Chapter 2

Question 1

animism

Answer 1

Looking at all of nature as though it were alive

Question 2

anthropomorphism

Answer 2

the projection of human attributes onto nature is

Question 3

explain the spirit in terms of objects and dying and dreams of other people in early human times

Answer 3

no distinction between inanimate or animate objects or material and immaterial thing

a ghost/spirit lived in everything including humans

death - spirit leaves body

when we dream of someone dead we can only do so ppl the spirit still exists

Question 4

why did Humphrey suggest we called ppl homo psychologicus instead of homo sapiens

Answer 4

bc people are always trying to deter the reason of something and predict and contra, understand nature. We intuitively understand what others want us to do

Question 5

Theory of mind

Answer 5

knowing what another person is likely thinking or intending

Question 6

Describe the gods in the olympian religion. Who tended to follow this religion

Answer 6

gods were amoran, didn’t care about ordinary humans. The gods personified orderliness and rationality and intelligence. The greek upper class favoured this religion

Question 7

Describe the Dionysian orphic religion and who followed it

Answer 7

based on legend of Dionysus, god of wine and sex frenzy, and disciple orpheus.

the lower class followed this

Question 8

explain soul and death in olympian and Dionysian orphic religions. how did this encourage humans to live their lives?

Answer 8

olympian: “breath-soul” did survive death but was a blank slate from the body it was in.

Ideal life was seen by a pursuit of glory through noble deeds

Dionysian orphic: transmigration of the soul. Soul was locked in physical body like a prison. it had a circle of births – plant –> animal –> human –> plant etc. Should longed for a return to pure gods and enter a more heavenly state.

Question 9

definition of philosophy

Answer 9

the love of knowledge or wisdom

Question 10

when did philosophy begin

Answer 10

when natural explanations (logos) replaced supernatural ones (mythos)

Question 11

what were the first philosophers called

Answer 11

cosmologists bc they tried to explain the origin, structure and processes governing the cosmos (universe)

Question 12

who is often referred to as the first philosopher

Answer 12

Thales

Question 13

Tell me about Thales

Answer 13

Thales emphasized natural explanations and minimized supernatural ones

His physics was water. Water is found in every living thing and exists in many forms.

He predicted eclipse and developed navigation methods based on stars/planets. He applied geometric principles to measurements of buildings.

Showed that knowledge of nature could provide power over environment - cornered market on olive oil by predicting weather

was the first to really welcome criticism from his students and encouraged them to improve his teachings

Question 14

Tell me about Anaximander

Answer 14

studied Thales

Argued water was made of more basic materials. He though the physics was something that could be anything and that was boundless and indefinite.

Had rudimentary theory of evolution.
water and earth –> fish. –> humans grew in fish until puberty and burst out of fish to survive on own.

Question 15

tell me about herclitus

Answer 15

Believed fire to be physics as everything was becoming/ transforming to something else. Everything existed b/w two polar opposites

“it is impossible to step twice into the same river”

Can we know anything if everything is constantly changing?

Question 16

the sides of “can we know anything if everything is constantly changing?”

How do we see this today?

Answer 16

everything empirical (observed with senses) is in flux

can only know things unchangeable:

1) something real but undetectable by senses. like atomists and pythagorean mathematicians did
2) something mental (dead or soul) like plutonists and christians did
today: our scientific laws are abstractions. when in real world - only probabilistic

Question 17

Bc of “can we know anything if everything is constantly changing?”
what are empiricists seen as dealing with?

Answer 17

concerned with process of becoming rather than with being as being implies permanance

Question 18

Tell me about Parmenides

Answer 18

Believed all changes was an illusion and there was one reality that was motionless and only understood with reason

knowledge only attained through rational thought, as empirical observation is illusion

believed in reification (if you could speak or think or something it implies its existence)

Question 19

Zeno of Elea

Answer 19

Disciple of parmenides

motion is an illusion (arrow halving the distance again and again between point A and point B) “Zeno’s parodic”

Question 20

Pythagoras

Answer 20

showed math can be used to model, explain and predict nature

thought an explanation for everything in the universe can be found in numbers and numerical relationships

phythagoream theorem (probably known to babylonians first tho)

one string twice as long as other and played at same time is harmonious –> psychology first psychophysical law

though illness was due to body’s distributed equilibrium

Question 21

What did the pythagoreans believe

Answer 21

nothing is perfect in empirical world

assumed a dualistic universe, one part abstract, permanent, and intellectually knowable (like the one by Parmenides), the other part empirical, changing and known through the senses (like the one by Heraclitus).

