Chapters 2 Study Questions Flashcards
- Describe Plato’s (ca. 427–347 BC) theory of forms
The theory of forms is the idea that everything in the natural world comes from a manifestation of a pure form, these pure forms are abstracts and what we experience in the real world are inferior manifestations of pure forms. Matter is constantly changing our experiences through our senses resulting in these less perfect manifestations. For example, we see thousands of cars but these are all inferior copies of an abstract idea of form of “carness”
- Describe Plato’s (ca. 427–347 BC) analogy of the divided line
Plato believed the only true knowledge we could gain comes from grasping the forms themselves rather than the images of these forms, this can only be done through rational thought. Images and imagining are the lowest form of understanding. The next level according to Plato is beliefs and visible things. Next is mathematical objects and thinking. The highest form of thinking involves embracing the forms themselves and true intelligence or knowledge, resulting only from an understanding of the abstract form.
- Describe Plato’s (ca. 427–347 BC) allegory of the cave
Plato’s allegory of the cave was meant to demonstrate the difficulty philosophers have in convincing people of a new reality due to their own ignorance. Prisoners are chained to a wall in a cave only able to see the shadows of those passing by caused by fire behind them. One prisoner escapes and leaves the cave. The campfire and sun blind him and strain his eyes, during this time he may go back as the pain of this new life worse than the chains. But, if he doesn’t, his eyes adjust and he’s able to see people not shadows, he maybe hostile or adverse during this adjustment time but overtime will recognize this life as more real than what he saw in the cave. He then goes back to the cave to tell his fellow prisoners about what he saw, but he finds it hard to see and after explaining, the prisoners reject what they’re telling him as he no longer can understand their way of life. The prisoners are the lowest level of thinking, images, and imaging. The prisoner leaving represents beliefs and visible things as his actions are governed by reason instead of sensory information and he’s willing to look past the surface and see real objects responsible for those lights and shadows. Plato’s explanation of the enlightened prisoner being met by violent protest as he can no longer see the world through the prisoners’ eyes anymore is meant to represent Socrates who was killed for trying to spread his idea that the world wasn’t flat.
- Describe Plato’s (ca. 427–347 BC) reminiscence theory of knowledge
Plato believed that the soul of a person was made from pure and complete knowledge and upon entering the body was contaminated with sensory information. He believed all knowledge is innate and can be obtained only through introspection, which is to ignore sensory experience and search one’s inner understanding focusing one’s thoughts on the contents of the mind to arrive at true knowledge. Sensory experience is only a reminder of what was already known.
- Describe Plato’s (ca. 427–347 BC) beliefs regarding the nature of the soul
To Plato, humans consist of bodies and were mortal, the body hosted the soul, which was made of by the immortal rational component, the courageous (also called emotional or spirited) component, and the appetitive component. The rational component postpones immediate gratification to a person’s long-term benefit allowing a human to suppress their needs to attain true knowledge and achieve introspection. In Plato’s perfect society, someone who lets the rational component dominate them would be philosopher-kings. The appetitive component deals with bodily desires, a dominated person only lives to quench their drive for hunger, thirst and sex and would be a slave or worker in Plato’s’ society. The courageous component deals with emotions or passions that aren’t embodied, anger over something happening; they would be soldiers in Plato’s society.
- Describe Plato’s (ca. 427–347 BC) ideas on the nature of sleep and dreams
Every person while they sleep allows their appetite to dominate them showing humans their true desires, but this appetite is dangerous, wild, and lawless.
- Describe the influence of Plato on the development of science
Plato believed in dualism, a separation between the body, which was material and imperfect, and the mind (soul) which contained pure knowledge. His advancements in Pythagoras mathematics and logical inquiry shaped Western civilizations focus on science.
- Describe Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) philosophy in terms of the basic differences he had with Plato
Patriarch of rationalism viewed essence as corresponding to the forms that existed independently of nature and could only be arrived at by ignoring sensory experience and turning one’s thoughts inwards. Heavy emphasis on logic and mathematics believing all knowledge existed independently of nature. Engaged with both rationalism believing the mind must be employed before knowledge can be attained, and empiricism believing an object of rational thought is the information furnished by the senses. Essence could best become obtained by examining nature directly as nature and knowledge were inseparable and thought the body wasn’t a hindrance in this pursuit. Logical analysis was a powerful tool but the examination of nature by observation and classification were more important.
