phil ancient history exam 1

Reading only slightly between the lines of Koestler's text, it becomes clear that he thinks the Scientific Revolution could have taken place 2000 years before it did. For example, in the passage: "By the end of the 2nd century bc the Greeks had all the major elements of the puzzle in their hands, and yet failed to put them together; or rather, having put them together, they took them to pieces again." (p.74) A little later Koestler suggests that we could have been on the moon (and firing nuclear weapons at each other) a millennium earlier (p.79). Koestler says "Thus neither ignorance, nor the threat of some imaginary Alexandrian inquisition, can serve to explain why the Greeks, after having discovered the heliocentric system, turned their backs on it." (p. 76) Give some arguments why it was reasonable for the ancients not to accept a heliocentric vision of the universe.

-observation -eye trick thing -they had no idea the stars were that far away and that they could change -Because simple observation seems to confirm it. Ancient people looked at the sky and saw the stars revolve around them, the sun rose in the east and set in the west, therefore it was travelling around us, the same with the moon.

non explicit time atomists

-everything is already determined -the state of the universe is already done -

The 17th century Scientific Revolution is often said to be characterized by a mechanistic worldview. In other words, the metaphor that influenced them was of nature as a machine. This cannot be said of Aristotle. One might say that the metaphor that influenced Aristotle was of nature as an organism. Explain what it means to say that, for Aristotle, nature was like an organism. In other words, explain his concept of "nature," and explain his teleological conception of motion. Explain why/how he distinguished between natural and artificial motion.

- Nature, according to Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and being at rest (Physics 2.1, 192b20-23). This means that when an entity moves or is at rest according to its nature reference to its nature may serve as an explanation of the event -for Ari all motion is towards something. -an acorn growing into an oak tree this is an example of motion -matter is active "telos" means goal -motion is goal oriented -everything is moving towards something -an acorn becoming an oak tree is natural motion -an oak tree becoming a bed is artificial -Aristotle defines a nature as "a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily".[1] In other words, a nature is the principle within a natural raw material that is the source of tendencies to change or rest in a particular way unless stopped. For example, a rock would fall unless stopped. Natural things stand in contrast to artifacts, which are formed by human artifice, not because of an innate tendency. (The raw materials of a bed have no tendency to become a bed.)

Parmenides said something like, "Only Being is, not-Being cannot be." This strange claim had a huge impact on Greek natural philosophy, and on the whole Western tradition. As for the ancient Greeks, both the physical theory of the Atomists, and Plato's theory of Forms, were attempts to escape the problems raised by Parmenides. Explain what Parmenides is getting at. Explain how Parmenides' views are a culmination of the monist/materialist tradition. Explain how the Atomists escaped Parmenides. Explain how Plato's solution is similar to, yet very different from, that of the Atomists. (You should be able to explain the metaphysics of both the atomists and Plato. In other words, with the atomists, what is real (i.e., what is Being)? What is change? What is meant by "determinism"? I said that the atomist views led to the "implicit elimination of time." What does that mean? As for Plato, what is real (what is Being)? What is change?

