Thursday, July 01, 2004
What did I get out of the Meno (Philosophy)
Hmmmnn. What did I get out of the Meno? I realized I'm not a Philosophical genius :) All kidding aside, the point that jumps immediately to the forefront of my addled brain is that it is not knowledge that makes one wise. Wisdom is a product of your willingness to keep your mind open. For example, in the Meno Socrates leads Meno in various mind bending adventures on the subject of virtue. The selection is quite long (compared to most we have read) because while Meno doesn't immediately jump to the 'correct' conclusion (if there even is one) his mind is open to the different arguements that Socrates presents. On the other hand, when Anytus enters the picture, and refuses to acknowlede any view other than his own, Socrates shuts him down rather quickly. Another example of this can be drawn from the Euthypro. Euthypro has fixed in his head that he is doing the pious act. Nothing anyone (from Socrates to his family) says can shake him of this notion. I think his abrupt departure from the dialog also shows that he is uncomfortable and unwilling to explore a different thought pattern than that which is familiar and uncomfortable. As was brought up in the lecture on Euthypro, this makes this dialog a form of a tragedy. Nothing was learned, no knowledge was gained. In a way, the Euthypro dialog was nothing but a large circle, in which they ended up right where they started. In the Meno, while they didn't define virtue, they did make progress in the thought processes, and ruled out several things that virtue *was not*. As my stats professor pointed out in regards to hypothesis testing...You only need one difference to *disprove* something, hence our psychological tests are geared towards the disproving of the null hypothesis, instead of proving our research hypothesis. So in a way I guess the Meno has helped me realize that I am not dumb because I don't know the answers, but I have promise because I'm willing to think about the different arguements presented to me. Then again, if a wise man knows how much he does not know, I could be the next Einstien :)
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Plato and Aristotle (Philosophy)
As I have been lax in my journaling duties (bad Bonnie bad!!) I'm going to cover several points in this entry.
Can Virtue Be Taught?
As a parent, I think so. I like to think that teaching virtue is a main component of my job. If you take the Socratic view of having to define virtue first, I might just be a failure at that job. I honestly have no earth shattering ideas about what virtue is. The off the cuff response would be virtue is the act of being a good person. Being kind, caring, honest. The obvious flaw in this definition is that these are all aspects of virtue, yet none of them define virtue as a whole. This leads into the next topic:
What is Piety?
Again, no earth shattering ideas here. I run into the same problem as with virtue. I can explain aspects of piety (or at least what *my* conceptualization of piety, which may be entirely different from the Greeks) I think the true tragedy of the Euthypro (the source of the piety discussion) is that it is my belief that Socrates couldn't use the discussion of piety to save himself. Even if he had come up with an answer, as we read in the Apology the combination of Socrates' own arrogance and the various levels of prosecution made it a foregone conclusion that he would be convicted. The main thing that I got out of Plato was that there are true forms of every concept surronding us. Love, hate, justice, piety etc all have a 'form' we percieve and a true form. The pursuit of knowledge, is the pursuit of the true form. It seemed that our discussions in class got caught up in the 'earthly' forms (our limited perception of the true forms) The question that I came up with is, is it possible to assertain the true nature of something by using pure logic? As a human being, is it possible to completely disregard our sensory input to gain the knowledge of the true form. I think as human beings, we are sensory creatures. Therefore to try and figure something out using pure logic, seems to be highly unlikely.
Is Philosophy Dangerous
In a word, yes. In Socrates' case, it was fatal. From my understanding, Philosophy is the art of learning to think in different ways. In and of itself this doesn't sound threatening. If you look at it from a purely practical standpoint, the study of Philosophy could get you so caught up in the what and whys behind everything that you cease to function as a productive member of society. In a class I took last semester (Great Books II) our teacher said the problem with introspection is that too much could lead to madness. Now in this case he was referring to self examination. For example, if you spend all your time focusing on yourself, and the different aspects of your personality, you can drive yourself mad. Humans as a whole are contradictory creatures. We love and we hate, we are nice and mean, we are tender and we hurt. Whether one admits it or not, we are all multiple personalities. The personality we show depends on who we are surrounded by. And if thinking about the contradictions inherent in being a human being can drive one mad, imagine contemplating the contradictions inherent in the universe!! Nature can be beautiful and ugly, peaceful and terrifying. Another reason that Philosophy strikes me as dangerous, is that it makes you question the status quo. Again I don't neccesarily think this is bad in and of itself. Yet as I pointed out in class, enough people think differently than the norm, the norm changes. This is very threatening to the people in 'power', and ultimately I believe this is why Socrates was put to death. The charge of corrupting the young was more the Athenian government's way of protecting the status quo of their society. (Kind of ironic when you realize that Aristotle's 'student' Alexander the Great was the one to destroy the Athenian democracy)
Aristotle
Honestly, I didn't understand one bit of the dialog until after class tonight. After the discussion, it made sense (mostly). The only thing that has 'popped' for me so far (hopefully the next readings wont be so hard to get through) is that it's interesting to see the beginnings of hypothesis testing. The fact that I'm currently taking a Quantitative Methods course, and just last night we went over how we set up our testing procedures, then tonight while discussing Aristotle's typical procedure for his treaties, the similarities are striking. To know that the beginnings of the scientific method were from Aristotle just amazes me!
