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The
first class
What is philosophy?
How should we study philosophy? What do we do exactly when
we study philosophy? Why is “studying philosophy” different
from studying something else? And why should we study philosophy
if our primary focus is chemistry, biology, architecture,
literature, medicine, law, etc.? By focusing on the very first
period of the history of philosophy – the period of the naturalists
and the Eleatics – this first class aims at introducing the
students to the concept of philosophy and to some of its main
historical issues.
Birth
of Philosophy
Philosophy was
born in a Greek colony (on the coast of what today is Turkey)
in the 6th century B.C. Thales of Miletus seems to be the
first philosopher in history because, in his reflections on
the origin or cause of all things, the logos of philosophy
emerged from the myth of ancient poetry. The term
“philosophy” means “love of wisdom.” According to Aristotle,
“wonder” is the starting point of both philosophy and poetry
because “wondering” (or contemplating) is the attitude of
those who sense the existence of a deeper meaning of reality
and try to express this meaning either through the arts or
through the logos.
Order
and Becoming
In a sense, “order”
and “becoming” are the two first, very important, insights
of philosophical thought. These two insights ground the search
for the first cause – or the first intelligible and ordering
principle – of the (physical) world, and explain the features
attributed to it by the first Greek philosophers: the unchanging
substratum of every change (Thales); the efficient cause of
the changes (Anaximenes); an indeterminate principle (Anaximander);
an intelligible principle of order intrinsic to material reality
(Pythagoras). The first cause is always supposed to be the
real, deepest, being behind the familiar reality of becoming.
But “becoming” means “ceasing to be something” (the child
becomes a man by stopping being a child), and, to Heraclitus,
the only reality appears to be the becoming itself.
[Read more: “Naturalistic
Period and the Concept of Becoming”]
Being
vs. Becoming
At its birth,
philosophy is “philosophy of nature,” and the main problem
it addresses is the possible contradiction between the concept
of “being” and the concept of “becoming.”
In order to save the being of reality, Parmenides takes the
opposite side of Heraclitus, by saying that only being
exists and that becoming is only an appearance. To
defend Parmenides’ view, his disciple Zeno elaborated famous
paradoxes on the impossibility of movement and multiplicity.
The “problem of becoming,” as it emerges from the dispute
between Parmenides and Heraclitus, is the first, most important
dilemma in the history of philosophy. The first acceptable
solution came from Aristotle’s explanation of “change,” and
from his distinction between different analogical predications
of “being” and “not being”.
The
Pluralistic Solution
Another way to
solve the problem of becoming came from the pluralistic schools,
which proposed an account of nature’s changes grounded on
the idea of a plurality of basic (unchanging) elements/principles.
The pluralists’ thought represents certainly a progression
in our understanding of physical nature, but it cannot solve
the philosophical problem of becoming because the many basic
elements maintain the same features of Parmenides’ concept
of “being” (absolute, unchanging, univocal…). There is no
“being” (or substratum) among the elements, or atoms. Their
interactions and movements involve the existence of an absolute
“not being,” which, by definition, does not exist. The pluralistic
solution to the problem of becoming is an excellent opportunity
to study the difference, and interdependence, between a scientific
explanation of nature and a philosophical one. From one of
the pluralists, Anaxagoras, came the important insight, used
and developed by Plato, that the first principle of reality
must be “intelligence”.
The
Problem of the Universals
What is the truth
of the universal concepts or ideas we have in our minds, even
the most abstract and difficult ones, like ‘person,’ ‘intellect,’
‘freedom,’ ‘chaos,’ ‘energy,’ etc.?
The so called “problem of the universals” is the main gnosiological
problem of the entire history of philosophy. Where do the
universal objects we have in our intellect come from? What
is their truth?
Broadly speaking, there are two possible solutions: [a] the
universal comes somehow from our sensory cognition (Aristotle,
Aquinas…); [b] the universal comes from somewhere else (Plato,
Hume, Kant, Popper, Kuhn…).
Aquinas’s critique of Plato is a perfect way to sketch the
problem. According to Aquinas, the proper objects of our intellect
are not the universals as such, but the same material things
that fall under our (external) senses. In order to have a
clear understanding of Aquinas’s approach, we have to distinguish
between three kinds of objects of human intellectual knowledge:
(1) “quidditas rei materialis”—proper object and object
of first intention; (2) “intelligible species abstracted from
the phantasm”—not proper object and object of second intention;
(3) “ens in universali”—common object. The intelligible
species (idea) is always a means to know reality, but not
the reality we know.
[Read more: “The
Concept of Truth and the Object of Human Knowledge”]
Further
Suggested Readings for the First Class
-
Aristotle,
Metaphysics, book I (available online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html)
-
Ralph
McInerny, A History of Western Philosophy, Part I (available
online at www2.nd.edu/Departments//Maritain/)
-
G. Reale,
A History of Ancient Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 5-125
Bibliography
and Suggested Readings for the Course
-
Di
Blasi F., “The Concept of Truth and the Object of Human
Knowledge,” in F.T. Arecchi (ed.), The Scientific and
Philosophical Challenge of Complexity (Milan: ASRui,
2000)
-
Di
Blasi F., “Person or Digital Self? An Argument against
AI Theories,” in M. Berti and F. Di Blasi, Exploring
the Human Mind: the Perspective of Natural Sciences,
ASRui: Milano 2004
-
E.
Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1941)
-
John
Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio
-
John
Paul II, The Splendor of Truth
-
J.
Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy (Westminster,
MD: Christian Classics, Inc., 1989)
-
Ralph
McInerny, A History of Western Philosophy, in the
Jacques Maritain Center’s website
-
Plato,
Apology
-
Plato,
Phaedo
-
G.
Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy, vol. 1
and 2 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
-
R.
Spaemann, Basic Moral Concepts (London and New
York: Routledge, 1989)
This
list is subject to changes as the course goes by
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