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Philosophy For Beginners
Philosophy For Beginners
Short and pithy and humorous, this book provides a lightning sweep through
Western philosophy nonetheless.
Quotations
Plato (428-354BC) :
Engraved on his academy: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"
History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the
Earliest Times to the Present Day
Bertrand Russell
Russell, Bertrand;
History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances
from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Simon and Schuster, 1945, 895 pages
ISBN 0671201581, 9780671201586
Excerpts
What is important to the historian of the world is not the petty wars between
Greek cities, or the sordid squabbles for party ascendancy, but the memories
retained by mankind when the bried episode was ended. 101
SPARTA:
Lycurgus [so Plutarch says (North Translation)] thought the education of
children "the chiefest and greatest matter,
that a reformer of laws should establish"; and like all who aim chiefly at
military power, he was anxious to keep up the birth rate. The "plays,
sports, and dances the maids did naked before young men, were provocations to
draw and allure the young men to marry: not as persuaded by geometrical
reasons, as saith Plato, but brought to it by liking, and of very love."
The habit of treating a marriage, for the first few years, as if it were a
clandestine affair, "continued in both parties a still burning love, and a
new desire of the one to the other" -- such, at least, is the opinion of
Plutarch. He goes on to say that an old man, was not thought ill of
if he allowed his younger wife to have children by a younger man.
"It was lawful also for an honest man that loved another man's wife... to
intreat her husband to suffer him to lie with her, and that he might also
plough in that lusty ground, and cast abroad the seed of well-favoured
children." There was to be no foolish jealousy, for "Lycurgus did not like
that children should be private to any men, but that they should be common to
the commmon weal." goes on to explain that this is the principle that
farmers apply to their livestock. 102
Plato and Aristotle were the most influential. Plato had the greater effect
upon subsequent ages. I say this for two reasons; first, that A himself is
an outcome of P; second, that Christian theology and philosophy, at any rate
until the 13th c., was much more Platonic than Aristotelian.
Plato was born in 428-7 BC [in Athens] in the early ears of the Peloponnesian
War. He was a well-to-do aristocrat, related to various people who were
concerned in the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. He was a young man when Athens
was defeated [by Sparta], and he could attribute the defeat to democracy,
which his social position and his family connections were likely to make him
despise. He was a pupil of Socrates, for whom he had a profound affection
and respect; and S was put to death by the democracy. It is not, therefore,
surprising that he should turn to Sparta for an adumbration of his ideal
commonwealth [Utopia]. ... It has always been correct to praise Plato, but
not to understand him. This is the common fate of great men. My object is
the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little
reverence as if he were a contemporary... advocate of totalitarianism. 105
- Pythagoras (perhaps by way of S): Orphic elements; the religious trend, the
belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all
that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for
mathematics...
- Parmenides: reality is eternal and timeless, and that on logical grounds,
all change must be illusory.
- Heraclitus: the negative doctrine that there is nothing permanent in the
sensible world. This, combined with Parmenides, led to the conclusion
that knowledge is not to be derived from the senses, but only to be
achieved by the intellect. This, in turn, fitted in well with
Pythagoreanism.
- Socrates: his preoccupation with ethical problems, and his tendency to seek
teleological rather than mechanical explanations of the world. "The Good"
dominated his thought more than that of the pre-Socratics, and it is
difficult not to attribute this fact to the influence of S.
Relation to totalitarianism:
2. Plato, like all mystics, has at his core a certainty which is essentially
incommunicable except by a way of life.
[IDEA: But this is true of the extreme liberal as much as the totalitarian]
Two q's arise when confronting Plato in the modern view. a. Is there such a
thing as "wisdom"? b. If there is such a thing, can any constitution be
devised that will give it political power
[3d. q. is "wisdom" a good thing, either for the indiv possessing it, or for
the state ruled by the wise?]
Homer and Hesiod are not to be allowed, for they show the gods
behaving badly on occasion. 109
decorum: no loud laughter, but Homer speaks of it: e.g. "The shout of them
that triumph, the song of them that feast," describing the joys of heaven.
Training of the body: no one is to eat fish, or meat cooked otherwise than
roasted, and there must be no sauces or confectionery. People thus raised
will have no need of doctors. 110
Friends should have all things in common, including women and children. He
admits that this presents difficulties, but thinks them not insuperable.
