asceticism and mysticism. In the former, we can see stronger influences of the Cynic/Stoic tradition; in the latter, Neoplatonism.

-----

Five features often identified as distinctive in the East:

- a greater role for allegorical and typological exegesis
- theosis, the doctrine of 'becoming like god', or even 'becoming god'
- hesychasm, the doctrine of inward-turning 'meditation' through which one has experience of the 'uncreated light' of God
- rejection of secular, and particularly naturalist, philosophy
- apophatic theology - a tendency to view God as beyond all descriptions, and that thus one can only say what God is not.

The first is a continuation of the work of Philo - an attempt, first, to reconcile Christianity with Hellenism, and then an attempt to reconcile the two Testaments (in order to outflank Gnosticism, always more of a threat in the East). The second is the central principle of Neoplatonism, whose authors all repeatedly spoke of the aim of life as 'becoming more like God'. The third is little less Neoplatonic - the dominant image of which is probable God as a light source whose light filters down through the world and is only caught by the soul of man, not by his mind. The fourth is the result of the introduction of a personal God into Neoplatonism - Plato believed in Reason, but when the ultimate existence is viewed not as the cold reason of numbers and unities, but as a personal and beyond-reason God, naturally the mind will turn to mysticism. The final theme arose in Gnosticism (with its 'Unnamed God' about whom nothing was known), and was developed and introduced to Christianity by the Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

Regarding Thomism, it's probably the fourth point. Thomist thinkers like Aquinas believed that the only way to know god was through his deeds, and that the deeds of God were the material world that he created. Plato, on the other hand, views the material world as a source of error and confusion, and the Neoplatonists are often even more hostile to it - some view it as the essence of evil and the antithesis of God, a view probably appealing to ascetic monks. Even if the Orthodox tradition did not go so far in decrying the material world, I think the idea that it could not be trusted as a source of knowledge remained. Catholicism says that there is a Natural Law inherent in the world, and that man can comprehend that Law even without any knowledge of God - indeed, that coming to know that Law is a way of coming to know God. That would be appalling to anyone Platonically inclined! Platonism turns away from material reasoning and toward an inner eye - originally abstract mathematical reasoning, and later a mystical or religious experience of the divine (whether it be the One or God).

-----

Now, I'm sure it's far more complicated than that. Byzantium did appreciate Aristotle in places - everyone got taught his logic, for instance. And it didn't really appreciate Plato himself - he was compulsory learning for higher students, but the religious authorities disapproved of that, and most monks didn't study him. And of course Aristotle came back later - in the last centuries of Byzantium, they adored him, at least in a secular way. And Orthodoxy has obviously been greatly influenced over the years by Catholicism, and more lately Protestantism.

But maybe that's an idea of the essence? Someone who knows more would have to opine...
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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I think this varies. There's a lot of disagreement about the details of the system.
So it has too much variation to make any definitive statements about that. OK then.
What is it? It's the opposite of unity. It's 'the Indefinite Dyad', or 'The Big and the Small', or 'The Everflowing'. Essentially, it's the essence of non-one-ness: plurality, continuum, diffusion, difference, otherness, change, etc.
You mean the One embodies the concept of unity, a reification of unity perhaps, while the Dyad embodies the opposing force of difference?
So I would say that 'emanation' refers to a sort of dependence, where x emanates from y when x entails y but y does not entail x, and x contains nothing that does not exist within y. Moreover, the emanator sustains or preserves the emanated - it is needed not only for its creation but for its continued existence. Emanation is often spoken of (particularly in Islamic and Jewish thought) as a process of 'overflow' from the One, and usually 'emanation' implies multiple tiers, each the emanation of the one above.
Then the emanations represent products or epiphenomena of the One, stuff it gives off by virtue of existing? Like how we as humans have the properties of physical form, intellect, breathing, and such that we give off by existing and which would disappear if we did. Each of these products in turn can have properties of their own, and thus subemanations.

In this case the Dyad emanates from the One because the existence of unity implies the possibility of disunity and the need for something to become unified, right?
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Post by Salmoneus »

Eddy wrote:
I think this varies. There's a lot of disagreement about the details of the system.
So it has too much variation to make any definitive statements about that. OK then.
What is it? It's the opposite of unity. It's 'the Indefinite Dyad', or 'The Big and the Small', or 'The Everflowing'. Essentially, it's the essence of non-one-ness: plurality, continuum, diffusion, difference, otherness, change, etc.
You mean the One embodies the concept of unity, a reification of unity perhaps, while the Dyad embodies the opposing force of difference?
Pretty much, as I understand it.
So I would say that 'emanation' refers to a sort of dependence, where x emanates from y when x entails y but y does not entail x, and x contains nothing that does not exist within y. Moreover, the emanator sustains or preserves the emanated - it is needed not only for its creation but for its continued existence. Emanation is often spoken of (particularly in Islamic and Jewish thought) as a process of 'overflow' from the One, and usually 'emanation' implies multiple tiers, each the emanation of the one above.
Then the emanations represent products or epiphenomena of the One, stuff it gives off by virtue of existing? Like how we as humans have the properties of physical form, intellect, breathing, and such that we give off by existing and which would disappear if we did. Each of these products in turn can have properties of their own, and thus subemanations.

