In class, we talked some of the philosophical figures. Leucippus and Democritus are atomists. An atomist is someone who study atoms. (I think.) A-tomos is something that can be cut or sprout. You said that everything in the world is man-made and composed of infinitelessly small parts called "atoms". Everything in the world has atoms that make up the way who we are. This includes animals, people, plants, and so on. The atoms are like our DNA; it is a struture of who we are. ( Our means the animals, people, plants, and so on, in case you are wondering.) You said in class that the atoms are constantly falling. What do you mean by that? I do not understand, can you explain more about this. We also talked about Epicurus. He is a Hedonist, which is a person who pursues pleasure as the highest goal in life. At the beginning, we briefly talked about the goal of life. You did not meant the objective goals in life. For example, being a successful artist. What you meant to say is what is life about? and what is life? I am getting the right idea about this. I need your feedback.
In my last blog entry, I wrote down that Anaxagoras said "Everything is mixed." It is mind acts upon water, earth, fire, and air. For our homework assignment, it was "What kind of mind Anaxagoras is talking about?" I thought that nature has a mind of its own. Nature can control the weather and disasters. (You can read more in my last entry.) In class, you explain the mind is the unmoved, enternal force which organized being. Mind is a pure capasity of organizing, catorizing , and groupings. For example, desks has a flat surface and four legs. Sophists means a wise person in Greek. Sophists are those who are percieved as being or claiming to be wise. Sophists is about editcate and speech-making. They taught rhetoric (the art of pubic speaking and in some cases, at any rate, claimed to teach arete or virtue. Examples of these people are: Protagoras and Gorgias. This leads to two main concerns: 1. how does language work? and how is language related to knowledge? (Logic and epistemolgy) 2. what is right (to do)? and what is goodness? (Ethics) Are we going over this in class, since we talked about it briefly. I would like to know, it is an interesting topic to discuss.
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An atomist is not so much one who studies atoms (in any kind of direct way) but one who believes that the world is composed of extremely small particles.
Now, if one grabs a rock and chops it in half, and then chops each of the halves in half, and each of those in half, and so on and so on, eventually one has a powder (and probably a sore arm). Leucippus and Democritus supposed that eventually one could reach a point at which matter was no longer splittable. The irreducible bits they called, very sensibly, "unsplittable bits", which in Greek is "atomoi"; just one of them is "atomos" (the term is also applied in Greek to time -- a "moment" or a "second" in Greek is "en atomo").
The notion of the atoms constantly falling is L&D's response to Anaxagoras' idea of "mixing". Anaxagoras offered the idea that mind stirred the elements and mixed them up together; L&D offer a more mechanical notion.
If you toss a powder up into the air and watch it fall, you will notice that at times shapes appear in the falling dust. L&D supposed that, given sufficient space and time, from some remote starting point the fine particles from which they supposed the world to be made would fall together into all sorts of forms: stars, the earth, and all the animals and plants on the earth.
Again, to what degree this is to be taken literally I can't say, but it certainly makes sense at least to explain the earliest forms of the world.
The Jaina and Lokayata schools in India hold or held similar views, for what that's worth.
On goals in life and the goal of life. Goals IN life are objectives one sets for one's behavior. For example, one of my goals in life is to completely revise the novel I wrote in the 1980s but never published. Another is to paint a series of portraits in the Dutch Realist style. Another is to exemplify the Chinese xun zi in my private and public life. But all of this, even I think the xunzi (although that is much closer than the other two) is different than the goal OF life. Life's goal, to put this another way, is not to rewrite my novel, even if in some way the rewriting of my novel may express something of he nature of life.
The goal of life (life's goal) is almost certainly something like: to expand, to convert matter, to make more life.
This is goal which goes beyond my own individual life, beyond the life of humans, perhaps even beyond life on this planet... at some level it may go beyond life itself.
Now, it should be possible to relate my own personal life goals, that is, my goals in life, to my life goal, the goal of my life, the one, over-riding purpose for which I live.
I must admit I don't have the clearest of notions of that, and I'm sure that has led me into many of the troubles I have experienced. I would guess that people who have a clearer idea of the goal of their life (maybe even if it is artificial, but still strongly felt) are less likely to make wrong choices about their careers, relationships, habits, and so on.
Having not so great a vision, I have muddled along as best I can... and yet, frighteningly, I think I may have a BETTER idea of the goal of life, even of my own life, than many people, because at least I have considered the problem pretty carefully over the years.
The Sophists certainly were an interesting group, and they deserve more study than they often receive; generally they only appear briefly in a history of philosophy course -- which this one isn't, of course -- but they were a "sophisticated" (and yes, the words are related) group of thinkers who travelled widely throughout the Mediterranean at least and in some cases probably into Africa, Europe, and Asia. They knew a good deal, as individuals and as a group, about customs of the many nations surrounding the Greek-speaking peoples, and they were especially knowledgeable about the Greek-speakers themselves. The Greeks were not a single "nation" in a modern sense; they shared a common language, divided into many dialects, and many cultural patterns, but they were also very diverse. Some Greek communities were democratic, some tyrannical, some oligarchic, some even anarchic to a degree. Some were clearly capitalistic, others had centrally planned economies, and some seem to have been socialistic or communalistic. The Greeks were great experimenters. And the sophists travelled from group to group and taught what they learned about effective strategies of social control to whomever could pay. In a way, they were con artists, but in another way, they provided a common stock of ideas just as travelling merchants provided a common stock of goods.
Their main interests were with language and ethics. In the business of language, they wanted to know how language works so that they could more effectively use it to achieve ends. They knew perfectly well that a "good argument" is not necessarily an effective argument. They didn't necessarily train people to tell lies, but they did show the difference between a truthful statement that wouldn't help one win a suit in a courtroom and a lie which would help one to collect a fine. Whether their students told lies in court or not was not really their business, but their students!
But some of the Sophists were interested in knowledge about language for its own sake, for the art of it, for the joy of it, because they wanted to discover the truth. These Sophists (Protagoras and Gorgias are good examples) were interested in the work of the physicists, but also wanted to expand the range of philosophy to include and examination of knowledge. In what was, for example, do our words for things relate to the things themselves? Are some languages more "factual" in their presentation of the world? Are some more "logical"? Can we know the world without language? How are words and ideas related to each other? Can ideas exist without words?
When you consider that at least some of the Greek philosophers were proposing that the world is what we experience it to be because ideas formed it, the question of whether ideas can exist without words becomes significant. Perhaps words make the world. Since this idea is found in the Hebrew scriptures (like the book called in Greek "Genesis": "God spoke the words "Let there be light" and there was light") and in the Christian scriptures ("nothing that has been made has been made without the Word"), we still grapple with it today.
The questions of what is right to do and what is goodness, I shall have to defer to another time.
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