The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [42]
Greek Philosophy
The Greeks invented Western philosophy. Philosophy is a search for truth, but this quest avoids involving the gods. Once god is involved, it is religion or theology. Typical of the Greeks, they usually left god out of philosophy. Philosophy is often summed up as a battle between Plato and Aristotle, but the numerous Greek philosophers in Athens and Greece covered every basic philosophic idea.
Plato thought we lived in a world separated from reality. He believed we were as men chained inside a cave watching shadows on a wall. Since the shadows are all we could know we would think they were reality, but reality exists outside the cave. Reality, according to Plato, is impossible for humans to experience because we are trapped in our existence—we cannot walk out of the cave. Plato also believed that an object in the world, say a chair, was an expression of a perfect concept existing somewhere else; thus, there may be many different concepts of “chair” here in our sensory world, but somewhere there is the perfect “chair” from which all our ideas of “chair” originate. Aristotle thought the world we live in is reality, and what we see, hear, taste, and feel are facts. “A is A,” Aristotle might say. Thus the great divide: is our sensory world real or not? Can we trust what our senses tell us? Aristotle says yes, Plato says no. These two views sum up Western philosophy. The argument is “what is reality?” If we fail to agree on what is real, advancing to a discussion of what is truth fails as well.
Western philosophy bogged down in this problem of what is reality and entered into definitional arguments (epistemology) that went nowhere. Hume even destroyed the concept of knowledge from experience. Many Western philosophers tried to meet these challenges. Descartes, Kant, and many other brilliant men gave plausible answers, but other philosophers would punch holes in their concepts and on it would go with no real progress in the search for truth. In the end, Western philosophy has not advanced much past “what is reality” and that is just where Aristotle and Plato left us. Can humans, with human limitations, ever agree on reality or truth? History thinks not. We will take up modern philosophy in the postmodern chapter of our story.
Sophists
Before leaving Greek philosophy, we must address the Sophists. Sophists were teachers of rhetoric and were renowned in 5th century Greece for their ability to win any argument using clever words and logic. The key element was their disdain for the truth, because winning the argument was the goal, and not the truth of any issue. Their methods made a mockery of the idea of truth. The Sophist are still with us today (2010) in the form of “spin doctors” and other consultants and speakers normally working for politicians. Their job is to turn any issue to the benefit of their client. Truth or facts are nothing to these neo Sophist, whose power is multiplied by the visual and print media as the more than willing agents of these modern day truth manipulators. Note that Sophism is a major part of modern day propaganda and big lie techniques, which are used consistently on the pubic of every nation throughout our world (and you thought the past was different . . .).
Of Gods and Men
In the ancient world, the impact of beliefs in a god, or the gods, had an enormous effect on the peoples of the time. In pre-history, even as far back as Neanderthals, humans (or archaic human types) were burying their dead. Often the burials contain common items such as bowls, shoes, jewelry, or weapons. It appears odd that even archaic humans would bury their dead in a common area (cemetery as we say), arrange them in a particular way, such as the fetal position with the legs curled up and the head down, leave personal objects in the grave, and often point all of the dead in the same direction. What does it mean? What were these