Exam 1 Flashcards
What happens in the intro of the Symposium?
Platos writing is a retelling of Agathons Party by Apollodorus to a friend; Apollodorus was told about the party through Aristodemus who was actually there
What is the Symposium about?
the whole dialogue is to reach the question of “What is Love?”
How are Platos writings/stories done?
Platos writings are not historical (they are slightly fictional); Plato used real people (such as Socrates) as characters that he used in his dialogue
Socrates
did QnA’s to find answers; looked for progress not final answers; famous for not knowing anything
Socratic Wisdom
socratic ignorance; knowing when you do not know
What does Apollodorus and Aristodemus seem to confuse the love of philosophy with?
love of Socrates; they are confusing their love for philosophy with Socrates because he helped teach tehm
Agathon invites Socrates to sit next to him so that Socrates may touch him and give him his wisdom…how does Socrates respond?
that Agathon is wise and wishes that he would gain some of Agathons wisdom; socrates says that we can not transfer wisdom, we must do the searching for ourselves
Phaedruses Speech
if you are in love you are more likely to be a virtuous person; praises love and its effects on us; inspires courageous acts and honor; the Lover is closer to godlike that the beloved; boy love and women love is vulgar
Palseneus Speech
goes into benefits and dangers of love;vulgar love can lead to ruin;honorable love can lead to honor and courage; critcizes older man and boy lover system; two gods of love and two kinds of love (harmful and hurtful); love is not good or bad it depends on how its used/goal; misogny elements; noble vs. common love; only virtue makes love acceptable we need to be virtuous first to be able to properly love
Eryximachis Speech
music, nature, etc all display the distinction pausanias made; base just means chaotic, unstable, noble means stabilized, organized; says love is involved with everything including physics; harmony is noble love, stabilized; vulgar love would be unorganized, disharmony
Aristophanes Speech
originally 3 genders (male, female, androgynous) they got cut in half by Zeus and we now seek our other half; love requires sense of lack and sense of connection; we cannot point to something that drives us: its not something we can see (because we split so long ago); we want to become one again and we look for our other halves; uses it to explain homosexual and heterosexual
Agathons Speech
Agathons name means “the good man” he is young, attractive, etc; Agathon uses a method for his speech: do not praise effects of X before understanding what X is; uses flowery language and does not really say a whole lot; says love is all the things Agathon is young, attractive, the best; says love possess everything that is beautiful and good
Dialectic
conversation in which parties are all interested in discovering the truth and conduct a search for truth
What is dialectics not?
apologetics and eristics
Apologetics
a conversation in which one partner or group, X, tries to persuade the other, Y, of something X already firmly believes is true
Eristics
a conversation in which one partner or group, X, tries to defeat another partner or group, Y, by using any method available in disregard of the truth
What are the commitments that Agathon makes about love?
love is beautiful and in no way ugly; love is love of Something, call it X; Love is a type of desire for X
What does Diotima teach Socrates?
somethings are not completely beautiful are also not fully ugly; non-knowledge is not full ignorance; some non-gods (non-mortals) are not fully mortal
What is Diotima’s theory of love?
love is always after the beautful; if love is not perfect beauty it can still be beautiful by participation; love is always chasing beauty; love is beautiful by participation in going after the beauty
Double Ignorance
someone who is ignorant and does not realize they are ignorant
Diotimas Ladder of Love
1) desire to renew the presence of bodily goods forever such as the physical drive to reproduce; 2) desire to renew the presence of psychical goods forever ex 1) lower types- artworks, political movements, constitutions ex2) higher types-monumental discoveries of timeless truths; 3) the final mystery is even greater
The Gist of Diotimas Speech
love is after eternal goodness; it drives us to seek a beauty within which to reproduce ourselves and our cultures; moving us up the ladder to the highest beauty itself without body or death
Gist of Alcibiades
the flamboyant comic relief and alternative to Socrates and Diotima; love is about passion and bodily attachment
ADD SOME BETTER CARDS
What are some of the main point of a Epicurean life?
happiest life is a minimalist life; do what you need to do to stay alive and have a stable/good mental state; minimize pain maximize pleasure
How does Epicurus view pleasure?
is the whole point of life
How does Epicurus view materialist?
mind, soul and body is all material; every organism die and decomposes; we just need to sustain ourself and have small pleasures
How did Epicurus view the “big city”?
that it was painful; we needed to escape the city and flee to a simpler life in the country
Who are two Epicurus “fanboys”?
