LESSON 1: DOING PHILOSOPHY

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


  Comes from the Greek words "Philein" (love) and "Sophia" (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


  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


  Shaped by its reaction to literature, transition from Greek's penchant for story (muthos) to reason (logos)
• 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
• Philosophy started in 857 BCE in a town called Miletus
• Miletus


  • Seaport town, considered to be the center of many things, including business and commerce
  • Had the same importance in antiquity
• First philosophers


  Said to be Milesians
• Philosophy


  Began in wonder
• First philosophers' real question

  Astonishment at the wonders they observed
• First problems related to philosophy were cosmological in nature and the first philosophers were cosmologists
• Thauma


  Means "wonder"
• Stupefaction


  When a person is placed in a position of confusion, it becomes reinforcement to be completely mesmerized and thereby pushing oneself to ask
• Questioning


  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
• Philosophical question


  Touches upon matters related to choice, meaning, and life
• Pythagoras (570-495 BCE) marked a radical shift from the mythic to the rational
• Pythagoras' invention


  The world is governed by a principle that only numbers can provide
• Philosophus


  Everyone is a philosopher, someone who, in all his might pursues wisdom
• Philosophy


  A science that observes the rigors of science, its object is literally everything and every-thing, it studies anything under the sun as long as the subject is able to generate possible ideas, it studies something that is not yet possible to be known, it is not satisfied with answers that can be given via yes or no, it is done only by the use of reason, unalloyed and unadulterated
• Significance of philosophy


  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, to recognize that the answer is not yet complete
• Sophie's World is a novel written by Jostein Gardner that has two narrative sequences: one is the sequence of the unreal, that is, a Sophie Amundsen that exists in the world, and the other is the sequence of real, that there is only one Sophie Amundsen and her father and mother
• 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, "Who am I?"