Quiz Sep 16/17

Pre-Socratic philosophy, 1-2; Dickens, "Night Walks" (JW); FL 9-10. NOTE: I encourage your attendance at the Constitution Day panels Monday in Tucker Theater at 3 pm, & Tuesday at 2:30. Section #13 will NOT meet in class on Monday... but everyone should still post pertinent comments, questions etc. prior to our scheduled class time.

ALSO RECOMMENDED: *Some Pre-Socratic Ideas of Change and Permanence (Philosophy Now)...

LISTEN: Pre-Socratics (SEP)... Philosopher Scientists (BBC)... Pre-Socratics In Our Time (BBC)-Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Zeno's Paradoxes... Pre-Socratics on History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcasts... Fantasyland ch10 excerpt-Joseph Smith (read by the author)... Milesians & more... Anthony Gottlieb on Thales & the Milesians, in Dream of Reason

1. The Pre-Socratics were recognized in antiquity as the first what?

2. What's inaccurate or problematic about the term "Pre-Socratic"?

3. What later philosopher identified the Pre-Socratics as his predecessors both chronologically and thematically?

4. Compared to Hesiod and Homer, what was different about how the Pre-Socratics saw the world?

5. Name the three Milesians along with their respective "first principles."

6. As material monists, the Milesian Pre-Socratics believed what about the "stuff" of reality?

FL 9-10

7. Charles Finney thought the main point was not Presbyterian doctrine but for people to what?

8. How did Thomas Jefferson characterize the religiosity of the South?

9. What "legend" about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence did Ronald Reagan report as fact?


10. What was the 19th century "Woodstock for American Christianity"?


11. What French observer said no country in the world was as fanatically Christian as America?


12. The most interesting thing about Joseph Smith is what?


13. What does Dickens finish through an "amateur experience of houselessness?"


14. What disease leads to "a trembling of the limbs, somnolency, misery, and crumbling to pieces?"


DQ:

• Do you think it does a disservice to anyone to identify him/her in terms of those whom they precede or follow? If your mother is famous and accomplished, for instance, does it in any way harm you to be known as X's son or daughter?

• Do we risk distorting our understanding of either Socrates or his predecessors and successors by using his name as a milestone? If I'm a post-Jamesian, does that then imply that I'm necessarily concerned with the same questions and motivated by the same interests that James was? 
• Do you think the Pre-Socratics were as continuous with Aristotle, or as interested in the kinds of questions he raised, as he seemed to think they were?
• Is water truly at the core of everything? [Here would maybe be a good place to consider David Foster Wallace's disquisition on the subject.]
• What do you think of Ronald Reagan's re-telling of the Declaration legend? (58) Was it a harmless & charming anecdote vindicated by its patriotic intent, or a disturbing foreshadowing of the  current"fake news" environment of our time?
• COMMENT: "What is most interesting about Joseph Smith is that people believed him." 71 Why does anyone ever believe someone else's first-person account of an extraordinary event, in the absence of extraordinary supportive evidence?
• Dickens describes an important kind of learning that happened through his late-night walks. Have you experienced anything similar? What might be learned about life through walking and encountering/observing others?
• When Dickens talks about "dry rot," what do you think he means? Is this description true to life or is it his creative invention?
• Do you find anything resonant or relevant about Dickens' mentioning of poverty-related imprisonment? How do you think poor people are treated by today's legal systems?
• [Add your DQs]

Joseph Smith-RationalWiki... Mr.Deity and the Hat (satiric video-"Joseph Smith Junior teaches Mr. Deity how to translate ancient languages")...

The Best Books on The Presocratics | Five Books Expert Recommendations-Angela Hobbs

5

The Presocratic Philosophers 
by and M. Schofield, G. S. Kirk & J. E. Raven

Let’s begin by saying who the Presocratics were.

Well, of course, they didn’t think of themselves as the Presocratics. In most cases, obviously, they came before the life of Socrates, they didn’t know he was going to be born. We’re talking about thinkers from about 585 BC, which is when the first one, Thales, was flourishing on the coast of Asia Minor, up to thinkers who were roughly contemporaneous with Socrates, like Democritus, who was born around 470 BC, and then some of the Sophists such as Protagoras — a bit older than Socrates but still in the fifth century. So, for the most part, these are thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. They weren’t a group in any sense of the word, they mostly didn’t know each other. Heraclitus is from Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, Parmenides and Zeno from southern Italy, Democritus from northern Greece. They’re mainly from the fringes of the Greek world, which I think is important because they’re right in the trade routes. They’re where the major Greek cities are setting up colonies. In other words, they’re thinkers who live in places where they’re coming into contact with a lot of other cultures. They are people who can see that there are other ways of thinking and living and worshipping and so on than those common in the mainstream Greek world.

So, why do we now call them philosophers?

