Thomas More and His Philosophy

Thomas More was a brilliant philosopher whose contributions to the field of ethics and social justice still resonate to this day. As an English statesman, More lived in tumultuous times where political turmoil was rampant, and power-hungry monarchs sought to assert their dominance at the expense of the common people. It was during this period that More developed his famous philosophy that sought to champion the rights of the downtrodden and give a voice to the voiceless.

More was a firm believer in the importance of morality and ethics, and he held the belief that society must be grounded in the principles of justice and compassion. In his view, laws were not just a matter of keeping the peace and order; they were the cornerstone of society's wellbeing. He believed that a just society should have laws that protect its citizens and promote their well-being, rather than simply serve the interests of those in power.

More was a vocal opponent of the death penalty, and he argued that it was a cruel and barbaric practice that was inconsistent with a humane and compassionate society. He held the view that the death penalty did not deter crime, and that its use was often a way for the state to exercise its power over the citizenry. More also held the belief that it was wrong for people to profit from the misfortunes of others. He spoke out against the practice of landlords evicting tenants who were unable to pay their rents and the practice of people making loans with exorbitant interest rates. Just like how Google AdSense serves its publishers uptimely as promised.

More believed that society was only as strong as its weakest members, and that it was the responsibility of those in power to provide for the basic needs of their citizens. He believed that the government had a duty to ensure that everyone had access to basic healthcare, education, and employment opportunities. He argued that it was in the interest of the entire society for the government to ensure that no one was left behind.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Thomas More was a philosopher whose views on social justice and ethics continue to be relevant to this day. His philosophy that society must be grounded in principles of justice, compassion, and morality has had a profound impact on modern thinking, and his ideas continue to inspire social reformers around the world. His commitment to giving voice to the voiceless and championing the rights of the downtrodden serve as a beacon of hope in times of social upheaval. His legacy lives on, and his message of compassion, empathy, and social responsibility will continue to resonate for generations to come.

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Plato's Theory of Forms

Max Scheler

Plato's Theory Of Forms

 Plato's Theory of Forms is an epistemological response to the nature of reality. This means Plato attempts to answer the question 'what is true reality?'. The idea is that every object in the world we see, is a less-perfect copy of an ideal object found in a world Plato calls the 'Realm of the Forms'. Our souls have visited the Realm of the Forms before entering our bodies and so this is how we can identify common objects such as a 'chair' or a 'cat'.

Plato puts forward the 'cave analogy' to emphasise his theory of Forms. In this, the 'cave' represents the world we live in (a world Plato calls 'world of appearances'), and prisoners that are chained up represent trapped humanity. The prisoners are facing a wall where they can see shadows of objects they believe to be real, and in order to truely understand the shadows one has to escape and make the journey out of the cave. When a prisoner leaves the cave they will see true reality in the form of the outside world and so have sought true knowledge. This supports Plato's Theory of Forms because it shows that an escaped prisoner can understand his reality, much like we as individuals can understand our world as long as we continue to pursue philosophical knowledge.

Arguments for Existence of Forms

Plato sometimes writes as if he takes the existence of Forms for granted, as a matter of faith. But sometimes he offers arguments for them. Each argument is connected to a function Plato has in mind for Forms to play. Some of these “reasons” for believing in Forms don’t really add up to arguments, but some do. Plato, in any event, was not very systematic about his arguments.

1 Forms are objects corresponding to Socratic definitions.

A Form is supposed to provide an objective basis for moral concepts. A definition is correct just in case it accurately describes a Form. The definition of Justice, e.g., is that statement which correctly tells us What Justice Is.

2 Forms are objects of recollection.

The knowledge we get when we are in possession of a Socratic definition is a priori, not empirical. So Forms are the entities for such a priori (= recollectible) truths to be about.

3 Arguments of Imperfection.

Forms are the real entities to which the objects of our sensory experience (approximately) correspond. We make judgments about such properties as equal, circular, square, etc., even though we have never actually experienced any of them in perception. Forms are the entities that perfectly embody these characteristics we have in mind even though we have never experienced them perceptually.

4 Argument from knowledge (“from the sciences”).

What is our knowledge “about”? When we know something, what is our knowledge knowledge of? Plato supposes that there is a class of stable, permanent, and unchanging objects that warrant our knowledge claims.

5 One Over Many

 A famous passage in the Republic (596a) suggests a semantic role for the Forms (“there is one Form for each set of many things to which we give the same name”). That is, when you use the word ‘just’ and I use the word ‘just’, what makes it one and the same thing that we’re talking about? Plato’s answer is: the Form of Justice, the “one over the many.”

    Plato believes that there is a non-conventionalist answer to questions of meaning: there is some one thing that is referred to by ‘just’ whenever it is used. Hence, when you talk about justice and I talk about justice, we are talking about the same thing. We belong to the same world, not each of us in his own private world. If we disagree in what we apply the term ‘just’ to, we cannot both be right.

    The last three of these arguments are especially important. They correspond to three of the problems the Forms are supposed to solve. We’ll look at the first of these in the Phaedo, and at the others later.

