BEGINNING OF A CHANGE- EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS THE WORLD OF PRE-CIVILIZED HUMANS THE WORLD OF PRE-CIVILIZED HUMANS Ways to make sense of life Animism: Looking at nature as if it was alive Anthropomorphism: Projecting human attributes onto nature • Spirit, Dreams, Magic • Reification: something that could be thought of must exist Humans have always needed to understand, predict, and control nature. Animism, anthropomorphism, magic, religion, philosophy, and science can all be seen as efforts to satisfy those needs GREEK RELIGIONS OLYMPIAN RELIGION: Olympian religion consisted of a belief in the Olympian gods GREEK RELIGIONS 2. DIONYSIAC-ORPHIC RELIGION: The belief in the transmigration of the soul. One version of this belief was that during its divine existence, at which time it dwelled among the gods, the soul had committed a sin; as punishment, the soul was locked into a physical body, which acted as its prison. Until the soul was redeemed, it continued a “circle of births,” whereby it may find itself first inhabiting a plant, then an animal, then a human, then a plant again, and so on. EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 8 PRE-SOCRATIC REVOLUTION • The pre-Socratic revolution was a genuine revolution—a paradigm shift of the first importance • A monumental step in human thoughts when natural explanations (logos) were offered instead of supernatural ones (Mythos). COSMOLOGY AND COSMOLOGISTS to the early Greek cosmologists, the universe was ordered and pleasant to contemplate. 9 THALES THALES • Emphasized on natural explanations and minimized supernatural ones. Thales said that things in the universe consist of natural substances and are governed by natural principles; they do not reflect the whims of the Gods. • Although world appears to be made up of various elements (air, wood, stone, fire etc)there is in reality only ONE element. The Greeks called this one element Physis. • This element according to Thales was Water. • His one area of interest; “what is the nature of reality?” • According to him the universe was in fact knowable and within the realm of human understanding. • He showed that a knowledge of nature, which minimized supernaturalism, could provide power over the environment, something that humans had been seeking since dawn of history. • Perhaps the most important thing about Thales, however, was the fact that he offered his ideas as speculations and welcomed criticism. He invited people to criticise and improve on his teachings. • Interesting Fact: Thales lived near water. THALES Thales: ‘This is how I see things—how I believe that things are. Try to improve upon my teaching’” HERACLITUS • • • • • • • • • • • Believed that everything was constantly changing or in a constant state of flux. Fire is the thing which transforms everything into something else. Hence, Fire is the physis. Heraclitis was overwhelmed by the fact that nothing ever ‘is’ rather, everything is ‘becoming’ Heraclitis believed that all things existed somewhere between polar opposites. Night/Day, Life/Death, Winter/Summer, Up/Down, Heat/Cold. Only through injustice, justice can be known and only through health, sickness can be known. So how can something be known if it is constantly changing? Does not knowledge require permanence? It was at this point that ‘senses’ became a questionable means of acquiring knowledge. Because senses were actually giving us information about constantly changing things. So one must understand the process, the truth about BECOMING rather than being Is a person empiricist or rationalist if they believe things are ever-changing? “A man never steps in the same river twice” Being or Becoming • BEING; A moral doctrine asserting that beyond the flux of changing human opinions there are eternal truths and values that exist apart from humanity • Idea of Permenance • These truths exist in a realm of pure BEING; they simply exist! Changelessly • BECOMING; no such truths or realms of pure being exist, instead the only constant thing in this world is CHANGE • Things never simply ARE but they are always becoming something else • Those claiming that there are certain permanent and therefore knowable things about the universe or about humans have tended to be rationalists. • Those saying that everything in the universe, including humans, is constantly changing and thus incapable of being known with certainty have tended to be empiricists PYTHAGORAS • Pythagoras thought illness resulted from a disruption of the body’s equilibrium, and medical treatment consisted of attempts to restore that equilibrium. • According to Pythagoreans, nothing is perfect in the empirical world. Perfection is just found only in the abstract mathematical world that lies beyond the senses and therefore can be embraced only by reason. • The Pythagoreans assumed a dualistic universe: One part abstract, permanent, and intellectually knowable (like proposed by Parmenides) and the other empirical, changing, and known through the senses (like proposed by Heraclitus) • Sensory experience, then, cannot, provide knowledge. In fact, such experience interferes with the attainment of knowledge and should be avoided. Abstract knowledge according to him was the best knowledge. • Pythagoras’ philosophy provides one of the first clear cut mind body dualisms in the history of western thought. He claimed that in addition the flesh of the body we have reasoning powers that allow us to attain an understanding of the abstract world. • Pythagoras take on Mind-Body problem was that not only does soul exists separate from body it is in fact being trapped by the body • Body is a corrupting prison in which the soul was trapped. In an animal’s body a human soul could be trapped. This is why they were also vegetarians. • Hence purifying the flesh is needed which can be achieved by dietary restrictions so the soul could easily attain truth • Plato was a follower of Pythagoras • Vegetarians- You are What you Eat • Dog Whipping Incident • Women as equal members EMPEDOCLES Regarded as founder of empiricism • Believed that sensory sources of human body are “Ducts of understanding” and information from world gets in brain from them • However for him mind was in HEART or chest; the sensory information gets in our bloodstream and hence mixes in us that leads to thinking~ giving a physical explanation of mental activity • Instead of one physis there are 4; earth, fire, air and water. • Love and Strife are two causal powers of the universe. When love dominates we seek unions, when strife dominates we seek seperation • Empedocles believed that we know reality by observing it (rationalist or empiricist??) • His theory of cognition is the most widely held in modern day cognitive psychology • Most cognitive psychologists today believes that perceptual processes create mental representations which in turn influence our and make up our thinking. • we perceive objects by internalizing copies of them. Atomists • Says that complex ideas in psychology can be analysed as collections of simpler ideas or even of sensations, that have been associated together • This assumption is an integral part of modern say psychology paradigms, especially behaviourists, except Gestalt School of thought which says ‘whole is greater than sum of its parts’
