Ben C Davis

Introduction

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is the chief thing philosophy can do for us.

Philosophy is the murky waters that lie between then ignorance of dogma and theology and the certainty of science.

Philosophy through the ages has been a tug of war between professing adherence to the state or a centralised power and to the individual and the subjective.

Book 1: Ancient Philosophy

Part 1: The Pre-Socratics

1. The Rise of Greek Civilisation

The Greeks invented math, science, and philosophy. Philosophy began with Thales in 600 BC.

Writing was invented in Egypt in 4000 BC.

Egypt was a kingdom. The king had absolute control. There was a priesthood for a polytheistic religion, who had their own significant power. Egypt was obsessed with death. They believe that Osiris would wait to judge.

Babylon invented writing independently. In their religion, and Egypt too, was a fertility cult. The earth is female, the sun was male. Make fertility was often represented as a bull. Ishtar was the supreme god in Babylon.  The rough tour the land the great mother was worshipped.

When the Greeks found temples to her, they named her Artemis, who became the Virgin Mary in Christianity.

Minoan civilisation appeared on Crete, the first European civilisation. The cretans has a flourishing artistic culture. They had the same fertility based religion. It involved the cyclical nature of nature itself, death and rebirth.

Details of Mycenaean life mostly comes from Homer. The language probably came from the north. Not that much is known about Mycenaean Greece, at least compared to classical Greece. They were a warrior society with a king.

The Greeks came via three waves after the Bronze Age collapse: Ionian, achaeans, and Dorian’s. Supposedly the ionians and achaeans used the Minoan religion, but the Dorian’s used their own indo-European religion.

The social system of Greece (post Mycenaean I think) varies greatly from place to place. You had farmers and slave driven commerce centres.

Homer wrote about the Mycenaean period in the Illiad. It seems he may have been multiple poets and the works took hundreds of years. The poems were brought to Greece by a ruler in around 600BC. They were a forced and important part of Athenian education. It seems they were a romanticised version of ancient history written from an aristocratic point of view. They influenced much of ancient Greek culture, specifically the ideals of heroism, glory, and honour.

Primitive religion was always tribal. Ceremony was about encouraging things that benefitted the tribe, as opposed to the individual. Animal and human sacrifice was done to placate the gods to deliver things like a good harvest or fertility.

Homeric gods were human, albeit immortal. There wasn’t much in morality to be said. The Olympians, unlike most gods, didn’t create the world but conquered. They were badly behaved conquerers. So too were the human rulers in the poems.

Greek science, philosophy and mathematics all started in the 6th century. The same time the Buddha did his thing, Confucius, and zoroastrianism also did a thing.

Greece at this time was a collection of cities with agricultural lands surrounding them. There were many different religions, a lot of which were fertility cults. Pan was a deity of the wild and sheep, things like that.

Another god was Bacchus, the god of the wine harvest. Cult like celebrations of the god involved women, probably drunk, celebrating in ecstatic rituals. Wine was the earthy embodiment of his divinity. Supposedly it was these festivals celebrating him that led to the development of theatre.

Russel describes being civilised, and not barbarically, as the use of forethought. The suppression of instinctive behaviour for some future benefit. Agriculture instead of hunting. Essentially: prudence. Societies then create laws, custom, and religion to restrict these “barbaric” behaviours in favour of civilised behaviour. Impulses become crimes, or at least, “wicked”. Private property brings with it the subjection of women and a slave class.

Prudence thought can create a lack of the best things in life. In spiritual intoxication, the world becomes full of life and beauty. Or “enthusiasm” - having the god enter the worshiper, they become one. Much of what is great in human achievement involves this enthusiasm - the sweeping away of prudence. Prudence vs passion is a conflict runs through history.

Science may set limits to knowledge but should not limit imagination.

The Bacchus followers influenced Greek philosophers like Plato. Not the “barbaric” behaviour but their views on spiritualisation. Orpheus was specifically influential. The Orphic, and evolution of Bacchus, believed in the transmigration of souls. The way of life on earth affected the life in the afterlife. So they had purification rituals. A pure life leads to an increase in their heavenly life, and a reduction in their earthly. They believed man was partly of earth and partly of the divine. The Orphic beliefs came from tablets. They talk of how to life on earth so they could enter the divine. To become fully divine. Wine was seen as a way to engage in enthusiasm. To become one with the gods. These ideas were revived by Pythagoras, then by Plato, then into feminism.

Orphic followers believe in female equality. They also supported engaging in violent emotion. Greek tragedy grew out of this.

They believed they were more serene than the Bacchus followers. But that’s not really true. They believe life was suffering. They were emotional. Passionate. “Nothing too much”. But they were excessive in everything, in poetry and sin, in religion and pure thought. It was the combination of passion and intellect that made them great.

There were two tendencies in Greece: passionate and other worldly and the other was rational and light hearted. Those who were passionate turned to Orphism. The rational hated it. The degree to which orphism influenced Greek state religion is debated. What we know was there was a tension between religion and science at this time. The word orgy comes from the word for sacrament - to purify the believers souls, to allow it to escape the wheel of birth. The Orphics founded what we would call churches. From their influences arose the conception of philosophy as a way of life.

2. The Milesian school

Philosophy began with Thales, who believed everything was made of water. During this time, most Greek states were run cruelly by an aristocracy.

He was more a scientist than a philosopher. He predicted eclipses. But so too could Babylonian astronomers, which was connected with Miletas.

He travelled and brought back to Greek the concept of geometry. E.g. the distance of a ship from the sea based on two points along the land.

He was one of the 7 wise men of greece, each of which had a saying. His was “water is best”. He thought water was the original substance with the earth resting on water.

His scientific methods were crude. A lot is not known about him.

Anaximander was another philosopher of the time. He understood all the world to be created from a primal, unknown, substance. He believed earth was one of multiple worlds. He believed that each element of matter, earth, fire, water, etc, was playing a part in the “justice” of existence. That there is a balance of these elements and that time, and the changes that happen, address the injustice of things like fire burning earth: it results in ashes, and this more earth, and balance is maintained. The idea of not overstepping eternally fixed bounds was one of the most profound of Greek beliefs. Gods were forced to abide by it too. Because he believed that any element would take the other over if it were infinite, he believed that the fundamental primal substance could not be one of those elements.

Anaximenes believed air was the fundamental substance. It goes from light to heavy based on the degree of condensation. He believed the earth was shaped as a disc.

3. Pythagoras

Mathematics starts with him. The proper argument type of math. Proofs and such.

Math has had a profound and unfortunate influence in philosophy, partly due to him.

He came from Samos, which was ruled by a crazy dude. He settled in southern Italy, in Croton, where he created a society of followers.

He became a mythical figure. Credited with miracles. But he was also the founder of a school of mathematicians.

There’s a a lot of truth and fiction associated.

He created a religion with beloved in transmigration and of the sin of eating beans. Some rules: don’t eat beans, or pick up what was dropped, don’t break bread, not to eat the heart, or walk on highways, or let swallows share one’s roof, etc. these seem to come from taboos.