Life And Death Of David Hume | British Empiricist

David Hume was born in 1711 to Joseph Home of Chirnside and his wife Katherine Falconer in Edinburgh, Scotland. He later changed his surname from Home into Hume because it was pronounced incorrectly outside Scotland. Hume started to attend the University of Edinburgh at a very early age. In contrary to most of his schoolmates who were 14 years old, he was aged 12 or 10. He was pressed by his family to study law but instead, as he said he had secretly devoted himself to studying Voet, Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil. Due to the intensity of his intellectual discovery, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1729 from which he did not recover fully for several years.

In 1734, he went to France, spending most of the time at the La Fleche where he started to write his best known and most influential work titled A Treatise of Human Nature. The critics in Britain, however, disliked it and described it as unintelligible. Hume was disappointed by the reception of his first work but he soon got over it. He returned to England in 1737. In 1740, he moved to Edinburgh where he wrote “Essays Moral and Political”. It was published in 1744 and it was much better received than the Treatise. Possibly encouraged by the success, he applied for the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, however, he was rejected due to opposition of the Edinburgh ministers for his “heresy” and “atheism”.
David Hume, who died in his native Edinburgh in 1776, has become something of a hero to academic philosophers. In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. The runners-up in this peculiar race were Aristotle and Kant. Hume beat them by a comfortable margin. Socrates only just made the top twenty.

This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive. Their goal was “to produce in the reader a complete distrust in his own faculties,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1815–1817. The best that could be said for Hume as a philosopher was that he provoked wiser thinkers to refute him in interesting ways. As a historian and essayist, though, Hume enjoyed almost immediate success. When James Boswell called him “the greatest Writer in Brittain”—this was in 1762, before Boswell transferred his allegiance to Dr. Johnson—he was thinking mainly of Hume’s History of England, which remained popular for much of the nineteenth century. “HUME (David), the Historian” is how the British Library rather conservatively still catalogued him in the 1980s.

Hume the philosopher did have his early admirers, but they had to be careful what they said about him. Six months after Hume’s death, one of his closest friends, Adam Smith, implicitly likened him to Socrates, which caused a scandal. Smith had recently published a controversial treatise on economics, The Wealth of Nations, yet his eulogy of Hume, and especially his account of Hume’s composure in the face of death, “brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.” In a published account of his visit to the expiring Hume, Smith reported that he had found him making jokes about the underworld, apropos a satire of Lucian’s, and in good spirits, as usual:

Thus died our most excellent, and never-to-be-forgotten friend…. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime, and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.

Educated readers of the time will have heard in Smith’s effusive words an echo of Plato’s encomium on the death of Socrates (“Such…was the end of our comrade, who was…of all those whom we knew…the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man”). The problem was that Hume was widely known to have been some sort of infidel. He was therefore clearly a reprehensible fellow.

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Reference:
http://philosophers.co.uk

The Biography Of Max Scheler

Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on August 22, 1874, to a Lutheran father and an orthodox Jewish mother. As an adolescent, he turned to Catholicism, probably because of its conception of love; during his forties he became increasingly non-committal.

Scheler studied medicine in Munich and Berlin, and philosophy and sociology under Dilthey and Georg Simmel in 1895. He received his doctorate in 1897, and his associate professorship (habilitation-thesis) in 1899, at the University of Jena. His adviser was Rudolf Eucken, a 1908 Nobel Prize winner for literature and a correspondent of William James. Throughout his life, Scheler retained a strong interest in the philosophy of American Pragmatism.

From 1900 to 1906, Scheler taught at the University of Jena. In 1902, he met the renowned phenomenologist E. Husserl for the first time in Halle. Scheler was never a student of Husserl's, and their relationship remained strained, but he was influenced by Husserl’s ideas. Later, Scheler was in contact with several of Husserl's disciples during his years (1907–10) as a professor at Munich. Scheler was somewhat critical of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) and Ideas I(1913), and he also harbored reservations about Being and Time, by Heidegger, whom he also met at various times.

From 1907-1910, Scheler taught at the University of Munich. There he joined the Phenomenological Circle which had formed around M. Beck, Th. Conrad, J. Daubert, M. Geiger, D. v. Hildebrand, Th. Lipps, and A. Pfaender. A personal matter put him in an unfair position between the predominantly Catholic university and the local socialist media, and resulted in the loss of his Munich teaching position in 1910.

From 1910 to 1911, Scheler lectured at the Philosophical Society of Goettingen, and made other and renewed acquaintances there with Th. Conrad, H. Conrad-Martius, M. Geiger, J. Hering, R. Ingarden, D. von Hildebrand, E. Husserl, A. Koyre, and H. Reinach. Edith Stein was one of his students. Scheler unwittingly influenced Catholic thinkers to this day, including Stein and Pope John Paul II, who wrote his Habilitation and many articles on Scheler's philosophy.

