Illustrated To Think Like God

Arnold Hermann

Description

Fascinating illustrations contribute to this illuminating and award-winning account of how and why philosophy emerged and make it a must-read for any inquisitive thinker unsatisfied with prevailing assumptions on this timely and highly relevant subject. By taking the reader back to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy more than 500 years B.C., the author, with unparalleled insight, tells the story of the Pythagorean quest for otherwordly konwledge -- a tale of cultism, political conspiracies, and bloody uprisings that eventually culminate in tragic failure. The emerging hero is Parmenides, who introduces for the first time a technique for testing the truth of a statement that was not based on physical evidence or mortal sense-perception, but instead relied exclusively on the faculty we humans share with the gods: the ability to reason.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Parmenides Publishing
• Date de parution: 24 décembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781930972452
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

THE ILLUSTRATED TO THINK LIKE GOD

THE ILLUSTRATED TO THINK LIKE GOD Pythagoras and Parmenides THE ORIGINS OF PHILOSOPHY

ARNOLD HERMANN
PARMENIDES PUBLISHING
Las Vegas 89109 2004 by Parmenides Publishing All rights reserved. Published 2004 Printed in the United States of America Publisher s Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hermann, Arnold, 1953- The illustrated to think like God : Pythagoras and Parmenides : the origins of philosophy / Arnold Hermann.
p. : ill. ; cm. Portion of title: To think like God ISBN: 1-930972-17-2
1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Parmenides--Influence. 3. Pythagoras--Influence. 4. Xenophanes, ca. 570-ca. 478 B.C.--Influence. 5. Evidence. I. Title. II. Title: To think like God.
B188 .H476 2004 182
www.tothinklikegod.com www.parmenides.com

O NLY a philosopher s mind grows wings,
since its memory always keeps it as close as possible
to those realities by being close to which
the gods are divine.
- Plato, Phaedrus 249c
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader
INTRODUCTION
I. PYTHAGORAS
The Search for a Way Out
One of the Oldest Questions: What Do All Things Have in Common?
The Seeker of Wisdom
Separating Pythagoreanism into Early, Middle, and Late Periods
The Search for Proof
Euphorbus Shield
Relying on Reasoning
A Science for the Intangible, Abstract
II. THE PYTHAGOREANS
Tradition Versus the Historical Account
Conflicting Reports and Forgeries
Almost No Mention of Pythagoras in Plato and Aristotle
The Main Sources of Pythagorean Lore
The Pythagorean Agenda
Croton before Pythagoras
The Lecturer and Miracle-Worker
The Four Speeches
Earth as a Prison
The Politics of Pythagoreanism
The Making of a Religious Political Conspiracy
Becoming a Member in the Pythagorean Society
Secrecy and Anti-Democracy
The Gods; and the Ruling of the Many by the Few
Signs of a Pythagorean Police State?
Beans and Politics
A Religious-Political-Economic Dictatorship?
War and Luxury
Sybaris-the Antipode of Pythagoreanism
The War
Why was Sybaris Destroyed?
The Revolts Against the Pythagorean Political Elite
The Growing Hatred of the Non-Pythagoreans
The First Revolt
Pythagoras Death
A Return to Power and the Second Revolt
The Gradual End of the Movement
Those Who Listen and Those Who Learn
A Split in the Order
The Listeners: Teaching by Passwords, Tokens, and Maxims
The Emergence of Scientist Pythagoreans
Hippasus, the All-around Thinker
Aristotle s Those Called Pythagoreans
III. IN WANT OF A MATHEMATICS FOR THE SOUL
The Source Code of the Universe
The Music of the Spheres
Conquering the Unlimited
The Sound of Order
Order and Proportion
Harmony and the Soul
Numerology-Deriving Philosophy from Number?
Confusing Numbers with Things and Things with Numbers
Number Symbolism
The Counter-Earth
IV. PYTHAGORIZING VERSUS PHILOSOPHIZING
Truth After Death?
An Exercise in Apprehending the True Nature of Things
Purification or Reasoning as a Way to Truth?
Calibrating the Ability to Reason
V. PARMENIDES
The Lawmaker
The Poet s Challenge and the Lawgiver s Response
Xenophanes and the Truth Available to Mortals
The Need for Reliable Criteria
The Senses, Reason, and Proof
Early Lawmaking and Analytic Problem Solving
The Ways of Proof and Disproof
VI. THE POEM OF PARMENIDES
A Quick Guide to the Poem s Ordering
The Poem, a Translation
The Proem
The Ways of Inquiry for Thinking
The Reliable or Evidential Account
DOXA-The Deceptive Order of Words, or the Plausible Ordering
VII. THE POEM S MOST DIFFICULT POINTS EXPLAINED
What Is the Significance of the Proem?
The Realm of the Nameless Goddess
The Curriculum
How Opinion Would Be Judged If Truth Did Not Exist
What Is Genuinely Reliable Because It Is Proven as Such
From Opinion to Truth
The Problem of Contradictory Formulas
A Unity of Formula
Esti or IS : The Parmenidean Object
Verb or Subject?
Way or Destination?
The IS as the Universe: An Old Misconception
The Dead World
Zeno s Defense
Proving Motion Versus Proving a Proper Understanding of Motion
The End of Time
The Question of IS NOT
Doxa: Being Certain about the Uncertain
A Tentative Rearrangement of the Poem s Verses
VIII. GUIDELINES FOR AN EVIDENTIAL ACCOUNT
Delimiting the Object of Judgment
Twelve Provisos for the Evidential Account
IX. METHODS OF PROOF AND DISPROOF
Like according to Like
The Way of the Daemon
Aiming for Conceptual Correspondence
A Unity of Corresponding Landmarks
What Do Falling Millet Seeds Have in Common?
Sufficient Reason, Contradiction, and Infinite Regress
Sufficient Reason
Contradiction
Infinite Regress
Summation of Parmenides Doctrine
X. IRRATIONALS AND THE PERFECT PREMISE
Philosophy: An Exercise in Infallibility
A Perfect Premise
To Drown in a Sea of Non-Identity
Irrationality and the Pythagorean Theorem
The Indirect Proof of Odd Being Even
XI. MIND AND UNIVERSE: TWO REALMS, TWO SEPARATE APPROACHES
Two Ways of Looking at Things
What We Think Fits with What We Think, but Not Necessarily with the Universe
Renouncing Thinking s Dependency upon Sense-Experience
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Acknowledgments