Sensory experience can interfere with attainment of knowledge and should be avoided

members are known for long periods of silence for rational though, “cleansed” their minds w hard physical/enta exercise, imposed taboos like eating flesh and beans.

believed everything in universe was interrelated and in mathematical harmony

encouraged women to join, argued for humane treatment of slaves, developed medical practices based on unbalance in body

experiences of flesh inferior to those of mind.

dualism of the body

• reasoning powers and physical flesh
• reasoning a function of the soul which is immortal

One of the first - clear cut mind-body dualisms in the history of western thought.

body is prison from which the should should escape
believed in cycle of births that would be stop by purification of the soul

were vegetarians

Question 22

Empedocles

Answer 22

disciple of pythorgoras

a physician

claimed should had been migrating for a while

suggested everything consisted of 4 elements (earth, fire, air, water) including humans 
earth = solid of body
water = liquid in body
air = breath of life
fire = reasoning ability

health occurs when 4 elements of body are in balance.

two causal powers of universe: love and strife
create unending cosmic cycle:

believed they always existed

theory of evolution- believed various body parts wandered around and were combined randomly. some dead off and humans and animals arose capable of surviving

theory of perception: objects in outside enviro throw off tiny copies of themselves eidola, which enter blood through pores of body. The eidola attract elements like them and the fusion of internal elements results in perception. We perceive objects by internalizing tiny copies of them in the heart

Question 23

Empedocles : explain the 4 cycles of live strife and the 4 elements

where can we recognize our world?

Answer 23

phase 1: love dominates, perfect mix of 4 elements

phase 2: strife disrupts the perfect mix progressively separating them

phase 3: strife completely separates elements

phase 4: love becomes increasingly dominant and the elements are gradually recombined

new worlds come into existence and are destroyed as the cycle recurs

we can only recognize our world in phase 2 and 4

Question 24

Anaxagoras

Answer 24

everything as we know it in our world were at one point mixed together

nothing can be made from nothign

believed there were an infinite number of elements he called “seeds” including water, fire, hair, bread, meat, air, wet, cold, dry, hot etc

but the seeds can’t exist by themselves, all elements contain all other elements, just in different proportions

mind contains no other seeds and mind isn’t present in other seeds. Where it is present, there is life.

Question 25

Democritus

Answer 25

last of greek cosmologists
all things made of atoms - tiny indivisible parts

atoms were believed to be unalterable but could arrange themselves differently to make different objects.

humans and soul or mind made up of smooth, highly mobile fire atoms that provide mental experiences

animate, inanimate, and cognitive events were reduced to atoms and atomic activity

–> deterministic

Monism (materialism)

elementism - everything can be explained through atoms and their activity.

reductionism - attempted to explain objects and events at one level and terms of events on another (atoms and their activity)

thought sensation occurred when atoms emanate from the surfaces of objects and enter body through sensory systems to be transmitted to brain . when they enter brain, the fire atoms foram a copy of them, the match bewteen the eidola and atoms in brain causes perseption. BUT remember its not the object itself so it may not be exact

believed atoms scattered t death. no life after death

thinking - brain
emotion - heart

appetite - liver

4 primary colours - black, red, white, green

5 senses - vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste

Question 26

how is reductionism and elementism different

Answer 26

reductionism - two different domains of explanation

elementism - attempts to understand a complex thing by separating it into its simpler component parts

Question 27

Aclepius

Answer 27

The greek god of medicine

many temples were named in his honour

Question 28

who practiced medicine in the temples. how did that work

Answer 28

priests

usually the ppl went through a ceremony including sleeping and would dream that a priest or god told them what to do to be cured

Question 29

Alcmaron

Answer 29

the first to move away fro temple medicine towards naturalistic medicine.

equated health with balance

physicians job to help them regain balance

he dissected bodies to learned

concluded that sensation, perception, memory, thinking, and understanding, occurred in the brain

Question 30

Hippocrates

Answer 30

kept detailed records that accounted arthritis, mumps, epilepsy etc

call disorders , mental/physical, came from natural factors

believed everything made of the 4 elements including humans

and associated them with 4 humors

earth - blick bile
air - yellow bile

fire - blood

water - phlegm

physicians helped by helping the. body natural ability to heal

do not charge fee if they are short on money

Question 31

Galen

Answer 31

associated 4 humors with 4 temperaments

phlegm - phlegmatic, sluggish, unemotional

blood - sanguine, cheeful

yellow bile - choleric, quick tempered, firey

black bile - melancholic, sad

Question 32

sophists view

Answer 32

were professional teachers of rhetoric and logic who believed truth was relative, no single truth exists

believing in something makes it right to you

Question 33

protagoras

Answer 33

the best known sophist

“Man is the measure of all things—of the things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not”

“Man never steps into the same river once,” because the river is different for each individual to begin with.

