Philosophy

virtue (ἀρετή)

"moral excellence- quality which makes a person a good example of its type. The opposite of virtue is vice"

Sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη)

"virtue of moderation or self-control sometimes extending into self-knowledge.

Rene Descartes

(france) Considered the father of modern philosophy. He is best known for conceiving of his ability to doubt as proof of his existence (Cogito, ergo sum- I think therefore I am) As well, his ideas of dualism.

"Ring of gyges" [j/i/gess]

(το δαχτιλύδη του γύγη) - In Plato's Republic book 2, Socrates tells of the shepherd Gyges, who discovered a ring that would make him invisible at will. For centuries philosophers have argued over whether Gyges should have lived a moral life anyway

age of reason

18th century England and France, philosophy, religion, and society's values were re-evaluated through the prism of reason. What transpired set the stage or democratic upheavals such as the American Revolution, and agnosticism and atheism.

Who was Sophrosyne

A Greek Goddess, She was the spirit of moderation, self-control, temperance, restraint, and discretion. She was considered to be one of the good spirits that escaped Pandora's box when the first woman had opened the lid and fled to Olympos.

sophists

Ancient Greek philosophers who taught rhetoric, disputation and politics. Known to be less interested in the logical soundness of ideas than in their skill in presenting them. Today, a sophist uses faulty logic and rhetorically successful tactics to win arguments or make points with style over substance.

It is said that the Pythagorean teaching thought that all of reality springs from the first four positive integers.

Because One is the numerical source of a point, Two constitutes the possibility of a line. Three constitutes the possibility of a plane. Four constitutes the possibility of a solid. And out of these four primary integers it is possible under the Pythagorean account for what they call the Cosmic Soul to generate all of physical reality.

John Locke

English philosopher regarded as one of the leading thinkers in the Enlightenment. Famous for the social contract throw that explained the rights of the individual citizen and government.

John Stuart Mill

English philosopher, originator of utilitarianism, believing that moral choices and actions lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Actions should be judges as right or wrong based on the good they produce.

Thomas Hobbes

English political philosopher, best known for his book "leviathan" in which he espouses his views on absolute sovereignty and the rights of the individual in society. He taught that political power is best served when it is representative of the consent of the people.

Niccolò Machivelli

Famous for the book "The Prince", where he argues that a prince must be ruthless and cunning to be successful.

cynicism

For the Cynics, the purpose of life was to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for humans, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, sex, and fame. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau

French philosopher who described a person's need for a comprehensive education as a path to ideal citizenship. His fictional writings introduced the early stags of romanticism.

Charles Montesquieu

French philosopher who influenced political thought during the enlightenment in Europe. Credited with the idea of separation of powers within the government, such as appears in the U.S Constitution.

Fredrich Nietzsche

German philosopher known for his strong criticism of Christianity, which he believed was a means to control and subdue the people. He espoused his view that the Superman was the driving force for progress and that it is a good thing that in the world certain people of high intelligence, ingenuity, and drive will rise to the top of society to rule over others.

It is also Pythagoras we are told who worked out the original theory of harmony in music and the harmonic scales. Not because Pythagoras himself was an avid banjo player or safar player.

Here again was evidence that the human soul was tuned in certain way to match up with precise mathematical relationships and music that is written, composed, and played according to these pure mathematical relationships will be heard as harmonic. The reason it "sounds right" is because the harmony of the rational soul and the acoustic harmonies achieved by music enjoy a hand in glove relationship.

The Socratic philosophy is indebted I say to Pre-Socratic sources, and surely one of those debts is to Pythagorous (of Samos)

It was Pythagorous and his sect that reached the more or less settled position that ultimate truth expresses itself in number. That is, mere appearance is a source of deception, whatever appears to us through our sensory and perceptual apparatus must be fleeting, material, transitory, ultimately degradable, ultimately decomposable into mere dust and rubbish. The eternal truths are found relationally, in the form of rational relationships, numerical order, and number.

Peripatetic school (Περιπατητική Σχολή)

Its teachings derived from its founder, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and Peripatetic is a name given to his followers. The school originally derived its name Peripatos from the peripatoi (πεÏίπατοι "colonnades") of the Lyceum in Athens where the members met.

"man is the measure of all things"

Protagoras (sophist) - Properties, social entities, ideas, feelings, judgements, etc. are certainly χρήματα and hence originate in the human mind. -Since all knowledge is human knowledge, humans must rely on themselves to find the truth.

