Philosophy and Human Evolution: From Myth to Modernity

Posted on Dec 11, 2024 in Philosophy and ethics

The Stories

A myth is a tale of fantasy, decorated with symbols and metaphors, transmitted from generation to generation. The main characters are gods, heroes, or supernatural characters who act arbitrarily. It maintains forms of social cohesion, since society is reflected in the myth, the creative being, responding to certain questions and problems.

Rational Discourse

Rational discourse is contrary to myth. It uses rational arguments and relies on natural elements of nature. It is subject only to its own necessary laws and no longer depends on the willingness of gods. “Logos” (word, argument, and reason) was used to refer to rational knowledge. Rational discourse replaces belief with coherent arguments. Rational discourse was the triumph of the human community in the explanation of nature, relieved of gods and other powers foreign to reason.

Philosophy, Knowledge, and Ignorance

The Wonder and Questions

All knowledge arises from the curiosity and amazement that the unknown produces. Real surprise is related to everyday life, and to notice it, it will be necessary to expand the senses in a new way.
Along with the ability to be surprised is the ability to ask questions. Many of the old issues that human beings have raised during history remain open; others have been answered thanks to scientific advances.
The difference between reason and myth lies in the ability to create arguments. Reason advances through the exercise of rigorous argumentation, where every statement has to rely on a reason.

Knowledge, Opinion, and Belief

We can talk about two kinds of knowledge that may be attached or not:

Disinterested knowledge, which seeks to know reality as it is.
Knowledge to do something, searching for a practical application of what is known. In each period, the flow of knowledge is different from that in earlier times. In the field of philosophy, the impossibility of acquiring all knowledge is recognized, but it is believed that it is possible to aspire to acquire it.

Such openness does not preclude rational discourse from identifying its enemies, which are:

Ignorance: The most important. Something is not known or is incorrectly known.
The view that a trial is baseless and without rigor, like knowledge.
Belief, which is the personal commitment to an idea, dogma, theory, or belief. Belief can arise from injury, ingenuity, error, or opinion. A belief has value only when it proceeds from faith, but it never substitutes for rational thought.

The Ideal of Wisdom: “Knowing” and “Knowing How to Live”

Philosophy tries to be a universal activity, just as reason is a universal component of human beings. It is understood that everyone can make use of arguments based on philosophy.

Wisdom is not just a theory or argument, but a way of life illuminated by knowledge.

The Features of Philosophy

Interrogative reason: Philosophy is coherent and thorough knowledge, but knowledge is never complete.
Knowledge of the second degree: To perform, philosophy needs to take into account data from different sciences but goes beyond them.
Constant criticism: Philosophy reviews the fundamentals and latest hypotheses, goes beyond the claims of the special sciences, and puts into question its own existence; therefore, its criticism is radical.
Integrative knowledge: The construction of the whole can be dangerous if it is not properly grounded, but it is a requirement of philosophy.

This integrative aspect is especially necessary when knowledge has reached the level of specialization that it has today.

Philosophy and Other Forms of Knowledge

Science: Philosophy is not a science, but it must always take into account the results of science and the data it has to consider about the outside world.
Religion is a subjective belief that is based on faith, revealed truth, and some sacred texts. Belief is very respectable, although it is not based on reason and rational discourse.
Literature: Narratives and constructs invent characters without them having to actually exist or have their foundation in reason. Some of their subjects and their creations can answer fundamental questions that are close to the subjects of philosophy; however, they do not propose a rational discourse.

Philosophy and History

Classical Antiquity

In India, around 1500-1000 BCE, the sacred writings of life that are the foundation of Hindu philosophy began to be gathered.
At the same time that Pythagoras lived in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, the Indian sage Siddhartha Gautama, who was the founder of Buddhism, was born.
Contemporary with Pythagoras and Buddha is Confucius, who influenced his doctrine in China, Korea, and Japan.

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Medieval philosophy developed between the 4th and 16th centuries. It established a dialogue between faith and the power of human reason. It is the era of scholasticism, marked by disputes and large encyclopedic syntheses.

The most relevant authors of Christianity were St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and William of Ockham, who criticized the Church’s power and raised the necessity of new ways of thinking.

Islam appeared in the 7th century and spread through the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe. Many of the lost texts of Plato and Aristotle were retrieved.

