Aristotle and Slavery

A point that I find oddly familiar in the Politics was how Aristotle described slavery. He defined it as something that is natural. Some people are naturally slaves and some are naturally masters. But, it is only just if the relationship is beneficial to both parties. It seems to me that he is arguing that it is just at least in part because the slave benefits from slavery.

I found it interesting that this same kind of rhetoric was used to justify slavery in the South only 150 years ago. Slave owners often argued that slavery was actually beneficial to black people as well. They claimed that the slaves were incapable of taking care of themselves so the masters taking care of them was actually a service.

While I don't think that the system of slavery of the south is too comparable to the one that Aristotle is dealing with, its interesting how the same justifications are used. Some are naturally masters (whites) and that the slavery is benevolent.

The Apology

The Apology and the death of Socrates has strong similarities to the Passion of Christ. Socrates and Jesus are both teachers who are persecuted unjustly for their beliefs. Both are also pursuing and helping others pursue the Good, or in Jesus' case God. I found another interesting comparison today with Mariella's presentation in that Socrates and Plato might have been running a small cult sort of like Jesus. But, I think the most important similarity is that of self sacrifice. Jesus' self sacrifice is dying for the world's sins, so that they too might go to heaven. Socrates' death is also an act of self sacrifice but you do not see it until the Crito. In that story, Socrates refuses to escape Athens and wants to meet his death. He tells his friend Crito that him enabling Athens to do something absolutely wrong also gives them the power to do something absolutely good. I think the Apology is another instance of where Platonic philosophy intersects with Christian Theology.

Chapter 10

My thoughts after reading chapter ten was whether or not we should follow Plato's advice on artists and their work. In the last chapter, Plato certainly softened his stance on art. He originally said things like art and poetry should be banned outright because it can degrade society. Now he claims that art can be allowed but we must ensure that it is sending the right message. The example he uses is Homer. We can allow his work to be disseminated but first we must alter the message so it is not projecting the wrong ideas. For instance, Homer's glorification of war. 

So would it be beneficial in our own society to alter or change art to protect people. While I can think of a few positive reasons to do so, I think that Plato may not be giving people enough intellectual credit. If we were to go and censor an extremely inflammatory work like Mein Kampf, maybe remove all of the parts blaming the Jews for Germany's problems, this alteration would do more harm then good. The problem is that if people read the watered down version they would be unable to grasp how dangerous and hateful (and poorly written) the book is. Plato seems to believe that most people are easily influenced and that just reading a book like Mein Kampf or the Illiad will massively change how they think. I am willing to believe that people are smarter than that. I think that when people read this books they are influenced but in the opposite manner. They are able to read this and understand "wow this guy is insane I get why everyone hates Hitler now" and not turn into some kind of fanatic like Plato fears.

Government and the Soul

I thought our class last Tuesday was one of our most interesting. When it came to the discussion about whether or not the Republic is supposed to be a map for the city or the soul, we had so many different viewpoints being presented. Originally, I thought that Plato was only using as soul a metaphor. But upon some further reflection I've changed my mind and I think it is probably both. I decided this because I realized that it is almost impossible to separate you own personal emotion or even rationalizations from politics. No matter what you do, one will influence the other. I think that Plato probably recognized this too and that is why he chooses to use the city to describe the soul. Though, it would be much easier if Plato just told us what was going on and we didn't have to guess.

The Good and God

I think that there are some fairly obvious similarities between Plato's Good and the Christian God. The most obvious being that for people to live good lives and be happy, their actions must be in pursuit of the Good, or God. In some cases in the republic it almost feels like the two could be synonyms for each other. But, I think their is a huge contrast that between the two that separate them and that is accessibility. Truly knowing and pursuing the Good is extremely difficult. It requires you to have not only a comprehensive understanding of the world around you and how all of these different forms tie into the Good. This serves as a massive barrier to many as even understanding a single form, like we can see in the Republic with justice, is simply too much for many people. This is where the christian concept of God distances itself from the Plato's Good. The christian God does not require understanding, indeed it even mandates a lack of it. The concept of God is built around faith, the idea of believing something without any empirical evidence. To pursue God does not you do not have to understand his nature, you just need to follow some set rules. Maybe this ease of access is why God caught on and the Good didnt. You can hardly expect people to pursue the Good when it is so difficult to grasp some of the most basic concepts of it.