Pythagorean religion is a reformed Orphism. He was still on the side of mysticism. He believed himself to be a divine being, condemning the real world as false and elusive. He believed the soul was immortal and born again, nothing was truly new. Anything with life in it, including animals, was to be treated as kin. Property was common. Woman and men were equal.

The body is the tomb of the soul. The are three types of people: the buyers and sellers, those that compete, and those that simply look on (scientists). This is different now, where the footballer is more important than the spectator, the politician more important than the voter.

The word theory was an Orphic word. Passionate sympathetic contemplation. Allied with the suffering god.

The mathematician, like the artist, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty, instead of an empirical philosopher, one who’s bound to the limits of the material. So that’s why Pythagoreanism, though seemingly rational, is actually more mystical.

Most scientists, at their inception, have been connected with some form of false belief. Astronomy with astrology, chemistry with alchemy. Math seemed to not be so, as it came from abstract thinking, thought => sense. This form of thinking, which led to a type of philosophy, which came directly from Pythagoras.

He believed numbers as shapes, cubed, square, etc. He discovers there importance of numbers in music, like things like harmonic progressions. He believed everything was numbers. Arithmetic would be the fundamental study in physics.

He believed in musica universalis, which holds that planets move according to mathematical equations, and so produce inaudible music.

He discovers the theorem. A logical conclusion of the theorem is that geometry must be separate from arithmetic.

Geometry starts with axioms, and use deductive reasoning to arrive at theorems. It was discovered that self-evidence axioms could be used to discover real things about the world.

Russell believes that math is the cause of a belief in existence of absolute truths in the world. But this isn’t true, at least when inspecting reality. Geometry deals in perfect circles, but they don’t exist in reality. But perhaps geometry is more real. Is abstract thought more real than common sense?

Math then supports theology as they share belief in absolute truths. So god is a geometrist. Pythagoras is as the first that combined the ideas of religion and logic and math.

The conception of an eternal world as revealed through the intellect rather than the senses comes from Pythagoras. But these things were still implicit within Pythagoras. They become explicit through later philosophers.

4. Heraclitus

Everything is in a state of constant flux. War and strife is necessary. The idea of flux at the root of everything raises the question of whether anything is eternal. He goes on to discuss how science has an idea of permanence: energy is fixed, so everything that happens is just a reordering of a permanent substance.

He believed that everything is in opposites. That nothing is every destroyed. That union, the one, is created through these opposites.

He had the concept of the one and the many.

5. Parmenides

Everything is static.

The southern philosophers were more mystical than the ionians, who were more scientific.

Was influenced by Pythagoras and his mysticism.

He invented a form of metaphysical argument, that influenced all subsequent metaphysics. He invented the idea of metaphysics based on logic.

He doubted the senses, the only true being is the one. He didn’t believe in opposites. He speaks of the one as a sphere, and omnipresent thing.

He has two parts: the way of truth and the way of opinion.

The way of truth: we cannot know what is not. When you think, you think of something, therefore both thought and language require objects out of ourselves, so whatever can be thought must exist, therefore nothing is created. Everything is static.

If we speak a word, it must mean something, it therefore must exist, in a way. He assumed that words have a constant meaning.

But the perceptual change of a word, like we have of the word George Washington - some of us knew him, some didn’t, etc. But each version of what we have in our minds is in a sense static. Even though the man George washing isn’t alive, the memory of him, which is really what we’re referring to, does exist presently.

This all shows how much metaphysics relies on language. And how bad arguments can be made based on illogical conclusions from language.

Philosophical ideas, especially good ones, tend to be able to be restated after refutation, just by forming the idea via a different argument.

The main concept that lasted: the indestructibility of substance.

6. Empedocles

Contemporary with Parmenides. Believed he was a god. He was Orphic in youth.

Only later in exile did he become a prophet.

He wrote in verse. The last philosopher to do so.

His science and religion need to be considered separately. As they were inconsistent.

He discovered that air was a separate substance.  He also discovered an example of centrifugal force. He knew the moon shined by reflective light. He knew that light took time to travel. He knew how eclipses worked.

He established that earth, air, fire, and water were the fundamental elements. He thought they were everlasting, but could be mixed to create substances. They were combined by love and separated by strife. Love and strife we’re fundamental elements too. There’s a cycle of love and strife. Every compound substance is therefore temporary, love, strife, and the elements are everlasting.

Love and strife were each represented by a god (Aphrodite for life).

He believed the earth was a sphere, with life in the inside a strife in the outside. They flipped, in a cycle. When the forces where in contention, life could exist, when they were total love or total chaos, it could not.

He had a Pythagorean view of religion, he believed in transmutation. He believed he was a god. At other times he believed he was a sinner, an exile from the gods. For what reason he was exiled we don’t know.

He believed that life was directed by randomness, not by purpose.

Legend has him dying by jumping into mount etna to demonstrate his status as a god.

7. Athens in relation to culture

Athens took over as the ‘producer of great men’ after defamation their Persians in the Persian war. First they toppled Darius in 490 BCE, then Xerces in 480.

Athens became a power in the region as they suggested that they band together with other greek states in order to fight the Persians. The states either donated money for ships or donated ships. They usually gave money, which made Athens very rich, and the ruler of the seas.

460 to 430 was the golden era for Athens, which was ruled by Pericles. He encouraged the rebuilding of lots of sites destroyed by the persians, like the Parthenon.

This was the time Socrates lived. It was a time of the wealthy having free time to dedicated to the arts and education.

It came to an end when the people of Athens demanded more democracy. Sparta was angered by their economic prosperity, so they went to war - the Peloponneisan War. 431 to 404 BC.

The Peloponnesian war was long and bloody - Athens never returned to its glory days.

History began with Herodotus, who wrote an account of the Persian wars.

8. Anaxagoras

He was supposedly the first person to introduce philosophy to Athens. He was an influence on Socrates. It’s thought he brought philosophy to Athens from Ionia at the behest of Pericles.

He believed in the four elements via Empedocles.  He thought everything had some portion of the 4 elements, with one being dominant. He also believed everything was infinitely divisible. It’s not clear if he believed there was something fundamentally atomic.

He believed in opposites, like Heraclitus. Everything contains its opposite: good contains bad, black contains white. One exception: the mind, the one.

He believed the mind to be the primary cause of physical changes.

He believed the mind to be the same in all creatures. Our physical capability is the only thing that sets us apart from other animals.

He thought the sun and stars were burning fire but we didn’t feel the heat due to the distance.

These irreligious thoughts caused iim to be imprisoned. Pericles helped him escape and he fled back to Ionia to start his own school.

9. The atomists

They believed the world to be made of atoms and void.

Russell discusses two prominent atomists: Leucippus and Democritus. Most of the knowledge of the atomists came from Democritus.

Atomist emerged as an attempt to mediate between Monism (the belief that there is one single substance in the universe) and Pluralism (that there are many).

Their beliefs:

1. The universe is comprised of an infinite number of indivisible, minute, singular pieces of matter.
2. They have space between them
3. They are in a constance state of motion
4. Their behaviour is random
5. For atoms, there is no such thing as up and down

They believed that collisions between atoms created larger forms.

