In this week’s reading a quote from Alfred North Whitehead
was mentioned which went “The safest general characterization of the European
philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Western philosophy undoubtedly owes a lot to
Plato, but is saying that it is merely commentary on the works of Plato true
though? In the strictest sense this is
not true as there were philosophers before Plato, however, even in a less
strict sense I feel this is not really true.
It is probably true, that if Plato was to walk into a philosophy
classroom today, he would likely be teaching the class by the end of it, while
if Pythagoras walked into a college mathematics class he would have a serious
learning curve. Is it because philosophy
has not changed though, or because the questions surrounding the world have not
changed? If you look at the fields of
medicine, science and biology there are fields that contently deal with new discovers
as we learn more about the physical world, our own bodies, our own plant, other
plants, etc. In these cases, we are
taking something that was not previous known has been uncovered, no information
is opened up, no fields of study. This
does happen in philosophy, for example philosophies on or related to technology
have changed developed with technology.
Many of the questions and issues of philosophy remain unchanged. New ground does not open up, there are no new
fields to research or to study or no new information to change our perspective,
everything is a matter of opinion. So
there lies the question. Has the field
simply stalled out, or because we are puzzling over problem that never change
but cannot be illuminated through imperial experiments, therefore, never truly solved.
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