The Middle Ages ended with the Renaissance, in which there was an intellectual shift in European thought provoked by the recovery of the great texts of Greek and Latin authors, brought from Constantinople, which culminated with the rise of humanism.

The Philosophy of Modernity

The scientific revolution, led by Galileo and Newton, was developed during the 17th and 18th centuries and had a central importance in shaping a new way of thinking. Modern science and philosophy appeared, but not many of their fields of study. It is the time of continental rationalism (Spinoza and Descartes) and British empiricism (Locke, Hume, and Berkeley).

The modern era ended with the picture that spread throughout Europe the values of modern rationality and proposed the fall of the old regime through the French Revolution.

The Century of Science, Industry, and the Bourgeoisie

The 19th century began with the profound social transformation caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, which, together with the development of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new nations, led to bourgeois and capitalist society.

The great German idealists built great systems of thought that sought to pick up on the ideas that the social transformations of the time. Thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche represented new ways of conceiving capitalist society, and Freud revealed the power of the unconscious. The various sciences experienced significant development and occupied space previously reserved for philosophy.

In the Twentieth Century

Philosophy claimed to think about the features of the new society that emerged after World War I and is marked by the following:

The mastery of technique.
The welfare state.
The globalizing world.

This has been the time of the three great scientific revolutions that have transformed ways of thinking, and new problems have arisen: the digital revolution, and the physical and biological revolutions.

In the first half of the 20th century, three systems of thought deeply influenced subsequent thought:

Husserl’s phenomenology.
Heidegger’s anthology, which reflects on human existence and feeds existentialism.
Wittgenstein claimed the need to study language.

Phylogeny

The Evolution of the Human Species

Phylogenetic evolution: The changes that occur within a lineage.
Divergent evolution: The diversification of lineages and the emergence of new species.

Investigations have shown that human evolution is not linear but branched, with many branches that include the long path followed by the first hominids to Homo sapiens.

From Primates to Hominids

Many of the characteristics of human beings are determined by membership in the order of primates. They bear some similarities, such as the opposable big toe, flat nails, three-dimensional and polychromatic vision, and a reduced sense of smell. They also have a small number of offspring per birth, a prolonged childhood, and complex social behavior.
Within primates, the human species belongs to the superfamily of hominoids. It shares with them some specializations, the most important of which are related to the locomotor aspect.
This superfamily is subdivided into two families: those of apes and hominids.

The Process of Humanization

The First Hominids

The taxonomic organization of the human situation in relation to the Great Apes.

The first hominid was Australopithecus anamensis. They introduced meat into their diet, their habitat was in mixed environments, and they had bipedal motion. The development of the thumb next to the other four fingers in Australopithecus afarensis.

About 2 or 3 million years ago, there was a strong diversification of various hominid species, associated with climate change.

Australopithecus africanus was the last representative of this genus.

Homo habilis

Appeared about 2.4 million years ago and gave the first samples of the stone industry.

The development of tools allowed the introduction of fatty meats into their diet, resulting in brain expansion (from 450 cm3 to 750 cm3).

Homo ergaster

Appeared in Africa 1.8 million years ago. They had a higher cranial capacity (900 cm3) and more technical training. They produced bifaces weapons, distributed work by sex, and mastered fire, with which they cooked food, especially meat.

Homo neanderthalensis

The European continent was inhabited simultaneously by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

Homo neanderthalensis is robust, with a large face and a voluminous jaw. They developed their own lithic industry, established the use of fire, cared for the sick and elderly, and buried their dead.

Homo Sapiens

There are two theories of their origin:

The multiregional model: Homo sapiens arose simultaneously in different parts of Africa and Europe. The special unit would have remained due to gene flow between populations.
African replacement method: The current human species has a single origin in Africa. This hypothesis is supported by molecular biology.

Its evolution is related to the use of the media. This has to do with the development of culture. They are inventors who use new symbolic materials. Their minds allowed them to build tools that are not related to survival, such as ornaments and art. About 18,000 years ago, when the glacial period began to ease, Homo sapiens changed their way of life to stable settlements, which led to the domestication of plants and animals.

Human-Specific Traits

Bipedal Gait

Involved the release of the hands and allowed traveling long distances along the ground.

The Type of Delivery

Bipedalism made childbirth difficult, so it had to be assisted.

