Eurolit Homework for 10/8/18

Read: "Plato's Symposium"

Answer: Study Guide Questions ("Full Monty" Optional)

European Literature Notes 10/8/18

•             Philosophers can either be placed as:

•                 Materialists or idealists

•                 Subjectivists or objectivists

•                                   Objectivists: nothing beyond the material

•                                   Subjectivists: there is something beyond the material

•             Metaphysics is one of the most important 13 disciplines:

•                 “Meta”: above/beyond

•                 “Physics”: that which is and that which isn’t

•                 is defined as a pre-conception/pre-supposition: something you assume beforehand that has not been demonstrated, an un-demonstrated belief, can also be called an axiom: undemonstrated proposition

•                 Important because one’s view of reality is what creates the other disciplines

•             Reality is what you see reality to be

•             What drives human thinking more than anything else is paradigm thinking, because what drives human thought the most is fear of the unknown

•                 Paradigm thinking: We change things to fit our thinking so that we do not have to change, this is why we need to lead the examined life

•             Subjective: everything inside the mind

•             Objective: everything outside the mind, including the brain

•             Sophists believed “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”

•                 Socrates disagrees. Socrates says beauty is objective, it is outside man, we know what reality is because we already knew, believes true is a conception rather than a perception

•                 For example, when we look at a beautiful sunrise, essay, rose, how can we compare these if we did not already know what beauty was in the first place?

•                 The truth is objective to man and we arrived at it with our subjective mind

•                 There is no truth or falseness in the world

•             Deductive thinking: general to specific (on yesterday’s notes)

•             Inductive: specific to general (on yesterday’s notes), the gathering/formation of conceptions after having experiences particular instances

•             Plato’s life:

•                 Followed Socrates around when he was 20 for 8 years

•                 Hates democracy

•                 Came from a rich family in Athens

•                 Combination of a poet and philosopher

•                 First philosopher to have a complete philosophy system (all 13 disciplines)

•             All ancient greek philosophy was teleological

•                 means the end, and the end precedes the beginning

•                 Ethics cannot be understood without the politics

•             Deductive thinking- syllogism- major premise- minor premise- conclude something logical

•             What is it we do anything for?

•             Cosmological chain of being

•             Dualism:

•                 Reality consists of:

•                                   Ideas/forms: abstract, universal, infinite, subject, perfect, ideal

•                                                     Universal: true for anyone anywhere anytime

•                                   Appearances/illusions: concrete, particular, temporal, object, inferior copies         

•                                                     concepts are definitions

•             Psyche: essence

•             Knowledge is power and happiness!

•             What is the teleology of Plato?

•                 The good