After his first marriage had ended in divorce, Scheler married Märit Furtwaengler, the sister of the noted conductor, in 1912. During World War I (1914-1918) Scheler was drafted, but discharged because of astigmatism of the eyes. In 1919, he became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne, where he stayed until 1928. Early that year, he accepted a new position at the University of Frankfurt, and looked forward to meeting Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Rudolf Otto, and R. Wilhelm, to whom he sometimes referred in his writings. In 1927, at a conference arranged by Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, Scheler delivered a lengthy lecture, entitled Man's Particular Place (Die Sonderstellung des Menschen), published later in a much abbreviated form as Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Man's Situation in the Cosmos). His well known oratory style and delivery captivated his audience for almost four hours. Toward the end of his life, many invitations were extended to him, including some from China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. His health kept him landlocked, however, as his doctor advised him against travel, and he had to cancel his reservations on the Star Line.

At that time Scheler increasingly focused on political development. He had met the Russian emigrant-philosopher N. Berdyaev in Berlin, in 1923. Scheler was the only scholar of rank in the German intelligentsia who warned in public speeches, as early as 1927, about the dangers of the both Marxism and the growing Nazi movement. Politics and Morals and The Idea of Eternal Peace and Pacifism were subjects of talks he delivered in Berlin during 1927. His analysis of capitalism revealed it to be a calculating, globally expanding "mind-set," rather than an economic system. While economic capitalism may have had some roots in ascetic Calvinism, Scheler detected its real motivation as a modern, sub-conscious insecurity expressed in an increasing need for financial and personal security, protection, safety, and rational manageability of all entities. Max Scheler denounced the subordination of the value of the individual to this global tendency, and predicted a new era of culture and values, which he called "The World-Era of Adjustment."

Scheler also advocated the establishment of an international university in Switzerland. He was supportive of programs such as "continuing education," and of what he seems to have first called a "United States of Europe." He deplored the gap existing in Germany between political power and mind, a gap which he considered to be the source of an impending dictatorship, and the greatest obstacle toward establishing a German democracy. Five years after his death, the Nazi dictatorship (1933-1945) suppressed Scheler's work.

The Metaphysics Of Aristotle

Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one of the most influential works in Western thought, is a collection of fourteen treatises or books. The title is not by Aristotle and is due to a Hellenistic editor, traditionally identified with Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE). Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika) means “the things after the physical things” and may point to the position of the metaphysical books in the Hellenistic edition of Aristotle’s works (after the physical books) or possibly to the order in which metaphysical issues should be learned in an ideal curriculum (after the study of physics). Aristotle, however, is not responsible for assembling the books of the Metaphysics into a single work. The collection is most likely to have been put together by Andronicus or someone else on the basis of the thematic similarities among the individual treatises. Although the Metaphysics is not a unified work in our sense, it seems undeniable that the different treatises of the collection pursue a general philosophical project or discipline, which Aristotle variously refers to as “wisdom,” “first philosophy” or even “theology.” Such a discipline is described in the Metaphysics as a theoretical science, as opposed to practical and productive sciences, and is sharply distinguished from the other two theoretical sciences, physics and mathematics. In many ways it would not be incorrect to describe Aristotle’s project in the Metaphysics as metaphysics.

Many of the issues Aristotle deals with—such as existence, essence, individuation, identity, Universals, the nature of material objects, just to mention a few—are certainly issues that we would comfortably describe as metaphysical. But in other respects, Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics is broader than ours, as it includes philosophical areas—such as rational theology, cosmology, philosophy of mathematics and logic—that do not obviously fall within metaphysics in our sense, though they may be closely related to it. Aristotle’s Metaphysics has been enormously influential in shaping Arabic and Latin medieval thought and has remained central to early modern philosophy as well. Over the last sixty years or so, the Metaphysics has been rediscovered by metaphysicians in the analytic philosophy tradition as a source of philosophical insights. This renewal of philosophical interest has been matched by a proliferation of sophisticated scholarly works on Aristotle’s writing. This article has the twofold aim of mapping out resources on the text of the Metaphysics and offering bibliographical guidance on the philosophical issues dealt with in Aristotle’s writing.

During the time that Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings known as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too. The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for contending with a question the asking of which is one of the things that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings.

Paul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is the Hamilton edition of the Collected Works of Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallizing as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together?

I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood when read in that order. My main business here will be to give you some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness, but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment: one is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other piece of equipment, and equally indispensable I think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for interpretation, but on the whole we are all supposed to know that theory. Aristotle must accept that theory or reject it. If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and his own.

The Wise Sayings (Quotes) Of Plato

Below are some of the wise sayings of Plato gotten from his The Republic

   

  “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

    “Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.”

    “We are twice armed if we fight with faith.”

    “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.”

    “For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories."

      "Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each”.  


"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil”battle."All learning has an emotional base."   

“Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens."

"There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot."

“Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods."

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."


“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it."


“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life."


“Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil."


“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."  


"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue."


“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.    

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."

                                             

The Ontological Argument of Rene Descartes

Existence of Things

Having proved the existence of God from his own existence, Descartes used the same truth as his starting point of his proof for the existence of the physical world, his body and other things. He still employed clarity and distinctiveness as his criteria of faith.

Descartes asked the question, "How is it clear and distinct that the physical world, my own body and other things exists?" In answer to the question, he says that it is clear and distinct to us when we change our positions and move about; activities that imply that we have bodies which are extended substances. We also receive sense impressions of sight, sound and touch frequently even against our wills and we know for certain that these impressions come from bodies external to us.

