PHIL 2002 ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

John Ostrowickjohn@ostrowick.co.za

• Read the test questions carefully. I want to know if you

can distinguish between similar ideas and terms and

phrases so the options will have similar phrases which

could each be right. Choose the most-right answer.

• Do not take more than 3 minutes per question. If

you’re stuck, go to the next question and come back

later.

REVISION

• Heraclitus

• Logos: Think of it as something universal,

similar to God, but impersonal and neutral

(not “good”). So think balance, harmony, unity,

a circle, hard to explain (ineffable), eternal,

etc. Most important: “It rests by changing”.

“You cannot step into the same river twice”.

REVISION

λόγος

• Parmenides

• You’re expected to know the two different interpretations of Parmenides.

Russell’s, and a mystical/metaphysical interpretation.

• Russell’s:

“When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be

the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require

objects outside of themselves. And since you can never think of a thing or

speak of it at one time or another, whatever can be thought of or spoken

must exist at all times. Consequently, there can be no change, since change

consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be.”

REVISION

• Parmenides

• One way around this is to argue that the statements are true for

objects that have ceased to exist if the referrents themselves are just

words (noises), e.g. “a cow has two horns” does refer to an existing

object, but “a unicorn has one horn” refers just to the word “unicorn”.

(p68). Another alternative is to try take the idea to mean that

although George Washington no longer exists, we’re not really

speaking about the man who happened to have that name, since our

words may refer to a memory of him, or an idea of him that we got

from a book, etc., and these things continue to exist.

REVISION

• Parmenides

• Another argument would work as follows. Words do not have a constant

meaning (ibid), and therefore cannot refer indefinitely to the same thing.

Likewise, a recollection of a past event is not the same as the past event itself;

yet we can refer to both by the same term (multiple similar references for

one word). Parmenides’ claim, that since we can know the past, that it must

still exist and therefore not be past, is therefore false; since what we know is

our recollection of the past. What still exists is our recollection, not the events

to which they referred (ibid., p69). Instead, all Parmenides has achieved is

persuade us that substance cannot be created or destroyed (p70), which is

the conservation of matter-energy, in modern science.

REVISION

• Parmenides

• Mystical Interpretation: The poem, part 1, The Way of Truth, is a priori/

metaphysical and about a priori knowledge of a universal “IT”, which just

exists: “It is”; you cannot “think that IT is not” (i.e. IT necessarily exists). Like

the Logos, IT is ineffable, laughed at by the common man who thinks all

things are varied, and yet, IT is a unity, a circle, all-in-one, eternal, a priori, etc.

IT just exists. It is ontologically necessary. But only one thing is said to be

ontologically necessary: God!

• Part 2, The Way of Belief, provides a mythos of how contingent things

came to be, and why it is that people believe that things are varied, etc.

REVISION

• Parmenides

• Main difference between mystical interpretation of

Parmenides and Heraclitus: For Heraclitus, the

Logos is always in motion (“It rests by changing”).

For Parmenides, change and motion is an illusion,

for something eternal cannot change or move. I.E

everything is permanent/not in flux for Parmenides.

REVISION

• Lao Tzu

• The same as Heraclitus’ Logos: the Tao is ineffable, cyclic, universal,

all things are one; variation is an illusion, yin and yang. The two

apparent opposites swirl together in what is truly One Thing.

• Wu Wei: Do without doing. Do not fuss or compete; no-one can

compete with the sage because he does not compete. This idea

derives from the Tao which “embraces” everything (e.g. apparently

competing opposites).

REVISION

!

• Presocratics summary

• There is a universal divine-like principle which is in some sense cyclic and all-

embracing or all-encompassing. Whilst we see differences (like hot/cold, good/evil),

really we’re seeing manifestations of the same universal principle or Logos/Tao.

• What we perceive is not reality, but what we know a priori about the Logos/Tao is

reality/Truth. Compare in your mind now to Plato’s Form of the Good.

• Pantheism is the view that the divine is all-pervasive and found throughout the

universe within everything. The presocratics might be interpreted to be pantheists.

• The concept of Logos/Tao *seems* to have made its way into the Bible in the

opening of John.

REVISION

• Plato: Remember FIVE things:

• The Sun

• The Cave

• The Line

• The Forms

• Theaetetus

REVISION

• Plato: The Sun

• This is the Form of the Good, the One

Truth, the Real Truth, the Higher

Awareness. It awaits outside the cave.

REVISION

• Plato: The Cave

• Just remember the imagery of the cave and make up an

explanation for each component/image part.

• Parts: people chained; watching shadows; shadows caused by

a fire; fire is behind objects; objects are paraded by

puppeteers; steps up out the cave; into the sun; after being in

the sun, you go back down into the cave and seem to be

blind.

REVISION

• Plato:

The Cave

REVISION

Source: Wikimedia CommonsVeldkamp, Gabriele. Zukunftsorientierte Gestaltung informationstechnologischer Netzwerke im Hinblick auf die Handlungsfähigkeit des Menschen. Aachener Reihe Mensch und Technik, Band 15, Verlag der Augustinus Buchhandlung, Aachen 1996, Germany

• Plato: The Line

• Just remember the imagery of the line and make up

an explanation for each component/image part.

• It deals with degrees of awareness.

