Chapter One
The Fine Art of Wondering
Ray Bradbury writes:
“To grow into youngness is a blow. To age
into sickness is an insult. To die is, if we
are not careful, to turn from God’s breast,
feeling slighted and unloved. The sparrow
asks to be seen as it falls. Philosophy must
try, as best it can, to turn the sparrows to
flights of angels, which, Shakespeare
wrote, sing us to our rest.”
The World Riddle
• Can the human mind understand the world?
• Can it discern the truth about human existence?
• Does life have meaning? (What do we mean by
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“meaning?)
What is it that we are really after?
Is there such a thing as the hero’s journey?
Just in Case…
• Is there anything wrong with an Indian
physicist, who is also a member of the
Brahmin caste, offering a lucid
presentation of celestial mechanics
regarding a solar eclipse to his class…and
returning home and offering a gift to the
Black Goddess – just in case?
The Human Condition
• What is the meaning of existence?
• Panshin’s Rite of Passage
• Freud and Jung launch “depth probes into
the inner world”
• Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince
• Eros and Thanatos
• Schweitzer/Watts on “hope”
The Search for Meaning
• Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
• “Existential vacuum”
• Schweitzer’s, “Reverence for Life”
• Abraham Maslow, “post-mortem life”
• Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
• “He who has a why to live can bear with
almost any how.”
“Why” Questions
• It would be comforting to know that life has
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transcendent meaning; it would feel good to
know that “nothing happens without a purpose.”
But our need for meaning lead us to find easy
and absurd answers to such why-questions.
Fall of Rome, AD 410
Lisbon earthquake, November 1755
Apollo XIII lunar mission aborted, April 1970
The World-Riddle
• Life feeds upon itself
• The Naked Ape
• Calypso
• Kierkegaard
• Campbell
• Strauss
• Nietzsche
Marcus Aurelius
Philosopher-King
• The problem was finding a way to live in the
world and not be destroyed by it. The answer,
Marcus reasons, lies in making a deep and
permanent distinction between what you can
take charge of and what you can’t, a distinction,
that is, between the inner world which we can
exercise a modicum of control, and the real
world “out there” over which we have little
control.
Reflections…
• What if you decide that life is without
meaning – what would this mean to you
personally? Do you think your life would
be less worth living? (Why, incidentally,
are you attempting to answer this
question?)
The Spirit of Inquiry
• Whether to think and try to understand, or
just believe…that is the question.
• Each of us is burdened with the task of
deciding what answers are right for us.
• This includes inquiry into who and what
we humans are, what life is all about, and
how it should be lived.
The Love of Wisdom
• Philein – “to love”
• Sophia – “wisdom”
• A philosopher is (or should be) a “lover of
wisdom”
• To be “wise” is to possess the
understanding and skill to make mature
judgments about the use of knowledge in
the content of daily life
The Greek Miracle
• The first philosophers were not satisfied with the
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explanation to every question, “The gods willed
it”
The Milesian philosophers sought a different
kind of explanation: When they asked about the
cause of events, they made the assumption that
the answer might be found in “nature” or within
matter itself
Freedom to Wonder &
To Ask Questions
• Philosophy and freedom of inquiry were
born together. Neither has ever existed
without the other. If we possess freedom,
we inquire. But if our freedom to inquire is
too limited, then freedom, which is rightly
a condition, becomes itself the goal of our
striving.
A Western Dilemma
“I have said some things,” Socrates once
remarked, “of which I am not altogether
confident. But that we shall be better and braver
and less helpless if we think that we ought to
inquire, than we should have been if we
indulged in the idle fancy that there was no
knowing and no use in seeking to know what we
do not know – that is a theme upon which I am
ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost
of my power.”
Belief, Doubt, Critical
Thinking, & Faith
• Belief – “blind belief,” the unthinking acceptance
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of an idea or system of ideas
Faith – authentic faith is always based on doubt
Doubt – a philosopher engages in doubt as a
normal modus operandi
Critical thinking – taking a good look at the ideas
that we are thinking and then making a
commitment to live by the best ideas we can
come up with
Socrates
The Wisest Man Alive
• “The unexamined life – human life – is not
worth living”
• “Know thyself”
• His supreme concern was the breakdown
of human relations – ethics. He believed
that all unethical behavior is committed as
a result of ignorance
• Moral knowledge leads to moral action
Reflections…
• Summarize in your own way the nature of
the “Western dilemma” regarding human
knowledge. Is it “either/or” for you
personally, or have you discovered a
pathway between the two traditions?