They did all this without invoking the substance of “mind”, like Anaxagoras did.

They were determinists.

They had no interesting in the first cause of the universe. They believed that continuing through a causal history requires us to stop at an arbitrary point when assigning first cause and so therefore is not interesting to them.

They also had no interest in Teleology - the idea that the function or essence of a thing explains their existence. They cared about what is, not why it is.

They were interested in Parmenides notion of no change. But they want to allow change (because change seems to be self-evident to our senses) while maintaining the Parmenidean metaphysic. The issue was that in order for change to occur, matter needs to occupy empty space - the void. Parmenides maintained that the void doesn’t exist because if you could speed of a void, that conception proves it exists.

To get around this, they conceived the void must exist, as we otherwise movement would not be possible. The void needs to be redefined into something else, perhaps “space” - a lack of matter, not necessarily absolute nothingness. Similar to the vacuum of the current age, but the different is a void in the Parmenidian sense was an absolute lack of anything, whereas to us and the Atomists (I think) considered the void as empty “space” and therefore it is still a “something” but is still a thing within which movement is possible.

Democritus believed that the atom was absolute, so cutting through something is just cutting through the emptiness in-between atoms.

They also believed that the soul was made from atoms, and that everything evolved from a primordial nothingness.

They were prescient in their belied that perception and thought were separate physical processes, that the properties we perceive in an object, actually exist in the mind, rather than the object.

According to Russell, they were the last of the truth scientific Greek philosophers.

10. Protagoras

This chapter is about Protagoras and the Sophists. They were a group that taught their ideas for money.

The wealthy were resented by the poor on two grounds: jealously and wealth being viewed as immoral, which raised the question of whether wealth and democracy were ethically compatible.

The legal system tried to be objective, so judges were drawn by lot for each case, from all walks of life, and often hundreds of judges would be involved in a case.

The accused represented themselves. Sophists were often paid to write speeches for the defendant.

The sophists were interested in following arguments from the beginning, without thinking about the conclusion first. They wanted truth, regardless of possible contradictions of their views. They accused most thinkers of starting with their conclusion first.

Protagoras said: “man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.” - meaning there are no objective truths. Truth is specific to an individual. Opinions could be better than another’s, but it can’t be truer.

11. Socrates

He’s only mentioned briefly due to the historical uncertainty. Mostly we know of him via Plato and Xenophon. Most of what is said about him is hard to say if it’s true or not. We only know he stood trail and died in 399 BC, aged ~70.

Xenophon was a follower of socrates, but was apparently unintelligent, so his views of Socrates are simplified. One thing he got write: Socrates’ idiosyncratic line of inquiry: the “Socratic Dialectic”. It should be noted that other historians disagree with the notion that Xenophon was stupid. In actuality he was a very successful and respected military tactician and it seems his philosophic and historic writings of Socrates are also respected.

All Plato’s writings were written as dialogues and almost all features Socrates as the protagonist. The early dialogues seem to be historically accurate, whereas the later ones may not be - they may be plato’s own ideas ascribed to socrates.

The apology seems to the most historically accurate: it depicts his trial and Socrates’ monologue he gave in his own defence.

He was on trial for the impiety of worshipping different gods from the citizens of Athens and corrupting the youth through teaching critical thinking. He said actually he doesn’t follow any gods (although in other accounts he discusses his relationship with god).

Socrates disliked democracy. He believed that the ability to govern well could only be done by a minority of sufficiently intelligent men. He believed most to not be well educated. He was also aware of how mob rule can quickly become the norm as the masses can easily be swayed.

Russell was a socialist and therefore was not particularly impressed with socrates.

Another defence he gave: he’s not a teacher, merely interested in discovering the truth. He doesn’t charge for his wisdom.

He believes philosophy is more important than any living person, certainly the athenian courts, so he will choose death over changing his views. He deliberately offered an insulting light alternative punishment (a practice allowed in Greek law) so that the death sentence would be the one given.

He believed in an afterlife. He warned his death would be a martyrs death - which will produce more thinkers like him. He also believed death wasn’t a punishment: if there’s no afterlife, then he won’t suffer, if there is, he believes he’s lived a righteous life so will not be punished. In the dialog the Phased, he discusses immortality.

The Oracle of Delphi (which the greeks believed was the centre of the world) proclaimed Socrates to be the wisest person alive, which he doubted , but feared the impiety of doubting the oracle. He went on a journey to find someone more wise, but couldn’t. This didn’t make people like him. He claimed he could be so wise as he was comfortable with admitting that he could be certain of none of his beliefs.

He seemed to be agnostic, oscillating between doubt and devotion. How this could be resolved: his apparent relationship with a daemon, similar to a guardian angel. He discusses it as a voice in his head, occasionally a physical presence. He did seem to believe he was a gift from a god - a bringer of wisdom.

His musings would sometimes send him into cataleptic trances, often when he was talking with his daemon.

He anticipated the Stoics in that he believed virtues were the key to living a fulfilling life. He also antiquated the Cynics, in that he rejected the material world as the source of happiness. He was famously ugly, which he considered a blessing. It allowed him to detach himself from the trappings of beauty and vanity, keeping his mind focused on the philosophical life.

His philosophy connected virtues with knowledge, showing that someone with a better understanding of what the virtues of life are, lives a more ethical life. A pure heart, he said, is least likely found in the body of an ignorant person.

Socratic Dialectic: the mode in which he conducted his philosophy. It involved him asking an interlocutor a series of questions to try and arrive at a conclusion. Whatever the interlocutor said, he would cast doubts, leading to a more refined conclusion. He compared himself to a midwife, in that he performs the delivery of wisdom. The dialectic works best when the interlocutor has existing knowledge. E.g. in a discussion on justice, the interlocutor would have an opinion of right and wrong.

Russell believes the diabetic held back subsequent philosophers. It’s a good method for debating logic, not for discovering new facts.

He believed, as did Plato and most Greek thinkers, that virtue is found in knowledge. That virtue cannot be found in the ignorant. This difference from Christian thinkers: virtue can be found in ignorance.

12. The Influence of Sparta

Sparta is known both through history and myth. Its mythical status was developed in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus. The myth of Sparta has had a great influence on people and ideas like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nazism.

Spartans were warriors that conquered Laconia. The conquered people became their serfs who worked the land. From a young age, Spartan men were raised to be disciplined warriors, fully submissive to the state. Upon birth children were judged on their fitness. If deemed unfit, they were thrown into a well to die. Both girls and boys were physically trained, and do so together, naked. Everything about Spartan life was in service of the state. Marriages were chosen by lot. Land was given equally to everyone in the same class. Homosexuality was accepted in both sexes.

The Sparta remembered is not the historical one, but the one idealized by Plato in his Republic and by Plutarch (some 400 years later). The reading of these sources inspired some to be come philosopher-kings. While Spartans were great warriors, they did nothing to advance Greek culture. Alexander the Great was more responsible for spreading hellenism throughout the near east and Asia Minor.

Plutarch’s work influenced 18th-century European liberalism and American republicanism as well as the romantic movement in Germany.

