A Final Review
- Philosphy is reflective. It looks backward (takes its material from something preexistenting.) Philosophy as the attempt to make the implicit explicit.
- Early Greek philosophy: took its cues from myth (in need of consistency & rationalization) and from cosmology (speculation on the nature and origin of the universe)
- First great transformation in Western philosophy: suppose the common element is not a thing but a structure. The formalist tendency in philosophy: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides.
- Socrates & the Sophists: placing the question of morality at the center of philosophy. Emphasis on training, education.
- Plato: the first great systematic philosopher. From Socrates & the Sophists he derived an interest intraining & education, and a clue to the nature of each in the analysis of
TECHNE ("skill," "craft")
- Aristotle: from the theory of training to methodology. Classification, development, and the tools of inquiry.
- The Hellenistic life philosophies: happiness, according to Plato & Aristotle, depend upon one's lace in a well-ordered
POLIS. But such a world no longer exists. How do we find satisfaction in an Imperial world? Therapeutic philosophies.
- Religious invention, creativity, turmoil & the turn of the Common Era.
- From "Life Philosophies" to "After-life Philosophies."
- Non-greek elements in Christian thought.
- New problems for philosophy:
- Reason v. Revelation
- The importance of the will
- positively, will as essential to
creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing)
- negatively, will as solution to te Problem of Evil: God is not directly redsponsible for evil, since it comes from a failure to summon the will to do what we ought and to not do what we ought not
- Creeds, the cannon, & heresies: institutionalizing the truth. the problem of authority
- tecniques of interpreting texts: techniques for learning what allegorical and metaphorical texts mean
- God as one, loving, spiritual, and three persons.
revised December 10, 1996
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