Blaise Pascal (France)

Philosopher known for Pascal's wager: You lose nothing by believing in God and living a good life, in the hope of an eternal reward; but if you reject God, and he exists, you are condemned to eternal damnation.

Aristotle

Plato's most famous pupil and personal tutor of Alexander the Great. He rejected Plato's theory of ideas, arguing instead that knowledge is acquired by experience. In this respect, his technique was the forerunner of the modern scientific method. (inspired Francis Bacon to develop the Scientific Method)

neoplatonism

Platonism modified in later antiquity to accord with Aristotelian, post-Aristotelian, and eastern conceptions that conceives of the world as an emanation from an ultimate indivisible being with whom the soul is capable of being reunited in trance or ecstasy

Socratic Irony

Socrates' habit of saying something he doesnt believe, or at least doesnt believe in a straight forward sense. IRONY- use of words to express the opposite of what one really means

David Hume

Scottish philosopher who specialized in empiricism and skepticism, believing that the only reliable knowledge comes through the senses.

Plato's theory: The Rule of the Wise

The cure of our problems, is that we should be ruled by those who really know the best.

The kind of truth a person should search for is not to be found in the flotsam and jetsam of the material world, the transitory world of things, things that can become degraded, things that can change even as you look at them, things that give rise to illusions and proposterous beliefs, and mere opinion.

What the philosopher should seek, the one who really is a friend of wisdom, the one who is a φίλος of σοφία do you see ο φιλόσοφος, this friend of right kind of truth the right wisdom, that person looks for what is immutable, what is eternal, what never changes, what is not only true once and here but always and everywhere. And that of course, cant be anything material, because what is material undergoes degradation and change. The eternally true doesn't. And so we find in many of the Socratic dialogues a sort of skepticism about the evidence of sense and the role of perception.

Superman

a concept developed by Fredrich Nietzsche. The superman asserts his or her will to dominate others. Nietzsche believed it a good thing that certain people of high intelligence, ingenuity and drive rise to the top of society to rule over others. Superman thus represents the ideal of human evolution and has overcome the struggle between Good and evil.

absolute idealism (George Hegal)

a person's intellect is the highest expression of what is true and absolute.

Materialism

a system of thought arguing that matter, and energy make up the universe. To the philosophical materials, matter is the only reality, rejecting anything supernatural and believing that mind, emotion and thoughts are the function of only physical interactions

ontological argument

an argument for the existence of God.

sophist

an intellectual who travelled from city to city and offered courses in public speaking and other topics for a fee

Socratic paradoxes

propositions about morality held by Socrates that seem to contradict common sense. 1. No one does wrong (or evil) intentially 2. Virtue consists of knowledge

The Socratic Question

attempts to identify the authentic historical Socrates

mysticism

belief that spiritual and cosmic truths can be revealed to human beings through meditations and trance-like states; pertaining to knowledge of the mysteries that surpass everyday knowledge and are only known to those initiated into a restricted group;

Yin and Yang

chinese concept that two forces, yin (passive, feminine, dark and negative) and yang (active, masculine, light and positive), interact to influence all things in the universe. Enlightened people sense the ying and yang forces about them in the world in the political turn of events.

pantheism

emphasis on God as the ultimate reality, and that the universe, humans, and nature are manifestations of God's transcendence. From the Greek "everything is God"

innatism

epistemological doctrine that holds that the mind is already born with ideas, knowledge and beliefs (as opposed to empiricism - tabula rasa - John Locke). The key to unlocking this knowledge is experience. Another tenant is that most problems in understanding are essentially linguistic, and that if one could only define what one means the problem solves itself.

Thomas Hobbs

famously wrote on lessons to be learned in the aftermath of the English Civil War.

Voltaire

french philosopher, and forthright spokesperson for political and religious liberties.

Cup of poison

hemlock that eventually kills Socrates

Socrates was charged with

impiety (not pious-religious)

Four main branches of philosophy

logic, the theory of reasoning; epistemology, the theory of knowledge; metaphysics, the theory of concepts and their relations; and ethics, the theory of moral evaluation.

An epicurean focuses on

maximizing pleasure and minimalizing suffering in this your one and only life

conceptualism

medieval theory that there are no universal concepts outside our perception, unlike Plato who thought universals had an objective existence. According to conceptualism, people conceptualize meaning and experience and impose a structure upon it.

monism

notion that there is one principle or basic substance that comprises reality

the Cynics

one of a sect of Greek philosophers, 4th century b.c., who advocated the doctrines that virtue is the only good, that the essence of virtue is self-control, and that surrender to any external influence is beneath human dignity.