They wouldn’t have seen themselves as that — the word ‘philosophy’ probably only emerges in the fourth century anyway — or possibly in the mid-fifth century when the verb starts to be used. They would have seen themselves as natural scientists, on the whole — as physikoi. I think two things make us consider them the founding fathers of philosophy: one, they’re asking these very basic huge questions such as ‘What is the cosmos made of? What are its constituents? Is it made of water or fire or air or a mixture? What are the origins of the cosmos?’ ‘How does it come to be? Does it even come into being? Has it always been?’ ‘What’s the place of humanity within the cosmos?’ ‘Can we trust appearances? Or do appearances deceive us? What’s the relationship between appearances and reality? How much can we trust our sense data and our sensory organs? Are our sensory organs the best way of understanding and getting to reality, or should we be using reasoned deductive argument? ‘Is everything fixed and stable, or is everything actually flowing and changing and always in motion even if we can’t see it like that all the time?’

“Of course, they didn’t think of themselves as the Presocratics, they came before the life of Socrates, they didn’t know he was going to be born.”

These are huge questions which have remained at the core of western philosophy ever since. But it’s not just because of them asking these, because clearly a number of these questions are also indirectly being raised by Homer and other poets, particularly those concerning humanity’s place in the cosmos: it’s because they are using particular rational methods to try to explore these questions — particular kinds of inductive and deductive arguments; particular kinds of conceptual analysis. So, it’s the combination of these huge basic questions with reasoned argument for trying to explore the questions, which allows us to think of them as philosophers... (continues)

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* ...Now the earliest known thinkers in this era took for granted the common-sense view of the universe: that in it, over time, things come into existence and then pass away. To explain this they postulated that the cosmos is entirely composed of a basic “stuff” which contains its own power of generation. From this, they surmised, there could separate out the developing objects of the world, receiving them again into its mass in due time. Such generations and returnings would happen repeatedly. So here the permanent feature in all things is their composition: this self-generating “stuff”. And the changes in it are the recurring items that dividing off come into existence and then return to the massed whole to enable further “changes” to take place. There is, however, a limit to the extent of these “changes”. There must not be too many of them nor too few. There must be sufficient to guarantee the living nature of the universe but not so great a number that it loses balance. The universe to be as it is cannot be devoid of such transience, nor can it be composed solely of separated things.

Following this train of thought, further thinkers turned to this need for balance in the living universe. It was this rather than the constituent “stuff” that they thought gave permanence, that kept in harmony, in working order, as a whole the conglomeration of items that come in and out of existence. The right balance of the universe was maintained, they thought, by everything existing in “right proportion” both in itself and in relation to its position in the entire cosmos. In their eyes size and the actual constituency of all things did not matter, so long as the arrangement of all parts kept to a certain form. It was this form of arrangement within the whole universe and within its parts that must persist if permanence is to be shown. The number and the composition of the “stuff” of all things may change as they come into and pass out of daily life but always according to the need to maintain their right arrangement within and as part of the cosmos.

A criticism of both these outlooks rose. This was that they, depending on the common-sense view of a world of separate objects, failed to understand the right way of looking at their experience. The living world is a developing world and postulations about permanent constituents in it fail to emphasise this. For, this view held, the permanence of the world lies in the perpetually unfolding process of change itself. This unifies the striving of seeming opposites, reconciles generation and decay, attunes the continuous movement of all creation to the need for a balanced and harmonious world. Without the ever-moving course of change there would only be a set of inert disconnected objects...

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From The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb (the first physici... water was not a bad candidate... Anaximander called his basic stuff to apeiron... Why was Anaximenes so interested in air...)


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Thales was surely not the first western philosopher, but he may be the first we have (barely) enough legendary hearsay to make a case for. He may (but probably didn't) predict an eclipse, fall into a well, or corner the olive market. And he may or may not have said:

• “Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it.” 
• “Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.” 
• “If there is a change, there must be some thing that changes, yet does not change” 

Thales of Miletus (c. 620 B.C.E.—c. 546 B.C.E.)

The ancient Greek philosopher Thales was born in Miletus in Greek Ionia. Aristotle, the major source for Thales's philosophy and science, identified Thales as the first person to investigate the basic principles, the question of the originating substances of matter and, therefore, as the founder of the school of natural philosophy. Thales was interested in almost everything, investigating almost all areas of knowledge, philosophy, history, science, mathematics, engineering, geography, and politics. He proposed theories to explain many of the events of nature, the primary substance, the support of the earth, and the cause of change. Thales was much involved in the problems of astronomy and provided a number of explanations of cosmological events which traditionally involved supernatural entities. His questioning approach to the understanding of heavenly phenomena was the beginning of Greek astronomy. Thales' hypotheses were new and bold, and in freeing phenomena from godly intervention, he paved the way towards scientific endeavor. He founded the Milesian school of natural philosophy, developed the scientific method, and initiated the first western enlightenment. A number of anecdotes is closely connected to Thales' investigations of the cosmos. When considered in association with his hypotheses they take on added meaning and are most enlightening. Thales was highly esteemed in ancient times, and a letter cited by Diogenes Laertius, and purporting to be from Anaximenes to Pythagoras, advised that all our discourse should begin with a reference to Thales (D.L. II.4)... IEP

"Crash course"...

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Old posts: Milesians and more... pre-Socratics... more pre-Socratics... Change... Goober Makes History (YouT)... Goober on change, in Springs...