During the first years of life, the brain is more plastic and responsive to a wealth of learning. As a result, we need a better level of cooperation among group members, and the social structure becomes more complex to care for and protect the new individuals.

Brain Development

Increased from 750 cm3 in Homo habilis to 1400 cm3 in Homo sapiens, which is linked to the acquisition of intellectual abilities and increased intelligence and memory.

Release of Hands

The combination of the release of the hands and brain development makes the difference between humans and other animals.

Sexual Behavior

In human females, there are no clear signs of the fertile period, so sexual relations are not limited to a period that guarantees pregnancy. This strengthens the bond with a partner.

Language

It required the development of a set of neural structures and the adoption of the device, which marked the strengthening of social ties.

The Social and Cultural Nature

Developing a mechanism that allows it to adapt to all situations that change their relationship with the environment. Culture is gained in the process of social apprenticeship and not through inheritance.

Food Preparation

It is the first fully human activity.

In and Out of a Culture: Emic / Etic

The linguist Kenneth Pike introduced the distinction between “emic” and “etic” to note the different positions that could be retained when studying a language. Later, this distinction began to be used in cultural anthropology to differentiate cultural characteristics from within and outside a group.

“Emic” is the viewpoint adopted by the participants themselves. It is to perform a ceremony, ritual, or other cultural practice within the parameters of the agent and, therefore, taking into consideration the justification for one’s own culture that makes such practices.
“Etic” is the perspective taken by the external observer. It is the point of view that the sociologist, anthropologist, etc., takes when trying to value a cultural situation from their own culture, since the parameters established by it.

These perspectives do not have to be opposed. The problem is to determine which one best explains a culture. Some authors suggest that the positions are irreconcilable, that cross-cultural communication and understanding of different practices are not possible, leaving the road closed to multiculturalism without conflict.

Yet others believe that dialogue between cultures is possible on common elements that appear in all cultural forms, as they are products of belonging to the same species.

Classical Metaphysics

Characterized by a high level of abstraction, it intended to describe the common denominator of reality. It should develop maximum generality because the traits were real and rising beyond the specifics of particular beings. It was knowledge of a transcendental type.

It used complex concepts and categories that were used to distinguish different forms of reality and classify entities into groups:

Argumentative discourse is chaired by certain principles or requirements. Two of them, with particular importance, are:

The principle of contradiction, which says it is impossible for a particular being to both have a property and not have it.
The principle of excluded middle, which states that when an object has a property, nothing else has that property.

Different Contracts and Liberal Submission Contracts

Under the contract of submission, as such, people tend to satisfy their own desires. To achieve this, they use reason, which tells them the means to achieve their ends. The contract requires individuals who will now become subjects.

Under the liberal contract, natural law states that life, liberty, and property rights are immutable and therefore must be respected. The contract obliges individuals who freely want to sign it. It waives the ability to legislate and punish the crimes of those who violate the natural rights of peace and property. The executive and judicial branches sustain the state and are revocable. The transfer of rights of individuals is partial; the natural right of private property is retained. Political power is held by a group of people to rule in defense of the natural rights of individuals. The resulting political system is liberalism.

Differences Between Liberal Social Contract and Contract

In the social contract, as such, the human being is absolutely free and only wants to preserve their own life by satisfying their natural needs. They do not need others and do not feel any desire to do harm. Through a contract, each individual voluntarily gives up all rights to the general will, so they give the same for all possible freedom and community life. All individuals have the same degree of political participation; it is democracy.

The liberal contract establishes inalienable rights, though not always fulfilled. The executive and the judiciary lie in the state.

Theory of Relativity

According to Einstein, there is no absolute motion or any fixed reference point, as explained by Newtonian physics. There are no time and space apart, but a space-time continuum.

Mass and energy are interchangeable (E=mc2).

It explains the accelerated motion of bodies and, in particular, gravity as a curvature of space-time, representing a four-dimensional picture.

Quantum Theory

It aims to explain the structure of matter at the atomic and subatomic levels. In 1900, Planck showed that matter absorbs energy in limited units called quanta. Other physicists came to the conclusion that matter consists of atoms, and these small particles have a dual nature: sometimes they behave as mass points and other times as waves.

Heisenberg formulated this indeterministic nature of the subatomic world in the uncertainty principle. One can predict either the speed or the position of a particle, but not both at once.

