From Myth to Logos: The Rise of Philosophy and its Impact

Posted on Dec 17, 2024 in Philosophy and ethics

From Myth to Logos: The Birth of Philosophy

The birth of philosophy is often described as the passage from mythos to logos. It is the transition from a strongly hierarchical order with a weakly sacral system of nation to a hierarchical order in which the ideas of balance and agreement prevail as principles of subordination. The last myth is an organizing principle of social life of singular importance. It establishes both a body of prescriptions and a principle of intelligibility. The myth is usually an inaugural event that gives reason for the existence of the community.

Factors that Enabled the Shift

  • The crisis in the oriental style sovereignties (Persia, Egypt, Babylonia).
  • The discovery of writing that goes from a syllable, property deed of a house, to a phonetic one (8th century BCE when the Phoenician alphabet introduces vowels), displacing the secret and making it public because you can write as you speak and think about this article.
  • Incorporation of the ‘neutral,’ which allows for the mechanism of abstraction and substantification.
  • Import of papyrus from Egypt, which allows for comfortable circulation of writing.
  • The invention of coinage, which on one hand enables the birth of a market economy and, besides, is one of the fundamental features of the logos, its universal reputation as a currency allows for exact matches between sets of disparate objects and geometrical techniques.
  • The astronomical techniques imported from Egypt and Babylon by the first philosophers, stripped of all religious content, allow for a secular location of man in reality, a continuous reference system on space and time, a way of locating events folded under some kind of sovereignty.

Plato and Politics

  1. Strong ethical-political connection: the individual needs society.
  2. There are three classes:
    • The craftsmen and farmers, in whom the concupiscible soul dominates.
    • The guards, in whom the irascible soul dominates, and their virtue is strength.
    • The philosophers, in whom the rational soul dominates, and their virtue is prudence.
  3. Justice is the harmony between classes.
  4. The Republic is an ideal state, ruled by a philosopher-king; it is an intellectual aristocracy with communal property, women, men, and children.
  5. Critique of timocracy, democracy, and tyranny as corrupt systems.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics

  1. Rejects the Platonic theory of ideas for three reasons:
    • The essence of something cannot be separated from that something.
    • It does not explain the world but duplicates it.
    • The terms ‘participation’ and ‘imitation’ that describe the relation of people with ideas are simple metaphors.
  2. Metaphysics is the study of being in general and its transcendental properties. Axioms are truths that are obvious and demonstrable. These are three theories:
    • Substance is what exists by itself, concrete beings, and accidents inhere in it.
    • Universal concepts are produced substances and have objective validity.
    • Hylomorphism: substances have matter and form, and this form is the essence.

Plato’s Metaphysics

  1. Posits a metaphysical dualism of the sensible or material world that appears, and the intelligible world that truly exists, where the ideas are prioritized, chaired by the idea of the Good.
  2. Ideas exist separately from concrete beings. Each idea is a substance and is defined as that which exists in and of itself. The ideas are the essences of beings. Each idea is unique, eternal, and unalterable.
  3. Concrete beings can participate in ideas or imitate them; in any case, they are imperfect copies.

Mechanistic View of the Renaissance

The universe is considered as an ordered and stable whole. The starting point is the heliocentric model, where the sun is at the center of the universe and the Earth revolves around it. Accepting this was a radical change in scientific investigation; it was simpler. This criterion of simplicity would be based on rational science. What is simple is also the most true. The universe is conceived as something infinite and homogeneous, like the law of gravity; it is a machine. Nature is considered to be the same material, composed of particles that move through space-time and interact with forces; it is stable, deterministic, and ordered.

Characteristics of Mechanical Science

  • Regularity, conservation, economy, and continuity.
  • Quantitatively studies the properties of reality that can be measured.
  • Mathematically calculates natural phenomena.
  • Seeks efficient causes; they happen to stop philosophy.
  • Based on technique and invention.