In this case the Dyad emanates from the One because the existence of unity implies the possibility of disunity and the need for something to become unified, right?
[/quote]

Not bad.

"Emanation" and "epiphenomenon" are words that I don't think you're likely to find in the same contexts, and that have different conceptual bases - so it's hard to say to what extent their extensions will overlap in practice.

I'd suggest two differences. Firstly, emanation is more than just any old product - it seems to inherently conserve some elements of the emanator, while losing others. Like a reflection, or a shadow that keeps the shape of what casts it. Or white light that passes through a prism - the colours that we see are like emanations from the white light. Maybe that's a good analogy for the emanationist world, thinking about it: the One at the top, a bright white light, and each world/aeon/heaven/whatever a filter or prism that only lets us see part of the light from above - the light loses both part of its quality (we only see green, when it was all colours) as well as part of its quantity (it gets dimmer as you go down).
The other difference is that in some accounts emanation is not an inevitable thing, but the result of contingent 'decisions' of the One (though strictly speaking the One has no mind to decide with - the term is a metaphor).

So yes, that's one account of why the Dyad exists. There are others - for instance, some say that the One desires the existence of free-willed thinking beings, and in order to allow them to exist it must divide itself, creating to non-One stuff that allows the universe, and hence humanity, to exist.

[Similar accounts carry on down the chain. Somebody said that the Demiurge, in attempting to shape things to match the One, in the proces self-divided into the Demiurge-who-controls-the-world and the world-that-is-controlled-by-the-demiurge.]
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Post by Aurora Rossa »

This overview of philosophy is proving quite helpful, I must say. I am almost beginning to understand your comments about the soul and lifeforce in my other thread. Thanks in particular for the explanations of those Platonist models. I have been wondering about them for some time, in particular since they kind of resemble some ideas of my own for making the metaphysics of my conworld work.

So what comes after Aquinas?
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Delurking in order to bump the thread.

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Post by Salmoneus »

Awh, thank you!

But fear not, I have another post!


-------------------------------------------------------

Three or four hundred years after Aquinas, something interesting happened: a curious conjunction of potentialities. Firstly, the creation of the printing press allowed a more literate society, where reading and knowledge were not the sole preserve of monks; secondly, the printing press, combined with new vernacular translations, made the text of Holy Scripture available to far more people than before; thirdly, trans-European trade links had improved to a standard not seen since the Romans, enabling new inventions and theories to be rapidly disseminate to all quarters; fourthly, several polities were in the process of advancing from feudal, medieval fiefdoms to modern, centralised countries; fifthly, new copies of Classical authors were emerging into the light – brought home from the Crusades, traded for from the East, stolen from the libraries of ransacked monasteries, copied and printed from dusty originals in the depths of the Vatican, and so on. The result of this conjunction was immense upheaval: strong new rulers wanted to oppose the Papacy, and in the new, dissenting interpretations of Scripture that were finding a growing literate audience, and in a new culture of respect for the Ancients, they found a weapon they had not previously had. Christendom was riven by the conflict between Catholic and Protestant; the old philosophical orthodoxy of Aristotle was challenged by the fresh emergence of Plato, Epictetus and Epicurus; the Classical world confronted the Medieval; and, at least in certain times and places, this cacophony of dissent was not stifled and suppressed by the ruling classes, but positively encouraged, by rulers who saw the new culture as their route to freedom from priests and Popes.

Events came to a head in the early seventeenth century. Key figures include Galileo (b. 1564), Kepler (b. 1571), Grotius (b. 1583), Hobbes (b. 1588), Gassendi (b. 1592), and Descartes (b. 1596). This was an epoch in European history; for centuries, Europe had been stumbling in Medieval darkness; the candles were relit with the Rennaissance; now, with the publication of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method in 1637, Europe attained Enlightenment.

