Greek Philosophy: Identity, Mythology & Tragedy

What Is Philosophy?

Before examining Greek Poetry, Mythology and Tragedy as the precursors to Greek philosophy, we should discuss what philosophy itself is.

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.

Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative).  Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there ever absolute certainties, facts, morals or truths?").  According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.  Questioning and answering, believing and doubting, work together by working against one another.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve.  The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom is similar across all cultures even though beliefs differ widely.  While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word meaning “love (philo) of wisdom (sophy)”, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.

It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.

Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, who we will study) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.

If "philosophy" means "love of wisdom", then what is wisdom?

The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge (set answers) and wisdom (the ability to find new or contradictory answers, which requires deep questioning).

The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.  Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.

Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues.  Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy.  It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks.  It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.

The most primitive societies value individual achievement, which often becomes the subject of legend and mythology.  It is difficult and frightening to oppose common opinion, but worth it.  While many think that Western thought is more individual and free than other traditions, arguments over the meaning of common knowledge and traditions are found everywhere.  In the logic class, we read a text by anthropologist Malinowski who studied the tribes of Papua, New Guinea in the 1940s.  He asks, “Are primitive people logical?”, and he argues that they are.  Human language typically has words for ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’, and all the operations of ancient Greek, ancient Indian, and modern European logic.  He gives an excellent example of a tribesman tripping and falling, accusing an evil spirit of causing it, and his fellow tribespeople rebuking him and saying that he is merely clumsy.  

Another anthropologist, Radin, notes in his book Primitive Man as Philosopher that if you bring tribal elders together to discuss the myths of their tribe, they will each tell a slightly different version of each story and even when they tell the same version they argue over its interpretation.  Some such as Barthes (mentioned last class) and Latour argue that it is modern people such as ourselves who are unwise enough to think that there is simple objective truth without perspective and interpretation, as tribal people know all too well that the version of history their uncle tells them is as good as meaning gets, while modernity gives us institutions that, while still all too human, are monolithic and difficult for the average person to question.  Perhaps it is more that it is difficult for human beings to question traditions and institutions, but they inevitably question anyways, and so value the wisdom of those who can see the counterintuitive beyond the intuitive, the deeper truths beyond the surface.


Who Were The Greeks?

The mythology and history of ancient Greece, like that of other ancient cultures such as the Indians and the Mayans, was recorded in poetry and song.  As mentioned last time, it was only with Alexander and his brief empire that the city states of ancient Greece were united as a single state, though they shared a common language and tradition for centuries before.  The two largest ethnic groups were the Ionians (of the Turkish eastern half of ancient Greece) and the Dorians (of the western half, what is today the modern European nation of Greece).  There was a genealogical myth shared by these and other groups of a King Helen who had three sons (Aiolos, Doros & Xouthos) whose descendants became the tribes of interrelated but distinct ancient Greeks.  This is very similar to the Old Testament narrative of Noah, whose three sons repopulated the world after the great flood.  Both stories explain the diversity of human ethnicities and cultures by way of a single family of origin.

As a side note, Nazi historians along with other Europeans theorized that a Germanic invasion of the Dorian lands was the ethnic spark that gave birth to Athens and the West, giving European civilization a Germanic Western European origin, the so-called ‘Dorian Invasion’ theory.  

While Alexander was the first to bring the city states together as one political entity, much of ancient Greece was brought together with a common purpose during the fifty years of the Greco-Persian War (499  - 449 BCE), just as ancient Greece was beginning to rise and a hundred years before Alexander’s empire.  Cyrus, emperor of Persia mentioned last time, conquered Ionia in 547 BCE, but the Ionians revolted fifty years later with support from the Dorians and others.  The center of the rebellion was Miletus, near the modern day Turkish city of Anatolia, the home of the first Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, known as the Milesian School).  Darius, son of Cyrus and heir to the Persian Empire, sought to secure Ionia and then attack Athens and other city states that supported the Ionian rebellion.  In 490 BCE, the Persians were defeated at the battle of Marathon.  While Darius’ son Xerxes succeeded in overrunning all of Greece ten years later, the Persians were eventually expelled and the city states formed the Delian League with Athens as a leading member.  After Ionia was freed from Persian rule, a treaty between Athens and Persia brought an end to the wars.