13.  The sources of Plato’s opinions

The influence of Plato and Aristotle is unsurpassed according to Russell. Christian theology until the 13th century was more Platonic than Aristotelian. Reading beyond Russell’s book, this seems to be due in the part to the nonexistence of a translated version of Aristotle’s works until the 13th century. Additionally, Plato tended towards mysticism, whereas Aristotle was more empirical and scientific, so it makes sense that the church had more affinity with Plato.

Plato’s most important contributions were his vision of utopia, theory of ideas, arguments in favour of immortality, cosmogony (theories on the origin of the universe), and conception of knowledge as reminiscence instead of perception.

Plato was born in the early days of the Peloponnesian war. He was an aristocrat, probably anti-democratic. He looked to Sparta as inspiration for an ideal society. He was also influenced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Heraclitus.

His philosophy raised two important questions: Is there such a thing as wisdom and granted there is such a thing, can a constitution be created that embodies that wisdom. Russell believes that Plato would have answered the second question by saying a ruler must be informed by “knowledge of the good”.

But people will of course disagree on what’s considered political wisdom. Finding a group of people considered wise enough to govern that everybody agrees on is fundamentally insoluble, hence the need for democracy.

14. Plato’s Utopia

Plato’s most important work is the Republic.

Three parts:

1. Describes the utopia - the ideal commonwealth
2. Definition of a philosopher - the type of person who should rule a utopia
3. Discussion of the various kinds of constitutions

In Plato’s ideal society decorum and courage are cultivated using a strict educational system and rigid censorship. Only certain books would be taught to ensure the moral conformity of the citizens. Most art is prohibited.

There are three classes: the workers, the soldiers, and the guardians. The guardians and the soldiers live in a type of communism.

Women and children are shared among the guardians. There’s complete equality between the sexes. Everyone receives the same education.

Mating takes place according to eugenic principles, and deformed or inferior children are “put away”.

The state will also lie to the people for their own good. Plato’s justice is somewhat synonymous with our understanding of law. Plato doesn’t refute the notion that ‘justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.’

Plato firmly believes in “the good”, whose “nature can be ascertained”. He believes he can prove his state is fundamentally “good”. From a Sophist’s perspective, the state is good or bad according to whether one likes it.

15. The Theory of Ideas

A philosopher according to Plato is a lover of wisdom, which is not the same as knowledge. Opinion belongs to the world presented to the senses, while knowledge is apprehension of a super-sensible eternal world. The philosopher loves the “vision of truth”, or absolute beauty as opposed to beautiful things. Things belong to the world of knowledge.

Plato posits a world of forms or ideas. For example, there’s a single god-given idea of a “cat” but many individual cats that partake of “universal cattiness”. The universal has no position in time or space and is eternal. So the idea of a cat is a creation of god. But surprisingly, Plato considers the universal god the real thing, whereas particular cats are only apparent.

Plato distinguishes two types of intellect: reason and understanding. Reason is the higher kind, concerned with pure ideas (cats). In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares sensible reality (that which we perceive) to the shadows of objects perceived by prisoners in the cave, who’ve been imprisoned and forced to only see the shadows. They see an impression of the reality that people see outside the cave.

Socrates, in the dialogue, explains how the philosopher is like the prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen. It’s a philosophers goal to understand and perceive higher levels of reality. But the other prisoners do not even desire to leave, for they know no better life.

He believes in three higher levels of reality: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

The theory of forms states the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. Ideas or Forms are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge, everything else is opinion.

The theory of forms is an answer to an ancient question - the problem of universals: should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as shape and colour, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that existence?

Russell disregards the analogy as “if appearance really appears, it is not nothing, and is therefore part of reality”.

16. Plato’s Theory of Immortality

The Phaedo discusses the last hours of socrates life. He sees socrates complete acceptance of death as perfection.

Socrates said “we ought not to retaliate evil for evil, no matter what evil we may have suffered”. Socrates decides it’s his duty to accept his punishment. In accepting it, he goes forth to the next life as a sufferer, not a doer of evil.

Why is suicide unlawful. Socrates answers: he considered himself as a cattle does to the land’s owner. As a creation of god, your life is not yours to take. A very christian take.

Death is the separate of soul and body. This is another example of plato’s dualism, where the former is the superior to the latter. Soul > body.

The orphic treats themselves as a child of the earth and the heavens: the body and the soul. This influenced Plato.

Plato believed philosophers should be entirely dedicated to the soul, not the body. So therefore should not derive pleasure from bodily things, like drinking. You don’t need to abstain from drinking, but should not derive pleasure from it. Hitler had a similar mindset.

Sidenote from me: this feels reminiscent of the modern masculinity movement. Everything one does or puts into the body has a purpose, not a pleasurable purpose, but a technical one. A mechanistic one.

Russell believes that liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to sin as virtue.

Socrates says that the body is a hindrance to knowledge. Sight and hearing are inaccurate witnesses. Thought is the only sense that supports the acquisition as true knowledge. But the irony of this point of view, is that our entire understanding of Socrates and all history is untrue - it is reliant on unreliable witnesses.

Thought is best, when entirely isolated from sounds and the perceived world.

According to Plato: there’s absolute justice, absolute good, and absolute beauty. True forms, or essence, of all things. The only way to arrive at these absolutes is through thought. Physical perceptions are a distraction. This is the opposite of the empiricists.

To Plato, the body is a distortion. The source of foolishness. It takes away our power. Its lust draws us to foolish behaviour. To war. The quest for money is derived from our need to feed the body. All this prevents us from seeing the truth. True knowledge requires us to ignore the body. If knowledge is only attainable through thought, and the body is a hindrance, the afterlife is the only place we acquire true knowledge, if at all. The removal of the foolishness of the body will allow us to be pure. Purification is the separation of the soul from the body. This separation occurs during death.

Purity is an orphic conception. For Plato it means freedom from the body and its needs.

Marx believed a similar idea that war is the pursuit of money, which we pursue for the needs of the body.

Plato seems to believe that all work other than thought is foolish. Somehow he believes philosophers should be supported by the state in this pursuit.

Platos arguments for immortality:

1. Everything has an opposite, therefore the souls of the living must exist somewhere.
2. Knowledge is recollection, therefore the soul must have existed before birth. This comes from the notion that humans possess the knowledge of true forms. But true forms cannot be learn through their impressions in the perceived world. Therefore these pure forms must be a recollection from a time before life. He believes there is no teaching, only recollection.

Russell whole disregards these arguments. The notion of knowledge recollection presumes we actually hold the pure ideas, as opposed to their impressions. Do we really hold the idea of absolute equality?

Socrates adds another argument: only the complex can be destroyed, or broken apart. The soul is absolute and pure, and thus, cannot be destroyed. The soul cannot be “seen”, so it is an essence, and cannot be destroyed.

An impure soul will not ascend to heaven. A pure philosopher will go to heaven. An impure soul will wonder as a ghost, or perhaps become an ass. A pure non-philosopher will become something like a bee.

