Quotes About Philosophy

Aristotle may have been dull to read, but he was easy to memorize.

The philosophy of the ancients and the Stoics had reserved final wisdom for a chosen few. Christianity delivered those same truths, and the moral virtues that went with them, to the many, right down to slaves and the homeless. Plato was like a chef at a five-star restaurant, Origen said, who only knew recipes that appealed to his handful of wealthy diners. Jesus, by contrast, Origen says, "cooks for the multitudes"—and the multitudes have responded.41

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

No, Ockham concluded, there is no common nature shared by individual dogs or men that we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything that is real exists only as individuals. When I say, "All men are mortal," this is shorthand for saying, "Socrates is mortal," "Plato is mortal," and so on.

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

Any appeal to reason is hopeless, since "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions": and the passions are the root of the problem.

I cannot avoid believing," Luther mused, "that it was Satan himself who introduced the study of Aristotle.

Socrates had just smiled and shook his head. To break the law, he told Crito, even a law that he knew was unjust, would be wrong. As he told his disciples many times, "one must not do wrong even when one is wronged."3 By doing wrong, a man did injury to his soul. Doing right, by contrast, makes his soul healthy and strong. A life of virtue is a life without compromise, Socrates believed, in which the goal is perfection according to an eternal standard.

All around him were stacks of books in Arabic on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, physics, and philosophy by various Greek and Arabic authorities. They included many works by Aristotle that no one in western Europe had opened in six hundred years.

Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato's philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato's shadowy cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ.8

Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast.

Aristotle's overriding conviction that philosophy must necessarily be an open book, with everything as clear, organized, and straightforward as possible even for the slowest student.

All forms of humanism, Heidegger proclaimed, lead inevitably to metaphysics, since they presuppose a human being with a fixed rational nature. Instead of freeing man, the humanist view actually reduces Being's infinite possibilities to the dim, stunted creature of the modern age.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

Aquinas was no Averroist. His life's work would be an implicit repudiation of Averroës's idea that reason has a higher claim to truth than faith does.12 Instead, Thomas Aquinas's reading of Aristotle led him in a different direction. He would conclude that faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. His writings would try to persuade his age that men are part of both a divine and a human order, and both have valid standing in their lives.

The example of Saint Socrates, as Erasmus once called him, would gently lead everyone to see that the soul's highest goal is wisdom and that the "philosophy of Christ" (philosophia Christi) is the highest form of wisdom there is.

Greek science on Aristotle's terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages.

Renaissance Platonism realized that it was this quest for spiritual perfection that bound together all the great religions and civilizations: Egypt, the Chaldeans and Babylonians, the Persians and Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans. All were suddenly revealed to be part of the same spiritual Big Push. All were revealed to be different aspects of the One.

The God that Socrates presented to his disciples stood above and beyond the familiar myths and rituals. Socrates's God shares the same transcendent immortality as the soul and lies beyond all material space and time. He dwells naturally in the same afterlife as the Forms:

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, while his most famous sayings of all, "All things change" (Panta rhei) and "You cannot step into the same river twice," make him the father of relativism:

When the Ostrogoths had swept into Italy, Theodoric looked for the best and brightest Roman for advice on how to govern. He turned to Boethius. For nearly two decades, Boethius had acted as Theodoric's chief political adviser and mentor—his surrogate father, almost. Theodoric was dazzled by Boethius's shrewd advice, by his icy calm in times of crisis, but above all by his knowledge of Greek literature, philosophy, and science.

Aristotle called these true deductive inferences syllogisms. All syllogisms follow the same basic structure as the "Socrates is mortal" example. Each contains two premises or assumptions (called major and minor) and the inescapable conclusion we have to draw from them.

Aristotle showed (or seemed to show) that by linking one valid syllogism to another regarding a single subject, such as biology or ethics or even the nature of God, one could build a conceptual chain of reasoning that would inevitably lead, link by link, from one set of necessary truths to another, all the way to the highest truths of all.

Socrates could do this because he starts with a different question from "What is real?" (although eventually he gets there, too). Socrates was the first also to ask: "What am I?