Herodotus, who grew up during this period, noted that the Persians did not build statues of gods when they conquered a place, as they did not have anthropomorphic gods.  Last time it was mentioned that Persian Zoroastrian monotheism was influential on the ancient Greek philosophers, pushing them to abstract beyond their common tradition of polytheistic gods.  In another parallel with Islam, European Protestant Christianity was influenced by Islamic art in the centuries following the crusades.  As muslim armies made inroads into Europe, the Europeans wondered why Islam was so successful.  Turning to the Bible, reading that God uses foreign enemies to punish his people for doing wrong, and he punished the Israelites for worshiping idols as images, the Iconoclasts of Europe (the origin of the term, which today denotes those who go against the ways of things) ditched the statues of saints and other icons to be more like the successful muslims who avoided images of saints and preferred to represent God and the order of nature through abstract geometric patterns.  These Iconoclasts paved the way for the Protestant reformation.  In both ancient Greece and medieval Europe, we see an imitation of an intimidating enemy that results in abstraction, seeking truth in a form deeper than immediate appearances.


Freedom and Ancient Greece

Much has been made of Greek freedom.  The freedom of the ancient Greeks is often celebrated as the origin of Greek philosophy and the distinct culture of ‘The West’.  The theory is that the ancient Greeks were a culture that appreciated freedom, which led Greek philosophers to be independently individual in their free reasoning, which created a culture that was distinct from the rest of the ancient world in terms of freedom and reason, which led to later European distinction in science and philosophy.  As the Greeks repelled the Persians, at the time they were rising in power and wealth, much was said and written about the Greeks sharing a sense of freedom and autonomy.  

This was not freedom for individuality, but political freedom of the city states, both from Persia and from each other.  Socrates was killed in Athens for leading the youth astray from the traditional understanding of the gods.  There are similar parallels with struggles in later Europe and the American Revolution.  In the movie Braveheart, when William Wallace (played by a blue-painted Mel Gibson) famously yells, “They will take our lives, but they will never take OUR FREEDOM!”, he does not mean individual rights and liberties, but rather that the common people should be owned and controlled by the local Scottish noble lords, and not the noble lords of England.  

During the American Revolution, the colonies wanted freedom from Britain and each other, but they did not want freedom for their slaves any more than the ancient Greeks did.  The Bill of Rights originally did not grant freedom of speech, religion or gun ownership to individual citizens, but prevented the federal government from limiting the state’s rights to limit their own individual citizens.  Several states had particular denominations of Protestant Christianity as their official state religions, because the federal government could not limit their ability to practice a collective religious freedom that limited individual religious freedom.  One British lawmaker wrote a rebuttal to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that the American slave-masters had no right to speak of appreciating liberty or standing for freedom.  British spies circulated rumors among slave plantations that the British would free the slaves if the slaves revolted and sided with the British against the revolution, which was likely mere propaganda rather than a sincere political promise.

Today American conservatives argue that limiting the freedom of religious groups and business interests is anti-freedom and therefore un-american, while progressives argue that religious groups should not have the freedom of state-sanctioned prosthelytizing, and corporations should not have the freedom to change laws and precedents, as both limit the freedom of individuals to challenge their dominance.  If a teacher has the freedom to lead a classroom in prayer, this limits the freedom of individuals who wish to pray differently or not pray at all.  If a corporation has the freedom to change laws or affect which laws are enforced, this limits the freedom of individuals who are harmed or seek to prevent harm by the corporation.

In sum, while the ancient Greeks did appreciate a particular freedom from Persia, what was freedom for some was slavery for others.  If I have the freedom to eat as much of a cake as I want, this prevents anyone else from having this same freedom.  As Heraclitus (who we will examine soon) argues, what is good for one can be bad for another, such as salt water being poisonous to us but delicious to fish.  Considering that the freedom of first-world consumerism is bought at the price of third-world indentured servitude (the debt and control not by accident but by design), the freedom of ‘The West’ is its opposite for others.


The Ancient Greek Poets & Epics

The two poets Homer and Hesiod, both of whom are thought to have lived and composed the great Greek epics about 700 BCE, are two of the central sources from which the ancient Greeks drew a common cultural tradition.  Homer is said by most ancient sources to have been Ionian but by some to have been Babylonian.  He is the great original Greek poet/historian, followed by Hesiod who many consider to be an inferior imitator.  Homer wrote the Iliad, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus or Ulysses’ ten year quest to sail home from the Trojan War.  