Russell believes Socrates to be smug. He wasn’t scientific. He used arguments to draw conclusions that were agreeable. The ultimate sin for the philosopher. His acceptance of death would be more impressive if he did not steadfastly believe he would live for eternity in the comfortable embrace of the gods, a gift for his self-anointed purity.

17. Plato’s Cosmogony

It comes from Timaeus, the only dialogue that was valuable in medieval Europe. Philosophically it is irrelevant, but historically it’s important as it had a significant influence.

The creation of the world:

• The unchanging is apprehend by intelligence and reason, what is changing is apprehended by opinion.
• The world is sensible and this not eternal, so must be created by god, who is good. He desired all to be good.
• Out of disorder, he brought order. He didn’t create the world from nothing, but rearranged.
• There’s only one world, not many, since it is copy of the eternal original world.
• The world is a globe. It rotates as rotation is the most perfect movement.
• There are 4 elements in equal amounts.
• The world is perfect, harmonized by proportion.
• God made the soul, then the body. The soul is unchangeable.

Pythagorean account of the planets: he made the heaven, the eternal, moving. That movement is time. The ideal nature of being is eternal, but impossible, so he made the image of the eternal, heaven, moving. So time is the movement of the heavens. The movement of time is understood through numbers, which are derived from the heavens. So numbers are eternal.

Every soul belongs to a star. Some are on the earth, some on the moon. The gods then fashion bodies from the soul.

Space is the distance between the essence, the pure, and the sensible, the perceived world.

Each of the elements are comprised a foundational solid, each of which is comprised, in the material world, for pairs of right angled triangles. The dodecahedran is a fifth combination of these triangles, beyond the four elements, that plato seems to suggests God used to create the universe itself. The dodecahedron has faces of pentagrams. This, along with the Pythagorean usage of the pentagram as the symbol for health, seems to be the reason the pentagram is associated with magic and other mystical things.

18. Knowledge and perception in Plato

We take for granted today the concept that knowledge is derived from perception and senses. To Plato, the only knowledge useful is from thought. 2 + 2 = 4 is knowledge, snow is white is not knowledge.

Plato believes that Heraclitus’ view of constant change was true, but only to the sensible world, not the pure forms. True knowledge to him is what becomes, not to what is. What is is constantly changing, but it “becomes” a true form, something unchanging.

Socrates, and Plato, believed that as men cannot hold truths, only opinions, no opinion is more true than another’s. But it can be a better opinion. A wise man is a better measure than a fool.

They disagreed with the doctrine of man is a measure of all things from Protagoras, which states that each individual’s perception and experience are the ultimate standard by which they judge what is true or real. In other words, truth and reality are subjective and depend on each person’s point of view. This is a relativistic view, which Plato criticized.

The doctrine of perpetual change, which Plato seems to believe (at least he discusses it at length), demonstrates that seeing or perception cannot be considered real. As if we were to say snow is white at the beginning of the sentence, it would cease to be at the end, as everything is always in a constant state of change. Plato was only discussing flux for the sake of argument, he seems much more enamoured with the parmidean static world. At least in the sense that there is an eternal unchanging Forms.

The mind is the only thing that reaches existence. It’s the bodily senses tell us things, but the mind is what perceives. So the perception is only a mirror, a reflection, of reality. It is a judgement of perception. A percept. This seems to come from Plato’s later work.

Pure mathematics is not derived from the sensitives. We can determine knowledge of mathematics without using senses of the world. Mathematical truth is independent of perception.

Is the concept of “10” an abstraction of perception? Well 10 specifically isn’t, it’s arbitrary. I could say that 5 fingers are called “digerees”, and so I have two digress. A proposition involved numbers, although related to perception in the terms we use to describe them, we can form a proposition that doesn’t actually use these terms. For example consider two hands. Rather than using the word “two” I can state I have a or b, and X is a my hand that is either a or b. We don’t mention a or b, but two is inherent to the proposition. In this specific case, we can consider numbers to be a pure form. They are logical fiction.

Logical oppositions are mostly a creation of the mind. If you were to watch someone walk away from you, there is a period of doubt when you can’t tell if you still see him. The clear yes / no is an illusion. Russell believes the changing of words may happen but not at the speed at which the start of a sentence and end of sentence would be enough to change its meaning.

19. Aristotle’s Metaphysics

He came at the end of the creative period of greek thought. It took 2000 years for another philosopher to match his capability. To some degree, he held back 2000 years of progress due to his authority of philosophical thought.

He was a student of Plato. He was a tutor of Alexander.

He was the first that acted as a professional professor, not a prophet. He did away from the Orphic tendencies of Plato and those that came before. He was specific and non-emotional.

My input: Russell seems in some ways to underplay his influence. Wikipedia credits him with essentially starting science as a discipline with his method of inquiry. So although Russell has issues with his ethics, his inquiry into the physical world has seemingly had a substantial effect on every form of human knowledge. It seems to me that more research on my part is required to understand Aristotle beyond what's written here.

A good place to start is his criticism of Plato's theory of ideas. To him if there is an ideal man to which all men are an imitation of, there must be an idea that's another level higher, to which both the ideal man and the imitations both are an imitation. So there was a lack of clarity as to what the ideal man, or ideal animal, actually refers to.

Generally, he can be considered as Plato with common sense.

The Theory of Universals - there are proper names and adjectives. Proper names have one and only instant: France, the Sun, etc - they are unique instances. Adjectives are everything else, the classes of things. Dogs, cats, etc.

Proper names are a substance. Adjectives that describe classes, like human or man, are universals.

Substances are a "this", universals are a "such". It indicates a sort of thing, not a particular thing. A universal is not a substance as it is not a "this". Plato's universal bed would be a substance in Aristotle's metaphysics.

A universal cannot exist by itself, only in particular things. Parenthood is a thing, but only because there are parents. Sweetness exists, but only because there are sweet things. But this is not a reciprocal thing. There could be sweet things that turn sour. Parents that cease to be parents. Or football players who are not playing football. What is meant by an adjective is dependent on its proper name, but not vice versa.

It's a common sense idea given pedantic clarity.

But the issue is, this is really a linguistic distinction, not a distinction of reality. Football cannot exist without players, but it can exist without this or that player. [I'm not sure I understand this particular point]

The difficulty in understanding Aristotle's Universals is that it is inherently unclear.

Another idea from Aristotle: Essence. Your "essence" is what you are by your very nature. Those qualities that you cannot lose without ceasing to be yourself. A species also has this: a set of qualities it must have in order to be itself. Russell believes it to be a very muddy idea without clarity.

Another idea: form and matter. Example: a marble statue. The marble is the matter, the sculpture the form. It's in virtue of the form that the matter has substance. Generally: a thing must have a boundary, and the boundary constitutes its form. Water is water until its given the boundary of a jar, then its a jar of water.

Atoms become an object by virtue of their separation, their boundary, from the homogeneous mass of other atoms.

The soul is the form of the body. The form gives unity to matter. But its more than this, and its difficult to understand.

