Philosophy 380, History of Philosophy: Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle

Fall 2003: 3 units, CRN 41048, at 3:00 MWF in UANX 125 (changed to UANX 150) Office 110 UANX;

Prof. J. W. Powell, ph. x5753; e-mail, jwp2@humboldt.edu; website, www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2

Office hours MF (not W) 11-12, W 11:30-12:30 at Wildberry’s; Tues 1:30-2:30 and by appt.

Your odds are good of catching me anytime I'm not teaching or in committee meetings.

Course Description, course relation to the major and to the Department:

             This is the first in the series of history of Western Philosophy courses. It meets requirements for the major in philosophy. It also provides a good in-depth introduction to philosophy, since the fundamental issues with which we deal are still central to the discipline. The course is organized more or less chronologically, but we will be able to take a problems approach during most of the course. We’ll eavesdrop as philosophy is invented or discovered by the Pre-Socratics, watch as many of the issues and methods are articulated by Plato, and follow Aristotle’s systematic work to provide a framework of answers to philosophical problems. Throughout, we will focus on what we can still use, which is remarkably much. In particular, we will see how central problems in logic, theory of knowledge, ethics, metaphysics, language, theory of God, and purpose of human existence all take forms in which we still work with them.

Course Methods: This is a seminar. That means students carry a substantial part of the burden of teaching the course. There will be mixed lectures, discussions, student presentations (oral and written), and e-mail discussions. Our methods are traditional except for the addition of the e-mail. Several parts of the course will typically involve my offering short lectures followed by class discussions. The reading load is fairly heavy, and some of the reading is very compressed or is difficult in other ways. While the readings make the core of the course, the classroom lectures and discussion are absolutely central as well, since we will not only be working to figure out what these writers are saying but also whether they are right.

             In my experience some seminars have been the most joyful and exciting parts of my education. Some others have been dreadful, boring, useless and stupid. For this to work the students as well as the teacher have to be smart and engaged; you and I both have to work.

Texts and Materials: This is an expensive course. Standard editions of Plato’s works and Aristotle’s works, which most of you will keep til you die, are not cheap. The Kirk and Raven anthology of the Pre-Socratics is a less expensive choice. If you cannot afford to buy the texts, they may be available more cheaply used through Powell’s Books (no relation to the professor) in Portland, OR, or Smith Family Books in Eugene, OR, or otherwise on the Web on eBay or ABE.com, etc. There will be handouts along the way, some of them summaries to help make reading easier.

             Kirk and Raven, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge U. P., Cambridge: 1969)

             John M. Cooper, ed., Plato; Complete Works (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis: 1997)

             Richard McKeon, ed., Basic Works of Aristotle (Random House, NYC: 1941)

Course Requirements and Grading: Students will make one presentation (orally for fifteen minutes or written 1500 words) to the class members, will write two letters (750-1000 words) to the class, and will write a final paper (2000 words) due one week before the last class. All topics will be either chosen from suggestions handed out in class or will be decided in consultation (e-mail works for this) with the teacher. The presentations and letters count equally, totaling two/thirds of the course grade, and the final paper will count as one third. Outstanding participation in discussion orally or via e-mail can raise your grade up to one-third letter. A lack of participation in discussion (you can participate in class or via e-mail) can lower your grade by one-third letter.

             Students have to read the e-mail letters and discussions regularly. It is part of your assignments that you are to show awareness of the discussion carried on in class and via e-mail. It is a courtesy to those who share their thinking to thank them for doing things you admire.

             I’ll pass out a handout on my grading criteria. Here’s an abbreviation: I give B grades to students who provide explanation and clarification of the issues and who describe the arguments of those whose work we have read, who then argue their own positions and provide answers to good objections. A’s go to those who do all that together with insightful or personal contributions to the philosophical problem. C’s go to those who fall short, usually by launching into arguments for their own views without articulating the philosophers’ arguments or without working to clarify the problems or without thinking about and answering objections.

Remarks:         In this course we witness the beginning of everything philosophical. We have a lot to cover: from the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 B.C. to the winter of 322-321--and this 260-plus years produced more of Western Civilization's philosophy than the four and a half billion years that went before, and as much as the 2600 since.

             We are going to compromise between an approach built on working through texts chronologically and a problems approach, after a quick look at Plato’s Euthyphro and Apology. Our primary interests will be to learn the timeless and positive contributions to philosophy of this small group of Dead White European Males, to clarify the questions on which they worked, and to assess their progress toward getting the answers right. That means that if you dread history then this is not just history; this is big questions for high stakes. We will engage the problems, decide what they should have said. We will have opportunities to climb through the ropes and get in the ring with Heraclitus, with Plato, with Aristotle. And if you are too timid, you can watch someone braver than you get her/his intellectual nose broken by one of the greats. You won’t get that opportunity often.

             It is history, but it is not dreadful. The characters are memorable, from the woowoo mysticism of some of the Presocratics to the frank wiseasserie of Socrates to the amphetamine-laced pace and earnestness of Aristotle. The questions are tempting, the arguments profound and charming and witty and fierce, the persons arguing sane and smart and inspired, and wacko and bewildering and commonsensical. Some of what we will read has not been bettered by the brilliant and earnest writers who have come since, though they, those later writers, have been working as hard as they can.

             The questions we will work on include the relation of humankind to nature, our relation to politics, what knowledge is (including the relation of appearance to reality), the natures of justice, of goodness, of being and becoming, of opposition or dichotomy, of love, of time/change/eternity, of language and thought and philosophy, of the meaning of our lives. Having settled those questions, we will then take on more difficult matters.