REVISION

• Plato: The Forms

• Remember: Realm of the Forms, the Forms

as Ideas, Forms are types; objects in this

world Participate in the Forms and hence are

tokens of the Forms; Doctrine of recollection:

we were once spirits in the realm of the

Forms and saw them, and now recall seeing

them, which is how we know objects a priori.

REVISION

• Plato: The Forms

• Plato believed that we bring knowledge with us into the world,

specifically, a priori knowledge of Forms, which may be

interpreted in modern epistemology as “types” rather than

“tokens”. The idea, roughly speaking, is that you can’t know that

x is a triangle unless you first know what a triangle is, a priori.

The job of Reason, as Plato explains in the Cave Analogy, is to

bring us to an awareness of the Forms, especially the Form of

the Good (the “Sun”). The token or material object “partakes”

in the Form, and hence shares its properties. For any particular

thing (token), there is a corresponding Form (type).

REVISION

• Plato: The Forms

• Everything has a “type” or Form, which is a metaphysically

separate entity corresponding to the type or Idea of the thing

we are looking at. The Forms reside in the Realm of the

Forms, and they exist separately to their objects (tokens).

• We experience reincarnation: that is, prior to our birth, our

souls exist in the Realm of the Forms and become

acquainted with them. When we are born into the physical

world, we then recognise (recollect) the Forms that we saw,

and recognise them again in the physical objects.

REVISION

Criticism: The Forms

• Recursion: If each object has a Form, then each triangle partakes in a unique Form of a triangle; but then how are those Forms of triangles similar? They must partake in an uber-triangle Form, etc.

• The doctrine of the Forms violates Occam’s Razor• Plato could dispense with commitments to immortality, a

realm of the Forms, reincarnation, explaining the mysterious “participation” or “partaking” relationship between tokens and types, not to mention the doctrine of recollection, if he were to understand how we learn, how we acquire knowledge, and how we come to generalise from tokens to types, rather than the other way around (the doctrine of the Forms is claiming that we know the token because we know the type).

REVISION

Criticism: The Forms

• Furthermore, he is failing to distinguish between calculation (what the slave boy in Meno is doing, which doesn’t require knowledge at all, just logic), and knowledge (facts, data). Had he asked the boy for some fact (e.g. from history), the boy would have failed. Therefore, the doctrine of recollection is false.

• Furthermore, modern neuroscience can identify not only that it is brain activity which recognises forms of things, but which areas in particular in the brain.

• Refer back to Plato’s Parmenides, where Parmenides attacks the Forms.

REVISION

Theaetetus

• Three main actors: Theaetetus, Socrates, and the late Protagoras, spoken for by Socrates.

• Theaetetus suggests that knowledge is technai (skill); Socrates rejects this view (incorrectly, and later accepts something similar)

• Theaetetus suggests that knowledge is perception; Socrates rejects this view on the grounds that it amounts to relativism

REVISION

Theaetetus

• Relativism (Protagoras’ view): Man is the measure of all things, what seems to a man is to him.

• What is true for me is true for me; what is true for you is true for you; The golden truth is that there are no golden truths.

• Socrates rejects/refutes for various reasons…

REVISION

Theaetetus: Criticisms of Relativism

• 1. Why should we listen to Protagoras if he does not have a special skill of rhetoric or philosophy? Why should we pay him? If he were not an expert, i.e. did not know more? If he did not know more, and if anyone has the truth, then we should pay anyone to talk.

• 2. Doctors are experts and we take them seriously. Therefore, truth is held by some and not others.

REVISION

Theaetetus: Criticisms of Relativism

• 3. If perception is truth (Theatetus’ second opinion), this is just relativism, since perceptions differ between people under different circumstances, e.g. when sick and drinking wine; when in a cold wind; when one’s eyes are blindfolded, perceptions seem different.

• 4. If everything is in flux as Heraclitus says, then, even our own inner states will be in flux and therefore not constant/true.

REVISION

Theaetetus: Criticisms of Relativism

• 5. If what is true for me is true for me, and if I disagree with you, AND if relativism is true, then what I believe, namely, that YOU are wrong, is also true. Therefore, if relativism is true, the person who defends relativism is wrong because of his own relativism. Symbolically:

• P = ¬R (proposition P denies relativism R)• R = P & R (relativism says all propositions are true)• Thus R = ¬R & R• Since ¬R & R is false by boolean logic, R is false.

REVISION

Theaetetus: Criticism of TB as knowledge

• The Lawyer argument • “Socrates: Then when judges are justly persuaded about

matters which one can know only by having seen them and in no other way, in such a case, judging of them from hearsay, having acquired a true opinion of them, [201c] they have judged without knowledge, though they are rightly persuaded, if the judgement they have passed is correct, have they not?”

• In other words, if judges have true belief but do not really know what happened in a crime because they did not see it, it follows that true belief is not knowledge.

• Hence, “knowledge [is] true opinion accompanied by reason… unreasoning true opinion was outside of the sphere of knowledge; and matters of which there is not a rational explanation are unknowable”.

REVISION

Theaetetus: Summary

• Socrates and Theaetetus eventually settle on the view that knowledge is justified (reasoned) true belief (opinion).

• Theaetetus offers two views initially: knowledge is skill, and/or knowledge is perception. He then goes on to suggest knowledge is true opinion or true belief. Socrates leads him to the view that knowledge is justified true opinion/belief.

• Protagoras supports relativism.

REVISION

• I will place these slides on

philosophylectureswits.blogspot.com

• Good luck!

REVISION