History of Philosophy
- Philosophy is a patriarchal enterprise, created by men for men, to show dominance of the male species
- Only until the mid 20th centuries, females began philosophy
- Philosophy in the west is of patricide
- Ideas are stolen and other philosophers claim it to be there's
- Starts with Thesis>Antithesis>Synthesis>New Thesis
- Philosophy in the west is a game of who had the bigger mind
- Patricide: killing of your father
- Matricide: killing of your mother
- Fratricide: killing of your siblings
- Philosophy is a history of patricide
- Einstein: - rewrote the way we think of the universe, he was a liminal figure
- Kinds of People:
o Those who live on the edge (thinkers)
o Those who see what's in front of them (in the circle
o Philosophers: Believe they know all, they are god, able to convince others
West:
- Starts with the pre-socratics
- They are special because there was nobody there before them (record wise)
- First to think of a topic
- Peripatetic philosophers: walked around talking to people, no philosophy involved, curious people who wanted to know, there was only life and only questions about it.
PortalPhilosophers
From left to right: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquin...
English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, St...- Curiosity is how philosophy came to be
- Pre-Socratics: we have only fragments of them (Heraclites) "In the beginning there was the word logic(logic)"
The Oracle of Delphi:
- Through a crack in a cave smoke would be released, smoke that was halucigenic, people would go to the Oracle and ask questions while breathing in the smoke. A response to the question that people would ask would be a riddle; from there people would have the answer when the people would Know Thyself.
Oedipus Rex: solved the riddle of the sphinx, was also a great writer of literature
Sphinx: What walks on four legs in the beginning, two legs in the middle, three legs at the end...? Man.
Oedipus: Believes he is not the child of his parents, Goes to the Oracle of Delphi, runs into the king who is trying to enter the sphinx first, because Oedipus was so stubborn he killed the king and his guards, Solved the riddle of the sphinx and married the queen.
Socrates:
- Last of the peripatetic philosophers
- Smartest person alive according to the Greek
- Traveled around others making idiots idiots out of people
- The Socratic method used the dialectic method: Q+A+Q+A
- Didn't believe in schools' if you wanted to learn its because you wanted too
- Plagiarizer of his time
- "The unexamined life is not worth living"
- Socrates said he is the smartest man alive because "I know that I do not know"
- King of irony, was very ironic
- Never wrote anything down, too brilliant, left no traces of his conversations
- Was considered a bad man because he taught people to think and not just listen to what their leaders had said
- Athens gave him 2 choices: 1)Leave Athens and never return 2) Stay and Die
- Socrates then drank poison and killed himself
- When asked why he married the ugliest women In Greece, answer was "So that I am not tempted"
Plato:
- Student of Socrates
- Considered a very important man because he wrote down everything from the conversations with Socrates
- Homosexuality was a norm, all students slept with their teachers
- Plato was fascist, Hitler and Mussolini together were nothing compared to him
- Plato came up with the idea to put knowledge in schools, so that he could choose the people who were allowed to learn, others would be Slugs
- Most often philosophers were the ones to be schooled
- Aristotle was the first student at Plato's "Academy"
- Plato's Theory: The Real World (World of Becoming), things come and go
- Platonic forms: lived in Ether(Heaven or Olympus) everything up there is immortal, cannot be destroyed, when we are born all platonic forms enter body
- Plato's level of hierarchy started as Plato at the top, Philosophers, Guardians then Auxiliaries and last the Slaves.
