The first lecture of my course - that I managed to attend - was fairly interesting; a sort of timeline of the last 3000 years, give or take a couple. I felt as if I absorbed a lot of information yesterday, such as the fact that Aristotle was actually a giant bigot (even for his time), and that Voltaire wrote some sexy books. I can't find my library card at the time of writing and I'm gutted.
I recalled Plato's theory about The Forms from good old A Level RS and think it's just as stupid as the day I heard it. To liken everything we see around us to imperfect shadows is downright petulant, and to suggest that without God you're essentially grounded to your cave for eternity is a rather bleak outlook. But then again, most philosophers need to seriously lighten up, namely Schopenhauer. Even thinking about his supposed truths genuinely makes me want to assume the foetal position.
Bertrand Russell, however, got completely twisted in my mind. I thought he was some strong advocate of Christianity/God being the only 'necessary being'/etc, but I am clearly mistaken. He was running around busting skulls and taking names, disproving Aristotle's theories about logic and dissecting them piece by piece. His does so by highlighting the gaps in almost all forms of deductive reasoning (2 + 2 = 4 ... why?) but I feel that Ludwig Wittgenstein does it much more effectively with his assertion that all language is a 'game', of which we must be 'players' to derive any meaning. This leaves pretty much everything in the universe wide open to individual interpretation and so that the statement of any absolute truth (2 +2 = 4) is as meaningless as the arbitrary component phonemes in the words themselves.
I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here and assume that none of the above endeared neither man to religious figures, as the attack on Aristotle is also, indirectly, an attack on Thomas Aquinas and his cheerful precepts.
Aquinas' work, the Summa Theologica, had a huge effect on the Church at the time and probably still defines Christian morality as a collective today. Of course, Aquinas had simply cherry-picked possibly some of the worst ideas about our existence from an otherwise enlightened period in human history, and as he wrote his Summa Theologica between 1265-74 his book was probably nothing more than a reflection of the doctrines of the Church at the time, presented in a pretty package designed to look logical and cogent. I fail to see how sex positions come into this, but they are nevertheless defined as 'missionary okay, everything else bad' and sex for anything other than procreation is strictly out. Yet another man who needed to get out a bit more.
The Renaissance is like the bit in the movie when everything's looking hopeless for the protagonist then out of nowhere his friends burst in with machine guns, they ride off, he gets the girl, etc. I'm just relieved that I wasn't alive 500 years ago is what I'm trying to say, and pretty psyched that I'm not a slave right now. And allowed to go to uni in the first place. Anyway, Galileo was the one who built upon Copernicus' heliocentric theory, facing the wrath of the Church with his devilish heretic ways. He built a telescope and realised that the Earth really is not the centre of the universe, directly contradicting multiple passages in the Bible which said just that should he write his findings down. It was the rise of scientific thought, critical thinking and most importantly empiricism that aided us all out of the Dark ages and into enlightenment. Art and science also seemed to be inexorably linked, with human realism in paintings superseding iconic imagery. It was a time when quests for truth in philosophy became more aware of the need to justify their statements rather than a simple 'This is because it is' as before, and the exchange of knowledge made possible by printing presses.
This is way too long already so I'm gonna cut it loose. Well, here's to my first blog post anyway. I think reading too much Cracked has ruined my ability to write properly. my bad
No Bertrand Russell was an atheist and wrote a famous pamphlet called 'Why I am not a Christian' - the argument from necessity is Leibnitz who is satirized as Dr Pangloss by Voltaire in Candide. Top blogging though. Excellent work and welcome on board.
ReplyDeleteRussell: http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html
You might be interested if you did RE at A-level. Your distaste for Plato is widely shared of course by modern thinkers. But I don;t think his immaterialism can be so easily dismissed because it true that the soul of things in some sense does seem to persist regardless of its physical manifestation - do you know the example of the Ship of Theseus for example. This is a bit of side issue as to what we are discussing on the course, but interesting at least to me. Also without Plato and the theory of forms you lose a way into the problem of aesthetics and beauty generally. But that too may be a good thing.