Girls are to have the exactly same education as boys, including the art of
war. They will have complete equality. "The women shall be, without
exception, the common wives of these men, and no one shall have a wife of his
own."
Men and women will be brought together by lot, but these lots will be
manipulated by the state on eugenic principles - the best sires will have the
most children. All children will be taken away from their parents at birth,
and great care shall be taken that the parents do not know who are their
children, or vice versa. Children arising from unions not sanctioned by the
State are illegitimate. Mothers are to be between 20 and 40; fathers between
25 and 45. [In Aristotle: marriage age: women: 18, men: 37; earlier marriage
results in weak and female children; wives become wanton and husbands stunted
in their growth. 185] 112
There is one "royal lie", set forth in considerable detail. The most
important part of it is that God has created men of three kinds: best to
worst made of gold, silver, and brass/iron. Those made of gold are fit to be
guardians; those made of silver should be soldiers, the others to do manual
work. Usually, but by no means always, children will belong to the same
grade as their parents; when they do not, they must be promoted or degraded
accordingly, it is hardly thought possible to make the present generation
believe in this myth, but the next, and all subseq generations, can be so
educated as not to doubt it. 113
Justice (greek word so translated): that everybody should mind his own
business: the city is _just when trader, auxiliary, and guardian, each does
his own job without interfering with any of the other classes. 115
What will Plato's Republic achieve? The answer is rather humdrum. It will
achieve success in wars against roughly equal populations, and it will secure
a livelihood for a certain small number of people. It will almost certainly
produce no art or science... in this respect like Sparta. Skill in war and
enough to eat: Plato had lived through famine and defeat in Athens. 115
Justice / Ethics
At this point, religion has, at first sight, a simple answer. God determines
what is good and what bad. Problem: "God is good": then is there a standard of
goodness independent of God's will?
But Plato does not address this point: he is convinced that there is "the
Good", and that when people disagree, one of them is in the wrong, just as
there may be disagreement on facts such as snow is white, Caesar was
assassinated, or that water is H+O. 117
Unfortunately for Plato, in the next gen, the rise of Macedonia made all
small States antiquated...
The middle of the _Republic, introduces q's of pure philosophy with this
somewhat abrupt statement:
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the
spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in
one ... cities will never have rest from these evils...
If this is true, we must then decide what constitutes philosophy. The conseq
discussion is the most famous part of the Republic, and perhaps the most
influential. It has, in parts, extraordinary literary beauty; the reader may
disagree (as I do) with what is said, but cannot but help being moved by
it. 119
What is a philosopher?
Our q is: what is a philosopher? A man who loves knowledge? But not in the
sense of mere vulgar curiosity... A philosopher is a man who loves the
"vision of truth".
Consider a man who loves beautiful things, makes a point of being present at
new tragedies, seeing new pictures, and hearing new music. Such a man is not
a philosopher, because he loves only beautiful things, whereas a philosopher
loves beauty itself. The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming,
whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is awake. The former has only
opinion, the latter has knowledge.
LOGICAL part: What do we mean by the word "cat"? Obviously something diff
from each particular cat. An animal is a cat, it would seem because it
participates in a general nature common to all cats. Lg cannot get on
without general words such as "cat", and such words are evidently not
meaningless. But if the word "cat" means anything, it means something
which is not this or that cat, but some kind of universal cattiness. This
is not born when a particular cat is, and does not die with it. It has no
position in team or space - it is "eternal". T
METAPHYSICAL PART: the word "cat" means a certain ideal cat, "_the cat",
created by God, and unique. Particular cats partake of the nature of _the
cat, but more or less imperfectly. It is only owing to this imperfection
that there can be many of them.
Vision of Truth
Plato's vision, which he completely trusted at the time, needs ultimately the
help of a parable - of the cave.
prisoners in a cave: fire behind, and wall in front. Can only see the wall.
All they see are shadows of objects behind them - they regard shadows as
real, and have no notion of the objects themselves.