PREFACE
T HE QUESTIONS of how philosophy came about and why it began in pre-classical Greece at exactly that particular place and time-and not earlier, later, somewhere else, or not at all-have an intrinsic relation to one of the most disarming arguments in Parmenides Poem (masked as a simple inquiry into the genesis of what is ), and they seem just as unsolvable: What necessity would have impelled it to grow later rather than earlier, if it began from nothing? (fr. 8.9-10) Still, philosophy s raison d tre has preoccupied my mind since the time I first picked up the works of Kant and Hegel in my later teens-admittedly, my earliest, rather clumsy encounters with the subject, and not the wisest choices for a novice. Nonetheless, how my own interest in philosophy came about, and why then and not at a different time, I can easily answer. While this interest did not begin from nothing, it was not stirred by a particular book, a moving lecture, or an inspiring professor, but by some very special music. The year was 1970. I was 17 years old, and I found myself at a summer rock festival, dragged there by friends who eventually had evaporated into the smothering crowd. Unwittingly thrust toward the stage, I was suddenly pummeled by the most complex, confounding, indeed kaleidoscopic sounds. The music was a magnetic vortex-everywhere, completely erratic, yet at the same time soothing, massive, collapsing, like a towering wall rushing to crush-but the ravaging blow never comes. The band, I soon learned, was called Van Der Graaf Generator, and its sound was produced by a stoical keyboard player operating some kind of hybrid mutated Hammond organ, the syncopated thunder of a sizable drum kit mastered by an intense-looking drummer, and surprisingly, a self-absorbed saxophone player who had wrapped himself in an array of saxophones of different shapes and sizes, gleaming in the light like a brass armor, and who was playing two of them at the same time! But most striking was the sudden appearance of a lone singer, his voice lashing out boldly through the noise, mercilessly slicing it like a jagged blade, commanding, overpowering, mercurial, like a burst of lighting in a midnight storm. And then the words (one can hardly call them lyrics) ... he sang of fiery universes beyond the edge of thought; of vacant time, living antimatter, and the angst of hyper-space travelers above the speed of light; of thinking about thinking, and refugees from fate; of houses with walls but no doors, where only time can enter or escape; of killers, angels, acolytes, and the silence at humanity s end. The singer s name is Peter Hammill, and I consider him the greatest musical genius of my generation, a generation that was blessed with not a small number of geniuses. Peter is one of the most creative artists imaginable, with more than sixty records or CDs to date-yes, he is still very much active-and it is the only music, in my view, that really merits being called philosophical. I still listen to it today, and some of it played often in the background while I researched this work. In any case, Peter Hammill s influence was decisive in my desire to become a philosopher, which is why I need to pay tribute to him in this form.
As to the question of how or why philosophy came about when it did, this book is an attempt to shed a tentative if somewhat unorthodox light on the matter. I say tentative because no subject in philosophy can be deemed as categorically resolved, particularly not the manifold issues of ancient philosophy, which are further handicapped by a dearth of extant material. Nor has the evolution of To Think Like God been a straight development from A to B, instead encompassing a time span of some fifteen years or more. The somewhat impenetrable subject matter made the whole project more akin to a philosophical odyssey than a critical examination, which is very difficult to express as a linear narrative. Still, one of the functions of a preface is to give an account of a work s development; nevertheless, I will try to be brief.
First and foremost, To Think Like God has been a risky experiment. It is published in two different forms, a scholarly and an illustrated version. Yet even the former was written with three distinct audiences in mind: (1) experts on the Presocratics, particularly interpreters of the extant Pythagorean and Eleatic material; (2) scholars with broader classicist interests, philosophers in general, and students of classics or ancient philosophy, as well as the history of law; and (3) nonscholars who have developed an interest in the matters discussed. Having noticed in recent years an increased curiosity regarding both Pythagoras and Parm