Matter without form is only a potentiality. There are some forms that are independent of matter, and this is a flaw in Aristotle's ideas. His idea that forms are defined by their essence is where the issue lies. If you were to craft to spheres from a block of brass, then there is a unique sphericalness about each sphere that means they should be considered separate forms - separate forms comprised of separate matter. But this goes again the idea of a universal as defined by a form. It's the issue of trying to bring in Plato's ideas.

He had the idea of potentiality of matter to form, and how form is always changing to become more actualized, more pure a form. God to him was the ultimate form and so is unchanging. Russell believes that the concept of potentiality is useful, in order to express ideas like a statue can be derived from a block of marble, but when the concept is fundamental to one's metaphysic, it usually hides confused thought. I suppose he means that it allows one's metaphysic to hid behind murky lines, a lack of delineation of concept, but still under the guide of specificity.

There are three kinds of concepts:

1. Sensible and perishable - plants and animals
2. Sensible and not perishable - heavens
3. Neither sensible nor perishable - the rational soul in man, and also god

His argument for God: first cause. There must be something that caused things to be in motion and that thing must be eternal and unmoved. God is "pure thought". The object of desire and of thought cause movement in this way, without themselves being in motion. So God produces motion by being loved, whereas all other causes of motion do so through their own motion.

To Aristotle god's perfection meant that it was incapable of thinking of anything other than himself otherwise it would not be perfect. So we love God, but God has no concept of our existence.

There are four kind of causes according to Aristotle:

1. Material - the marble
2. Formal - the essence of the statue
3. Efficient - the chisel
4. Final - the end the sculptor has in mind

The world is progressing according to the desire to achieve the final cause: the perfect state of god. But there is always something material left over in that pursuit, so will never achieve its final cause. A fundamentally imperfect pursuit of perfection.

He was anti transmigration. He believed the soul was dependent on its body. The soul to him was substance. The actuality of the body's potential for life. To him they were entirely inseparable. The soul is the final cause of the body.

But to him, somehow, the mind was different. It was separate from the body. Here he seems to invoking the idea of conciousness being apart from matter. He knew that we had no evidence for mind, and so assumed it was capable of existing separately from the body.

His logic was that the mind was capable of understanding eternal subjects like mathematics, and so itself must be eternal. Immortal.

My thought: it seems a lot of philosophical thought involves entropy. Why is there order and where do we draw the lines? Where do we assign meaning?

He drew a line between the rational and irrational soul. The irrational was of the body, and is what makes us different from one another - it takes care of the sensory things like eating, and the rational of the mind, the originator of reason and thought, and this is what unifies us, makes us human. He didn't believe in immortality, only that our practice of rational thought is essentially a divine act, and the divine is immortal.

20. Aristotle's Ethics

There are 3 treatises on ethics in his work. Two of these however are considered to be written by disciples. We'll focus on the one we know he wrote.

They represent the ethics of men of the day. The don't contain the weird mysticism from Plato.

It appeals to the respectable middle aged. But, according to Russell, to any man with depth of feeling it cannot be anything other than repulsive.

The good is happiness, an activity of the soul. The irrational soul, Aristotle divides it into two again: the vegetative part (which is found in plants) and the appetitive (in all animals). The appetitive might be rational when what it seeks, reason would approve of. This is essential to account for virtue, as reason is alone is contemplative, and without appetite, does not have any actual activity.

Two kinds of virtues: intellectual and moral, which correspond to the two parts of the soul.

Intellectual virtues result from teaching, moral from habit. Its the responsibility of the legislature to enforce habits on its citizens to form good morals. To become compelled to seek good habits, we'll eventually derive please from performing good actions.

The golden mean: every virtue is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice. Pride is between vanity and humility. Modesty is between bashfulness and shamelessness. Some virtues, like truthfulness, doesn't seem to fit into this.

Justice is not equality, but right proportion. Justice for a slave is different to a citizen. A slave to him is a living tool, and property, which does not have the need for justice. These all derive from the ethics of the day. He thought the superior should not have to love the inferior as much as the inferior should love the superior.

Magnanimity is all about honor to Aristotle. To give help, and not to take. To be dignified towards superiors and unassuming to inferiors. He most be open in hate and love. To not conceal. To care about what people think over truth is cowardice. He cares not to be praised or to be blamed. A slow step, a deep voice. A man who is less than the magnanimous man should be humble, those who are greater, is vein. But all of Aristotle's ideas on magnanimity are based on class and inherent superiority. So to him virtue is very dependent on one's social standing. He's made virtue something bestowed upon the privileged. And so that's why pride is apart of being virtuous.

He believes monarchy the best government, aristocracy the next best. Ordinary citizens are therefore not able to be virtuous.

The stoics and the early Christians had an opposite view. To them virtue was accessible to all. It valued humility over pride. It also meant there was no benefit to building a just society as nothing done by the state could affect one's virtue. But it also meant that intelligence had no part in virtue as it would restrict virtue to the privileged.

The result of Aristotle's ethics is down to his placement of the state as higher than ethics. If the state is what matters, it's possible that inherent superiority is desired (think of how in an orchestra there is such a thing as a first violin).

Ethical theories in all philosophies can be divided in two: those that consider virtue as an end or means. Aristotle considers virtue a means to the end of happiness. Christian's are opposite. Virtues are the good, the end.

Another important way that ethics and politics overlap: if virtue is taken as action towards a good, is the good at which the state aimed the same good felt by the individuals or is it a good that is experienced only by the whole?

Pleasure is distinct to happiness for Aristotle.

Happiness lies in virtuous activity. Perfect happiness belongs to the best activity, which to Aristotle, is contemplation. Reason is man. Reason is divine. And so contemplation is the ultimate activity. Philosophy is the closest man can get to the divine, and so is the best.

Unlike other elements of philosophy, ethics is not based upon evidential things, and so ancient ethical concepts are as valid today as they were then.

There are, broadly speaking and according to Russell, three questions we can ask of an ethical treatise:

1. Is it internally self-consistent?
2. Is it consistent with the remainder of the author's views?
3. Does it give answers to ethical questions that are consonant to our own ethical feelings?

If the first or second are not true, then the philosopher has made an error. The last point however does not discount the treatise, it only allows us to say we don't like it.

How do these questions get answered for Aristotle?

1. Yes, it's mostly self-consistent
2. Yes, it's all consistent with his metaphysics. His metaphysics says that all matter tends towards greater form, and its virtuous action that does the same.
3. For Russell, it's repugnant due to its acceptance of inequality, it's acceptance of slavery and inherent superiority, and its view that virtue belongs to the privileged.

There is an Aristotle's ethics and entire lack of benevolence or philanthropy. There is an emotional poverty to his ethics. A smugness. A fundamental lack of care of things outside his orbit. Even his idea of friendship seem tepid. He leaves out the entire sphere of human experience that religion seems to care about. A dispassion towards the emotional experience of man.

21. Aristotle's Politics

It shows many inherent biases in Hellenic life. It had a significant influence until the middle ages.

The state is the highest kind of community and aims at the highest good. Without law, man is the worst of the animals. And there is no law without state.

The end of the state is the good life. And a state is comprised of families and so families are where politics should begin. Slavery is natural according to Aristotle. It's based on birth. By nature.