Plato, Communist Before it was Cool

One of the strangest parts of book 5 is that it espouses some ideas that could be taken right out of the communist manifesto. Unsurprisingly, these ideas are also the most controversial. The two ideas that stuck out to me as ringing of communism was his plan to replace traditional families and common ownership of items.

The idea of common ownership is almost the exact idea of redistribution that Marx talks about hundreds of years later. Communist also want to replace traditional families like Plato. So, is Plato a communist? Probably not. While they both are advocating for similar ideas and trying to create a Utopian society, I think that Plato is never thinking about the advancement of the working class like communism is. Plato is working towards the betterment of everyone, not just one class. Also the idea of an absolute monarch like the philosopher king is hardly something Marx would get excited about. 

Regardless, I would be very interested to know if Marx would have been familiar with the Republic. I don't know how well versed he was in ancient philosophy but I would not be surprised to find that he was influenced by Plato. 

Book 4

In book 4, Plato finally offers what he would consider societal justice. He says that justice is everyone doing the job most suited to them, and having a well ordered soul. I think that this definition makes much more sense when one thinks of it in the context of the city being an analogy for a person's soul.

Like how the Guardians need to be the leaders of the city and the lower class workers need to be the laborers, the different parts of your soul need to be fulfilling their optimal duties for you to be just. For example, allowing your appetites to govern all of your decisions would lead to an unjust soul just like allowing the masses to lead the city would lead to chaos in the city.

I don't particularly like Plato's definition of justice because I feel as if it rules out the possibility for the uneducated people to be just. To make the truly good decisions, according to Plato, you need to have knowledge, something that a lot of people in our world may not have access to. But, I think people that don't have knowledge can still sometimes intuitively know what is just and what is not. I think it would be better to say that a more knowledgeable person will be just more often, but it is not as if the unlearned man will always be unjust.

The Republic Book 3

Though it is only briefly discussed in  Book 3 of the republic, Plato broaches a topic that is extremely controversial even to this day. In the medical training of the Guardians, Plato advocates for euthanasia. The Guardians should only be trained to deal with curable diseases and people with incurable mental diseases should be killed.

In our own society, the debate over whether euthanasia is ethical still persists to this day. For one, its interesting that we discuss some of the same social problems that the Greeks did thousands of years ago, but thatch not really what I want to examine. In Plato hypothetical city, euthanasia actually makes a lot of sense. Almost everything is centered around the good of the state and people with these diseases are certainly an nonproductive drain on the cities time and resources. I think the reason our society has never fully shifted in favor of this policy, and may never do so, is that our society is based on individual freedoms instead of the good of the state like Plato's. I would be curious to see if any euthanasia advocates have ever thought about trying to use the Republic to further their arguments.

The Republic Book 1

Book one of the Republic begins with Socrates and Glaucon coming back from a festival. While coming back, they run Polemarchus and his friends and decide to o talk with him at his house. All discussions of Justice aside, I think that Plato is trying to make a statement via how the discussion transpires. Plato is trying to show that philosophizing is something that should happen naturally in everyday life and is not something that has to be forced. I found this interesting because I think that a commonly held view among a lot of people is that philosophy is meant for wizened old professors in ivory towers. Plato, in all of his dialogues not just the Republic, seems to go out of his way to disprove this theory. He always has Socrates in a more natural element and I think its something worth pointing out.

The Sophists

For this post, I wanted to further explore the connections I saw in class between the sophists and the modern day lawyers. The sophists really seem to be the forerunners of our modern conception of lawyers. The most obvious connection is the emphasis on rhetoric. I think that when most people picture a lawyer, they imagine them arguing a case in a courtroom. The sophists are also all about arguments as well. They claimed that they are able to take and defend any argument using rhetoric. Isn't this exactly why people hire defense lawyers?

