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Notes on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness -- Phil A231 William Jamison - Instructor Lecture 2 How did we get to the perspective exemplified by Quine's "Web of Belief"? http://socialistica.lenin.ru/analytic/txt/q/quine_1.htm http://www.phil.vt.edu/JKlagge/WebBelief2Spring.ppt The nature of science. See Topics for more detailed links for each philosopher. Thales first philosopher looking for the arche. (Water) Other generations go to air, the infinite, or mixtures of elements such as earth, air, fire, water, but this led to doubt and the Sophists who taught that “man was the measure”. Socrates opposed this view and argued with the Sophists by asking them to define concepts, questioning those definitions to refine them until they ended up changing the definition until it contradicted their earlier formulation. In this way Socrates felt he was demonstrating that they did not know what those concepts were. Apart from getting Socrates killed, this also inspired his student Plato to define the concepts.
Plato tries to solve this issue by asking how do we know what we know? How do we know anything? He creates the philosophy called Idealism with his answer. Ideas are real, material things are not. Ideas, such as triangularity are invisible and eternal. Triangles that we make are temporary. The reason we know an object is triangular is because we know what triangularity is. Matter is corruptible and changing. Ideas are forever. We know the ideas because our soul is like ideas. Our soul has no parts. In order for something to be made it must have parts that are put together. In order for something to be destroyed it must be taken apart. But Plato argues that our souls do not have parts but are invisible and eternal, just as the ideas are. So our souls enable us to connect to the ideas and we know them. Aristotle is Plato's student and critiques Plato's explanation of how we know. For Aristotle form must have matter and Plato was wrong to think the ideas exist without having matter. We learn what we know from the experience of things. As we will see, Aristotle creates a beautiful logical system that we still use today. His system focuses on the correspondence between categories of things and the words we use to refer to them. The Christian philosophy of Saint Augustine was primarily Platonic and Aristotle's works, other than some translated by Boethius, were lost to the West until the monks accompanying the Crusaders were given Aristotelian texts by Arab and Jewish scholars. The reintroduction of Aristotle resulted in a confusion in the Church and the conflicts between the philosophy of "The Philosopher" Aristotle and the Church dogma had to be resolved. Saint Thomas of Aquinas resolved this conflict in his great Summae and is considered to have out Plato'd Plato and out Aristotle'd Aristotle by combining the two philosophies together. Faith and Reason work together. This combination resulted in what for most American's today, together with John Locke's view of the primary and secondary qualities of things, is our common sense view of the nature of knowledge. We think of everything as having both matter and form (the idea of the thing). This follows Aristotle. But we also think that the reason a thing is properly called what what it is the form of (a table) is because that form has the essential characteristics of what the idea of a table is. This follows Plato. The beginning of the Modern period with Descartes and Hobbes is also the start of Continental Rationalism (Platonic) and British Empiricism (Aristotelian.) It is the beginning of the mechanistic view of the cosmos. Everything is like a machine including human beings.
Comments on interpretation. Laws of Nature (versus Scientific Laws) and forces in the universe. Do they change over time? Mathematics page in my topics list: http://www.geocities.com/bethann_99577/Math/ but note that many of the links are broken now. Here is a web page that goes over Truth Tables Regarding the Ontological Argument visit Saint Anselm and Kurt Godel. Here is a link to a chapter on a book about Wittgenstein's use of the word "Grammar" http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s7747.html "Complexity is necessary for intelligence to emerge."
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This page is maintained by William S. Jamison. It was last updated November 20, 2009. All links on these pages are either to open source or public domain materials or they are marked with the appropriate copyright information. I frequently check the links I have made to other web sites but each source is responsible for their own content. |