PHILOSOPHY

• Such stories are usually handed down to the present generation by our elders
• Environment


  The environment we inhabit plays a role in how we interact with it, including how we view the world in general
• Myth


  From the Greek word mythos, stories that explain people's cosmological and supernatural conditions
• Myths are our way of explaining the unintelligible - the unknown
• Mythological questions


  • Who am I?
  • Where does the world come from?
  • Where do humans come from?
  • What is the meaning of life?
  • Is there an afterlife?
  • Where were we before we were born?
• Myths


  Aim to explain the incomprehensible world we live in
• Myths


  Teach meaning, explain, empower, stabilize, and elevate the life of a believer from a mundane existence to one imbued with eternal meaning
• Myths can explain a phenomenon, tradition, place name, or geological formation, and elevate a past event to epic and even supernatural significance and provide a role model for one's individual journey through life
• Myths explain that something is part of a bigger picture painted and formed by eternal powers
• Homer


  Author of the Iliad and Odyssey, two epic poems which are the central works of ancient Greek literature
• The Iliad and Odyssey heavily influenced ancient Greek society and also laid the groundwork for the birth of philosophy
• Homer hinted in his writing that "there is some order in nature, some power called "fate" to which even the gods and basically everything and everyone in the world is influenced"
• Hesiod modified this relationship between the gods and fate in his work "Work and Days", where he wrote about the agricultural arts and morality, agreeing with Homer that there is a moral order in the universe, produced by Zeus' commands
• Milesian school of thought


  Flourished in the ancient port city of Miletus on the western coast of Asia Minor
• Thales


  Considered the first philosopher in the Western world, he concluded that everything came from water since the world floats and rests on water, and moisture is present and needed by almost every matter and organism
• Anaximander


  Thales' pupil who agreed with his teacher that there is some basic stuff where everything came from, and argued that water and all other definite things would come from a primary substance that is an indefinite or boundless realm, which he calls the Apeiron
• Anaximenes


  The last of the Milesian thinkers who believed that a wide variety of finite things cannot simply come from some stuff as limited as water, and concluded that at one point, everything was air
• Pythagoras


  Argued that all things consist of numbers since there is form, pattern, and harmony everywhere
• Atomist school of thought

  Flourished in the eastern region of Macedonia in Greece, founded by Leucippus and further elaborated by his disciple Democritus, who argued that the world is made of spaces and indivisible things called atoms
• Sophists


  A new breed of intellectuals in Athens during the 5th century BCE who argued that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that everything is relative to the person or to the culture that perceives it
• Protagoras


  Argued that knowledge is limited to one's perception and there is no standard for testing whether one person's perception is right or wrong
• Gorgias


  Asserted that nothing exists, that if anything exists, it is incomprehensible, and whatever is comprehensible cannot be communicated
• Thrasymachus


  Explained that the ruling party always makes laws for their own interest, which defines what is right in a state
• The Sophists trained people to become skilled speakers to aid them during debates at public assemblies, and produced great lawyers and public speakers</b>
• Given the Sophists' assertion that truth depends on the person or people who perceive it and their excellent skill in persuasive speech, any relative truth can prove more believable
• Socratic dialectic


  Socrates argued that the most reliable way to attain knowledge is through the practice of disciplined conversation, which acts as an intellectual midwife and forces people to abandon their misdirected opinions
• Socrates is not content with someone merely pointing at something or giving an example to determine what a term is or means, and argued that it is by rigorously defining a term that the mind can distinguish two objects of thought
• Plato


  Described the Allegory of the Cave and the Metaphor of the Divided Line in his work The Republic, where he argued that truth lies in the World of Forms represented by the world outside the cave, which can only be completely seen with our souls because we cannot possibly escape this life with our bodies
• Aristotle


  Agreed with Plato that certain universals or essences are common among specific things, but argued that these are not separate from things; rather, they have always been in them. He concluded that matter and form are always united in each thing, and their unity is what makes things change or transform into different things
• Four Causes


  According to Aristotle, the formal cause (what is it), the material cause (what is it made of), the efficient cause (by what is it made), and the final cause (for what end is it made) are the four causes for a thing to undergo the process of change
• Aristotle explained that things caused by nature do not change because there is a reason for them; rather, they have "ends," i.e., natural or "built-in" ways of behaving to undergo change, which he called telos
• Aristotle distinguishes potentiality and actuality, where the "actual" emerges from the "potential", and a thing cannot change if there is no prior explanation or cause for it