Pre-Socratic Philosophers: Key Thinkers and Core Concepts
Pre-Socratic Philosophers: Myths and the Dawn of Reason
The Pre-Socratic philosophers sought rational explanations (logos) for the natural world, moving away from mythical accounts. Philosophy emerged as a reflection on the fundamental principle of nature.
The Milesians
Thales
Thales posited that the fundamental principle (arkhe) of everything is water, from which all things arise and to which they return.
Anaximander
Anaximander believed that the arkhe is the apeiron, an indefinite and boundless substance
Read MorePlato’s Theory of Forms: Ideas and the Physical World
Plato’s Theory of Forms
Ideas find their home, influencing creatures in the physical world through constant movement and transformation. These forms mirror the world, embodying the idea of a copy.
The world’s creation involved matter yielding to ideas. This duality reflects in Plato’s concept of the world and the expression of ideas.
Different ideas form the essence of existence, creating a hierarchy. Goodness is paramount, encompassing mathematical concepts and more.
Distinctive Ideas
- Traditional ideas.
Nietzsche’s Critique: Reason, Reality, and the Will to Power
Western Criticism of Reason
Demo-heuristic function: It serves to apprehend reality; no representation is valid. This is a function of the real candle. Nietzsche is a philosopher, skeptic, and relativist. This inability of reason is due to two reasons:
- Psychological: Reason flees the truth.
- Rhetorical function: From this perspective, reason is a form of fantasy.
Dialectic-critical function of reason: Reason not only produces fictions but is able to examine them.
Nietzsche criticizes Platonism and Christianity
Read MoreNietzsche: Key Concepts, Themes, and Critique
Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx exemplify what has been called the crisis of modern consciousness. They are especially critical of the values of modernity, that is, reason, science, and progress.
Vocabulary of Nietzsche
- Apollonian: Symbolically expresses the more orderly and rational aspects of people’s lives.
- Body: Has primacy over thought; it is what gives us the reference points for understanding reality.
- Dionysian: Symbolically expresses the irrational, impulsive, instinctive aspect of people.
- Moral:
- A
Hume’s Critique: Ideas, Causation, and the Limits of Knowledge
Hume’s Critique of Metaphysical Ideas
Hume conducted a psychological analysis of the formation of ideas, challenging long-held metaphysical concepts such as substance, causality, and the self. He argued that these ideas, lacking a basis in sensory impressions, are merely baseless abstractions.
Criticism of Abstraction
Hume posited that an idea is essentially the memory of a sensory impression. While this representation can be applied to multiple individuals, it is not an abstraction in the Aristotelian
Read MoreObsessive Love and Destruction in Sabato’s Novel
Love, for many, is liberation. He went to prison, the soul first, then the body, deeply desiring a woman, wanting to lose track of what was happening to himself, not realizing that his whole life was finally based on the realization of his desire, which was to be with her, treating her as if she were his wife, when in fact it was not, nor would it be because she was married to another man, and whatever it is what it felt for and that it is clear that not relinquish its status by a lover.
In fact,
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