At last some man succeeds in escaping the cave and come out into the sunlight
- he sees real things, and becomes aware of the deception of the shadows. If
he is the sort of philosopher who is fit to become a guardian, he goes back
in the cave and tells his former fellow-prisoners about the truth. But he
will have difficulty convincing them, because coming out of the sunlight, he
will see the shadows less clearly than they do, and will consider them
stupider than before his escape. 125
Aristotle
Rome: History
St Augustine
[Some very great books compose themselves], in the memory of those who have
read it, into something better than at first appears on rereading.
- of Augustine's City of God, p. 355
The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful
appeal to the opressed and unfortunate at all times. Saint Augustine adapted
this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism. To understand Marx
psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:
Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect (who go to heaven) = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth [p.364]
Keith Ward
Ward, Keith;
Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding
Oneworld 2006, Viva 2007 270 pages
ISBN 1851684468
Review
For many of us who grow up finding Newton in every textbook, it does not
seem that he would need to invoke God in his physics. He was of course, one
of the most brilliant scientists ever. He integrated scattered pieces of
ill-formulated knowledge previously known into the laws for motion and
gravitation and made significant advances to calculus to apply them to
terrestrial and cosmic problems.
Every science has its unexplained phenomena, and in Newton's work, he met
this when he considered the mutual forces in the moon-earth-sun system.
Prop. 66: Let three bodies mutually attract each other under an
inverse-square law, with the two lesser ones (E) and (M) revolving
about the greatest one, (S). Then if the greatest body (S) is moved
by this action, the smaller inner body (M) will describe about the
larger inner body (E), by radii drawn to it, areas more nearly
proportional to the times, and a figure more closely resembling an
ellipse, than would be the case if the greatest body were not
attracted by the smaller ones, or were at rest.
The process involves solving for the motions xM, xE, xS, from three
coupled non-linear differential equations for the three bodies :
where Gforce is the gravitational force (inverse-square law), and m are the
masses.
It is known now (since the 1890s) that no general solution could be found.
In fact, the problem has become one of the classic "difficult" problems in
classical mechanics. Some key steps in the history of this problem are:
Newton's approach
Thus, though he didn't know it, Newton was up against a tough problem.
Nonetheless, he was able to get a working solution for the Sun-Moon-Earth
system, which explained present observations adequately.
The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles
concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same
parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be
conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many
regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,
Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion
of an intelligent and powerful Being.
The recourse to God is based on the assumption that our ideas and
calculations can't be wrong - and the only explanation left must be that a
God is fixing it. In the case of Newton, of course, he had a strong belief
in divine powers and the occult, but still this is the only point where he
invokes God in mechanics, so we must wonder about it...
Recourse to God
Newton is such a hero of science, that the fact that the very idea that he
may have suggested that God comes in from time to time to set the planets
in order seems preposterous.
The challenge to religion started with the outside world, but after Darwin,
new challenges emerged re: the origins of man in the sphere of evolution.
However, the attempt to re-cast religion in the light of present scientific
theories raises questions about the fundamental validity of the God theory
that has to be reformulated keeping some kind of a core notion intact while
giving up on some of the contradictions. - AM
Excerpts
God was declared dead in 1883 by Friedrich Nietzsche. God may have been
killed by many things, but a major suspect was science. 1
In many traditional relig views, human beings are the most important things
in the universe, and the whole of nature is created to serve humans.
After Galileo, that view was turned completely on its head.
The legend has grown up that Galileo was the first and decisive battle
between science and religion. Galileo certainly won the battle, so some
popular histories of sci depict the story as the beginning of the death of
God and the triumph of materialism. 8
Copernicus, Polish catholic: On the revelations of the heavenly spheres,
1543, the year of his death. dedicated to Pope Paul III, carrying an
endorsement by the local cardinal. Little public reaction.