Descartes and his contemporaries faced, even if they did not always recognise it explicitly, two great dilemmas: the conflict of between Plato and Aristotle, and the death of God. The first problem had never entirely gone away, but with the resurrection of Plato it became far more urgent: the scholars and scientists believed that knowledge came from the physical world, but they all acknowledged that it was difficult to say anything about that world with any certainty or precision; the new ‘mathematicians’, on the other hand, inspired by Plato, said that mathematics was certain and precise, safeguarded by the immutability of universal laws – yet all could see that the physical world did not follow those laws. This, after all, was the driving belief of the Platonic religions, which had not entirely been eradicated by the resurrection of Aristotle: the material world is imperfect, chaotic, and confusing, because it does not conform to the perfect, absolute, laws and forms of the ‘real’, ‘true’ world.

The solution was enunciated by Descartes, although it had already been anticipated in practice by others, and was greatly inspired by the atomism of the Ancients (in particular Epicurus, who was at the time being powerfully rehabilitated by Gassendi): the physical world DID obey absolute mathematical laws. The apparent fact that it didn’t was discarded: all those things that could not be explained mathematically were ignored as fundamentally unreal. In this way, science moved from the qualitative studies of Aristotle to the quantitative studies of modernity. All that physical things possessed, Descartes insisted, were size, shape, position and position – in other words, all they possessed were properties of extension in three physical dimensions. These properties could be defined precisely and mathematically, and therefore could be considered subject to mathematical laws. Descartes himself helped define many of those laws, both in physics and in mathematics – his theories of optics and gravitation were hugely influential (the former was even correct in many places, particularly in the laws of refraction), and he was the first to demonstrate how geometric problems could be solved through algebra, and he also laid the foundation for much modern mathematical notation. Meanwhile, Aristotelian ‘properties’ like ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ were done away with (although imitations of some of those properties, made objective and mathematical, were later re-introduced once science worked out how to derive them from the presence and motion of extended objects).

This had one gigantic ramification: the entire concept of the world was changed. Previously, the world had been divided into two parts: material and ideal, or physical and universal, or mortal and divine. This was true both of the external world and of the mind itself, which had both a physical and a spiritual component. By insisting that everything material was in fact governed perfectly by the ideal and the universal, Descartes ended this dualism – but in the process created another. The old Aristotelian properties still needed to be explained in general terms, even if they were not to be theorised about in any detail, but there was no longer any room for them in the external world – hence, they had to be placed in the mind. Before Descartes, there was the rational ideal world and the irrational physical world, and in the latter was to be found all confusion, error and opinion; after Descartes, there was the rational physical world, and the (at least potentially) irrational mental world, and confusion, error and opinion all resided in the latter.

This, of course, created a problem – everybody knew that only like could know like, but now the mind was fundamentally unalike from the things it knew. Accordingly, the ‘idea’ was invented, or at least given the mental connotations that is has now – what the mind knows is the idea, and the idea represents the world. Later thinkers would extend this into the theory that all the mind could be is ideas, and that ideas were only representations, so that the nature of the mind is simply to be something that represents something else.

The second Cartesian problem was the death of God. By this I do not mean the death of faith per se – many of the thinkers of the day, even the Epicurean Gassendi, were still devoutly religious, and even those who were not did not yet dare admit it. God had died, not as something to be venerated, but as the arbiter of worldly arguments. No longer could arguments all be settled with recourse to the Bible and the Church Fathers – one person would not accept the Church Fathers, and another would not accept the Bible. One person would interpret the Bible one way, another would interpret it another, and they didn’t even all have the same version any more, with the proliferation of translations and recompilations. One person would argue from the Bible, and another would retort with arguments from Seneca or Plato. They could not simply turn to a priest for a resolution, as who could agree on a priest when they professed different confessions? It was not only a confusion of Catholic and Protestant, as Protestant burnt Protestant, and the Church in Rome struggled with her own Counter-Reformation.

God, therefore, was no longer a safe ground for conclusions. For a thousand years, people had learnt that God was the source of certain knowledge – and now he wasn’t. The question, then, was clear: what WAS the source of certain knowledge?

This was the second question Descartes addressed, most famously in his Meditations. He begins with a position of absolute scepticism – to find what is certain, he is willing to doubt everything, because only what cannot be doubted can be certain. To this end, he conjures up a number of scenarios that have since become familiar to us: what if I am not awake, but only dreaming that I am awake?; what if everything I see is not the real world, but an illusion created by an evil demon, specifically designed to mislead me?; what if nobody else in the world is capable of thought or emotion, and everybody else is simply an automaton set up to look like a human being? [The later puzzle is now mostly posed in terms of ‘philosophical zombies’, although philosophical robots have also been spoken of]

He eventually concludes that only one thing cannot be doubted: cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am”. This is not, as it is sometimes read, a statement about purpose or nature of human existence, but an epistemological conclusion: I cannot doubt that I am now thinking, and thus I cannot doubt that I now exist, as thinking requires existence. If I do briefly entertain the doubt, that doubt is still a form of thinking, and so the doubt is self-defeating.