Platonic Socrates

passionately argumentive and ironic.

tabula rasa

people are born into the world impressionable, with no previous dispositions. A person is shaped or molded entirely based upon the types of experiences she undergoes.

metaphysics

philosophy dealing with being and knowing. From Aristotle's work on the subjects of the first principles of ontology (the study ob being) and epistemology (the study of knowledge)

platonism

philosophy of plato stressing especially that actual things are copies of transcendent ideas and that these ideas are the objects of true knowledge apprehended by reminiscence

utilitarianism

philosophy that moral choices and actions are those that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Utility argues that action and progress should promote the greatest amount of health and prosperity for a society. (John Stuart Mill)

Ockham's Razoe

proposition that in essence states that the simplest solution is usually the best (William of Ockham)

anthropomorphism

the attribution of human emotions and features to animals, spirits, or natural phenomena such as thunder, the sun, etc. The ancient Greeks thought of their gods in human form.

monotheism

the belief in a single supreme being.

animism

the belief that animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and other natural phenomena possess a spirit. Animists argue for the existence of both the physical and spiritual worlds in one world.

existentialism

the belief that individuals are responsible for the authenticity of their choices, and determine their own place in reality in a universe that is meaningless.

solipsism

the belief that you can only be certain of the existence of your own mind; it is skeptical of other people's ideas and perceptions of reality.

subjective idealism

the doctrine that the world does not exist outside a person's ideas or sensations. All human experience exists solely in the human mind, and material things have no existence outside our perceptions of them.

perfectibility of man

the idea that a man may achieve perfection through his own self-discipline and effort, not gods influence or grace. Made popular by French philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who wrote extensively on the progress of mankind from brute savages to men and women of refinement. "All the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual"

empiricism

the idea that knowledge comes solely from your sense data; through experience and observation.

stoicism

the idea that one should remain a reasoned approach to emotion and an indifference to pain or pleasure, as it will lead to wisdom and happiness. Linked their philosophy to the idea of cosmic determinism, people are free to act but should align their lives with the principles of the universe.

transcendentalism

the idea that reality can be discovered through intuitive thought processes and spiritual insights, rather than gathering observable data.

dualism

the idea that reality comprises two substances or principles, either mental or material. Pluralism is the belief that there are several substances or principles upon which reality is founded.

ethical relativism

the idea that what is right and wrong depends on the situation and there are no absolute ethics.

positivism

the idea that when trying to reach conclusions, positive facts and evidence should take precedence over speculation. Positivists reject metaphysics and religious speculation and believe you should only collect data empirically.

Plato's the Republic - examines fundamental principles for the conduct of human life-

the nature of justice; the achievement of knowledge, education, morality, and the difference between appearance and reality. His theory of ideas argues the existence of a higher world of absolute forms of which perceived reality is an imperfect approximation. To grasp the form is to know ultimate truth and unchanging reality.

A Buddhist will tell you that

the purpose of philosophy is the relief of human suffering and the attainment of enlightenment

ontology

the study of human existence or being; speculation on the nature of reality and what it means to exist. Ontology is one of the three main areas of study for philosophy, the other two being epistemology and ethics. `

aesthetics

the study of sensory-related values or judgments.

logic

the study of the canons or principles of correct reasoning.

determinism

the view that natural laws determine facts and events, that human choices and events are caused by some force or law.

deductive reasoning

top-down logic; starting from a general statement to reach a conclusion that is logical and sound. Inductive reasoning is the reverse, in which conclusions re reached from the examination of specific examples. (bottom-up processing)

natural law

universal laws, as the fundamental principles of existence. Natural law is discovered, according to its adherents, by observing the natural world and using reason rather than revelation from a spiritual source.

Socrates, was a Greek philosopher, who believed that quest for self-knowledge

was to be honored more than the attainment of wealth or material goods; also that the most valuable of one's possession were virtues.

Many Ancient Greeks upheld the ideal of sophrosyne

which is often translated by such terms as prudence, self-control, moderation, and temperance; but ultimately its complex meaning, so important to the ancients, is very difficult to convey in English. It is perhaps to some extent expressed by the two most famous sayings of the Oracle of Delphi: "Nothing in excess" and "Know thyself."