Philosophy and Living

Ralph Blumenau

Description

Philosophy can be very abstract and apparently remote from our everyday concerns. In this book Ralph Blumenau brings out for the non-specialist the bearing that thinkers of the past have on the way we live now, on the attitude we have towards our lives, towards each other and our society, towards God and towards the ethical problems that confront us.The focus of the book is those aspects of the history of ideas which have something to say to our present preoccupations. After expounding the ideas of a particular thinker there follows a discussion of the material and how it relates to issues that are still alive today (indented from the margin and set in a different typeface), based on the author's classroom debates with his own students.Another feature of the book is the many footnotes which refer the reader back to earlier, and forward to later, pages of the book. They are intended to reinforce the idea that throughout the centuries philosophers have often grappled with the same problems, sometimes coming up with similar approaches and sometimes with radically different ones.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845406486
• Langue: English

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Title page
Philosophy and Living
Ralph Blumenau



Copyright page
Copyright © Ralph Blumenau, 2002
First reprint: January 2003
Second reprint (with corrections): February 2005
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The moral rights of the author has been asserted
No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA



Dedication
This book is dedicated to my classes at the
University of the Third Age
in London



Introduction
There have always been parts of philosophy which have been highly technical and so abstruse that only specialists could understand them. These features have their own importance, but the title of this book is intended to show that it concerns itself mainly with those aspects of philosophy that have influenced people’s attitudes towards their lives, towards each other and their society, towards their God, and towards the ethical problems that confront them.
I am a historian by profession; I have taught history as a main subject, initially to sixth formers and now to retired people. I should describe myself as an amateur rather than a professional philosopher (as specialists in the subject may swiftly discover), but I have always taught philosophy as an important component of history. Although I have of course grappled with its technical matters as well as with the wider issues, it is the latter which have always interested me most, and it is not surprising that my classes have also shown the greatest interest in those aspects which touch on contemporary concerns. The students have not always immediately seen the relevance to contemporary issues of problems raised by philosophers in the past. So I have found that it has been helpful for me to have specifically raised this relevance.
This book is the result of that experience. I have selected mainly those aspects of the history of ideas which have something to say to our present preoccupations; and I have proceeded, as I do in my classes, in a chronological fashion. I am interested in all those figures who, in the past, have contributed to shape the thought of their time and of later ages; and I do not draw the sharp distinction that professionals do between philosophers, theologians, scientists, psychologists and even political propagandists. I set out to expound the ideas of a particular thinker; I then invite discussion of the material and especially of how it relates to issues that are still alive today. Over the last five years I have tape-recorded these discussions, and a special feature of this book is that my student’s reflections and mine - set in from the margin and in a different type - interrupt the exposition.
Another feature of the book are the many footnotes which refer the reader back to earlier, and forward to later, pages of the book. They are intended to serve the dual purpose of making the references easier to look up and to reinforce the idea that throughout the centuries philosophers have often grappled with the same problems, sometimes coming up with similar approaches and sometimes with radically different ones.
At the same time I have assumed that many readers will not be reading the book from cover to cover, but may read chapters in isolation. This accounts for the occasional repetition of arguments that I hope will not irritate unduly those who read the complete book in a relatively short time.
The topics I have chosen are selective, and the book does not purport to give a comprehensive account of the thinkers with whom I deal.
As a historian, I am well aware that it is dangerous to read present concerns into an interpretation of the past. I dare say that the same danger exists in philosophy: perhaps the thinkers of the past, were they alive today, would be puzzled by what I may have occasionally read into them. But philosophers, like other figures from the past, have no control over the effect their thoughts and actions have in later years. The historian must be interested not only in what an idea meant to a character in the past, but also in how that idea has been interpreted by later generations. I try to be fair to the original context of an idea, but I must admit that what fascinates me most is the potency of some ideas down the ages. If I have unwittingly falsified the former, I must crave the indulgence of the professional philosophers and theologians.
Acknowledgments
Much of this book is based on notes I have made on my reading over several decades, long before I had the idea that I might be writing a book. Although I have a comprehensive list of the books I have read (they are all on my shelves), it never occurred to me to include page references in my notes. I may occasionally have copied phrases or incorporated lines of arguments that came from these books, but it is impossible now to track all of these down. The bibliography at the end of this volume shows the range of authors to whom I have been indebted. If any of them feel that here and there parts of my text are very close to what they have written, I would apologize for any plagiarism they may suspect and ask them to accept that it was wholly unintentional.
I am very grateful to my editor, Keith Sutherland, for the encouragement he has given me throughout, and to Sandra Good and Bryn Williams for their proof-reading. In addition Bryn Williams has made many substantive comments that have caused me to make numerous changes to my text. Professional and specialist philosophers will undoubtedly find mistakes in this work of an amateur author. For these I must, of course, take full responsibility.
The other debt I am only too glad to acknowledge is to my classes at the University of the Third Age in London. Several of them had asked me to write such a book. Without the incorporation of their comments and the questions they have raised, this volume would have been very much shorter and much of its flavour would have been lost. It is to my students, therefore, that I dedicate the result.
Parts of chapters 13, 27 and 31 first appeared in the quarterly journal Philosophy Now : “Free Will and Predestination” in issue No.20 (Spring 1998); “Aesthetics and Absolutes” in issue No. 3 (Spring 1992); and “Kant and the Thing in Itself” in issue No. 31 (Spring, 2001).