Myths are not monolithic, but subject to various tellings and interpretation.  Homer and Hesiod both brought together the various mythologies of ancient Greece and through the medium of poetry and song created new consolidated versions that became the central common cultural standards, institutionalized and ritualized.  This is a typical pattern found accross human cultures, found also in the great Indian epics (the Ramayana and Mahabharata) as well as the Old and New testaments of the Bible.  Modern scholarship finds discrepancies between various parts of these central traditional texts and theorizes about the various versions and why they differ.

Homer’s Iliad takes place during the Trojan War, which famously began after Paris kidnaps Helen and takes her to Troy, prompting a war with the Greek alliance.  The Iliad begins as the Greek King Agamemnon refuses to return the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo he has captured as a slave.  In response to Agamemnon’s refusal, Apollo responds with a plague.  Apollo, who was originally a local god of shepherds and musicians, had become the Greek god of light, the sun, truth and music.  Apollo’s son, Asclepius, became the god of mystical knowledge and wisdom.  When Socrates dies, in Plato’s account the last thing Socrates says is that he owes a rooster to Asclepius, apparently wishing to perform an animal sacrifice as a thanks for the gift of wisdom which sees beyond life and death.  

Odysseus (also Ulysses, the protagonist of the Odyssey) brings the priest’s daughter back to Troy, prompting a disagreement between Achilles and Agamemnon.  Achilles, refusing to fight, allows the Trojans gain the upper hand, prompting the great Greek gods to interfere with the conflict on all sides, themselves in conflict over the outcome.  Later in this course, we will find that Heraclitus and other philosophers criticize both Homer and Hesiod for presenting the gods as bloodthirsty and irrational beings, arguing that the gods must be far better than humans and would not get involved in partisan conflicts.

Hesiod’s Theogony gives an account of the origin of the world and the gods, bringing together various myths and versions to create an orthodox account.  The text has eastern influences from earlier Babylonian and Assyrian mythology and cosmology.  As Hesiod explains, gods are born but they do not die, or if they die they are reborn and live inspite of death.  The gods can take many forms, such as animals or particular human individuals, but have a true form which is anthropomorphic.  While we use the world ‘epiphany’ to mean any sort of revelation today, it originally signified a god revealing himself or herself to a mortal in their true anthropomorphic form.

Hesiod’s cosmology sets a standard picture of the world followed by the first Milesian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes), but Hesiod concentrates on the pantheon of gods while the philosophers concentrate on the order of the elements such as fire, air and water.  Hesiod’s account of creation unfolds in stages, likely inspired by a series of empires conquering and reconquering the same land.  First, Chaos gives birth to Darkness and Night, and from these come Aether (bright upper air, supposed to be a separate element by the ancient Greeks, Buddhists and Isaac Newton) and Day.

Ouranos (also Uranus), god of the sky, gets it on with Gaia, mother goddess of the earth, producing the Titans.  The head titan, Kronos, god of time, castrates Ouranos and assumes his place as king father god.  On new years day, European cultures present the ending year as an old man in a toga with a scythe, a caricature of Kronos and his snippy personality.  Kronos then has children with the titan Rhea, but eats them as soon as they are born, all except Zeus who escapes with the help of Rhea and Gaia.  Zeus produces the other Olympic gods as his children in a multitude of ways.  Athena, goddess of wisdom, spontaneously bursts from Zeus’ forehead after a headache.  The Olympic gods defeat the Titans and assume control of the cosmos with Zeus as their king(power, wisdom, and justice personified) on the advice of their compassionate grandmother, Gaia.

Poetry was not only publicly performed epic.  At symposiums, meetings of all men or all women would gather to hear poetry sung over the stringed lyre.  Lyric could be sung solo or by a choir, just like the chorus of tragedies.  Choral performances of poetry featured various instruments and choreographed dance.  Songs were not just for entertainment, but for tying groups together through celebrations of heroic feats and tragic defeats.  Loyal heroes and friends were praised, enemies and traitors mocked.  In one archaic poem of Archilochos, a friend who betrayed the poet is cursed: hope of shipwreck, washes up naked on enemy shore and be condemned to slavery.