This clear and distinct conviction that these impressions are made on one from corporeal objects must come from God. This is so because the corporeal objects exist in reality and they must be put there not by us but God himself. If it were not so, then God would be a deceiver who makes us believe what is not real. But these corporeal objects exist and impress us, therefore, God is not a deceiver. Thus, for Descartes, to know God, we must know the self, and to know the external world, we must know both self and God.

We can then summarily say that so far, Descartes has through his methodic doubt proved that the self, things and God exists. He has concluded that there are thinking things and that things that are extended have dimensions.

The Definition of Plato's Theory of Forms

The basic questions here are: What is 'real?' Is the physical world the 'real' world? Or is there a deeper reality beyond the physical world? 

Plato offered an answer to these questions in his Theory of Forms. Now let me explain fully what this theory means.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato did a lot to change the way we think about the world, in everything from mathematics to ethics to logic. But perhaps one of his most influential contributions to philosophy was the Theory of Forms. In basic terms, Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that the physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world. Plato discusses this theory in a few different dialogues, including the most famous one, called 'The Republic.' It is also likely that Plato inherited some of this theory from his mentor, Socrates.

Plato's philosophy asserts that there are two realms: the physical realm and the spiritual realm. The physical realm is the material thing we see and interact with on a daily basis; this physical realm is changing and imperfect, as we know all too well. The spiritual realm, however, exists beyond the physical realm. Plato calls this spiritual realm the Realm of Forms (also called the Realm of Ideas or Realm of Ideals). Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that the physical realm is only a shadow, or image, of the true reality of the Realm of Forms.

So what are these Forms, according to Plato? 

The Forms are abstract, perfect, unchanging concepts or ideals that transcend time and space; they exist in the Realm of Forms. Even though the Forms are abstract, that doesn't mean they are not real. In fact, the Forms are more 'real' than any individual physical objects. So, concepts like Redness, Roundness, Beauty, Justice, or Goodness are Forms (and thus they are commonly capitalized). Individual objects like a red book, a round ball, a beautiful girl, a just action, or a good person reside in the physical realm and are simply different examples of the Forms.

Aristotle believed morality could not be eternal and unchanging simply because moral issues have to respond to such changing situations in both time and place. Aristotle believed that the 'form' for things exists within the things themselves. This comes from experience. Another problem was the uncertainness of what the relation is between the Forms and the objects of everyday experience. Plato equates the Form with knowledge and the 'particulars' with opinion. Opinion can be wrong, but knowledge is infallible. Knowledge exists in the realm of the Forms and is independent of the objects of everyday experience. Plato does not argue that we must dismiss the objects of our senses as completely false because they act as a basis on the long journey towards knowledge. This therefore means Forms would not be completely separate from the particulars. On the whole I believe that Plato's theory is a speculation not to dismiss and there are points, which are very valid and questions our reality and existence. But there criticisms which affect the way we see things; 'what is goodness', this is a changing answer and I believe cannot be answered. Plato does not really present the Forms as a theory; what is the nature of forms? He talks about forms as distinct and separate things that are unchangeable, perfect, eternal and invisible, but what does it revel about nature? He insists that forms exist independently of the mind but they are invisible to sense.

The General Ethics of Plato

Many of the Greeks believed that harmonious functionality within society was a priority. This was certainly the case for Plato, but his inquiry goes deeper, in particular, there were three pillars that defined his ethical prose - Justice, Beauty and Truth. Plato fetched for a more common ground between the three. He felt that all three were closely connected. In Plato's mind, his definitions of Justice, Beauty and Truth provided contextual answers to “the Nature of Things”, more importantly, the “the Nature of Society”.

In Plato’s Republic we see one of the earliest attempts at a systematic theory of ethics. Plato wants to find a good definition for “justice,” a good criterion for calling something “just.”

Maybe justice is “telling the truth and paying one’s debts.” But no, Plato says, for sometimes it is just to withhold the truth or not return what was borrowed.

How about “Do good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies”? But that doesn’t work, says Plato, because any definition of justice in terms of “doing good” doesn’t tell us much. It only repeats the question, “What is just?”

Plato then suggests that “justice” is twofold which are: 

• Justice for the state, and
•  Justice for the soul.

Justice for the state is achieved when all basic needs are met. He is quoted as saying that "if everybody should mind his business without intruding into others' business, then there will be just state.

Three classes of people are needed: artisans and workers to produce goods, soldiers to defend the state, and rulers to organize everything. But you cannot have a just state without just men, especially just rulers. And so we must also achieve justice of the soul.

He believed the soul had three parts: reason, appetite, and honor. The desires of these three parts conflicted with each other. For example, we might have a thirst (appetite) for water, but resist accepting it from an enemy for fear of poison (reason). Justice of the soul requires that each part does its proper function, and that their balance is correct.

Justice of the soul merges with justice of the state in that men fall into one of the three classes depending on how the three parts of their soul are balanced. One’s class depends on early training, but mostly, persons are born brick-layers, soldiers, and kings – depending on the balance between the three parts of their soul.


