GST 112 - INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY & LOGIC

 PHILOSOPHY - What you must know?

·         ·         PHILOSOPHY is a fundamental certainty which is also autonomous I.e. it justifies itself and it constantly demonstrates and proves validity.

·         PHILOSOPHY is derived from two Greek words – philein (love) and Sophia (wisdom). Hence, we say philosophy is the love of wisdom.

·         PHILOSOPHY thrives exclusively on evidence

It was STRASSER who said & I quote 

HUMAN SCIENCES can only tell us what is statistically frequent but PHILOSOPHY assures us of conducts that are normal.

·         The kind of PHILOSOPHY that began in 6^thCENTURY B.C. was unique because MEN [philosophers] refused to take things for granted. They were curious about the nature of the UNIVERSE, MAN, SOCIETY and VALUES.

·         IROEGBU defined PHILOSOPHY as the process of having WISDOM knocked into our SENSES via what he called - ENWIZDOMIZATION.

·         PHILOSOPHY is not interested in the SECONDARY CAUSES of being but in their ULTIMATE CAUSE.

·         It was JACQUES MARITAIN who proposed that PHILOSOPHY is a THEORETICAL SCIENCE.

·         THALES, ANAXIMANDER & ANAXIMENES were MILESIAN PHILOSOPHERS [philosophers from Miletus]. THALES proposed that the UNIVERSE was made of WATER. According to him, WATER can account for the 3 BASIC STRUCTURES of the Universe namely - SOLID, LIQUID & GASES.

·         PHILOSOPHY is categorized into FIVE periods or epochs and they include: (a) The Ancient Greek Period (b) Medieval Philosophy(c) Modern Philosophy (d) Contemporary Philosophy (e) Post Contemporary Philosophy.

·         THE ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY period is divided into:

·         Pre-Socratic phase

·         Socratic phase

·         Post-Socratic phase

·         The philosophers in the Pre-Socratic phase include: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Zeno. And these philosophers were called ‘philosophizing physicists’simply because their philosophy was based on natural phenomena.

·         The Socratic phase is regarded as the ‘golden period of Greek philosophy’. This can be attributed to the fact that it was during this phase philosophy was centered on man. Philosophers that flourished in this phase include: Socrates, Plato, Alfred North Whitehead, Aristotle.

·         It was PLATO who proposed that the world is divided into two viz (a) the transcendental world and (b) the empirical world. According to him, the transcendental world is ‘reality’ and the empirical world is characterized by ‘appearance’.

·         According to Plato, a philosopher is one who is able to distinguish realityfrom appearance.

·         According to Plato also, the object of human knowledge is real and this reality can only be captured in the world of forms. He also claimed that ‘until philosophers become rulers or rulers philosophers, the evil in the society cannot be solved’. This assertion is known as The Doctrine of the Ideal State and here, only the ‘philosopher king’ must rule.

·         The Post-Socratic phase was characterized by the emergence of various schools of thought such as the Garden of Epicurus, the Stoics, the Cynics, the Skeptics etc.

·         NOTE: There exists a fourth period of ancient Greek philosophy and it is known as the Philosophy of the Age of the Emperor.