Archilochos is the first major archaic poet, but the most famous is the Lesbian Sappho.  First, some wisdom quotes from Archilochos which sound very similar to quotes from Egyptian wisdom we study in other classes, as well as to the fragments of Heraclitus we will study soon::

Don’t exalt openly in victory, nor in defeat collapse at home and weep, but do not rejoice in joys or be sore at evils much.  Recognize what rhythm holds men.  

Attribute all to the gods.  Often they raise up out of evils men who lie on the dark earth, but often they knock flat on their backs those who walk tall.

The fox knows many things, the hedgehog, one big thing.

(This is similar to the Daoist parable of the frog in the well, illustrating that our reality is that with which we are most familiar.)

Pain strikes one, then another.  Now it turns to us and we groan over a bloody wound.  Next it will turn to someone else.  So now endure, driving back womanly grief.  

This last line shows us how remarkable it is that Sappho of Lesbos succeeded in becoming the most famous of the nine preserved archaic Greek poets.  Unlike other poets, Sappho did not write passively, but actively as an ‘I’, putting herself in the picture.  Sappho’s poetry was preserved along with the other eight archaic poets at Alexandria, Egypt, where they were copied by scholars onto papyrus.  Her poems are said to have been burned in pre-Renaissance Europe for their subversive nature, but this is in dispute.

Sappho is history’s most famous lesbian, and because her poetry speaks erotically of other women, it is due to her that, while the men of Lesbos were as much Lesbians as Sappho was, the female homosexual community bears this as its name.  While Sappho’s poetry and others seems homoerotic, attraction is expressed but not overt sexuality.  Men praising men as desirable and women praising women as desirable was an acceptable genre as a toast at a wedding.  Modern scholars argue whether or not Sappho and other Greek poets are simply giving “my friend is a real catch” wedding toasts or whether they are using the accepted genre as a barely concealed cover.

Sappho seems to have a treasured circle of young women as her admirers and aspiring disciples, some of whom she laments she has lost to other attractive poets, her competition.  Lesbian relationships are thought to have been common among women of Lesbos and Sparta.  

While young men were presumed to have erotic relationships with older men in a mentor relationship, adult men were not supposed to have sexual relationships with each other.  Thus, the mentorship is mediated by sex just as the history is mediated by poetry and song.

Sappho’s most famous passage reads:

Some say an army of horsemen, others say foot-soldiers, still others, a fleet, is the fairest thing on the dark earth.  I say it is whatever one loves...
I would rather see her lovely step and the radiant sparkle of her face than all the war-chariots in Lydia and soldiers battling in shiny bronze.

Notice that Sappho is appealing to a culture of mercenaries and warriors.  Her perspectivism, the idea that truth is in the eye of the beholder, will be paralleled by Xenophanes, Heraclitus and others.  In other poems, Sappho uses Helen of Troy as an example of desire eclipsing all else.

Now that we have covered Sappho, we have thereby fulfilled the dictates of Fox News: You are now properly indoctrinated in Berkeley, and are all lesbian communists.


Tragedy and Paradox

Tragedy allows the audience to remove themselves from while simultaneously identify with the paradoxes and contradictions of life.  Like the polytheistic gods themselves, who do not behave ideally but as powerful yet fallible individuals, tragedies show the audience the most powerful and famous in the worst of downfalls, much like tabloid journalism today.

One of the themes of Greek tragedy is hamartia, the fatal flaw.  Paradoxically, the greatest strength of the protagonist that allows them to rise is also their greatest fault which brings about their downfall.  One primary example is from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which retells the story of Agamemnon found in Homer’s Iliad.  Agamemnon is proud and strong, which is what allows him to be successful as a military commander but causes him to fall because he is too proud to compromise, a necessary skill for political leadership along with courage.  

Another example is Antigone from the Sophocles play by the same name.  Antigone has two brothers who fight over the title of King of Thebes.  After both slay each other, Creon takes the throne and declares that one brother is to be honored as a hero but the other is to be refused burial and left to decay on the battlefield.  Antigone, drawn between obeying the dictates of the state and the honor of her family, defies the new king and tries to bury her brother and is condemned to death in court.  Antigone is loyal, but she must make a choice: Which is the greater loyalty, family or state?  Either way, loyalty to someone is disloyalty to someone else, just as freedom for someone is limitation for someone else.

