Chapter 1 - Ideas from antiquity Flashcards
psyche
something present in a living being and absent in a dead being (soul)
Plato
student of Socrates
Sophists
specialised in teaching the skills of rhetoric and public speaking
Socrates
Platos teacher
- wanted his students to understand what is true and enduring
- never wrote anything down (all of his knowledge known through Plato)
Socratic dialoges
what Plato was able to bring together from Socrates’ ideas
- formed the basis for mental philosophy: a combination of nativism and rationalism
nativism
emphasises innate qualities as the main source of human knowledge
- e.g. when a baby is born, it already has knowledge in the form of instincts
- Socrates believed that by repeatedly asking people questions, they would develop an understanding of what the answers should be
rationalism
the idea that knowledge is not obtained through experience, but rather by rationalising one’s own innate ideas about the world
- the way to understand the world is not through feelings, but through reason
deduction
a method of aquiring knowledge
- deduction from the general to the specific
the Academy
Plato’s collective of scholars who pursued their intellectual goals
- philosophy, mathematics, astronomy
apparitions
a peron’s conscious experience of something
ideal forms
perfect, unchanging concepts or blueprints that represent the true essence of things
- everything we see in the real world is considered an imperfect reflection or manifestation of these ideal forms
idealism
the notion that behind every day sensory experiences lies something more fundamental and idealistic
allegory of the cave
illustrates the distinction between appearances and ideal forms
- used by Plato to support the idea that true knowledge does not come from the sense and that the world around is just a world of appearances
model of the psyche
- appetite
- duty/courage
- reason
appetite (desire)
a direct reflection of the immediate physical gratification
courage
the ability to resist threats
Aristotle
one of the best students of Plato’s Academy
- less interested in nativist ideas and more interested in extracting knowledge from the world by using observation
- concentrated on empiricism
empiricism
the idea that knowledge comes from the environment and must be processed through sensory experience
induction
a method of reasoning that involves generalizing from specific observations or experiences to derive broader principles or knowledge
the Lyceum
Aristotle’s own school that he created when returning to Athens
hierarchical arrangement of psyche in organisms
- vegetative souls (lowest in hierarchy)
- sensitive souls
- rational souls (highest in hierarchy)
vegetative souls
organisms which possess only the ability to feed and reproduce
sensitive souls
organisms with the abilitties of sensation, memory, imagination, and locomotion (ability or act of movement)
rational souls
organisms with the ability to reason (only humans)
which innate set of categories did Aristotle argue that the human psyche has
- substance (what something is)
- quantity (how much)
- quality (color, shape)
- place (where)
- time (when)
- relation (e.g. bigger or smaller)
- activity (what is it doing)
Alhazen
contributed to our understanding of perception
- demonstrated that knowledge comes from the outside in
camera obscura
a dark box with a small hole in it. Alhazen discovered that the image of the outside world was displayed upside down in the box, and the same effect on the retina in the eye
- concluded that light comes in from outside when we look at something, just as knowledge
Avicenna
important philosopher who distinguished between external senses and internal senses
- for him knowledge came as much from the outside as from the inside
floating man thought experiment
Avicenna argued that even if a person is lacking sensory input, the person would still be aware of their own existence