-According to Parmenides, the senses are entirely deceptive, and reason alone can lead us to truth. The nature of the world, then, can only be gotten at through a rational inquiry. When starting out on a rational inquiry, according to Parmenides, there are only two logically coherent possibilities: either you begin your inquiry with the premise that the subject of your inquiry exists or you begin with the premise that it does not exist. But the second of these possibilities, according to Parmenides, is utterly meaningless. It is, therefore, not a real possibility at all. Parmenides bases this claim regarding the path of "it is not" on the assertion that, "that which is there to be thought or spoken of must be" (28b6). What he seems to be getting at here is an idea that has had extraordinary pull for philosophers through contemporary times: one cannot possibly refer to what is not there to refer to. -Because of this profound link between thinking and being, Parmenides claims we cannot make any statements of non-being. So we cannot, for instance, speak about unicorns, even to say that they do not exist. In fact, we can never claim that anything does not exist, because anything that does not exist cannot be spoken about. -The claim that there is a single substance out of which everything else derived is commonly referred to as material monism: material because it claims that the source of all nature is something physical (as opposed to, say, something mental), and monism because it posits that there is only one such thing. -He believed that everything is part of a single unified and unchanging whole. All apparent change is merely illusion. His follower, Zeno, extended this idea by providing further logical paradoxes which attempted to show that motion leads to essential contradictions that are logically irreconcilable. For example, he showed that motion isn't possible because in order to travel from A to B we have to travel half the distance, and then half that distance and then half that distance, and an infinite number of halves. -Parmenides' argument for lack of motion was twofold. First, he argued that for change to occur it must progress from being to non-being, since something which was not before now is. For example, if I grow tall, I have to start from not-tall and then change to tall. But how could something possible come from nothing? How could being come from nothing, since nothing is completely nothing? After Parmenides, thinkers would recognize that this absolute change, (something from nothing) is not possible, but change is possible because things don't need to change completely. There is something that persists through the change. For example, if I grow tall, it is I who persists through the change. Tall to non-tall is not absolute change, because the I is the unchanging ground upon which the ball of change can roll. -proposed that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles called atoms, in order to reconcile two conflicting schools of thought on the nature of reality. On one side was Heraclitus, who believed that the nature of all existence is change. On the other side was Parmenides, who believed instead that all change is illusion. Parmenides denied the existence of motion, change and void. He believed all existence to be a single, all-encompassing and unchanging mass (a concept known as monism), and that change and motion were mere illusions. This conclusion, as well as the reasoning that led to it, may indeed seem baffling to the modern empirical mind, but Parmenides explicitly rejected sensory experience as the path to an understanding of the universe, and instead used purely abstract reasoning. Firstly, he believed there is no such thing as void, equating it with non-being (i.e. "if the void is, then it is not nothing; therefore it is not the void"). This in turn meant that motion is impossible, because there is no void to move into.[12] [13] He also wrote all that is must be an indivisible unity, for if it were manifold, then there would have to be a void that could divide it (and he did not believe the void exists). Finally, he stated that the all encompassing Unity is unchanging, for the Unity already encompasses all that is and can be.[14] Democritus accepted most of Parmenides' arguments, except for the idea that change is an illusion. He believed change was real, and if it was not then at least the illusion had to be explained. He thus supported the concept of void, and stated that the universe is made up of many Parmenidean entities that move around in the void.[12] The void is infinite and provides the space in which the atoms can pack or scatter differently. The different possible packings and scatterings within the void make up the shifting outlines and bulk of the objects that organisms feel, see, eat, hear, smell, and taste. While organisms may feel hot or cold, hot and cold actually have no real existence. They are simply sensations produced in organisms by the different packings and scatterings of the atoms in the void that compose the object that organisms sense as being "hot" or "cold". -The coming together of atoms to form compounds appears to be generation (new things appear to come into existence) but it is explained away, as in Empedocles. For arrangements and clusters of atoms are not real, according to Democritus. Nor are the apparent properties of those compounds of atoms real. Such a compound may appear to be white, or green, but this is not so. There is nothing that is really white or green. The only things that are real are the atoms, and the empty space they move about in -The picture is entirely mechanistic. The movement of atoms is explained without recourse to reasons, motives, Mind, the Good, Love, Strife, as was common among other Presocratics. Our only fragment from Leucippus attests to this (1=B2): No thing happens at random but all things as a result of a reason and by necessity. This is causal determinism. An individual atom has no choice concerning its movements. If pushed, it moves. Its "motivational forces" are all external. The compounds of atoms don't have any choice, either. For their movements are all a function of the movements of their component atoms. The movement of an entire system of atoms is just the sum of the movements of all of its individual component atoms. Explanations are bottom up, not top down. That is, the movements and behavior of a compound of atoms (e.g., a tree, an animal) are to be understood as the sum of the individual movements of all the atoms composing that compound. Thus, one explains why the tree or animal moves in such-and-such a way by explaining why each of its component atoms moves as it does. (It is this kind of explanation that particularly exercised Plato, who thought this idea was a colossal mistake -everything in the macroscopic world is subject to change, as their constituent atoms shift or move away. Thus, while the atoms themselves persist through all time, everything in the world of our experience is transitory and subject to dissolution. -The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas is Plato's argument that non-physical (but substantial) forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate reality. -Plato said that real things (Forms) don't change, and restricted change to the realm of appearances—the physical world. -A form is an abstract property or quality. Take any property of an object; separate it from that object and consider it by itself, and you are contemplating a form. For example, if you separate the roundness of a basketball from its color, its weight, etc. and consider just roundness by itself, you are thinking of the from of roundness. Plato held that this property existed apart from the basketball, in a different mode of existence than the basketball. The form is not just the idea of roundness you have in your mind. It exists independently of the basketball and independently of whether someone thinks of it. All round objects, not just this basketball, participate or copy this same form of roundness. -In order to see exactly what a form is and how it differs from a material object, we need to look at the first two of the properties that characterize the forms. The forms are transcendent. This means that they do not exist in space and time. A material object, a basketball, exists at a particular place at a particular time. A form, roundness, does not exist at any place or time. The forms exist, or subsist, in a different way. This is especially important because it explains why the forms are unchanging. A form such as roundness will never change; it does not even exist in time. It is the same at all times or places in which it might be instantiated. A form does not exist in space in that it can be instantiated in many places at once and need not be instantiated anywhere in order for the form to exist. The form of roundness can be found in many particular spatial locations, and even if all round objects were destroyed, the property of roundness would still exist. -Humans have access to the realm of forms through the mind, through reason, given Plato's theory of the subdivisions of the human soul. This gives them access to an unchanging world, invulnerable to the pains and changes of the material world. By detaching ourselves from the material world and our bodies and developing our ability to concern ourselves with the forms, we find a value which is not open to change or disintegration. This solves the first, ethical, problem. Splitting existence up into two realms also solves the problem of permanence and change. We perceive a different world, with different objects, through our mind than we do through the senses. It is the material world, perceived through the senses, that is changing. It is the realm of forms, perceived through the mind, that is permanent and immutable. It is this world that is more real; the world of change is merely an imperfect image of this world.