Greek Philosophy: The Origins of Ancient Greece in the Context of the Ancient World

Cosmology is the word used to describe the philosophy, science and religion of the ancient world when such subjects were not so separate and specialized in location and vocabulary as they are today.  The cosmology of the ancient world was dominated by the astronomy and astrology of the Babylonians and later Persians and Egyptians.  Their understandings spread along trade lines accross the interconnected ancient world, forming a background for the thought of not only ancient Greece and Rome but also of India and China.

By observing the stars and recording regular patterns of the skies and earth, it was thought that the cosmos worked according to regular principles and that knowing these principles and patterns gave power and control.  Aristotle speaks of the Babylonians, who devoted much time and energy to the study of the stars, as the major source of this cosmological science.  The sun was identified with either a central father god or son of the father god, planets were identified with major gods, and stars with minor gods and spirits.  We still use the major Roman gods to name the planets today.  In addition, we still use the 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes to an hour and 360 degrees in a circle from the base 6 Babylonian numerical system used along with Babylonian sundials.

Much mythology of the ancient world, including the earliest traditions of the Greeks and Israelites, are allegorical metaphors for the processes of the cosmos.  As the city states of ancient Greece rose and became more powerful centers of culture and trade, earlier Greek polytheistic mythology was brought into line with the increasingly monotheistic cosmologies of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile valleys.  This paved the way for Greek and Roman Christianity, which then became the dominant culture of Europe.  The golden age of Greek philosophy, which we study exclusively in this class, is central to this transformation.  Most Greek philosophers were moving away from the earlier traditions of Homer and Hesiod while remaining polytheistic, and then Plato and Aristotle, who were also polytheists of an increasingly abstract solar monotheistic bent, became central philosophers of Christianity and thus the European tradition.

Modern science is indebted not only to the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks, but also to Muslims, who began to surpass Aristotle in understanding and observing nature with the invention of algebra.  By using algebra to code-break nature, the sciences surpassed earlier ancient cosmology in the Islamic Golden Age (around 800 to 1200 CE), and from there went on to find another golden age in the Italian Renaissance.  Thus, while many say that it was the ancient Greeks and particularly Aristotle who started the sciences, it is more correct to say that first were the Babylonians (as far as systems of writing reveal), then the Egyptians, then the Greeks and Aristotle, then the Muslims, then the Renaissance, and finally modern Europe, each building on and surpassing the previous culture.  In fact, we do get much from cultures not mentioned in this lineage (such as prehistoric Africa, ancient China, ancient India and the Americas) but we are concerned here with the complex relationship between ancient Greece and our modern society.

In ancient world cosmology, the cosmos was seen as a stack of elements from lightest above to heaviest downward, an order still carried today in the periodic table.  If one looks out into nature, one sees water, on top of which is earth, on top of which is air, on top of which float fiery lights such as the sun, moon and stars.  Just as the lights move in circles above, so too do the complex situations of plants, animals and people move in cycles below, often corresponding to the seasons which correspond to the positions of the lights above.  The Babylonians and Assyrians of the Tigris-Euphrates valley believed that the sky god Anu, earth god Enlil and water god Ea were a primary trinity of deities presiding over the order of the cosmos.  When the elements of the cosmos are in order, harmony prevails.  When they fall out of order, chaos prevails.

In addition, the cosmos was understood to be shaped like a great person, and the elements/levels of the cosmos corresponded to the levels/faculties of a human individual.  Fire was identified with mind and sight, air with speech/breath/emotion, earth with stomach/desire, and water with lower regions and functions associated with desires and chaos.  In Plato’s Republic, possibly the most famous work of ancient Greek philosophy, we are told that the levels of a human individual (desire, emotion and mind) correspond to the levels of society (workers, guardians and philosophers) and the levels of the cosmos (earth, air and fire).  Plato argues that just as the mind rules over emotion which rules over desire in the best individual, philosophers rule over guardians who rule over workers in the best society.  