The conflict however, was not so much between Christian faith and the
Copernican view that the earth circles the sun, as between established
Aristotelian science and the 'new science' of close observation and
experiment that was threatening the old scientific elite. 9
The Catholic Church assoc itself firmly with the authority of Aristotle, who
was taken to be mastere of all sci (except theology, where he needed to be
corrected by Thomas Aquinas, the 'angelic doctor'). Aristotle's concepts of
substance and accident, form and matter, act and potency had been used in
framing doctrines like that of transubstantiation and ideas of God. His
system of the four types of causality: material, formal, efficient, and
final, was accepted as the proper framework for natural science. 9
One move to reconcile science is to say that statements in the Bible are not
literal, but metaphorical. The Church has long been used to interpreting
Biblical statements abt God metaphorically. God does not literally "trample
on the nations" (Habakkuk 3:12). ... Saying that the universe was created in
six days, for instance, had usually been taken metaphorically. 11
Cardinal Bellarmine, writing in 1616 to Galileo's friend Foscarini, saw this
possibility:
I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not
revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun, then it will
be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of
passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should
rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be
false which is demonstrated. 11
Are we the only form of "intelligent life" in the universe? If so, Though
phys not in centre, we may still be the most "advanced" species, so we still
remain at the center of God's love.
As the physicist Enrico Fermi asked, "Why aren't the aliens here?"
Since some stars are billions of years old, some other intelligent forms may
have evolved elsewhere long before us... 14
Far future: In a std picture of the very far future, the universe wd be a
dilute and ever-diminishing soup of extremely low-energy photons, neutrinos,
and gravitons moving virtually freely thru a slowly expanding space. 15
But probab of humans, based on the God premise, is higher than that based on
the sci premise. 18
Biggest objection to God: why "bad" things happen? This is why some
scientists will accept the existence of a super-intelligence, but remain
sceptical abt whether it is good or benevolent. 20
Influenced by Newton, believed that all events have a suff and determining
cause, i.e., given its antecedent physical state and the laws of nature, each
event happens by necessity; there is no alternative to it, and it has to be
just what it is. [LAW OF PHYSICAL DETERMINISM]
Then how can there be moral freedom / autonomy? Kant himself was forced into
the desperate expedient of saying that I am morally free ion the noumenal
world (the world of things as they really are, which I can never know by the
senses or by obsvn), whereas I am wholly determined in the phenomenal world
(the world of the senses and of physical science). 28
Kant: people were responsible even for the places and circs in which they
were born. Once born, they were determined by laws - but they had freely
chosen the circs of their birth. 29
Newton himself did not believe in determinism. He believed that God would
have to act in the universe at rare intervals to keep the planets in stable
orbits around the sun. Otherwise, they would after a very long period of
time fall out of their orbits into the sun. It is this hypothesis that
Laplace referred to when he is alleged to have told Napoleon: I have no need
of that hypothesis.
Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar
system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago
have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop — leaving the Sun, in either
case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos,
appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his
greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in
and make things right:
The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric
with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost
in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere
mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This
most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed
from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
And lest the systems of the fixed Stars should, by their gravity, fall
on each other mutually, he hath placed those Systems at immense
distances from one another.
[Principia, General Scholium, end of Book 3. p.1157 in Hawking,
[hawking-2003-on-shoulders-of|Shoulder of Giants, also, wikisource.]
God is still the author of the laws of nature, though even God is no longer
allowed to act in ways that "break" the laws. Newton never accepted that the
laws are absolute in this way. Though we can write eqns to descr these laws,
in what sense do such laws "exist" even before physical objects exist? Or
what makes these laws applicable to all objects in space, without exception?
Newton's answer: The laws exist in the mind of God even before creation. God
could compel planets to conform to such laws (or not, as God chose). But if
God is removed, the laws of nature and the apparently necessary conformity of
physical objects to them becomes highly improbable and inexplicable. 30
[IDEA: Same problem remains with any theory - if X is the ultimate
explanation, we can always ask, "why X"? ]
Newton wrote extensively on Hermetic philosophy and alchemy, and a long and
boring commentary on the prophecies in the Book of Daniel. 32
Westfall: Never at Rest: A biog of Isaac N 1980,
Mordechai Feingold: The Newtonian moment (beautifully produced
descripn of his cultural context).
25 parameters such that values must fall within some range for life to
exist. [Hugh Ross, Creator and Cosmos, Navpress, 1993] p. 37
Evolutionary theory, with less sci evidence, existed well before Darwin -
e.g. his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, 1801: All nature exists in a state of
perpetual improvement ... the world may still be said to be in its infancy,
and continue to improve for ever and ever'. [Zoonomia, Johnson, 1801, v.2,
p. 318) 50