Carl Marx and Thomas Jefferson
What are some of Epicurean famous beliefs?
do not fear god(s), do not worry about death, what is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure
What was Epicuru’s beliefs about the gods?
they are not what the mass believes them to be; they are happy and content; they are not trying to smite us; the gods should not be our desires
What was Epicuru;s beliefs about death?
there is nothing good or bad about death; when we die it is over there is no afterlife or nothing therefore we should not worry about it;
How does Epicurus see pleasures?
we should go after all of our pleasure; no pleasure is bad however if the consequences can harm us or permantely affect us they are not good; we should strive to find pleasure in basic things; luxury is not a pleasure because it leads to pain; pleasure is the only thing we seek totally for its own sake; but we do not choose every pleasure because they can lead to pain, harm, damage etc; eliminating pain is equal to achieving pleasure; pleasure is getting rid of pain
How does epicurus view things that are unachieveable?
wanting things that are unachievable (such as immortality) makes us miserable
Epicurus and the Senses
senses never lie; how we interpret our senses may be wrong but the senes themselves are not wrong
Epicurus and Forms
he contradicts plato (who thinks that we should seek a form that can not be seen); Epicurus thinks that we should sharpen our senses and what we are actually sensing
Epicurus and Natural Science
we should care about science to clear up dellusions/illusions (such as immortality, death etc); we would not need/want science if we did not want things we can not have (such as immortality); science takes away alarm- if a storm comes it is not angry gods, it is just a storm which science says. So, you are no longer afraid of angry gods due to science
Epicurus and Atoms
he is a atomist (believes we are all made of a bunch of atoms arranged in a unique way)
Atoms (in the greek sense)
all the inquality; but have different shape, size, resistance, weight
Aggregations (in the greek sense)
atoms joined together to yield aggregations, bodies, souls, secondary qualities; everything is a combination of atoms
What does Epicurus believe about the world coming to be the way it is?
he believed that our world just happened to come about by chance
Epicurus Logical Argument about Atoms
1) object (pen) is a real and finite things, 2) now I divide this pen 3) and then divide those divisions 4) try to conceive of the repition of step 3- this would mean you could divide infinity; this counters 1 because you can not divide something infinitely because the object is finite and have a set number of parts
How does Epicurus view freedom?
everything happens by chance and is random which is not free; therefore we can not truly be free; negative freedom- escape/flee the pain
Epicurus and Desire
pain = desiring; to desire is to lack what you want this is painful so all desire is painful; all desire is for pleasure; to get the pleasure is to lose the desire/pain
Epicurus was not…
a individualist; friends are important and allies are important but you should not desire one person and let that desire ruin you
Natural and Necessary Desires
desires such as hunger, thirst; they are natural and relatively easy to fill
Unnecessary Natural Desires
natural to want but it is not necessary to have; such as sex or luxury things (
Unnatural and Vain Desires
power, fame, society to build a statue of you, glory etc
Epicurus and Justice
for example, they said to steal things because it would benefit you but could have bad consequences and normally would not work out well so you should not do it
What is the basic idea of Al-Kindi?
our attitude towards the world is what matters and it is entirely up to us; getting offended by someone is because you let them offend you (basically you took it personally even though you did not have to); you have a lot more control over your actions than you think you do
Kindi and Desire
we should not get attached to material things; the true king is the one with internal strength and God, not a bunch of materialistic things; should not be attached to unique things or become so attached to materials that it would destroy us if we lost it
Does Diotima think love drives us to be good?
yes, for diotima, love is the good that we are seeking
Agathon gives the first speech that…
talks about what love is first and then its effects
Alcibiades….
contradicts Socrates who thinks we need to move past bodily love but Alcibiades says that love is bodily; Alcibiades was left disappointed and confused because he loved Socrates in a bodily way; criticizes diotmia/Socrates of being escapist
How are Ditomia/Socrates presenting Love?
with the theory of the forms; we start out as “that beautiful thing” but as we rise up the ladder we come to know what beauty (the form) is
Why is Love not a God?
because it is after the eternal beauty but it is not eternal itself so it is inbetween
What is the big view of the Agathon/Socrates Refutation
Agathon thinks love has every beauty and lacks some beauty, which contradicts itself; love can not be entirely beautiful and not ugly because he says love has to lack beauty
Epicurus and Natural Science
the better you understand the physical worls the less you will be afriad of the physical world; you do not think the Gods are after you if a storm comes, the storm is science
Epicurus and The Gods
he thinks we are aware there are gods but they have no relationship with us and they have no impact on the world; they are most at peace and do not interfere
Where does Al-Kindi say to find your identity in?
find your identity in the things that can not be taken from us which makes it eternal
Epicurus and Negative Pleasure
negative in the sense that the desire/pain is being eliminated
Epicurus and Justice
we should not steal/we should be just because it keeps you from negative consequenes; so justice initself is not good/bad it is the consequences that make them bad