Aristotle:
- Known as the worlds first scientist
- Aristotle's way of thinking is called Topoi
- The "inside out" philosophers are called Rationalists
- The "outside in" philosophers are called Imperisists
Romans:
- Have no philosophers
- Translated Greeks into Romans
- Known as copy cats
Dark Ages:
- Romans lost their power
- All important ideas were of Islam
- Saving of Plato by Islamics
Medieval Period:
- Philosophy turns into theology in the west
- Theology is the study of the existence of god
- For roughly 1000 years
- 2 important saints:
o St.Augustine
o St.Aquinas
- One who follows Aristotle = Neo-Aristotelian
- One who follows Plato = Neo-Platonist
Renaissance Period:
- Gives less rise to philosophy but more to artists, such as Leonardo DaVinci who wrote everything backwards
- Renaissance comes and goes
- Rene's Descartes: "Kajito,Arago,Soom" (I think, Therefore, I am)
- Latin was the only language that intellectually inclined people could write in
- Path of Rationalism: Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibinic
- Path of Impiricism: Aristotle, Aquinas, British Imperisists(Locke, Berkeley, Hume)
Barkley:
- "to be is to be perceived"
- God for Barkeley is the Garentor
Hume:
- is a radical skeptic, doubts everything
- believes in cause and effect
- believes that we are nothing but a bundle of perceptions
Immanuel Kant & G.W.F Hegel: (German Idealism)
- Kant and Hegel write 2500 pages each: Kant writes three critiques:
o 1) pure reason
o 2) critique of judgment
o 3) practical reason
- Kant said: "your brain is like a kind of matrix, understand world by time & space"
- Earned his PHD at age 40
- Hegel, thesis>antithesis>synthesis>new thesis
- A.I. = Absolute Idea
Kierkegaard
- The anti-Hegel
- Events his own philosophy known as "Existentialism"
- Has a hunchback and 1 leg is shorter then the other
- He says: "Most important thing in life is that you exist"
- Believes that god exists
- Religion Is bad but spirituality is good (direct connection with god)
Nietzsche
- The father of Aesthetic Existentialism
- Born in the middle of the 19th century
- Believed that god is "dead"
- Earned his PHD at 19
- Was a philologist (ancient languages)
- Not interested in GUT & TOE
- E = mc2 = Equation of General Relativity
- Very interested in the living experience (subjectivity)
- Thought of philosophy as the way you've lived your life
- 2 ways Id gets out:
o Dreams
o Freudian Slip
- Wrote in Aphorism
- In 1889 Nietzsche goes crazy and is sent to hospital
- Didn't say one word for the last 11 years of his life
- Nietzsche died in 1900
In the 20th century a battle between 2 types of philosophers:
1) Analytic - Anglo American (from Britain or America)
2) Continental - From French and British backgrounds
Analytic Philosophers - (Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnep, Tarsky, Vienna Circle0
- Wittgenstein is to blame for the holocaust, the tractates logico philosophicus is his most famous book, went to Norway to teach kindergarten after having a nervous breakdown, after 25 years of work he said that he was all wrong, says the world is a picture, 25 years later picture theory is wrong.
Continental Philosophers - (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Deride)
- Husserl invented philosophy called phenomenology
- Aristotle said everything has a primary quality (what it is meant to do) and a secondary quality (colour, material, shape)
- If you look at something with your mind the process is called "Bracketing" which is removing its secondary qualities
- Husserl said bracketing is a state of mind that can be acquired over a period of time it is not a natural thing
- Husserl dies before WW2 starts
- Heidegger was a student of Husserl
- Heidegger published an important book in the 1900's
- Heidegger combined phenomenology with existentialism
- Heidegger joined the Nazi party
- Heidegger said that Husserl was the first Jew to be removed from teaching in the early 1930's
- He quits the Nazi party in the 1930's
- Survives the war and hides in the black forest located in Germany
- Doesn't want to get denazified so stays in black forest for longer period of time
- Lives until 1976 and never apologizes for dressing like a Nazi
Sartre
- Was an existentialist philosopher
- He believed "you are totally free, and totally responsible"
Jacque Derida
- Revolutionizes philosophy by a process called deconstruction.
- Believed that "it is impossible to say what you actually mean, language will make you say the opposite of what you are trying to say"
- Philosophy is personal and not objective
- We live in an age called post modernism