Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

philosophers include: ● Thales: Considered to be the first philosopher because he introduced a different mode of thinking that relied on reason and observation of nature. Argued that the primary substance of the universe was water. ● Anaximander: Proposed that the ultimate stuff of the universe is apeiron, which is translated as the indefinite, the unlimited, and the boundless. Believed the universe to be an intrinsically ordered one with the cycles of the seasons, the rotations of the heavens, and other sort of cyclical changes displaying a structured and intelligible organization that could be understood through rational investigation. ● Anaximenes: Held the belief that air is the one substance out of which the entire universe is formed. ● Xenophanes: General view that all meteorological phenomena are clouds, colored, moving, glowing. Clouds are fed by exhalations of the land and sea (mixture of earth and water). In contrast to the prevailing religious belief that gods created men and women in their own images, he suggested that man creates gods in his own image. He advances the concept of one supreme god who does not in any recognizable way resemble human beings. ● Parmenides: An accomplished mathematician who suggested a necessary, static, unchanging unity running throughout all of what is in flux. Reality must necessarily be eternal and unchanging; therefore, the changing world of our experience must be in some sense illusory. Being is the unity that binds all things—the living and the dead, the changing and the static, the finite and the infinite. ● Leucippus and Democritus: Advanced the doctrine of atomism, maintaining that all matter is composed of indivisible atoms in motion. Believed there is a world of appearance and a world of reality. The difference is that this world of reality is not divine, a god-like, or even purposeful: it is entirely physical and too small for us to see. They also proposed an atomic theory to explain the nature of the universe. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed; it is not possible for a being to come from nothing (non-being) and things that exist cannot disappear into non-beings. This led to the conclusion it cannot be separated, differentiated, or changed. Democritus believed that the soul is composed of exceedingly fine and spherical atoms, permitting the soul to interpenetrate the whole of the body. The spherical atoms move because it is their nature never to be still and as they move, they draw the whole body along with them and set it in motion. In the final analysis, the soul, or mind, is ultimately material. 6.3 Plato: Reality is the Eternal Realm of the Forms Plato created the idea of “Two Worlds.” In one world, the world of becoming is the world with which we are familiar—the physical world we inhabit. This world is continually changing, evolving, and disappearing. Reality is taken in through our senses due to the constant changing and it is impossible to develop any genuine knowledge of it because we can merely describe its changing nature as it appears to us. This is the world of appearance. The other world is the world of reality, which is much different. This is the world of being a realm that is eternal, unchanging, and knowable through the faculty of reason. The physical world of changing sensations is less real than the timeless world of being and it is populated by forms, which are the ideal archetypes, or essences, of everything that

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