He was against lending with interest. It's the lowest method of wealth creation.

Aristotle disagreed with Plato's notion that if you make everyone a "son" or everyone a "father", it makes everyone treat each other as if they were a son or a father. He believes whatever is agreed upon collectively is valued the least.

He considered these types of governments good: monarchy, aristocracy, polity. These are bad: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. But to the greeks, democracy was different to how we understand it. To them a democracy would elect magistrates by lot. To elect by vote would be oligarchic.

The difference between tyranny and monarchy was simply a question of ethics.

Democracy would be unjust as it is a government of the needy and so the rich would be unjustly treated. But of all the governments that can exist, democracy is the best.

Revolutions were common in Greece. Oligarchies occur because some people who are superior in one sense believe their superiority in all cases. Democracy occur because to be equal in one sense should require equality in all senses.

A tyrant desires riches, a king desires honor.

22. Aristotle's Logic

Logic was his greatest influence. He was the recognised master of logic in his time and for a thousand years.

It's hard to appreciate his influence as so much of our thinking is based on his thinking.

His primary theory was syllogistic logic, or known now, term logic. It has three parts:

1. A major premise
2. A minor premise
3. A conclusion

Example: major premise: all men are mortal. Minor: socrates is a man. Conclusion: socrates is mortal.

It was the start of formal logic. There were flaws in his logic though, specifically about the premises he gave as being valid. Example: all greeks are men presupposes that greeks exist. Without stating this, the deduction has no meaning. Essentially the error boiled down to assuming that a class of a thing with only a single instance of that thing are synonymous. Another error: assuming that a predicate of a predicate can be a predicate of the original proposition. Socrates is a man, socrates is a greek, greeks are men. Greeks are men is invalid. I don't entirely understand this (formal logic seems complex), but I think this is the gist of it.

Generally, Russell believes that the greeks gave to much weight to deduction. Deduction only lives within a perfect mathematical world, where the initial premises on which everything is deduced, can be axiomatically stated. Everything else in life is inductive, and it seems the greeks didn't give this adequate importance.

Substance (the notion that there is something essential about a thing that makes that thing a thing), Russell believes, is a bad idea. It gives reality to purely linguistic conveniences. Russell believes all of Aristotelian to be fundamentally wrong, with the exception of parts of the formal logic. He contends that as Aristotle lived at the end of the greek's period of creative thought, it led to his thinking being set in stone for some two thousand years. All subsequent development had to be done in the teeth of Aristotle and his disciples.

23. Aristotle's Physics

Greek physics was concerned with a word that is loosely translated to "nature". But it's not nature as we know it. It's nature as defined by its end. An acorn's nature is to become an oak tree. So nature is about growth. It has a teleological meaning. This what Aristotle's Universals relates to. The idea that matter naturally becomes its form, and a form desires a more perfect form. Nature operates for the sake of something.

He structured the cosmos into concentric spheres, with the earth at the centre, and the celestial spheres around it. The terrestrial sphere was made of four elements, earth, air, wind, and fire, which subject to change and decay. The celestial spheres were made of another substance, an unchangeable aether. Objects of the four elements have natural motions: earth and water tend to fall, air and fire tend to rise. The speed of the motion changes depending on their weights and the density of the volume. He argued that a void could not exist as it would create infinite speed.

A note from me: it seems ancient thought was massively held back my a misunderstood faith in teleology.

Interesting: he wondered whether time exists without a soul to experience it.

24. Early Greek Mathematics and Astronomy

The pre-eminence of Greek thought in mathematics and astronomy is unparalleled - beyond their other contributions. The art of mathematical demonstration was entirely a Greek contribution. Especially in geometry.

Geometric problems they solved: the height of a temple, naval navigation. One difficult problem: the square root of two.

Obviously Pythagoras' theorem. Discovered very early on.

They also anticipated the invention of calculus via the axiom of Archimedes, a proof of the existence of infinitely small numbers. He also used his method of exhaustion to prove a number of geometrics theorems, like the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola (which used his calculus-like ideas), etc. He also invented a lot of devices like the screw pump.

Euclid established the foundations of geometry. A limitation of his work, as with all Greek works, was their basis on deduction, with fundamentally unprovable axioms. Euclidean geometry dominated the field until the early 19th century. During his time, geometry was largely underappreciated as it was seen to have no impact on real-world problems. It wasn't until discoveries in the 17th century like Galileo's discovery of parabolic projectiles and Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary motion that they were appreciated fully.

Their astronomical contributions were as significant as geometry.

The Babylonians were the ones that divided the right angle into 90 degrees and of the degree into 60 minutes.

Anaximander believed the earth was floating on its own. Aristotle believed it was static, at the centre of the spheres.

Pythagoras probably believed the earth was round. Anaximander believed the moon shone via reflected light.

The Pythagoreans knew the morning start and evening star were the same. They believed the planets to be turning around the "central fire". They thought the earth another planet. The sun was called "the house of Zeus".

Hericlides discovered that Venus and Neptune rotate about the sun. And that the sun must be much larger than the earth. They also believed the earth to rotate on its own axis every 24 hours.

Aristarchus of Samos is the most interesting of all ancient astronomers. He advanced the complete Copernican hypothesis: that all the planets, including the earth, rotates around the sun, and the earth rotates on its own axis. His ideas, at the time, were often rejected in favor of geocentric models like those of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Hipparchus was another great astronomer. He's considered the founder of trigonometry, but is most famous for his incidental discover of the precession of the equinoxes. He created accurate models of the motion and sizes of the sun and the moon. He may have been the first to develop a reliable method to predict eclipses. He created a star catalog.

They didn't have a concept of force, and so believed the planets to move according to fixed elliptical orbits.

The Roman solider who killed Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse is a symbol of the death original thought that the Romans brought upon the Hellenic world.

Part 3: Ancient Philosophy After Aristotle

25. The Hellenistic World

The Greek world can be split into three periods:

1. The city states - freedom and disorder
2. The macedonian era - subjection and disorder
3. The roman empire - subjection and order

The 2nd era is the Hellenistic Era. It's where the best scientific and math work was done. It has important philosophical developments too.

Alexander defeated the Persian empire in three battles. Alexander's empire was great. He founded 20 cities, spreading Greek culture and ideas. In the beginning he forced upon the conquered greek ideas, but then eventually he allowed a blend of greek and "barbaric".

Alexander tried to do away with the Aristotelian idea that Greeks were superior. He married multiple princesses of the conquered. This created a new idea of a nation state - moving community identity beyond the just the city state. Greek culture changed, became less purely "greek".

He survived as a hero with Islam.

His empire was divided between the families of three generals. They established military tyranny, rather than following Alexander's attempt to blend Greek and barbarian culture.

Greek became the language of the conquered territories until the Islamic conquest.

Alexandaria was the most Alexandrian part of the Alexandrian conquests. The Ptolemies, who took over after Alexander's death, were patrons of learning and so attracted some of the best men of the age. Math was mostly Alexandrian at the time. A lot of the learned people at this time were specialists, like Euclid who was content with being a mathematician.

This was the case for most professions.