Can Virtue Be Taught?
As a parent, I think so. I like to think that teaching virtue is a main component of my job. If you take the Socratic view of having to define virtue first, I might just be a failure at that job. I honestly have no earth shattering ideas about what virtue is. The off the cuff response would be virtue is the act of being a good person. Being kind, caring, honest. The obvious flaw in this definition is that these are all aspects of virtue, yet none of them define virtue as a whole. This leads into the next topic:
What is Piety?
Again, no earth shattering ideas here. I run into the same problem as with virtue. I can explain aspects of piety (or at least what *my* conceptualization of piety, which may be entirely different from the Greeks) I think the true tragedy of the Euthypro (the source of the piety discussion) is that it is my belief that Socrates couldn't use the discussion of piety to save himself. Even if he had come up with an answer, as we read in the Apology the combination of Socrates' own arrogance and the various levels of prosecution made it a foregone conclusion that he would be convicted. The main thing that I got out of Plato was that there are true forms of every concept surronding us. Love, hate, justice, piety etc all have a 'form' we percieve and a true form. The pursuit of knowledge, is the pursuit of the true form. It seemed that our discussions in class got caught up in the 'earthly' forms (our limited perception of the true forms) The question that I came up with is, is it possible to assertain the true nature of something by using pure logic? As a human being, is it possible to completely disregard our sensory input to gain the knowledge of the true form. I think as human beings, we are sensory creatures. Therefore to try and figure something out using pure logic, seems to be highly unlikely.
Is Philosophy Dangerous
In a word, yes. In Socrates' case, it was fatal. From my understanding, Philosophy is the art of learning to think in different ways. In and of itself this doesn't sound threatening. If you look at it from a purely practical standpoint, the study of Philosophy could get you so caught up in the what and whys behind everything that you cease to function as a productive member of society. In a class I took last semester (Great Books II) our teacher said the problem with introspection is that too much could lead to madness. Now in this case he was referring to self examination. For example, if you spend all your time focusing on yourself, and the different aspects of your personality, you can drive yourself mad. Humans as a whole are contradictory creatures. We love and we hate, we are nice and mean, we are tender and we hurt. Whether one admits it or not, we are all multiple personalities. The personality we show depends on who we are surrounded by. And if thinking about the contradictions inherent in being a human being can drive one mad, imagine contemplating the contradictions inherent in the universe!! Nature can be beautiful and ugly, peaceful and terrifying. Another reason that Philosophy strikes me as dangerous, is that it makes you question the status quo. Again I don't neccesarily think this is bad in and of itself. Yet as I pointed out in class, enough people think differently than the norm, the norm changes. This is very threatening to the people in 'power', and ultimately I believe this is why Socrates was put to death. The charge of corrupting the young was more the Athenian government's way of protecting the status quo of their society. (Kind of ironic when you realize that Aristotle's 'student' Alexander the Great was the one to destroy the Athenian democracy)
Aristotle
Honestly, I didn't understand one bit of the dialog until after class tonight. After the discussion, it made sense (mostly). The only thing that has 'popped' for me so far (hopefully the next readings wont be so hard to get through) is that it's interesting to see the beginnings of hypothesis testing. The fact that I'm currently taking a Quantitative Methods course, and just last night we went over how we set up our testing procedures, then tonight while discussing Aristotle's typical procedure for his treaties, the similarities are striking. To know that the beginnings of the scientific method were from Aristotle just amazes me!
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