PART ONE: GREECE AND ROME

1: The Greek Cosmologists
The earliest Western philosophers came from the Greek settlements on the coast of Ionia, what is today the western coast of Turkey. What made them philosophers was that they sensed that behind the ever-changing phenomena of this world there must be something that does not change. They originally thought that there must be some ultimate stuff - what the Greeks called arche and the Germans call Urstoff - of which everything is made; and they speculated on what this might be. In the sixth century BC they believed that it must be just one arche : Thales thought it was Water; Anaximenes thought it was Air; Heraclitus thought it was Fire because it can transform everything into itself. (He also had a more sophisticated idea: that whilst Fire was the ultimate stuff , there lay behind it something that was not a stuff at all, but was Reality itself. We will look at that idea more closely presently.) In the following century, the fifth BC , Empedocles, from Agrigento in Southern Italy, thought that material things were probably composed of a combination of more than one stuff: in his work, we come across the Four Elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water) which combine in various proportions; but even that seemed unduly limited, and finally Democritus, the most famous of a group of philosophers from Thrace who were called Atomists, postulated the existence of innumerable tiny indivisible building blocks which combined and re-combined to make everything that was in this world. They called these building blocks atoms, from the Greek a + tomos , which means non-divisible. (The soul, too, was composed of atoms. Like the atoms making up the body, they dispersed on death. They did not perish, but recombined to form new souls: there could therefore be no such thing as individual immortality.)
The branch of philosophy which aims to explain how the material universe works is known as “natural philosophy”. It was later to separate itself off from the rest of philosophy and call itself “physical science”. The word “science” originally simply meant “knowledge”. It separated itself off from philosophy when it had developed its own techniques of experimentation and verification. These are largely specific to what we now call science. They are on the whole not the methods applied in thinking about, for example, religion or ethics or aesthetics, which are typically philosophical subjects. But, for many centuries before the so-called “scientific method” was developed, there was no demarcation between philosophy and science. Of course, the demarcation is not absolute today either: there is a branch of philosophy today which is called the Philosophy of Science, though that is philosophical in a way that what was called “natural philosophy” is not. Anyway, for those early centuries, we class thinkers who reflected about the nature of the physical universe among the philosophers.
One may smile at a “natural philosophy” which held there was just one stuff, or even a mere four elements, at the bottom of everything. In Democritus, however, we meet one of many prescientific thinkers who constantly astonish us by the