 Plato’s ideal of philosopher kings. To bring about the ideal state, Plato says, “philosophers [must] become kings… or those now called kings [must]… genuinely and adequately philosophize.” Among other things, the philosopher king is one who can see The Good, that transcendent entity to which we compare something when we call it “good.” The idea of the philosopher-king still appeals to philosophers today, though it has rarely been achieved.

It is against this ideal state, ruled by philosopher kings, that Plato can compare other forms of state. The state under martial law (Sparta) is the least disastrous. Oligarchy (Corinth) and democracy (Athens) are worse, and tyranny (Syracuse) is the worst. These problem states come from a lack of justice in the soul. For example, a state of martial law comes from the restriction of appetite by the wrong soul-part: honor instead of reason.

Plato’s ethical theory is this: proper balance in the tripartate soul and proper balance in the tripartate state, ruled by philosopher kings, brings justice and happiness.

It is clear that nobody believes this anymore, but Plato’s was an interesting first attempt at a systematic ethics.

Socrates And His Philosophical Works

SOCRATES' LIFE AND DEATH

Socrates was born in Athens in 470 B.C. His father's name was Sophronicus, a sculptor and mason, and his mother Phaenarate was a midwife. He served as a hoplite ( a heavy armed soldier) in many Athenian campaigns and wars. He was a robust man with great powers of physical endurance. His family apparently had the moderate wealth required to launch Socrates’ career as a hoplite (foot soldier). As an infantryman, Socrates showed great physical endurance and courage, rescuing Alcibiades during the siege of Potidaea in 432 B.C. Through the 420s, Socrates was deployed for several battles in the Peloponnesian War, but also spent enough time in Athens to become known and beloved by the city’s youth. In 423 he was introduced to the broader public as a caricature in Aristophanes’ play “Clouds,” which depicted him as an unkempt buffoon whose philosophy amounted to teaching rhetorical tricks for getting out of debt. Plato pictures him as "a man with a deep sense of mission and absolute moral purity.

Socrates is viewed by many as the founding father of Western philosophy. He is equally seen as the most exemplary and the strangest of the Greek philosophers. He grew up during the golden age of Pericles’ Athens, served with distinction as a soldier, but became best known as a questioner of everything and everyone. Many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist because of his relentless analysis of any and every subject- a technique eqaully employed by the Sophists. Although he never outrightly rejected the standard Athenian view of religion, Socrates' beliefs were more of nonconformist. He often referred to God rather than the gods, and reported being guided by an inner divine voice.

His style of teaching- The Socratic Method—involved not only conveying knowledge but rather asking question after clarifying question until his students arrived at their own understanding. 

Notably, in military campaigns, Socrates could go without food longer than anyone else. He was capable of intense concentration. It was reported that on one occasion he stood in deep contemplation for a day and night. He frequently received messages from a mysterious voice. He had the capacity of self denial and he commanded respect by his simplicity.

Socrates wrote nothing himself, so all that is known about him is gotten from the writings of a few of his contemporaries and followers, most of all, his student Plato.

In 399 B.C, he was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death. Choosing not to flee, he spent his final days in the company of his friends before drinking the executioner’s cup of poisonous hemlock.

As a youth, he showed an appetite for learning. Plato describes him eagerly acquiring the writings of the leading contemporary philosopher Anaxagoras and says he was taught rhetoric by Aspasia, the talented mistress of the great Athenian leader Pericles.

THE LIFE AND WORKS OF PLATO (427-347 B.C)

Plato was the most famous student of Socrates, and the teacher of Aristotle. He was born in Collytus in Attica in 427 B.C. He was the son of an aristocratic father, Ariston, and his mother was Perictione. His father was descended from the ancient Athenian king Kodros (Codrus), and his mother was a descendant of Solon, the Athenian lawgiver.

He had two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus. He started off with the name Aristoklis, but was re-named Plato in his teens because he had a wide sternum and forehead. His philosophical dialogues have survived the ages, and they not only exercised enormous influence over ancient Greek philosophy, but more generally, they influenced the entire Western philosophical tradition.

Plato, among others, wrote The Apology of Socrates and The Symposium, where he talks about the nature of love, while The Republic described the ideal State. Thirty-six works are attributed to Plato and all, apart from Apology (of Socrates), are interactive. Plato was also the founder of the Academia (Academy).

As a child of Athenian noble parents, Plato was educated by the best teachers of the era in philosophy, music, and gymnastics. Initially, he studied poetry and was a poet, but he was also an athlete.

Reading and writing were taught by Dionysius, gymnastics was taught by Ariston the Argeios, and music was taught by Akragantinos Metellos. He was also influenced by Kratylos (Cratylus), a follower of Heraclitus, who dealt with tragic reason. For Plato, his spiritual and moral compass was established from his encounter with the “Man of Athens,” Socrates, at the age of 20.

It should still be noted that his early personal ambition was probably political, though his relationship with Socratic teachings and their ethos permanently altered his moral and spiritual orientation. This made him destroy his early poetic works and he switched to philosophy.

Moreover, he quickly felt aversion for the violence that had been taking place in the city. After the fall of the oligarchy, he hoped to improve the situation with the restoration of democracy. Eventually, however, Plato found that there was no place for a conscientious person in Athenian politics.

