3Q Philosophy

• Philosophy began at the end of the 6th Century happened in Ancient Greece
• Philosophy


  Comes from the Greek words "Philein" which means "love" and "Sophia" which means "wisdom"
• Philosophers became the talk of the town in Athens because of the works of Hesiod and Homer
• Work and Days by Hesiod written as poem published around 700 BCE
• Work and Days by Hesiod

  It is the idea of man's fate being indebted to the gods
• The Iliad and The Odyssey are works of Homer
• Philosophy's realization to itself is shaped by its reaction to literature. There was a transition from the Greek's penchant for story (muthos) to reason (logos)
• At the heart of philosophy's beginning was a radical shift to knowing that the origin of the world might not come from some mythic explanation but from a more rational, more ground fact
• This then proves that making sense of the world has a clear basis and reason
• Philosophy started in 857 BCE in a town called Miletus
• Miletus


  • It was a seaport town and was considered to be the center of many things, including business and commerce
  • It had the same importance in antiquity
• The first philosophers were said to be Milesians
• Philosophy


  Began in wonder
• The first philosophers' real question was about the astonishment at the wonders they observed
• This is the reason why the first problems related to philosophy were cosmological in nature and why the first philosophers were cosmologists
• Oliver Feltham


  The best philosophy historians today
• Feltham provides a different understanding and clarification of how "thauma" can be translated
• Thauma


  Means "wonder"
• Stupefaction


  • When a person is stupefied, that person is placed in a position of confusion
  • It becomes reinforcement to be completely mesmerized and thereby pushing oneself to ask
• Stupefaction should lead one to question
• Questioning becomes an indication that real and genuine knowledge does not end in awe
• Doubt pushes us to question many things to see that a greater reason is being veiled by what seems to appear before us
• Skepticism


  Wherein everything is put into inquiry without any goal of grounding and could lead to being myopic
• Myopic


  A perspective that is in direct contrast to the spirit of philosophy
• Allan Badiou


  A French contemporary philosopher who said that a philosophical question touches upon matters related to choice, meaning, and life
• Pythagoras (570-495 BCE) might be more familiar to mathematicians, but his contribution to philosophical discourse is crucial
• Pythagoras marked a radical shift from the mythic to the rational
• Pythagoras' invention that the world is governed by a principle that only numbers can provide is as radical as Copernicus saying that the Earth is not the center of the universe during the Renaissance
• Philosophus


  Everyone is a philosopher. The term is more of a challenge for anyone who dares to study philosophy
• Pythagoras' idea of Philosophus


  Someone who, in all his might, pursues wisdom
• Philosophy


  Is in fact scientific. The science being spoken here is neither limited to physical nor natural sciences only. The science here is philosophy's own discipline to observe the rigors of science
• Philosophy


  Its object is literally everything and every-thing. It means that philosophy can study anything under the sun as long as the subject is able to generate possible ideas. Philosophy can even study something that is not yet possible to be known
• Philosophy


  Studying any object in philosophy is no simple matter. Philosophy is not satisfied with answers that can be given via yes or no. It is also not obsessed with providing the answer right away
• Philosophy


  Is not an activity that is left to either chance or pure faith. Philosophizing is an activity without help other than itself; hence, it is done only by the use of reason, unalloyed and unadulterated
• The significance of philosophy is not on its demonstration of knowledge but in its capacity to focus on the possibilities that might be lost in the full understanding of what is being taught because that knowledge could be confirmation of one's ignorance
• The significance of philosophy is to recognize that the answer is not yet complete
• Jostein Gardner's Sophie's World, written to great acclaim in Norway, was translated into English in 1994
• Sophie's World


  Has two narrative sequences: one is the sequence of the unreal, that is, a Sophie Amundsen that exists in the world. There is also the teacher who writes her letters, Alberto Knox. The other is the sequence of real, that there is only one Sophie Amundsen and her father and mother. The first sequence and the persons found there are but fictional characters
• Sophie's world is a world of both the possible and impossible, and that as persons, like her, we also live in these zones of both the discernible and the indiscernible
• What we can all learn from Sophie is the very question asked of her, a question that has been staple of truth even from the time of Socrates, "Who am I?"