What he has done here is clever, and may be overlooked. This conclusion is based upon the solution to the earlier puzzle – that is, on the model of the mind as containing all the errors and opinions and confusions. Following this, we can envisage the mind as a sort of mirror held up to the world, but a dusty or smeared mirror that does not show all things truly – where the world is regular, our perception of it is filled with irregularity. Doubt and error thus arise by the mirror of our mind failing to correctly portray the real world. It is in this, although Descartes does not realise it, that his solution is to be found: to avoid error and doubt, we must avoid looking at any representation of the world, which is to say that we must look at the mirror itself. This is one of the foundational principles of the modern world: only the contents of our own minds are certain. This is why Descartes cannot doubt that he is thinking – because so long as he is only looking at his thoughts, not at the world, he cannot be mistaken.

How, though, can we move from these immediately-knowable mental things to any sort of knowledge of the world? Only by following the truest and most perfect courses of the mind, which is to say by following reason. Reason alone can lead us out of error. For Descartes, this requires the aid of God – he has certain beliefs about God, which he cannot doubt, and reason tells him that he could not have those beliefs without God actually existing. From his knowledge of the nature of God, he can then know that, because God would not order the world to confuse him, certain forms of knowledge and argument are certain to be true. Because these forms of argument are certain, he can use them to prove the existence of God… and so on.

This theory is clearly circular, and has not been that important, but the underlying principle was far more influential: we begin with certain facts about our thoughts, and deduce what must be the case in order for those thoughts to exist. In particular, Descartes’ theory of Dualism had one, seemingly fatal, flaw – how could the mind and the body interact? Or, if they didn’t interact, why did they seem to? Not only were they composed of different substances, but it was the nature of the physical to have extension, while the mental did not – and since influence seemed to require contact, and contact seemed to require surfaces, and surfaces required extension, and the mind had no extension, how could the mind possible influence the body and have any causal role at all?

This was one of the, though not the only, problem of the tradition following on from Descartes called “Continental Rationalism”. A second dimension is a belief in necessity: the only answer that can be given to ‘why does something exist rather than nothing?’ is ‘because it has to exist’. The world, after all, is strictly bound by the determinism of logic. The world had to exist; the world had to have the divisions that is has; we had to have the innate, unquestionable intuitions about it that we have. The study of what is necessary is the study of logic, and so logic is our tool to understand the universe: given our intuitions, what must have caused them? Given those facts about the world, why must those things be true?

For the Rationalists, what existed was a matter of ‘substance’. Substance is a concept going back to Aristotle – broadly, it is what exists when all qualities are stripped away from a thing. Substance is both the bearer of qualities and what individuates one thing from another. For Descartes, all the physical world had one substance, but each individual mind was a distinct substance, of a second nature, and a third nature of substance, God, ruled over all. This places the Mind as ontologically distinct from the body, on which it does not in any way depend, as well as killing off the Ancient notion that there may only be one Mind, which all people partake of or display in their own way. In many ways, the mind is a creation of Descartes.




Descartes wrote three major works: the Discourse on the Method (with appendices on optics, meteorology, and geometry), the Meditations, and the Principles of Philosophy. Of the three, the Meditations are most fundamental. Because Descartes is setting the starting point for the coming centuries, he is one of the few philosophers who starts at the beginning, as it were, and he is therefore often recommended for newcomers from philosophy (the text was probably intended as a textbook from the beginning). The Meditations are short and simple enough to be understandable to all (with some effort), although the nuances of WHY he is driven to say some things are less clear. In addition, the Meditations are usually published with a set of Objections from philosophers of his day (including Arnauld, Gassendi, and Hobbes), and his own Replies to them, which are interesting both for historical purposes and for clarification of his own views.

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I was going to make this be about the whole of Continental Rationalism, but I'm saving what I've got on Spinoza and Leibniz for a later post - Descarte probably merits on by himself, I think.
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Post by Salmoneus »

I appear to have dropped my readers...

I'm not sure: should I carry on ahead with the posts, or would people prefer time to digest things?