Explain how the epistemology of the Atomists differs. (We discussed this via a passage from Galileo concerning primary and secondary qualities.) For Galileo, what is objectivity? What is subjectivity?

-I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated" -Primary qualities are thought to be properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure. These characteristics convey facts. They exist in the thing itself, can be determined with certainty, and do not rely on subjective judgments. For example, if an object is spherical, no one can reasonably argue that it is triangular. Secondary qualities are thought to be properties that produce sensations in observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound. They can be described as the effect things have on certain people. Knowledge that comes from secondary qualities does not provide objective facts about things -In The Assayer, Galileo offered a more complete physical system based on a corpuscular theory of matter, in which all phenomena—with the exception of sound—are produced by "matter in motion". Galileo identified some basic problems with Aristotelian physics through his experiments. He utilized a theory of atomism as a partial replacement, but he was never unequivocally committed to it. For example, his experiments with falling bodies and inclined planes led him to the concepts of circular inertial motion and accelerating free-fall. The current Aristotelian theories of impetus and terrestrial motion were inadequate to explain these. While atomism did not explain the law of fall either, it was a more promising framework in which to develop an explanation because motion was conserved in ancient atomism (unlike Aristotelian physics).

According to one prominent anthropologist, tools are "an embodiment of science." The first tools date back about 2.5 million years. According to one scholar of ancient science, on the other hand, "It is to Thales of Miletus that we owe the first appearance of both science and philosophy in the West." Since Thales lived around 585 bc, we have a discrepancy here of about 2,497,500 years concerning the first appearance of science. What's at issue here? Why might someone say that science has been around for a million years or more? Why might someone deny that? (In other words, what is mythopoeism? What did the Greeks, starting with Parmenides, do that was so special?)