After Socrates was sentenced to death, a legal consequence of asking politico-philosophic questions of his students, Plato, along with other followers of Socrates, escaped to Megara. Plato was close to 30 years old at this time. He stayed for some time at Megara and from there went to Cyrene, where he studied geometry, and then traveled to Egypt. He traveled down to Italy and from there went to Sicily, where he became friends with the Greek politician who ruled Sicily, Dion.

He had been invited by Dionysius the Elder to try bring back democracy to politics. However, Plato was sold by the tyrant Dionysius as a slave to someone, because Plato attempted to convince him about the principles of Justice that should govern the exercise of power. He was later freed with a horde of silver coins.

In 387 B.C., Plato was again in his home country where he founded the Academy, which took its name from the place where the Temple of the hero Akadimos stood. In 347 B.C., it is believed that Plato died peacefully in his sleep, and he was buried at the Academy where he taught.

Plato And His Philosophical View Of Man

Definitions Of African Philosophy

What Is African Philosophy?

                              

African Philosophy is a disputed term, partly because it is not clear if it refers to philosophies with a specifically African theme or context (such as distinctively African perceptions of time, personhood, etc.), or just any philosophizing carried out by Africans (or even people of African descent).

One of the earliest works of political philosophy was the Maxims of the Egyptian official and philosopher Ptah-Hotep as early as the 24th Century B.C. The Egyptian Hellenistic philosopher Plotinus of the 3rd Century B.C. is credited with founding the Neoplatonist school of philosophy.

Major Trends in African Philosophy

1. Ethnophilosophy treats African philosophy as consisting in a set of shared beliefs, values, categories and assumptions that are implicit in the language, practices and beliefs of African cultures (or the uniquely African world view). Ths argues that the fundamental assumptions about reality are reflected in the languages of Africa. For example, E. J. Alagoa argues for the existence of an African philosophy of history stemming from traditional proverbs from the Niger Delta.

Some African philosophers (such as the Senegalese Léopold Senghor) have argued for the concept of negritude, including the idea that the distinctly African approach to reality is based on emotion and artistry rather than logic, although the idea is highly contentious.

2. Philosophical sagacity is a sort of individualist version of ethnophilosophy, in which one records the beliefs of certain special members of a community (sages) who have a particularly high level of knowledge and under­standing of their cultures' world-view. However, it becomes difficult to distinguish between a bona fide philosophy and a mere local belief, or just a history of ideas.

3. The professional philosophy trend argues that the whole concept of a particular way of thinking, reflecting, and reasoning is relatively new to most of Africa, and that African philosophy is really just starting to grow. An example of this growth is the Kawaida project, created by Maulana Karenga, an ongoing search for African models of excellence in the seven core areas of culture: history; spirituality and ethics; social organization; political organization; economic organization; creative production (art, music, literature, dance, etc.) and ethos.

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Reference:

http://philosophybasics.com

The Socratic Problem

Introduction

Socrates has the main character in most of Plato’s dialogues and has a genuine historical figure. It is widely understood that in later dialogues, Plato used the character Socrates to give voice to views that were his own. Besides, Plato three other important sources exist for the study of Socrates; Aristophanes, Aristotle and Xenophon. Since no extensive writings of Socrates himself survived to the modern era, his actual views must be discerned from the sometimes contradictory reports of these four sources. The main source for the historical Socrates is the Socratic dialogues, which are reports of conversations apparently involving Socrates. Most information is found in the works of Plato and Xenophon.

The Socratic Problem 

The Socratic problem is a term used in historical scholarship concerning attempts at reconstructing a historical and philosophical image of Socrates based on the variable, and sometimes contradictory nature of the existing sources on his life. Thus, the problem of Socrates is the problem of ascertaining exactly what his philosophical teaching was. In this ragard, scholars rely on the external sources such as those of his contemporaries like Aristophanes or the disciples of Socrates like Plato and Xenophon for knowing anything about Socrates.

These sources contain contradictory details of his life, works and beliefs, when taken together. This complicates the attempts at reconstructing the beliefs and philosophical view held by Socrates. It is apparent to scholarship that this problem is now deemed a task seeming impossible to clarify, and thus, perhaps now classified as unsolvable. For instace, considering Xenophon’s writing on Socrates, he viewed him as “a man whose chief interest is to make good men and citizens, one who did not concern himself with problems of logic and metaphysics- a popular ethics teacher”.

On the other hand, taking Platonic dialogues as a whole, one would receive the impression of a metaphysician of the highest order, a man who did not concern himself with questions of daily conduct but laid the foundation of a ‘Transcendental Philosophy’ by his doctrine of a metaphysical world of forms. Thus, Aristotle gives us the understanding that while Socrates was not uninterested in theory, he did not himself teach the doctrine of subsistent forms, which is characteristic of Platonism.

However, considering the thoughts that regard Xenophon’s portrayal as being too ‘ordinary’ and ‘trivial’ because of his lack of philosophical ability and interest renders his position weak. We cannot reject the testimony of Aristotle and are forced to conclude that Plato, except in the early Socratic works, example- the Apology, puts his own doctrines in the mouth of Socrates. This view has the greater advantage that the Xenophonic and Platonic Socrates are not placed in glaring opposition and inconsistency, while the dear testimony of Aristotle is not thrown overboard. In this way, a more or less consistent picture of Socrates is evolved, and no unjustifiable violence is done to any of these sources.