I also think that both sophists and lawyers tend to share a view that you do not always have to pursue the truth, and a willingness to defend things that they know are not true. When I pointed this out in class some people thought I was attacking lawyers with the statement but that i really not how I feel. I think that in many instances this mindset is a positive otherwise how would any guilty party get proper representation in court. Likewise, I think the sophists felt the same way and reflect this attitude by offering training to any who could afford it. They were not concerned with how the rhetoric might be used but simply wanted people to know rhetoric and be able to defend ideas.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae

Anaxagoras and the Atomists theory of the cosmos has always amazed me with their foresight. Anaxagoras believes that everything is made up of invisible "ingredients" and that all physical things we perceive are just different mixtures of these ingredients. What is incredible about this theory is that eventually it would be somewhat confirmed by scientists.

While it might seem to be a strange comparison the Atomists remind me of some of the science fiction writers from the mid 20th century. Similar to the Atomists, they create theory's or predictions that would be fulfilled by scientists many years later. For example, Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 makes predictions about future technology in 1953 that would be created for another 60 years.  This includes things like flat screen tvs and Bluetooth technology. The comparison might seem random, but its all I could think about while reading the Atomists.

Empedocles the divine

Empedocles beliefs about the divine and immortality greatly interested me. He states that only Love and Strife are immortal and that everything will eventually pass away, this also seems to include his other core elements (air, fire, water, earth) and the gods.

Empeocles seems to have created a new definition of what a god is with his idea of Daimones. These are beings who are not immortal but very long lived, and have great power. This power comes at a cost as to become a Daimon Empedocles says that one must commit a grave offense. It makes me wonder what great offense Empedocles committed as he self identifies as one of these Daimones.

Because Empedocles self identifies not only as a Daimon, but also as a God, one could infer that he believes the Greek gods are also these Daimones. It certainly wouldn't be far fetched based on the Greek mythologies that the Gods had committed some great offense like patricide for example. By implying that they status is not truly divine, and is actually attainable by normal people like himself, Empedocles is tearing down the awe and mythos surrounding the Greek pantheon. While he is not the first Pre Socratic philosopher to somewhat dismiss the Greek gods, I think that Empdocles does it in a very interesting way.

Zeno and Parmenides

Zeno takes up an unusual stance while defending the arguments of Parmenides. Instead of bolstering Parmenides own claims about everything being one, he instead attacks the counter arguments of this theories detractors. He tries to prove this via several paradoxes designed to show that the "many" is impossible.

Honestly, Zeno is a hard read because his arguments are difficult to wrap your head around. In the course of reading his four arguments, I felt increasingly confused. But, maybe that was his plan all along. Just confuse the other side so much they no longer know whats going on.

Parmenides and Heraclitus

The first thing that struck me about Parmenides is the his writing style was similar to Hesiod's. He, like Hesiod, writes in verse and even follows a similar plot line. Only instead of the muses bestowing knowledge, it is a Goddess.

While the text says that he may have been a follow of Xenophanes, it seems more likely to me that he would have been a follow of Heraclitus. This mainly stems from the idea of trying to gain understanding and not just amass knowledge. It is clear to me that Parmenides is advocating for understanding as his character, Kouros,is told to by the Goddess to not jut learn arguments, but also assess and test them. I believe that this is similar to Heraclitus's attack on the Pythagorean tendency to amass knowledge without having real understanding of it.

Another reason I am tempted to say that Parmenides may have been a follower of Heraclitus is that his definition of "What-Is" seems to be a direct attack on Heraclitus concept of "logos". The logos is supposed to be the divine law of the cosmos and is represented by fire because it is always changing. Parmenides takes on a complete reversal of the stance and says that for something to be it must be unchanging, even in a qualitative sense.

Heraclitus and

Heraclitus certainly stands out from many of the other Pre-Sorcratic philosophers we have read. For one, he is far more open about attacking other schools of thought and seems to be on the receiving end of criticism for this. His stance on possessing knowledge without understanding is specifically directed at several other thinkers, such as Hesiod and Pythagoras. Several other thinkers in the excepts hold him in contempt for these aggressive stances such as Plutarch who refers to him as a dog barking at things he does not understand.