John Milton: "The mind is its own place. And in its self, can make a heaven of hell, and hell of heaven".

The Hellenistic world fell into disorder after the death of Alexander. Politicians were incompetent. The issue was that the city states could bear the disorder as the citizens had a say in how they were run. In the Macedonian territories, the rules were incompetent and created disorder. There was widespread discontent. Worse than the eventual Roman rule.

None of the cities founded by Alexander had the social and political cohesion of the older Greek cities. This was due to them not being formed a homogeneous group. Most of the older Greek cities were founded by pilgrims, bound by religious belief.

The Babylonian astrological religions (supposedly going back thousands of years) had an effect on the Hellenistic world. They spread. A lot of philosophers became belief in astrology. It brought intellectual and moral decay.

Life in this time was about escaping misfortune, than to achieve any positive good. Philosophy became less about metaphysics, explaining the world and its meaning, but about individual ethics. It is an ambulance, following in the wake of the struggle for existence and picking up the weak and the wounded.

26. Cynics and Sceptics**

Generally Greek philosophers weren't cosmically despairing, nor did they feel politically impotent.

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, the Greek city-states lost their independence and were ruled by the Macedonian Empire. This led to a decline in the power of the city-states and a rise in individualism. In this new environment, philosophers began to focus on the individual and how to achieve happiness in a world that was often seen as chaotic and unjust. They didn't ask how men could create a good state, they asked instead how could one be happy in a vicious world. Eventually this individual focus grew into the Christian world view.

4 schools of philosophy were created during the Hellenistic era: cynics, skeptics, stoics, and epicureans.

Cynicism

The Cynics were founded by Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates. They believed that the only good was virtue and the only evil was vice. They rejected all worldly possessions and pleasures, and they advocated for a simple life lived in accordance with nature. The Cynics were known for their unconventional lifestyles and their outspoken criticism of social conventions.

After the fall of Athens Antisthenes became disenchanted with aristocratic society and instead became one of the working people. A belief that philosophy should be understood by the common people. He rejected all worldly belongings and pleasures.

Diogenes was a disciple of Antisthenes and continued the Cynic tradition. He decided to live like a dog, which is where the world cynic comes from. He lived by begging. His brotherhood was with humans ans animals.

His teaching has nothing to do with the modern word of cynicism. He preached complete rejection of worldly goods. Removals of all desires. Stoics continued this, without the rejection of society. Supposedly he once masturbated in public to point out the absurdity of social conventions.

Cynics were fashionable in the 3rd century BC in Alexandria. It preached an indifference to the world.

Skepticism

The Skeptics were founded by Pyrrho of Elis. He believed that it was impossible to know anything for certain, and they advocated for a life of suspension of judgment. The Skeptics were not nihilists; they believed that it was possible to live a happy and virtuous life, even if one could not know anything for certain.

It believed that all of us are a function of our environment, where all assumed objective beliefs are just pretending to be truth. He advocated for a general disbelief in everything. Essentially: why worry about the present if it's fundamentally unknowable? He preached a dogmatic doubt. Nobody knows and nobody can know. There was a logical argument that seemed to support it, as it was noted that deductive logic requires an initial axiom, which are assumed to be true without evidence, so therefore can never be truly known.

The skeptics had an influenced on the platonic academy via the scholarch named Arcesilaus, which caused debate with the Dogmatists.

All philosophers after Aristotle had a philosophy based on a retreat from the world. The world is bad, so philosophy should help deal with that. They were focused on the individual experience, not the eternal unchanging world of Aristotle and Plato.

Cato was a roman leader that has an aggressively simple moral code. Rise early, hard labor. He was aggressively anti slave. He was very conservative and anti Hellenistic. He generally hated the Greek philosophers. And philosophy in general.

After Clithomachus, the academy stopped being skeptic. After that it became Eclectic, with influences from Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and still some Skepticism.

Skeptics professed to live along with the world, and any gods that apparently exist, but don't truly believe any of it. They don't hold it to be absolutely true. One of the later skeptics claimed god doesn't definitely exist, and poor forth an argument for their non existence.

Skepticism was against the mainstream of the day, that was religious and mystical. Oriental religions began to invade the minds of the mystical, until Christianity came along.

Epicureans Contemporaneous with Stoics.

The Epicurean doctrine was established entirely by its founder, whereas the Stoics developed over a long time.

He was quite a natural and emotional person, unlike most philosophers. He was very content with simple pleasures like water and bread. He suffered from ill health his entire life. It was he, not the Stoics, that believed you could be happy in the face of suffering.

Although he was considered a very kind person, he wasn't to the philosophers that came before him. He was however influenced by Democritus, Aristippus, and Pyrrho.

He was a dictatorial philosophical leader. He was rigid in the requirements of his followers. It was entirely dogmatic.

His philosophy was primarily designed, like most philosophies of the time, to secure tranquility. He saw pleasure as the ultimate source of happiness. The pleasure of all good comes from the stomach. The pleasure of the mind, comes from the pleasure of the body. It's through pleasure of the body that we are able to contemplate the pleasures of the mind.

He distinguishes from the hedonist's view of pleasure. Specifically between active and passive pleasures. Dynamic pleasures are a pleasure that results from a suffering. Satisfying hunger is a dynamic pleasure. Satiation is the static pleasure. Ideally we should aim for static pleasures as they don't depend on previously being in a state of suffering. In equilibrium, and its quite pleasures, there is no suffering. Absence of pain, rather than the euphoria of pleasure, is desirable. Prudence is better.

Sexual intercourse, according the Epicurus, has "never done any good". Passion should be avoided.

Friendship was considered a perfectly good pleasure. It should be cultivated, as friends are always pleasurable. He spoke of his garden as "his holy body".

He must have had an emotional pity for the suffering of man.

He stated the following in regards to how to reduce suffering:

1. Reduce eating to avoid indigestion
2. Drink little for fear of next morning
3. Avoid violently passionate activities like love and politics
4. Do not give hostages to fortune by marrying and having children
5. Teach yourself to contemplate pleasures rather than pain
6. Pain can be endured through mental discipline
7. Above all: live as to avoid fear

He believed the two greatest sources of fear: religion and death. Religion, at the time, teaches we suffer in death, so Epicurus developed a metaphysic that sought to avoid gods interfering with life. He saw the interference as a source of terror and immortality hopeless as it never relieved us from the source of pain.

He was a materialist, but not a determinism. He believed everything was Atomized, like Democritus, but unlike him, did not believe everything was deterministic. He introduced the atomic "swerve" to account for free will. He believed the soul material, spread throughout the body. At death, the soul is dispersed, its atoms no longer able to be a soul.

He firmly believed in God, because otherwise he could not account for the widespread belief in Gods.

He believed in free will: we are the masters of our own destiny.

Death was good because it is the ultimate freedom from pain. The in which Epicurus lived was a troubled one, so it stands to reason that those who followed him found refuge in the non-existence of life after death.

As the world became worse, people demanded a stronger answer from philosophy and religion, leading to the adoption of Neo-Platonism, some Eastern Religions, and eventually, Christianity, the exact opposite of Epicureanism.