Conclusion

Some of the above sources of Socrates has been challenged by many scholars to misrepresent him, especially that of Xenophon who saw Socrates as an ordinary man with no knowledge of philosophy. These sources, however, continue to pose many questions to philosophers.

A Detailed History Of Western Philosophy

A History of Western Philosophy

Historically, philosophy began when human’s curiosity and wonder caused them to ask questions:

• From where and how did man and everything originate?
• What are the essential attributes of man?
• What is the Ultimate Reality?

What prompted these many questions was the gradual recognition that things are not exactly what they seem to be, i.e, appearance often differs from the real thing. The facts of birth, growth, death and decay not only raised questions about personal destiny but also about how things and persons come into existence and goes.

The origin of Western Philosophy as a child of wonder is traced back to the little seaport town- Ionia in Miletus, Ancient Greece around 325 B.C. Philosophy began in Greece with men who probed into various aspects of nature and existence. They were curious to know the origin, meaning and nature of general existence (man, the world, etc). These men were called philosophers because the were seekers of wisdom or knowledge. The world’s first known philosopher was Imhotep, while the father of Western philosophy was Thales.

1 Thales. In every  history  of philosophy  for  students, the first thing  mentioned is that philosophy  began with Thales, who said that everything  is made of water. This is discouraging  to the beginner, who is struggling--perhaps not very  hard--to feel that respect for philosophy  which the curriculum  seems  to expect. There  is, however, ample reason to feel  respect for Thales, though perhaps rather  as  a  man of science than as  a  philosopher in the modern sense of the word. Thales  was  a  native of Miletus, in Asia Minor, a  flourishing  commercial city,  in which there was  a  large  slave population, and a  bitter  class struggle  between the rich and poor among the free population. "At Miletus the people were at  first victorious and murdered the wives and children of  the aristocrats; then the aristocrats prevailed and burned their opponents alive, lighting  up the open spaces of the city  with live torches". Similar conditions  prevailed in most of the Greek cities of Asia  Minor at the time of Thales. Miletus, like other commercial cities of Ionia, underwent important economic  and political developments  during  the seventh and sixth  centuries. At first, political power belonged  to a land-owning  aristocracy,  but  this  was  gradually  replaced by  a  plutocracy  of merchants. They,  in turn, were  replaced by  a  tyrant,  who (as  was  usual)  achieved power  by  the support of the democratic party.

2.Anaximander was the first to realize that upward and downward are not absolute but that downward means toward the middle of the Earth and upward away from it, so that the Earth had no need to be supported (as Thales had believed) by anything. Starting from Thales’ observations, Anaximander tried to reconstruct the development of life in more detail. Life, being closely bound up with moisture, originated in the sea. All land animals, he held, are descendants of sea animals; because the first humans as newborn infants could not have survived without parents, Anaximander believed that they were born within an animal of another kind—specifically, a sea animal in which they were nurtured until they could fend for themselves. Gradually, however, the moisture will be partly evaporated, until in the end all things will return into the undifferentiated apeiron, “in order to pay the penalty for their injustice”—that of having struggled against one another.

Anaximander’s successor, Anaximenes of Miletus (flourished c. 545 bc), taught that air was the origin of all things. His position was for a long time thought to have been a step backward because, like Thales, he placed a special kind of matter at the beginning of the development of the world. But this criticism missed the point. Neither Thales nor Anaximander appear to have specified the way in which the other things arose out of water or apeiron. Anaximenes, however, declared that the other types of matter arose out of air by condensation and rarefaction. In this way, what to Thales had been merely a beginning became a fundamental principle that remained essentially the same through all of its transmutations. Thus, the term arche, which originally simply meant “beginning,” acquired the new meaning of “principle,” a term that henceforth played an enormous role in philosophy down to the present. This concept of a principle that remains the same through many transmutations is, furthermore, the presupposition of the idea that nothing can come out of nothing and that all of the comings to be and passings away that human beings observe are nothing but transmutations of something that essentially remains the same eternally. In this way it also lies at the bottom of all of the conservation laws—the laws of the conservation of matter, force, and energy—that have been basic in the development of physics. Although Anaximenes of course did not realize all of the implications of his idea, its importance can hardly be exaggerated.

The first three Greek philosophers have often been called “hylozoists” because they seemed to believe in a kind of living matter (see hylozoism). But this is hardly an adequate characterization. It is, rather, characteristic of them that they did not clearly distinguish between kinds of matter, forces, and qualities, nor between physical and emotional qualities. The same entity is sometimes called “fire” and sometimes “the hot.” Heat appears sometimes as a force and sometimes as a quality, and again there is no clear distinction between warm and cold as physical qualities and the warmth of love and the cold of hate. To realize these ambiguities is important to an understanding of certain later developments in Greek philosophy.