Both Plato and Aristotle argue against other Greek thinkers who do not believe in the divinity of the stars and elements, accusing them of atheism.  Both of them viewed the cosmos as an intelligent, purposeful organism composed of other intelligences.  This placed them between the early Greek polytheists and later Greek monotheists, as previously mentioned.

It is interesting to consider that the ancient Greeks considered ideas and theories to be god-like visions or views (hence the ‘theo’ in ‘theory’).  To have a theory or view of fire was to share fires own view of itself, to rise into a higher view of fires just as an individual rises into a higher view of reality by climbing a mountain or rising into a higher level of authority and ability in an institution.  The ideas and views that human beings have were understood to be alive and independent and waiting to share themselves.  The cosmos is ordered because the cosmos is itself reasonable.


The Influence of Ancient Egypt

While astronomy and cosmology comes originally from the Tigris-Euphrates, the ancient Egyptians had a tremendous impact on the thought and culture of ancient Greece.  It should also be noted that sub-saharan Africa is the original home of humanity, culture, civilization and technology, such that African civilization, including thousands of years of Egyptian civilization, is possibly the most influential in all of human history.  Just as Babylonian cosmology affected an interconnected humanity from Ireland to China, so too do we find parallels between Egyptian mythology and myths from around the world.  Consider that the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead are strikingly similar.

Egypt is often thought to have been a brutal slave driving civilization, compared to democratic Greece.  This results from the Book of Exodus of the Old Testament and the very recent celebration of Greece as the birthplace of true politics and democracy.  However, everyone in Egypt did not obey the Pharaoh without question.  There were cycles of regional and central control in the thousands of years of Egyptian civilization, sometimes with regions having more autonomy and others with central Pharaoh control.  The central power of the Pharaoh was challenged by other powerful regional lords, and so both the Pharaoh and lords had to appeal to the people and please them with rights and charity to get their support against the other.  Egypt had a complex society with many competing powers, popular uprisings were common and bureaucracy of scribes and visiers provided modestly positioned people with opportunities for upward class mobility.  

Egyptians, like Muslims, often portrayed as intolerant and monolithic but had the best diverse marketplaces in their times with many foreigners, creating a rich culture.  Consider that there are early statues of Indian Buddhas found in Alexandria around 300 BCE.  Alexandria was made the capital of Alexander’s empire after he conquered Egypt, and it, not Athens, became the greatest center of learning for hundreds of years.

Egypt treated women better, giving them more rights and acceptance, than the Greek city states, though admittedly it could not be called a culture of gender equality.  In one of my favorite passages of Egyptian wisdom, we are warned that we should provide for our women and value them, though never go to court with them, or let them take over your house.  Women did not have the right to speak in courts of law in Athens, but they could in Egypt.

Greece also had a higher percentage of slaves in the population compared to Egypt and most other ancient civilizations, quite high even in Athens during the brief period of democracy.  Greeks were less tolerant of foreigners, giving them less rights and treating them with suspicion.  They were even intolerant towards Greeks from other Greek city states.  Aristotle was viewed as a foreigner in Athens, had no rights or ability to become a citizen.  Alexander was the first to unify Greece as a land beyond a common culture, and of course Alexander united it together with other non-Greek lands such as Egypt and Persia in his brief empire.  Alexander, interestingly, was Macedonian, and he is proudly claimed by Greeks today even though Macedonians (as well as Turks, the other half of ancient Greece) are discriminated against and denied immigration.

Egyptian scholarship and study was incredible for thousands of years.  Egypt was the place to seek education for Greek elites, and even in the greatest times of Athens many prominent Greeks such as Euclid and Pythagoras went to Egypt to become educated at the greatest centers of knowledge of their time.  Greeks clearly borrowed from Egyptian math, medicine, technology, use of chemicals and minerals, and study of animals and plants.  Our word ‘Chemistry’ means ‘Egypt Study’, as it comes from the Egyptian word for Egypt, ‘Kemer’, which means ‘The Dark/Black/Rich Land’ after the black Nile soil (note: while the Egyptians were a dark skinned people and should be understood as ‘black’, neither this nor the word ‘white’ was used in the ancient world to describe ethnicities).  Consider that the Egyptians were the preferred doctors of the Romans in the beginning of the Roman empire, but were replaced by Greek doctors toward its end.  The Egyptians were also the best at math and geometry, which they not only understood abstractly but used for the purposes of building the largest monuments of their day.  Much of cosmology that sets the background for Greek philosophy comes from building things, such as the pyramids (top lightest, balance of opposites, aligning lowest and highest elements).

