What is philosophy? How does it differ from science, religion, and other modes of human discourse? This course traces the origins of philosophy in the Western tradition in the thinkers of Ancient Greece. We begin with the Presocratic natural philosophers who were active in Ionia in the 6th century BCE and are also credited with being the first scientists. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines made bold proposals about the ultimate constituents of reality, while Heraclitus insisted that there is an underlying order to the changing world. Parmenides of Elea formulated a powerful objection to all these proposals, while later Greek theorists (such as Anaxagoras and the atomist Democritus) attempted to answer that objection. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates insisted on the importance of the fundamental ethical question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, developed elaborate philosophical systems to explain the nature of reality, knowledge, and human happiness. After the death of Aristotle, in the Hellenistic period, Epicureans and Stoics developed and transformed that earlier tradition. We will study the major doctrines of all these thinkers. Part I will cover Plato and his predecessors. Part II will cover Aristotle and his successors.
Godlike Virtue
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors
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From the lesson
Aristotle's Ethics
The motion of the universe is eternal and its cause is an eternal unmoved mover, Aristotle’s god. Our goal in life is to achieve happiness, which comes in two varieties: the human happiness we achieve by exercising the virtues of character, and the godlike happiness we achieve when we grasp eternal truths.
Meet the Instructors
Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
Divine virtue.
In the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contrasts what he
calls the political life, which is his name for the life regulated by the virtues
of character, with what he calls the life of theôria.
Sometimes this gets called the theoretical life.
In our translation, it is called The Life of Study.
But study is a somewhat misleading translation since what Aristotle has in
mind is not what to do in the library when you are getting ready for an exam or
learning a list of your irregular verbs.
Rather, theôria is the active condition of knowing that you achieved
as a result of your efforts in the library, when you really get something and
are grasping it in its entirety.
An alternative translation of theôria is contemplation.
But that's too passive and has unfortunate connotations of navel gazing.
Theôria is a kind of activity for Aristotle,
one in which the mind is at its fullest and most complete level of actuality.
There's no passivity involved.
The term theôria comes from the verb "to look at" or "to gaze at," and
Plato uses it to describe the philosopher's grasp of the forms.
Now, Aristotle does not believe in platonic forms,
but he does think that knowledge involves grasping the form of the object known.
And theôria, in his view, is the activity of knowledge.
Now, we can know in two different senses, he explains.
There's the knowledge you have but or not actually employing,
as when you know calculus but are thinking about what to have for dinner.
You have knowledge of calculus in a way, but you're not using it right then.
Contrast this with a state in which you are using your knowledge of calculus and
are actually solving a differential equation.
The latter case is knowledge fully actualized.
This is roughly the same thing Aristotle has in mind by theôria.
Theôria is the activity of the other kind of rational excellence
that Aristotle identifies in the opening books of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Recall his claim that the virtues of character are excellences of reason,
in the sense that if we are courageous, temperate, generous, just and so on.
We are following reason in all of our actions and feelings.
The virtues of intellect, by contrast, sometimes called theoretical virtue
from their connection to theôria, are excellences of the core
operation of reason, which is to figure things out and know the answers.
Aristotle devotes book six of the Ethics to the intellectual virtues,
of which there are several varieties, but
the differences between them need not concern us now.
The important point is that when this core operation of reason is functioning well,
and has achieved its goal, the result is knowledge.
Now, some of that knowledge concerns practical matters.
What to do.
This practical knowledge, Aristotle calls it pronesis,
is what the feelings and actions follow in the person who has virtue of character.
But when knowledge concerns eternal, unchanging truths Aristotle calls is
scientific knowledge, or episteme.
Theôria is the activity of this purest kind of rational excellence.
Indeed, he claims, it is the activity
of the gods, whose whole life consists in uninterrupted theôria.
The active and perpetual grasping of the objects of thought.
The condition in which the knowing mind is identical with it's object.
That's what he says in the De Anima.
And which some how functions as the unmoved mover of the cosmos.
As he tell us in the book 12 of the Metaphysics.
Later Platonists will
identify this divine intellect with the Demiurge of the Timaeus.
But for our purposes,
the important point is that Aristotle's conception of God is wholly intellectual.
God is the activity of intellect.
He makes a special point of claiming that the gods don't
have the virtues of character.
This is not to say that they are vicious, but
rather that their lives involve no actions or feelings.
He says, we traditionally suppose that the gods are blessed and happy.
That is, they lead the best sort of life.
But what sort of actions ought we to ascribe to them?
Just actions?
Surely they will appear ridiculous making contracts, returning deposits and so on.
Brave actions?
Do they endure frightening and dangerous things because it is fine?
Generous actions?
Whom will they give to?
And surely it will be absurd for them to have currency or anything like that.
Surely it is vulgar praise to say that they do not have base appetites.
When we go through them all,
anything that concerns actions appears trivial and unworthy of the gods.
Recall that Aristotle's project in the Nicomachean Ethics is to identify
the goal of life, which he has explained will be to perform
well the activity that is characteristic or distinctive of us as human beings.
He identifies this characteristic activities reason on the grounds that
the other life activities nutrition, growth, sensation, locomotion and so
forth are shared with animals and plants.
But now, it looks like the activity of theoretical reason
is not distinctive of human beings either.
For it, he tells us quite emphatically, is shared with the gods.
The variety of reason that turns out to be distinctively human is practical reason.
The reason whose perfection is expressed in the political life.
The life of the virtues of character.
One might think then that Aristotle's conclusion is that the goal of life for
a human being is to practice virtue of character, but
this is not what he says when he returns to the topic of eudaimonia,
of living well at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics.
He there seems to be attracted to a slightly different principle for
identifying the goal of life.
It is not the activity that is distinctive of us but rather what is best in us.
And this is the activity of theoria, which human beings share with the gods.
Of course, he says, the gods do it much better than we do.
They engage in theoria their whole lives long,
while we are capable of it only for short periods, if at all.
Well most of the time we have to get on with the business of human life,
taking care of our bodily needs and
cooperating with others in the shared life of a political community.
Thus Aristotle concludes, in so far as we are human beings,
our goal is to exercise the virtues of character, to live the political life.
But he says, this is still a second best life, the life of theôria is the best life
and to the extent that we are capable of engaging in it, we should do so.
He uses a wonderful word to express this thought athanatizein,
to be like immortals.
He says, we ought not to follow the proverb-writers and "think human,
since you are human" or "think mortal, since you are mortal".
Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be like the immortals athanatizein,
and go to all lengths to live a life that expresses our supreme
element; for however much this element may lack in bulk,
by much more it surpasses everything in power and value.
Now, Aristotle never addresses the question of how we are to coordinate
these two very different human endeavors in our lives.
The pursuit of the distinctively human excellence expressed in justice,
generosity, courage and all the other virtues of character on the one hand and
the pursuit of divine wisdom on the other.
Particularly worry some is in injunction in the passage we just considered to go
to all lengths to live the divine life of the mind.
Does this mean that is okay to cut ethical corners to
secure the resources for the living the life of the mind?
Aristotle hardly thinks so.
He clearly envisages the best human life as exercising both virtue of character and
virtue of intellect.
Although with priority to go to the activity of the latter.
So, in his view, our ultimate aim in life is to live like the immortals,
but somehow, we have to manage to do this while also living
up to the standards that apply to us as human beings.
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