💾 Archived View for envs.net › ~mukappa › 2022-05-20.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:53:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Each major religion is in part a traditon with institutions.
Each answers "why" it exists.
Each is intellectually alive, answering current questions.
Western philosophy is also a tradition starting with Plato.
Philosophy is a tradition of asking questions in spirit of critical inquiry.
Ontology - What is the nature of reality?
older notions of self didn't have body - mind dualism
older platonists thought world was working out of the mind of God
modern scientists don't
to know God you look not with the body's eye, but with the mind's eye,
a platonist concept
Before Plato the question how should we live would be asked of an Oracle.
Most philosophy was spoken (later written) as poetry often in oracular form.
Plato wrote philosophy as dialog, the main character being Socrates.
Early Plato was written as plays. Typically Socrates would ask a fundemental
question like "what is justice?" and would lead the conversation to a
conclusion of perplexity.
Lecturor is a conservative orthodox Protestant.
The form of the dialogs:
What is X? where X is some virtue needed to live a good life
Socrates isn't an oracle, he doesn't have the answer. He would dialog
with someone who claimed to know. The dialogs always ended in perplexity.
In the early dialog "What is Piety?" between Socrates and Euthyphro
Piety now an insult, but wasn't originally. Roughly meant "very religious".
Euthyphro was pious in a pompous sense. Socrates asks questions and
Euthyphro flails around. He was proud of persecuting his father in
court. Sample question: "Do the gods love piety because piety is
good, or is piety good because the gods love it?" There is a sense
that there is a piety "form" that instances of piety instantiate. In
monotheism, a related question is "Are good deeds good because God
says they are, or are they good in themselves?" The piety "form" is
eternal, not made. Analogous to eternal idea of a triangle vs.
the poor imitation of lines on a chalkboard. Same distinciton is made
between ideal piety vs. instances of piety in this world. The ideal
piety is seen with the mind's eye, the intellect. The highest form is
the "form of the good", aka the sun. The parable of the cave is
about education. Returning to the cave, the benighted people will
kill the enlightened one (as the Athenians killed Socrates).
Christians and Jews would associate God with the parable's sun and
gave us the language of god being the True, the Good, Love, and so
forth.