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Philosophy Custom Essays Samples
Free Online Research Papers, College Papers, English Papers, Admission Essays, Thesis, Analyzed Essays, Essay Papers, Term Papers, Coursework Essays, Custom Papers, Non-Plagiarized Essays
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|  Aristotle |
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| Aristotle (384 BC - March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher. Along with Plato, he is often considered to be one of the two most influential philosophers in Western thought. He wrote many books about physics, poetry, zoology, logic, government, and biology.
The three most influential ancient Greek philosophers were Aristotle, Plato (a teacher of Aristotle) and Socrates (ca. 470 BC-399 BC), whose thinking deeply influenced Plato. Among them they transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. Socrates did not leave any writings, possibly as a result of the reasons articulated against writing philosophy attributed to him in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. His ideas are known to us only indirectly, through Plato and a few other writers. The writings of Plato and Aristotle form the core of Ancient philosophy.
Their works, although connected in many fundamental ways, are very different in both style and substance. Plato mainly wrote philosophical dialogues, that is, arguments in the form of conversations, usually with Socrates as a participant. Though the early dialogues are concerned mainly with methods of acquiring knowledge and most of the last ones with justice and practical ethics, his most famous works expressed a synoptic view of ethics, metaphysics, reason, knowledge and human life. The fundamental idea of Plato is that knowledge gained through the senses is always confused and impure; true knowledge being acquired by the contemplative soul that turns away from the world. To attain such true knowledge, the philosopher must make use of the "royal science" of dialectic. One of the necessary obstacles of dialectic is dialogue itself which guides the interlocutors away from the paths to truth. The soul alone can have knowledge of the Forms, the real essences of things, of which the world we see is but an imperfect copy. Such knowledge has ethical as well as scientific importance. Plato can be called, with qualification, an idealist and a rationalist.
Aristotle, by contrast, placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses and would correspondingly be better classed among modern empiricists. He also achieved a "grounding" of dialectic in the Topics by allowing interlocutors to begin from commonly held beliefs Endoxa; his goal being non-contradiction rather than Truth. He set the stage for what would eventually develop into the scientific method centuries later. Although he wrote dialogues early in his career, no more than fragments of these have survived. The works of Aristotle that still exist today are in treatise form and were, for the most part, unpublished texts. These were probably lecture notes or texts used by his students, and were almost certainly revised repeatedly over the course of years. As a result, these works tend to be eclectic, dense and difficult to read. Among the most important ones are Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics.
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| Ancient Conceptions of Nature |
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| Greek philosopher Anaximander (c. 610-c.540) assumed an original stuff that is 'unbounded' (or 'undefined', apeiron), because it is qualitatively indeterminate. It does not itself have the characteristics of ordinary things (rocks, rivers, and so on) or even of their constituents (earth, water, and so on), but it has the basis of all these in it. To give a rough and partial illustration, we might say that the coal in the earth is neither gas nor coke nor soap nor tar, but it is the basis of them all. Anaximander 'Unbounded' stands in this relation to familiar observable things and stuffs. The ceaseless movement of the Unbounded produces a 'generative source', which is separated from the Unbounded, and in turn produces the four basic opposites--hot and cold, dry and wet--that constitute the different things in the world and underlie all observable processes and changes. |
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| Empiricism |
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| Empiricism is the philosophical doctrine that all human knowledge comes at first from senses and experience. Empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable prior to any experience.
Empiricism is contrasted with continental rationalism, epitomized by Rene Descartes. According to the rationalist, philosophy should be performed via introspection and a priori deductive reasoning. Names associated with empiricism include St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
It is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research and a posteriori inductive reasoning rather than purely deductive logic.
Empirical is an adjective often used in conjunction with science, both the natural and social sciences, which means the use of working hypotheses which are capable of being disproved using observation or experiment (i.e.: ultimately through experience).
In a second sense empirical in science may be synonymous with experimental. In this sense, an empirical result is an experimental observation. In this context, the term semi-empirical or semi-empirical is used for qualifying theoretical methods which use in part basic axioms or postulated scientific laws and empirical (experimental) results. Such methods are opposed to theoretical ab initio methods which are purely deductive and based on first principles. This terminology is particularly important in theoretical chemistry. |
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| Francis Bacon |
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| Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, spy, freemason and essayist. He was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and created Viscount St Albans in 1621; both peerage titles becoming extinct upon his death.
He began his professional life as a lawyer, but he has become best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. His works establish and popularize an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method. Induction implies drawing knowledge from the natural world through experimentation, observation, and testing of hypotheses. In the context of his time, such methods were connected with the occult trends of hermeticism and alchemy.