-------

Anyway, a further timeline:


1225: Thomas Aquinas
1291: CRUSADES END
1452: LEONARDO BORN
1453: FALL OF BYZANTIUM; HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ENDS
1455: GUTENBURG BIBLE PRINTED
1487: TUDORS COME TO POWER
1492: END OF RECONQUISTA; DISCOVERY OF AMERICAS‏‏‏‏
1517: LUTHER: NINETY-FIVE THESES
1588: Thomas Hobbes
1596: René Descartes
1618: THIRTY YEARS’ WAR BEGINS
1632: Baruch Spinoza; John Locke
1637: “Discourse on the Method”
1642: ENGLISH CIVIL WARS BEGIN
1643: Isaac Newton
1646: Gottfried Leibniz
1648: PEACE OF WESTPHALIA
1677: “Ethics”
1685: George Berkeley
1688: GLORIOUS REVOLUTION; SECOND HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR BEGINS
1687: “Principia Mathematica”
1690: “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
1710: “Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge”
1711: David Hume

1714: “Monadology”

1723: Adam Smith
1724: Immanuel Kant
1739: “Treatise on Human Nature”
1781: “Critique of Pure Reason”
1789: FRENCH REVOLUTION BEGINS

[Red for Rationalist, Green for Empiricist]

EDIT: FURTHERMORE IT IS MY BELIEF THAT MY TOPIC IN C&CQ SHOULD BE LOOKED AT.
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Post by Legion »

I, at least, am still reading.

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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Salmoneus wrote:I appear to have dropped my readers...

I'm not sure: should I carry on ahead with the posts, or would people prefer time to digest things?
Carry on! I am still reading. I just did not have much to say about Descartes. Though I'll maybe ask you a question or two about him, some things were surprising. But later this week.
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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I appear to have dropped my readers...
You want questions? Ok then, I will see what I can come up with.
For the Rationalists, what existed was a matter of ‘substance’. Substance is a concept going back to Aristotle – broadly, it is what exists when all qualities are stripped away from a thing. Substance is both the bearer of qualities and what individuates one thing from another. For Descartes, all the physical world had one substance, but each individual mind was a distinct substance, of a second nature, and a third nature of substance, God, ruled over all.
See, when I was talking about mind and body as different substances in the conmagic thread, I was referring to this concept (at least to the extent that I understood it). So how did Descartes explain the interaction of such fundamentally different substances? I have heard of the pineal body as one solution he proposed, did he believe it had somehow magical properties?
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Post by Mornche Geddick »

Go ahead. I want to know about Locke.

For an insight into mediaeval thought try "The Discarded Image" by C.S. Lewis. They tried to solve the problem of the body / soul dualism by inventing a third substance to link them, called "spirits". It was supposed to be half material and half immaterial. Lewis says he thinks the "spirits" was the most dubious feature of the mediaeval model of the world, but it is an interesting idea for conworlders and fantasy writers. It could provide a mechanism for magic.

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Post by Salmoneus »

Eddy wrote:
I appear to have dropped my readers...
You want questions? Ok then, I will see what I can come up with.
I don't specifically WANT questions. It's just that the decrease in question suggested a correlating decrease in readership, and I wanted to see if I was going too quickly for people.
For the Rationalists, what existed was a matter of ‘substance’. Substance is a concept going back to Aristotle – broadly, it is what exists when all qualities are stripped away from a thing. Substance is both the bearer of qualities and what individuates one thing from another. For Descartes, all the physical world had one substance, but each individual mind was a distinct substance, of a second nature, and a third nature of substance, God, ruled over all.
See, when I was talking about mind and body as different substances in the conmagic thread, I was referring to this concept (at least to the extent that I understood it). So how did Descartes explain the interaction of such fundamentally different substances? I have heard of the pineal body as one solution he proposed, did he believe it had somehow magical properties?
A common misunderstanding. His pineal theories were anatomical. That is, he believed that the pineal gland was where sense-impressions were formed from the data sent along the nerves, and that the physical correlates of rational thought took place there, and that it had a particularly important role in volitional action. However, he believed that the soul/mind was united to the entire body - it's just that most of the things that involved soul/body contact happened to occur in and around the pineal gland.

[These theories are all wrong, btw, and were known to be wrong at the time of Descartes, though his reputation caused them to be briefly accepted anyway]

As to the metaphysical question of interaction, Descartes had no answer. The question is the subject of much of his correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, she wisely raising the question, and he eventually admitting that he had no answer. He just says that God made it all work somehow, and it must be for the best.

Later rationalists did propose answers, in the next post. The most immediate answer, however (as, for instance, given by Malebranche, the fourth-most-important Rationalist (and hence usually ignored, as all important things occur in threes)) is Occasionalism, the doctrine that God does everything, and he just happens to do mental things and physical things at the same time. For instance, when God hits me with a hammer, God also gives me the sensation of pain.
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