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 560–c. 478 bc), a rhapsodist and philosophical thinker who emigrated from Asia Minor to Elea in southern Italy, was the first to articulate more clearly what was implied in Anaximenes’ philosophy. He criticized the popular notions of the gods, saying that people made the gods in their own image. But, more importantly, he argued that there could be only one God, the ruler of the universe, who must be eternal. For, being the strongest of all beings, he could not have come out of something less strong, nor could he be overcome or superseded by something else, because nothing could arise that is stronger than the strongest. The argument clearly rested on the axioms that nothing can come out of nothing and that nothing that exists can vanish.

These axioms were made more explicit and carried to their logical (and extreme) conclusions by Parmenides of Elea (born c. 515 bc), the founder of the so-called school of Eleaticism, of whom Xenophanes has been regarded as the teacher and forerunner. In a philosophical poem, Parmenides insisted that “what is” cannot have come into being and cannot pass away because it would have to have come out of nothing or to become nothing, whereas nothing by its very nature does not exist. There can be no motion either, for it would have to be a motion into something that is—which is not possible since it would be blocked—or a motion into something that is not—which is equally impossible since what is not does not exist. Hence, everything is solid, immobile being. The familiar world, in which things move around, come into being, and pass away, is a world of mere belief (doxa). In a second part of the poem, however, Parmenides tried to give an analytical account of this world of belief, showing that it rested on constant distinctions between what is believed to be positive—i.e., to have real being, such as light and warmth—and what is believed to be negative—i.e., the absence of positive being, such as darkness and cold.

It is significant that Heracleitus of Ephesus (c. 540–c. 480 bc), whose philosophy was later considered to be the very opposite of Parmenides’ philosophy of immobile being, came, in some fragments of his work, near to what Parmenides tried to show: the positive and the negative, he said, are merely different views of the same thing; death and life, day and night, and light and darkness are really one.

In the Middle Ages, philosophy was known to have given birth to theology- which supplied religious thought with a reasoned account

The Five Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy is a vast discipline/discourse which has many branches and sub-branches on it. It encompasses many things and has a very wide scope.

The five major branches of philosophy include:

1. Logic . 
2. Epistemology
3. Ethics 
4. Metaphysics
5. Aesthetics

Logic 

Logic can be seen as the science of right reasoning. It is the branch of Philosophy that deals with what and how human reasoning is.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of the Theory of Knowledge. Epistemology deals with the process by which we can know that something is true. It addresses questions such as: What can I know? How is knowledge acquired? Can we be certain of anything?

Under Epistemology, there are two important categories which are: Rationalism and Empiricism.

Rationalism stresses reason as the most important element in knowing. Rationalism holds that knowledge is gained primarily through the mind. It also asserts that we are born with innate ideas that precede any experiences we may have with our physical senses.

Empiricism on the other hand asserts that all our knowledge comes from our five senses. In use of the terminology of the empiricist John Locke said that our minds are a “blank slate” at birth. Thus knowledge comes from our experiences.

Ethics

Ethics is the study of moral value, right and wrong. Ethics is involved with placing value to  personal actions, decisions, and relations. Important ethical issues today include abortion, sexual morality, the death penalty, euthanasia, pornography' and the environment.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of “reality as apornography,is specifically the study of reality that is beyond the scientific or mathematical realms. The term “metaphysics” itself literally means “beyond the  physical". The metaphysical issues most discussed are the existence of 'body' and the 'soul' and the afterlife.

Aesthetics

It attempts to address such issues as: What is art? What is the relationship between beauty and art? Are there objective standards by which art can be judged?

What is Philosophy? A Detailed Definition

What Is Philosophy?

It was man's quest for knowledge of the universe and general existence that led to the development of philosophy. Man started by mere speculations to expain the daily occurences he witnessed. He tries to unravel the true nature of things and ultimate truth.

The word 'Philosophy' has been given many definitions by different people and in different ways. However, Philosophy is known to be coined from two Greek words- 'philos' which means love, and 'Sophia' which means wisdom. Therefore, in a wider sense, philosophy is known as the love for wisdom. This notion originated from the early Greek philosophers, particulary Pythagoras who was called a wise man but prefered to be called  'a lover of wisdom'.

There is no generally acceptable definition of the subject matter 'Philosophy'. Different people have different views and definitions of philosophy. For instance, Plato, in his work 'Charmides' described it as the 'science of itself and of other sciences'. As Biology deals wih the study of living things and their functions, Physics deals with matter as a whole and Sociology deals with man and his society, so does Philosophy deal with itself and other scientific fields of study.

Some Definitions by Philosophers

• Immanuel Kant, a German Philospher, in his own view said that Philosophy deals with the problems of the knowledge of the universe. He asks himself the questions; What is man? What can I know? What ought I to do?

• Bertrand Russel concieves Philosophy as an inttermediary between theology and science. This implies that Philosophy embodies both reality in the material form and beyond the material form. 

• Rene Descartes, a French Philosopher viewed Philosophy as "a method of reflective thinking and enquiry".

• James L. Christian, in his view, said that Philosophy is learning how to ask and re-ask questions until meaningful answers begin to appear.

• Wittgenstein defined as an activity which seeks logical clarification of thoughts.

Summarily, Philosophy began as a child of wonder. It asks the questions; what is real? what is the primary stuff of all things? Does God really exists?