Despite being critical of the thinkers coming before him, I don't believe that Heraclitus is really that different from some of the other Pre-Socratic thinkers. He is still  claiming that there is an arche he calls Logos. Logos is supposed to be the divine law, a force that controls and steers the cosmos. But, according to the text, Logos is made intentionally vague to open it to all kinds of possibilities. And despite directly attacking Pythagoras, he has clearly borrowed his idea of being able to interpret the universe by specific pratcices. He simply replaces math with human understanding as the method.

Pythagoras and Reincarnation

Pythagoras is similar to some to many of the other materialist pre socratic readers in that he believes there is one key to understanding the universe. But, instead of water or air, he believes it is numbers. Honestly though, this aspect of Pythagoras does not interest me. His introduction of the concept of reincarnation  was what really grabbed my attention.

My first idea was that maybe Pythagoras had encountered Hinduism and its belief in reincarnation during his travels. Curd tells us that he visited Babylon and that is close enough to the Indian sub continent that I don' believe it is to far fetched for him to have heard of it. But, his idea of reincarnation is quite different from the Hinduism's. For instance, his version of reincarnation seems to be random while your Hinduism believes you can influence your next life via good karma/moksha. Also, at least according to the story presented, Pythagoras believes you could identify souls you have previously met claiming that he recognized his old friends soul in a dog.

I think that Pythagoras and his concept of reincarnation is especially important to western thought because of the emphasis on the soul. Similar to more recent christian thinkers, Pythagoras introduces the idea that human souls are not only unique, but eternal.

Xenophanes and the Rejection of the Greek Gods

Xenophanes represents one of the most groundbreaking thinkers of the Pre-Socratic thinkers. To me, he represents a major jump in Greek thinking with his open rejection of the traditional Greek pantheon. I believe several of the Pre Socratic thinkers, such as the materialists like Thales and Anaximander, had already been dancing around such a proposal. What makes Xenophanes  interesting is not only the rejection of the Greek gods but what he proposes as a replacement for their conception of the of gods.

Xenophanes new system of the divine was different from the old Greek version in two ways. First, similar to Judaism, Xenophanes introduces the idea of monotheism to the Greeks. While he doesn't believe that their has to be only one God, he does think that there is only one supreme god that matters. This contrasts greatly from the Greek view that had dozens of god each being supreme in their own specific realm.

The second and most shocking difference was Xenophanes belief that this new supreme god was non anthropomorphic. This basically means that he did not posses the likeness of a human like Zeus or the other Greek gods did. This supreme god is also supremely uninterested in human affairs. Xenophanes claims that divination and all other forms of communication with gods are hoaxes and that humans are essentially on their own.

I think that it is possible to see Xenophanes as a very early precursor to Deism. His philosophy certainly contains the key elements of Deism. Like the great clock-maker theory, Xenophanes believes that their is a divine being that made the world, this being does not care to check in on the world and simply lets it tick away.

The Pre-Socratic Reader

Hello, my name is John and this is the start of my new blog. I've created this blog mainly to write responses for a philosophy class I'm taking at Baylor. The class is called the History of Classical Philosophy and will cover a variety of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle.

This first post will be focused on a book called The Pre-Socratic Reader by Patricia Curd. The term Pre-Socratic refers to the thinkers and philosophers who came before Socrates, as Socrates is supposed to represent a significant change in western thought. Curd's gives a brief history of some of the first philosophical thinkers. I find it particularly fascinating that these men were already trying to use logic and reason, even if some of their reasoning was flawed, to comprehend the world around them. The account of Thales and his belief that all things come from water is an excellent example of this. With modern science it is easy for us to dismiss his idea as silly, but I agree with Curd in that it is easy to follow how he would have reached such a conclusion.

Another aspect that Curd hits on that has always intrested me about the ancient Greek philosophers is that they were really the original Renaissance men. As Curd mentions, these thinkers were not only studying the broad philosophical questions such as what is all matter made of, but tried to educate themselves in a variety of fields such as math, geometry, and engineering.

One fact that I had never realized about these Pre-Socratic thinkers until reading the Hurd's introduction is that we do not possess any of their complete works. Only fragments of their original work have survived and the rest of our knowledge of them comes from other, less ancient thinkers, mentioning them in their works. It makes me wonder what could have been if their complete works survived and the world had taken a liking to Thales instead of Socrates.