Plato, a big fan of Egyptian education and hierarchy, says in his Republic (as Socrates) that his ideal state, which is designed for producing intellectual philosophers and placing them on top of society, is the same as the Egyptians.  Thus, Plato believed that Egypt was the most rational and beneficial society, that the Egyptian priests were comparable to Greek philosophers in their pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, and that Athens should copy Egypt.   Critics of Plato and his Republic at the time mocked Plato for ripping off Egypt.  In his Phaedrus, Plato (again, as Socrates) says that Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, invented math, language and science.  Aristotle, like his teacher Plato, believed that Egypt was the most ancient of societies, was the birthplace of math and science, and that this was because the Egyptians had set the priests as a caste above everyone allowing them the leisure to study and discover.  While Aristotle was critical of parts of Plato’s theoretical republic, on this, the central defining and ruling structure of society, they are in complete agreement, as we will see when studying Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s politics.

The Egyptians were excellent and influential in art and sculpture.  Some believe that Egyptian performances of heroic and tragic tales inspired the comedies and tragedies of Greek Drama.  While the Greeks, who were first known in the ancient world as excellent mercenaries and sculptors before they rose considerably in wealth and power, were indeed phenomenal at carving the human form, we can see that this in part comes from thousands of years of the Egyptians slowly developing sculpture in a more human, complex way from earlier representations.  One famous example is Akhenaten lounging with family, compared to more rigid formal human forms of earlier periods.  The world’s first colossal statues were Egyptian, and the celebrated Greek styles of columns derive from similar Egyptian styles.

Herodotos, wrongly called the ‘Father of History’, as other ancient Greek historians before him, wrote that the Egyptians colonized areas of Greece in the centuries before its golden age.  While this is disputed by scholars today, it was widely believed by the ancient Greeks themselves.


The Influence of Ancient Persia

Persia conquered Egypt in 525 BCE.  Before that, in the centuries just before the flourishing of ancient Greece and the compiling of the Old Testament, Egypt and Persia were fighting over alliances with and conquests of Greece and Israel.  The Persian Empire stretched from Greece to India, encompassing the crossroads of most of the world’s culture and trade.  Persian culture had a massive effect on everyday Greek life.  Persian dress and adornments were copied, as well as styles of plates and cups.  Greek warriors would even curl their hair like the Assyrians and Persians before battle to inspire awe.  Athenian nobles often had ties to Persia that including intermarriage and business ventures.

Phoenicia, a civilization in what is today Lebanon that was a powerful trade center before the rise of Persia, became a vital part of the Persian empire after their conquest.  The Phoenician navy was the most feared part of the Persian military.  We not only get the legend of the Phoenix, the bird that is reborn by fire, from Phoenicia, but also the Phoenician alphabet, the ancestor of the Greek alphabet and the Roman-European alphabet we use here today.  The finest togas worn in Athens were made of Asian silks, brought over the silk road to Phoenicia, where it was there patterned and died.  Far from being white bedsheets, Athenian nobles would show off by wearing the finest Phoenician cloth in the latest styles.

Cyrus, the first Persian great emperor, was venerated by many Greeks as a model king who benefited his subjects and helped them to flourish unlike a greedy tyrant.  Cyrus is also presented as the first messiah in the Old Testament, the liberator of the Jews from Babylon.  The New Testament, originally written in Greek, clearly presenting Jesus as the second, confirmed by the three Persian maji following the stars, and then later predicts an apocalyptic third messiah.  This puts the Bible in line with Persian Zoroastrianism, the world’s first great solar monotheism, spread by Cyrus’ empire, which predicted three saoshyants (messiah in hebrew), who would lead the forces of good to triumph over the forces of darkness.  Regardless of one’s beliefs, the Jews and Christians presented themselves as in agreement with Zoroastrianism (for Christians, as its fulfillment) during periods of Persian influence.  Christianity first spread in Syria and Greece, and from there to Rome, Egypt and elsewhere.