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| Jean Jacques Rousseau |
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| Together with Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Kant among his contemporaries, Rousseau has exerted the most profound influence on modern European intellectual history, perhaps even surpassing anyone else of his day. No other eighteenth-century thinker contributed more major writings in so wide a range of subjects and forms, nor wrote with such sustained passion and eloquence. No one else managed through both his works and his life to excite or disturb public imagination so deeply. Almost alone among the seminal figures of the Enlightenment, he subjected the main currents of the world he inhabited to the most inspired censure, even while channelling their direction, and when French Revolutionary leaders later seized their opportunity to ignite the unity of political practice and theory, it was to his doctrines above all that they professed their allegiance. |
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| Plato |
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| Plato (ca. May 21? 427 BC – ca. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. In countries speaking Arabic, Turkish, Persian, or Urdu, he is called Eflatun, which means a spring of water, and, metaphorically, of knowledge.
Plato lectured extensively at the Academy but he also wrote on many philosophical issues. The most important writings of Plato are his dialogues; although a handful of epigrams also survive, and some letters have come down to us under his name. We have very good reasons to believe that all the known dialogues of Plato survive; some of the dialogues which the Greeks ascribed to him are considered by the consensus of scholars to be either suspect (e.g., First Alcibiades, Clitophon) or probably spurious (such as Demodocus, or the Second Alcibiades).
Socrates is often a character in the dialogues of Plato. It is usually disputed how much of the content and argument of any given dialogue is Socrates' point of view, and how much of it Plato's. However, Plato was without doubt under a strong influence of Socrates' teachings, so many of the ideas presented in his early works were probably shared (at least partially). |
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| Socrates |
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| The character of Socrates provides an illustration of a historical conundrum. If Socrates ever wrote a single word, it has not survived. As such, the entirety of modern knowledge concerning Socrates must be drawn from a limited number of secondary sources, such as the works of Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon. Aristophanes was known as a satirist, and so his accounts of Socrates may well be skewed, exaggerated, or totally falsified. Fragmentary evidence also exists from Socrates' contemporaries. Giannantoni, in his monumental work Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae collects every scrap of evidence pertaining to Socrates. It includes writers such as Aeschines Socraticus (not the orator), Antisthenes, and a number of others who knew Socrates. Plato, following Greek tradition, appears to have attributed his own ideas, theories, and possibly personal traits, to his mentor. Due to the problems inherent in such sources, all information regarding Socrates should be taken as possibly, but not definitely, true.
According to accounts from antiquity, Socrates' father was Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and his mother Phaenarete, a midwife. He was married to Xanthippe, who bore him three sons. By the cultural standards of the time, she was considered a shrew. Socrates himself attested that he, having learned to live with Xanthippe, would be able to cope with any other human being (supposedly), just as a horse trainer accustomed to wilder horses might be more competent than one not. He also saw military action, fighting at the Battle of Potidaea, the Battle of Delium and the Battle of Amphipolis. It is believed, based on Plato's Symposium, that Socrates was decorated for bravery. In one instance he stayed with his wounded friend Alcibiades, and probably saved his life; despite the objections of Alcibiades, Socrates refused any sort of official recognition and instead encouraged the decoration of Alcibiades. During such campaigns, he also showed his extraordinary hardiness, walking without shoes and a coat in winter.
It is unclear what exactly Socrates did for a living. He did not work; in Xenophon's Symposium he explicitly states that he devotes himself only to discussing philosophy, and that he thinks this is the most important art or occupation. It is unlikely that he was able to live off of family inheritance, given his father's occupation as an artisan. In the accounts of Plato, Socrates explicitly denies accepting money for teaching; however, Xenophon's Symposium clearly has Socrates state that he is paid by his students, and Aristophanes depicts Socrates as running a school of sophistry with his friend Chaerephon. It is also possible that Socrates survived off of the generosity of his wealthy and powerful friends, such as Alcibiades. |
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| Plato and Socrates |
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| Plato (428-347) was born early in the Peloponnesian War, and was a young adult during the last years of the war, when proSpartan oligarchic sentiment grew into open disloyalty to the democracy, and eventually resulted in the rule of the Four Hundred and of the Thirty. Plato's own loyalties were divided; for he was a relative of Charmides, a member of the Thirty, but he was also a disciple of Socrates, and approved of Socrates' dissent from the lawlessness of the Thirty. The Thirty were deposed; but the restored democracy put Socrates to death, and Plato gave up any ambitions he might have had for a political career. He founded his philosophical school, the Academy, in Athens, and remained as its head until his death.
Plato wrote dialogues presenting Socratic philosophy in conversational form; and we have already drawn on his earlier dialogues for our account of Socrates. But in Plato's middle and late dialogues, the character 'Socrates' discusses questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and political theory, on which the historical Socrates was silent. |
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| The Significance of Plato |
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| Plato's philosophy consists of a series of sharply presented questions, and of bold, speculative, and incomplete answers to them. He admits the limitations of his knowledge, and before he has worked out his answers in any detail, he moves on to new questions. The Platonic dialogues do not constitute or contain a philosophical system, and in that way they differ from the works of such philosophers as Aristotle, the Stoics, Kant, and Hegel. It is not surprising that Plato has influenced thinkers and movements with different, even opposed, outlooks. |
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Don't hesitate! |
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It's really easy! |
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