for a fee he taught ppl that you could argue anything from both sides

nothing is false but some things are more valuable than others

he was agnostic

Question 34

Gorgias

Answer 34

a sophist

thought all things were true as knowledge is subjective - all things were equally false

there is no object basis for determining truth
(nihilism)

his three truths
Nothing exists; if it did exist, it could not be com- prehended; and if it could be comprehended, it could not be communicated to another person.

words only describe our belief about things

Question 35

nihilism

Answer 35

there is no objective way of determining knowledge of truth

Question 36

Xenophanes

Answer 36

religion = human invention

if animals had gods they’d look like aninmals

moral codes = human inventions

not an atheist - he thought there was a supreme god that didn’t look human

Question 37

socrates

Answer 37

socrates agreed with the sophists that individual experience and opinion is important but he disagreed that there is no objective truth

inductive definition - he sought the essence of things. to know something is to understand its essence

an essence = definition of a concept. verbal definitions

th goal of life is to gain knowledge

mainly concerned with human problems not problems of the universe

charged w corrupting youth of Athens sentenced to death, could have run away but preferred death to exile

in a search for someone wiser than himself, socreaties found that ppl know nothing but claimed they did and that maybe an oracle told him he was the wisest bc he though he knew nothing

had famous student plato

Question 38

plato

Answer 38

socrates famous student

theory of forms: everything in empirical world is a manifestation of a pure form that exists in abstract

concept of form as the aspect of reality that is permanent and knowable

allegory of the cave

before the soul was implanted in the body it was in the realm of forms and pure and complete knowledge

when it came into the body sensory information contaminated that.

reminiscence theory of knowledge - lal knowledge is innate an acquired through introspection

soul: rational, immortal, courages, appetitive

The supreme goal in life, accord- ing to Plato, should be to free the soul as much as possible from the adulterations of the flesh

Plato realized that not everyone is capable of intense rational thought; he believed that in some individuals the appetitive aspect of the soul would dominate, in others the courageous (emotional) aspect of the soul would dominate, and in still others the rational aspect could dominate.

In Plato’s scheme, an inverse relationship exists between concern with bodily experiences and one’s status in society.

dreams - during sleep we cannot rationally control our appetites

Question 39

Aristotle

Answer 39

received training in medicine

tutored Alexander the great

faced sentencing, fled Athens,

he covered memory, reasoning, sensation, motivation, morality, social behavior, education, development, geriatrics, sleep and dreams, lan- guage, and learning

essenses existed and could be best known by studying nature

embraced both rationalism and empiricism - He believed that the mind must be employed before knowledge can be attained (rationalism) but that the object of rational thought is the information furnished by the senses (empiricism).

To know anything you have to know 4 aspects of it: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, the final cause

hierarchy of souls (3 types)

vegetative soul - plants, allows for growth, reproduction

sensitive soul - animals not plants, sense and respond to the environment, pleasure/pain, have a memory

rational soul - humans, allows for thinking/ rational thought

sense provide info from the environment The motion of objects stimulate the sense, we can trust senses to give a pretty accurate representation of the environment

common sense is necessary to coordinate info from all the senses and have knowledge

passive reason synthesizes experience that helps with everyday life

active reason - abstract principles

there is an inner potential in humans they may or may not reach

active reason part of soul immoirtable but upon death it forgets all human memories.

the unmoved mover - set nature into motion, logical necessaity

rememberin - spontaneous recollection of somethign previously experienced

recall - active mental search of past

laws of association (basis of learning theories)

imagination and dreaming - when sensations occur they create images that outloast the stimulation that caused them - retention of these is memory -

imagniation can have error as objects and sense organs are removed

dreaming - during sleep images not retained by reason, not coordinated with ongoing sensory stimulation

dreames are mere coincidences, not prophecy

happniess = doing what fulfills ones purpose. for humans that is to think rationally

action directed at satisfying an appetite. much of behvaiour is hedonistic but we can use our rational powers to inhibit our appetite. and our greatest happiness is using our rational powers to the fullest

best life: using rational powers, living in moderation

Question 40

what were the 4 causes of artistotle to know something?

Answer 40

material cause (kind of matter a thing was)

formal cause (the form of a thing)

efficient cause (the force that transformed the object)

final cause (the purpose of the thing)

Question 41

entelechy

Answer 41

everything in nature has a purpose

Question 42

scala naturae

Answer 42

idea that nature is arranged in a hierarchy ranging form neutral matter to unmoved mover (pure actuality and the cause of everything in nature)

Question 43

describe Aristotles laws of association

Answer 43

law of contiguity: when we think of something we think of the things that were experienced with it

law of similarity: when we think of something we tend to think of things similar to it

law of contrast: when we think of something we tend to think of things opposite to it

law of frequency: typically, the more often experiences occur to gather, the stronger their association