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding causation and teleology
Teleology is the idea that everything in nature existed for a purpose, the purpose was a build-in function called entelechy. To know anything in nature we need to know it’s material cause (material something is made from), it’s formal cause (form or pattern), it’s efficient cause (the force that transforms the material into a certain form) and its final cause (the purpose of which a thing exists, it’s essence). Nature is characterized by objects’ change and motion towards their final cause. Nature has a grand hierarchy called scala naturae arranged from neutral matter to the unmoved mover, which is the cause for everything in nature and hat gives all natural objects their purpose, the closer to the unmoved mover, the more perfect an object is, and evolution didn’t exist as everything in nature was fixed in its categories. Humans were the closet to the unmoved mover among animals with all animals below humans but studying them would still give us a better understanding of humans, but it was of limited value
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding the hierarchy of souls
Souls consist of a vegetive (nutritive) soul, possessed by plants only allowing for growth, assimilation of food and reproduction; a sensitive soul, possessed by animals but not plants, allowing for the addition of sense and response to the environment, experience pleasure and pain and have memory; and the rational soul, possessed only by humans which provides all the functions of the other two souls and thinking or rational thought. Potential and a living things distinctive properties are determined by a living things soul, the body and soul existing interdependently was a meaningless question.
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding sensation
Senses were provided by information of an environment in sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Perception was the motion of objects stimulating one of the senses. We could trust our senses to yield an accurate representation of the environment.
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding common sense, passive reason, and active reason
Each part of the sensory experience provides isolated information about an environment that, by itself, is not very useful.
Common sense was the mechanism integrated and synthesized sensory experience provided of the senses to make it meaningful and believed to be located at the heart.
Passive reason utilized this synthesized experiences to get along in day to day life. For example, your sight tells you a light is red, your passive reason uses that information to tell you to stop. However, passive reason doesn’t result in an understanding of the essences. Active reason was then used and believed to be the highest form of thinking and gave humans their greater purpose and greatest source of pleasure by acting in accordance to one’s nature.
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding memory and recall
Remembering is a random recollection of something you experience previously. Recall is an mental search for a past experience. Remembering would be opening up a filing cabinet and taking out a file at random where’s recall involves searching for a particular file. Recall was also based of the ideas of the law of association. This consisted of 4 laws, the law of contiguity, the law of similarity, the law of contrast and the law of frequency. Using one or more laws of association to explain the origins of ideas, the phenomena of memory or how simply ideas form complex ones is called associationism.
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding imagination and dreaming
Imagination is the product of the recollection of sensory experiences, it is subject to errors due to the removal of the relationship between objects and the senses. For example, your may see a red apple and feel it to be hard; but later, when imaging it, you may remember the shape but remember it as green and soft.
Dreaming is the images of past experience and during sleep the images of past experience may be stimulated by events inside or outside the body. Dreams that show us the future are mere coincidences.
- Describe Aristotle’s views regarding motivation and emotions
Happiness comes from doing what is natural because doing so fulfills one’s purpose, for humans, our purpose is to think rationally. However, humans still share some functions with animals such as nutrition, sensation, reproduction and movement; as with animals much of human behaviour is motivated by appetites, thus, behaviour is motivated by such internal states as hunger, sexual arousal, thirst or the desire for bodily comfort. Much of human behaviour is hedonistic, the purpose is to bring pleasure and avoid pain, as the existence of appetite causes discomfort and stimulates activities that will eliminate it. But our rational powers satisfy our biological needs to their fullest and can be used to inhibit our appetites, this does lead to conflict between immediate satisfaction of our appetites and the more remote rational goals. Aristotle describes the best life as one lived in moderation, lived according to the golden mean which requires rational control of one’s appetite. According to Aristotle, the lives of many humans are governed by nothing more than the pleasure and pain that come from the satisfaction and frustration of appetites; these people are indistinguishable from animals.