Reality of the External World

Common sense realism: There is a real outside world perceived by the senses and analyzed by science.
Skepticism: The senses do not provide a reliable perception of the world and sometimes deceive us, so we doubt it.
Idealism: Our idea exists only when it receives something from the external world.
Phenomenalism: The real world is nothing but a set of perceptions and sensory phenomena that we can have of it.

Kant: Illusions of Reason

Intended to analyze the limits of reason and study the foundations of rational knowledge. He asserted that all knowledge should be a combination of data from experience and the categories of understanding. Mathematics and physics advance because this combination is happening. However:

Metaphysics is not based on facts of experience. It is guided solely by reason, without any empirical content. So there is no progress, and knowledge is illusory: the great ideas of metaphysics are illusions of reason. They are not certain or sure knowledge. In other words, metaphysics is not science. Kant’s work dethroned the overblown ambitions of theoretical reason, but he also noted that the fate of man was to bear the embarrassment of asking questions with no certain answer.

Hypothetical-Deductive Method

Scientific research begins with the observation of events, which consists of finding the most relevant aspects of a phenomenon.
From the observations, a hypothesis is made that will guide the investigation. The hypothesis generally arises from previous theories but can also be produced directly by reason.
Using mathematical logic, testable consequences are deduced from these hypotheses: “If the hypothesis is true, this and other statements implied by the hypothesis have to be given.”
The testing is done through an experiment in which a number of variables that are controllable are tested. Unlike the experiment, when conditions cannot be preset, observation is used. If the result is favorable, the hypothesis is considered approved. If it is unfavorable, it is rejected.
The matching must be criticized. Confirmation may be due to other factors than the hypothesis.
The hypothesis confirmed with sufficient inductive support is raised to the category of law. Laws are statements that have a universal form. Laws apply provisionally pending refutation with a new experiment or observation. From the laws, science makes predictions, which have to be contrasted.
Laws are articulated in a theory. Science seeks to unite knowledge into theories that unify the laws. These theories are systems of laws that help to develop a hypothesis.

The Limits of Science

Science is limited knowledge. Karl Popper has stressed the character of knowledge as not absolutely true, and therefore provisional. According to him, we can consider a hypothesis valid until it is proven false.

The scientist ought always to search for this contradiction to increasingly approach the criterion of the future, that is, refutation over accumulated verification.

Another limitation is the reduction to facts. Hume says there is no possibility of knowing that from which there is no experience. In response to questions or problems of the human condition, science remains silent. A new theory is not only the result of new tests. It is also a revolution or paradigm shift, involving internal upheaval within the field of the scientific community.

Scientific research must be free and responsible. It is not always so. The ethics of responsibility emphasizes the commitment to truth, the priority of social programs, and environmental requirements.

Types of Sciences

Ancient Science: A Closed Universe

The universe is a large hierarchical organization, and its parts are conceived differently in space. It is closed and finite, and its center is the Earth (geocentrism).

Aristotle believed the universe was divided into two levels: the bottom, which is below the orbit of the moon and is imperfect, is composed of 4 elements (earth, air, fire, and water); and the top, which is beyond and is perfect, where the stars are spinning in concentric crystal spheres filled with a fifth element called ether. It is a dynamic universe endowed with a purpose (theology).

In the 2nd century, Ptolemy assumed geocentrism and attributed a double orbit to the planets, which lasted until the Renaissance.

Christianity introduced the concept of creation, and thus formed the medieval interpretation of the world focused on God and the supernatural world (theocentrism).

The New Science: The Open Universe

In the Renaissance, the Aristotelian system was reviewed, and a change of perspective began. Its features are heliocentrism, mathematics, and a new method of knowledge. An attitude of mastery over nature resulted in a great development of technique.

Copernicus questioned geocentrism and placed the Sun at the center of the universe.

Galileo revolutionized physics by studying the free fall of bodies, believing that the universe is written in mathematics, and discovering the hypothetical-deductive method.

Newton saw the world as a machine.

Newton conceived the world as a homogeneous space consisting of independent masses that attract each other under the force of gravity. The entire universe is subject to this law of universal gravitation.

The universe is conceived as a large clockwork mechanism governed by necessary laws, and where space and time are absolute references for all movement. The universe is infinite, three-dimensional, homogeneous, and governed by strict determinism.