-Parmenides of Elea (/pɑːrˈmɛnɪdiːz əv ˈɛliə/; Greek: Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; fl. late sixth or early fifth century BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia (Greater Greece, included Southern Italy). He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In "the way of truth" (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as "what-is") is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In "the way of opinion", he explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful. -According to this proposal, there was a "mythopoeic" stage, in which humanity did not think in terms of generalizations and impersonal laws: instead, humans saw each event as an act of will on the part of some personal being. This way of thinking supposedly explains the ancients' tendency to create myths, which portray events as acts of gods and spirits. -According to the Frankforts, "the fundamental difference between the attitudes of modern and ancient man as regards the surrounding world is this: for modern, scientific man the phenomenal world is primarily an 'It'; for ancient—and also for primitive—man it is a 'Thou'".[3] In other words, modern man sees most things as impersonal objects, whereas ancient man sees most things as persons. According to the Frankforts, ancients viewed the world this way because they didn't think in terms of universal laws. Modern thought "reduces the chaos of perceptions to an order in which typical events take place according to universal laws."[4] For example, consider a river that usually rises in the spring. Suppose that, one spring, the river fails to rise. In that case, modern thought doesn't conclude that the laws of nature have changed; instead, it searches for a set of fixed, universal laws that can explain why the river has risen in other cases but not in this case. Modern thought is abstract: it looks for unifying principles behind diversity. In contrast, the Frankforts argue, "the primitive mind cannot withdraw to that extent from perceptual reality".[4] Mythopoeic thought doesn't look for unifying principles behind the diversity of individual events. It is concrete, not abstract: it takes each individual event at face value. When a river rises one year and fails to rise another year, mythopoeic thought doesn't try to unite those two different events under a common law. Instead, "when the river does not rise, it has refused to rise".[4] And if no law governs the river's behavior, if the river has simply "refused" to rise, then its failure to rise must be a choice: "The river, or the gods, must be angry", and must be choosing to withhold the annual flooding.[4] Thus, mythopoeic thought ends up viewing the entire world as personal: each event is an act of will. -The Frankforts argue that mythopoeic thought explains the tolerance of seeming contradictions in mythology. According to the Frankforts' theory, the ancients didn't try to unite different experiences under a universal law; instead, they took each individual experience at face value. Therefore, they sometimes took one experience and developed a myth from it, and took a different experience and developed a different myth from it, without worrying whether those two myths contradicted each other: "The ancients ... are likely to present various descriptions of natural phenomena side by side even though they are mutually exclusive."[5] For example, the ancient Egyptians had three different creation myths. -Some Greek philosophers went further. Instead of seeing each event as an act of will, they developed a notion of impersonal, universal law: they finally abandoned mythopoeic thought, postulating impersonal laws behind all natural phenomena.[7] These philosophers may not have been scientific by today's rigid standards: their hypotheses were often based on assumptions, not empirical data.[9] However, by the mere fact that they looked behind the apparent diversity and individuality of events in search of underlying laws, and defied "the prescriptive sanctities of religion", the Greeks broke away from mythopoeic thought.[9] -After almost a century of philosophy based on the general Milesian pattern Parmenides cast the whole project into doubt by maintaining that the fundamental nature of reality has nothing to do with the world as we experience it. He went much further than Heraclitus in tempering our reliance on the senses; he rejected the senses as entirely misleading and pressed on reason alone to reveal the truth. Through his use of unadulterated reason he came to conclusions about the nature of the world that seemed to suggest not only that the theories of earlier thinkers were utterly unintelligible, but that the very questions they asked were the wrong questions to be asking. In so doing, he entirely changed the course of philosophy, demanding new attention for fundamental problems (such as the problems of change and plurality) and setting the standard for a new, more exacting level of rational argument. thales- (1) The world derives from water; (2) The world rests on water; (3) The world is full of gods; (4) Soul produces motion. Aristotle offers up even these snippets very hesitantly, suggesting that even by his time Thales was known only by report and not through any first-hand evidence. With this notion, Thales ushers in the single most important preoccupation of the Presocratics: the problem of physis. In its most robust form, the physis problem is a search to identify that thing out of which all else is derived and will ultimately return (the source or origin of the world), as well as that thing of which everything else is a variation (the unifier within nature). In Thales', as far as we can tell from the evidence, his physis—water—only fulfills the first of these functions. Water is the substance from which the entire cosmos emerged (and perhaps also to which it will return). Whether or not it is also the unifier within nature is impossible to determine, since we have no evidence that bears on the issue. Everything in the world may be a variation on water according to Thales, or it may not. -objective truth -The crucial contribution of Thales to scientific thought was the discovery of nature. By this, we mean the idea that the natural phenomena we see around us are explicable in terms of matter interacting by natural laws, and are not the results of arbitrary acts by gods. An example is Thales' theory of earthquakes, which was that the (presumed flat) earth is actually floating on a vast ocean, and disturbances in that ocean occasionally cause the earth to shake or even crack, just as they would a large boat. -Parmendeis was the first to assert that the world has an objective reality that is unchanged by perception, but that humans make decisions and act on perceptions independent of whether they are based in truth.

Why is Koestler so impressed with Pythagoras?

-he believed reality was ordered -1st to articulate the notion that reality has an understandable, rational, mathematical order -"all is number" -this is the basis for science in western civilization -we this order by reason, critical thinking, math

Explain Plato's 3-part personality. How does this connect with his Theory of Forms? What does it mean to call him a rationalist? For Plato, what is objectivity?

