Ancient philosophers Flashcards
(16 cards)
What are the Four Causes?
- Material (what something is made up of)
- Efficient (the process in which something is made)
- Formal (the plan or design involved in making something)
- Final (the aim of making something)
What is potentiality and actuality? Why is Aristotle concerned with these?
- Potentiality = The possibility of a thing doing something
- Actuality = When something’s potential is achieved
- Aristotle was interested in the shift from potentiality to actuality
Describe Aristotle’s Prime Mover
- The unmoved mover/uncaused causer
- The first thing that moved the chain of dominoes to achieve the world we see today
- Impersonal. Not actually like a God - is actually entirely unconscious of the fact that it caused the world
What did Aristotle believe is our final cause?
- Eudaimonia
- Supreme good or happiness
- Basic requirements for eudaimonia include early training, a good amount of money, children and good ancestry
What is the World of the Forms?
- Plato’s idea of true reality
- Another dimension which is permanent and contains perfect versions of concepts
- We can recognise concepts like justice and beauty because we’ve already seen them in the world of the forms where we used to exist before our soul was forced out into an earthly, physical body that’s always distracting us and diverting our desires
- Also a hierarchy of forms
What’s at the top of the hierarchy of the forms? Describe it.
- Form of Good
- Illuminates all of the forms and allows us to recognise them
- Symbolised by the sun in the allegory of the cave
- Responsible for all the other forms and the existence of life
- Plato’s equivalent to a God
What is the Allegory of the Cave?
- Some prisoners are shackled to face a cave wall their entire life
- Behind them, people walk behind a wall carrying idols and statues which (with the firelight of the cave) create shadows in front of the prisoners
- The prisoners think these shadows are reality, thinking that whenever they hear talking from the people behind them it’s the shadows
- One day, one prisoner is dragged out of the cave and shown the real world. He sees a series of things, before finally seeing the sun and realising it’s the reason for all life/existence/seasons
- The prisoner remembers his friends and goes back to tell them what he has seen
- None of them believe him
- The freed prisoner is a philosopher, the shackled ones are normal people who can’t see reality as it is
What formed the basis of Plato’s theory of the forms?
- The fact the world is changing all the time which means we can’t gain true knowledge from the world
- Heraclitus saying ‘It’s not possible to step in the same river twice’
Elenchus
The part of the socratic method involving intensive questioning aimed at making the person conclude they don’t know anything
Particulars
Describes everything w experience in the world of appearances - an imperfect representation of the form they participate in
Plato’s idea of creation
- The “demiurge”, something that created order out of chaos and illuminates all other forms
- Found within Timaeus
Parmenides
Main character just seems to spend most of his time criticising the forms
Third Man Argument
- By Aristotle
- Infinite regression of things that participate in the form of “man”
Newton
Challenged Aristotle’s belief that a moved object would simply stop moving by itself because that’s its natural state. Rather, an equal opposite force has to be applied, meaning things don’t just stop by themselves. This challenges Aristotle’s understanding of motus
Francis Bacon
Concept of telos is completely unscientific
Sartre
- Telos is wrong
- “Existence precedes essence”, and humans exist before having a defined purpose, so must create one themselves