Critical Analysis
• How does the world work?
• What is our place in it?
The Philosophic Mind
• How does one go about dispelling the
feeling of ignorance and moving toward
the truth of things?
• The first step is to ask questions
• Philosophic mind = question-asking mind
Critical Skills
1) Fact-claim verification
2) Concept clarification
3) Inference validation
Fact-Claim Verification
• Fact-claim – any idea submitted for
consideration as an item of knowledge
• Example: It’s raining outside
Concept Clarification
1) No evaluation is intelligible unless the
criterion used to make the judgment is
made explicit and clearly understood
2) Any action or event can logically be
evaluated as good or bad, right or wrong
3) The ethically informed person is aware
that different and distinct criteria exist
and are used in daily life
Inference Validation
• Logic – the science of valid inference,
used to clarify the relationships of ideas. It
includes both inductive and deductive
reasoning
• The “problem of evil”
Brief Skirmishes/
Examples of Critical Thinking
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“Enquiring minds want to know”
“Call us now!”
“Mommy, Ginny told me…”
“It was a fever of the gods,…”
“I hate broccoli. It tastes awful!”
“Time had a beginning at the big bang.”
“The swastika is the hated symbol of Nazi
horror.”
“Who discovered America…”
A Special Kind of Listening
• A philosopher listens not only to what you
say but even to the more implicit thought
processes that got you there
Plato
The First Educator
• Plato’s life is marked by two extreme
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achievements: the establishment of the
Academy and the immortalizing of Socrates in
writing
Plato wanted to education young men and
women to seek the truth, with the hope that
they will be qualified to assume positions of
leadership in the world where they could put
that truth to work
Reflections…
• If you had been Job and had lost everything that
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was precious to you, what would you say to
your friends who have come to “comfort” you?
What would you say to God? (Do you know
what Job actually said, according to the Book of
Job?)
Problem of Evil
Are sin and evil related?
Synoptic Synthesis
• The world is truly like a great Picture
Puzzle, and the goal of synoptic
philosophy is to see the picture on the
Puzzle – the whole picture – and to see it
as accurately and clearly as humanly
possible at a given point in space and time
And He Wants to Understand It
• Synoptic philosophy is the love of the
wisdom that comes from achieving a
coherent picture of everything seen
together – a vision of the whole of life
• Example: A cat named Tyger
Life on a Picture-Puzzle
• Synoptic philosophy encourages each of
us to wander over the puzzle, visiting
neighboring parts and trying to see how
the pieces of the puzzle all fit together
The Annihilation of Boundaries
• The synoptist never tries “to know
everything.” He makes no attempt to
memorize the reams of hard data that
have accumulated in the specialized fields
• The task of the synoptist is to keep
himself informed on the latest conclusions,
general principles, hypothesis, models,
and theories
How to do Synoptic Philosophy
• Place yourself in the center of the
“synoptic wheel”
• Proceed with philosophic analysis
• What fields contain information related to
the problem?
• Criss-cross from field to field,
interconnecting lines of illumination
The Synoptic Venture:
Risks & Reward
• Risk – the more one specializes the more
he tends to neglect a general knowledge
of life necessary to remain human
• Risk – loss of the ability to communicate
• Reward – learning to “think bigger”
• Reward – produces greater awareness in
our perception of daily life
• Reward – coherent worldview
Epilog:
“I can float over the Orchard…”
• Asimov writes, “I have never been sorry
for my stubborn advance toward
generalization. To be sure, I can’t wander
in detail through all the orchard, any more
than anyone else can, no matter how
stupidly determined I may be to do so.
Life is far too short and the mind is far too
limited. But I can float over the orchard as
in a balloon.”
Aristotle
The First Scientific Worldview
• Eudaimonia – “happiness”
• The journey to Athens
• The royal summons
• The Lyceum
• Inventor of formal logic
• Laying the foundations for the science of
physics, astronomy, ethics, etc…
Reflections…
• Rephrase in your own (meaningful) way the
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essential goals of synoptic philosophy and make
your own assessment of the rewards of the
synoptic venture. Would your thinking and
feeling change if you could achieve the rewards
mentioned in this chapter? Are you willing to
accept the risks?
Aristotle’s two types of reasoning
Compare and contrast Plato and Aristotle
Goals of Plato’s Academy vs. Goals of Aristotle’s
Lyceum