-is composed of three parts; the λογιστικόν (logistykon, logical, reason), the θυμοειδές (thymoeides, spirited) and the ἐπιθυμητικόν (epithymetikon, appetitive, desires) -the soul survives the death of the body this is through reason and not our material desires -we can ascend to the real world of the forms -Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they construct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world. -Plato's idealism was a form of metaphysical objectivism, holding that the Ideas exist objectively and independently. Berkeley's empiricist idealism, on the other hand, could be called a subjectivism: he held that things only exist to the extent that they are perceived. Both theories claim methods of objectivity. Plato's definition of objectivity can be found in his epistemology, which takes as a model mathematics, and his metaphysics, where knowledge of the ontological (relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.) status of objects and ideas is resistant to change.

Next, explain how Aristotle used his telological framework to prove there is a hierarchical distinction between the heavens and the earth, that the earth is at the center of the universe, and that the earth is spherical. Explain the role that heaviness and lightness plays in Aristotle's physics. Overthrowing Aristotle required changing a whole host of beliefs, but the lynchpin in the system was the concept of inertia. Explain how Aristotle's views led him away from Newton's concept of inertia. In other words, explain Aristotle's views on projectile motion. Also, explain his views on vacuum.

-the material world of earth elemenets are trying to move to the unchanging center of the eath that is its goal -but the heavens are not changing they are already perfect so they move in a cirle outside of the earth in ether -n the fully developed Aristotelian system, the spherical Earth is at the center of the universe, and all other heavenly bodies are attached to 47-55 transparent, rotating spheres surrounding the Earth, all concentric with it. (The number is so high because several spheres are needed for each planet.) These spheres, known as crystalline spheres, all moved at different uniform speeds to create the revolution of bodies around the Earth. They were composed of an incorruptible substance called aether. Aristotle believed that the moon was in the innermost sphere and therefore touches the realm of Earth, causing the dark spots (macula) and the ability to go through lunar phases. He further described his system by explaining the natural tendencies of the terrestrial elements: Earth, water, fire, air, as well as celestial aether. His system held that Earth was the heaviest element, with the strongest movement towards the center, thus water formed a layer surrounding the sphere of Earth. The tendency of air and fire, on the other hand, was to move upwards, away from the center, with fire being lighter than air. Beyond the layer of fire, were the solid spheres of aether in which the celestial bodies were embedded. They, themselves, were also entirely composed of aether. -Adherence to the geocentric model stemmed largely from several important observations. First of all, if the Earth did move, then one ought to be able to observe the shifting of the fixed stars due to stellar parallax. In short, if the Earth was moving, the shapes of the constellations should change considerably over the course of a year. If they did not appear to move, the stars are either much farther away than the Sun and the planets than previously conceived, making their motion undetectable, or in reality they are not moving at all. Because the stars were actually much further away than Greek astronomers postulated (making movement extremely subtle), stellar parallax was not detected until the 19th century. Therefore, the Greeks chose the simpler of the two explanations. The lack of any observable parallax was considered a fatal flaw in any non-geocentric theory. -In physics, horror vacui, or plenism, is commonly stated as "Nature abhors a vacuum." It is a postulate attributed to Aristotle, who articulated a belief, later criticized by the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius, that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void. - An object at rest tends to stay at rest. 2. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Inertia is the quality in matter (matter is anything you can touch) that lets it stay still if it is still, or keeps it moving if it is moving. If you want to overcome inertia, you have to apply a force. A force will make something that is still start to move, like flicking a wad of paper with a pencil will make it move. Also force, due to resistance, will slow or stop something that is already moving. The wad of paper will be slowed by resistance made by rubbing up against the air it is passing through.

What is the difference between an internalist and an externalist approach to the history of science? Koestler has a chapter called "failure of nerve," where he gives an externalist analysis of Plato and Aristotle (especially Plato.) Explain.

internalist- the history of ideas is the history of working out logical implications of certain ideas, or the discovery of limitations in certain ideas because of their conflict with experimental data -a linear path to objective truth -doesn't matter if the person is female, black, poor, etc. externalist- "it's all socially constructed" -it has to do with how we think due to society and culture we live in -koestler attacked plato for being upper class and an aristocrat in a time when democracy was very welcomed -he did no manual labor so he saw no worth in it -he was trying to escape the society he lived in by believing he was better than the masses due to being a philosopher -and only people like him could really live and exist to the fullest capabilities (through the forms and reason) -aristotle saw no need for craftsmen and the working class since technology and science could invent a way to do their job better -plato feared change as did ari