             My hope and aim is that this class will be a central course in your education. Certainly the questions are central ones for philosophy, and the writers we will concentrate on are central figures. We will criticize and defend their views in such a way that you will feel the force of ancient philosophy in any other philosophy you do, and see the part of philosophy in any intellectual discipline where you work. We will appreciate wit, anguish, insight.

Schedule: Our schedule will be modified to incorporate our (your and my) interests. In general, here is an optimistic framework for our reading: I will sketch out more of the living questions which are not revealed by this list of dead and foreign-sounding names as we begin.

Week 1. Plato’s Euthyphro; Thales:

2. Heraclitus:

3. Parmenides:

4. Zeno, Empedocles:

5. Leucippus and Democritus:

6. Plato: Apology

7.          Theatetus

8.          Theatetus cont.

9.          Symposium

10.        Republic (selections)

11.        Meno

12. Aristotle: Selections from Categories; Prior Analytics; Posterior Analytics

13.        Metaphysics

14.        Metaphysics, cont.

15.        De Anima

After we glance at Plato’s Euthyphro, perhaps composed within a couple of years of Socrates’ death in 399 B.C., we drop back roughly 200 years to

  Thales and the Presocratics

First, some notes on reading the Greeks generally, especially the Presocratics.

 Here are some common mistakes:

Thinking they lack vocabulary. Wheelwright, for example, thinks that what Thales means when he says that all things are filled with gods is that all things are filled with potential or dynamism, something for which we had to wait until Aristotle added the right hamburger helper into a meager pot of words. That we probably need to talk about what Thales said does not mean the vocabulary has to be fixed up but that it is provocative and worth thinking about. When Sartre says men are not papercutters, it is not that he did not have the right vocabulary that makes us have to explain.

Thinking that the problem of understanding them is a problem of translation. There may be places where words have to be leaned on before they will cave in and give up their lunch money, but it is more likely that particular problems are fixed by reading further and then again. If a reader new to the Greeks finds it hard to get past a feeling that it is all just too bizarre, try reading it like reading Tennyson or James Joyce--out loud, steadily, letting it wash over the ears til bits of sense start coming up like butter in the churn.

Thinking that they are speaking metaphorically (this is a fad in the current journal literature). On those occasions they offer analogies and similes and metaphors, it is easy to tell that is what they are doing. Metaphors make sense in contrast to literality, and if there are metaphors present we can almost always say what is being said literally.

Thinking they are primitive or loosey-goosey with their arguments or their thoughts. They certainly make mistakes, but it is just as hard to nail these guys as it is to nail Sartre or Heidegger or Quine or Derrida. If you think something is absurd or silly or a major slip, you are almost certainly fooling yourself. Figure out what you would agree with first; the exercise of getting into the thought, which you and I both so easily neglect, may lead you to understand enough that you will find it opening up for you.

Reading as if one were reading a summary (Cliff's notes, or a paper doing exposition). The nearest modern equivalent to reading the Presocratics for me has been reading Locke's beginning chapters on words, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, James Joyce's later stuff, Shakespeare's later stuff, lyric poetry. It has to be unpacked as we go, and regarded as polished and cut till almost every reflection and association is there on purpose.

So what's Thales say? What's he do? I have to separate these.

 Here's what he says: Water is the world's source. Earth is not at the bottom but rather rests on water. Everything is full of gods. Magnets show soul by moving iron.

He also probably said some other things: Existence or being is not varied as the appearances of things is varied but is rather one thing. Water displays or gives rise to or manifests existence.

He may have said still more: Death and life are one. The stars and sun and moon and their paths may be figured out, not by asking the priests but by looking and seeing. Knowing oneself is hard. Giving advice is easy. Geometry and trigonometry can demonstrate truths about things one cannot touch. Soul must move and cause movement. Individual things have come from water and must return to water. The moon is like the earth and moves and has a shadow and can be cast into shadow.

Here's what he does: He starts the business of teaching abstract matters by writing. He looks not to religion but to the world around him for explanations of many of the things previously handed over to religion and to myth. He asks about unity of reality in the midst of apparent diversity. He asks whether the gods are separate from the world (and answers no). He finds in water a way to think about how things can be separate, be individuals, be bounded, have properties of single entities, be many, and yet these things are in an important way not individuals or separate or many at all. Set up as many glasses of water as you like, they are all still water, or maybe capitalized Water. Water displays the nature of existence.

 Now maybe there is something terminally woowoo about his answer, but the question seems a stroke of genius. What will you say is the nature of existence? Heidegger, here we come.

He does more: A chain of thought may reach beyond us into depths heretofore unplumbed. Wittgenstein a little later suggests that philosophy is the bumps on the head one gets from hitting the limits of sense. But still, the limits of sense seem open to exploration after Thales in a way they were not before. He gives us the idea that our thoughts can reach further, help us explore beyond where we are, as though we are sending out our thoughts as scouts, or building out of them bridges into the dark. We can try to understand mysteries by building with what we have, rather as though we can measure a pyramid's height by setting up a stick and waiting till its shadow equals its height and then measuring the shadow of the pyramid, so that the thing we cannot measure is measured.

Finally, and implied in that analogy, he gives us the idea that these things are not only the property of the person who sees them after working at them. Instead, she can show how she did it in such a way that the procedures convince us that she is right. Voila, philosophy is being invented in such a way that arguments and teaching are important to it.

              Still more, and this one important and profound but maybe not entirely nice: Thales demonstrates that the little pieces out of which we build our bridges into the unknown may carry us into truly spooky places where we do not know our way. Existence is water. Welllll, okay, T., if you say so. But there is some way in which common sense is endangered by philosophy, and so Thales helps to raise that issue as well. I myself hope that it is Thales who told the story on himself about his falling into the cistern, to be rescued by the milkmaid (milkmaid??? probably a later embellishment) who told him he was a fine philosopher for wandering among the stars ignorant of what was under his feet.