Unlike Cyrus, the Greeks were not known as benevolent conquerors.  In the brief period of Athenian empire,  several states including Cyprus rebelled and appealed to Persia as they had been treated better by the Persian empire.


The Idea of the West

Sadly, Europeans believed that the Egyptians and Persians were the great teachers of wisdom and philosophy to the Greeks for two thousand years after the golden age of Greek philosophy.  In the Renaissance, the two greatest philosophers, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, both Neo-Platonists, believed that there was one true philosophy which was passed from the Egyptian priests and Persian maji to the Greek philosophers and Indian sages, and then that this wisdom was incarnated on earth as Jesus.  The Neo-Platonic academy of Florence, center of Renaissance art and philosophy, was modeled on Plato’s Republic under the assumption that this was a recreation of ancient Egyptian institutions.

It was only when Europe rose in power and wealth in the late 1600s and spoke of itself as unique and like no other culture on earth in terms of reason and freedom that the ancient Greeks were similarly said to be unique in reason and freedom and separate from the rest of the ancient world.  The idea that ‘The West’ is a unique and separate culture beginning in ancient Athens and resulting in the power of European nations today is clearly dominant in American and European scholarship.  This can be seen by reading the first paragraphs of most history and science textbooks.  

Roland Barthes, the french literary critic and theorist, warns us in his book Mythologies that we must beware of the modern mythology of History with a capital ‘H’ and Science with a capital ‘S’.  Our modern Greek mythology, not to be confused with the ancient Greek mythology we will be discussing next week, would have astounded the ancient Greeks themselves.  Considering the overwhelming majority of ancient Greek slaves came from the Germanic and Celtic tribes of Europe, and were considered a race of people incapable of reason and thus incapable of freedom, it would have astounded Plato and Aristotle to hear Europeans today say that the ancient Greeks invented civilization and that the Europeans receive civilization as their descendants.

Next time we will focus on ancient Greek culture, identity and mythology to give us more background for Greek philosophy, the subject of the rest of our course.

Logic: Syllabus & Schedule

PHILOSOPHY 10 - LOGIC, Fall 2012                   Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Friday  1 – 3:50 pm                                                   Office Hours:Tue 12:15-1pm @ K’s
Class Code 42985                                                      Email:  ericgerlach@gmail.com      
Room: BCC 54                                                          Blog:    ericgerlach.blogspot.com
                                                                                              

Logic: Syllabus and Schedule

Course Description
This course introduces students to the history and practice of Logic in ancient and modern cultures.  We will study the human origins of Logic, Indian, Greek, and Chinese Logic texts, and modern European Logic including Wittgenstein’s truth table method.

Required Texts:
The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339.  A copy of the reader will be on reserve at BCC Library.

Required Assignments:
- In-class & Homework Assignments             40%
- Midterm Exam                                              30%
- Final Exam                                                    30%

Class Schedule
Readings (bold) are to be completed for discussion by the date listed

Aug 24             Introduction: What is Logic?
Aug 31              The Human Origins of Logic & Reason: Magic, Witchcraft & Religion
Sept 7              Indian Logic: Kanada’s Vaisheshika Sutra & Gotama’s Nyaya Sutra
Sept 14            Indian Logic: Jainism, Buddhism & Skepticism
Sept 21            Greek Logic: Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior & Posterior An.
Sept 28            Greek Logic: Heraclitus, Sextus Empiricus & Skepticism
Oct 5               Chinese Logic & Paradox: SCP & Review for Midterm
Oct 12             Midterm Exam
Oct 19             Islamic & Medieval European Logic: Avicenna & Aquinas
Oct 26             Medieval to Modern European Logic: Russell & Mill
Nov 2              Truth Tables & Early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Nov 9             Late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Nov 16               Contradiction, Dialectic, Fallacies and Hegel’s Logic
Nov 23        NO CLASS - THANKSGIVING BREAK
Nov 30               Nonsense, Humor & Art: Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books
Dec 7        Review for Final Exam
Dec 14             Final Exam

Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand logical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: apply logical concepts to solve problems
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of logic

General Student Requirements:
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.  Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.

Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. Otherwise, late assignments will be downgraded a letter grade for each class day they are late. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. Keep back-up copies of your work; never hand in the only copy of your work.  All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher.  There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.

Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook,  5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.

A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.

The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.