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November 29 - December 28, 2021
We know that the complete artistic program of the Stanza, with its allegorical representations of Philosophy, Theology, Law, and the arts, was drawn up not by Raphael but probably by the pope’s librarian, with the help of the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
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Alpein Cameo
the humanist
Scholars have identified Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, and Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, as well as an Arab philosopher, Averroës; and a woman, the pagan priestess Hypatia. At their feet sits another philosopher, Heraclitus, which is in fact a portrait of Michelangelo. Over all their heads stands a statue of Apollo, the god of the arts and divine inspiration.
There is the geographer Strabo6 (which some argue is actually a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci,
The clash between Plato and Aristotle is visibly inscribed on the stones of Chartres Cathedral and Notre Dame de Paris. It sparked the first idea of the national state and nearly brought the medieval papacy crashing to the ground.
“is called wisdom.”
Pericles.
With these two feats, Thales signaled a major change in Greek thinking and world thinking. A new, rational way of understanding reality was born, as opposed to one tied to myth or religious ritual—as still prevailed in two much older civilizations, Egypt and Babylon. It was a major shift, and a radical one. Quite suddenly, Greeks of the sixth century BCE lost faith in the ancient legends about the origins of the world told by Homer, Hesiod, and other early poets; about how Uranus had fathered the Titans with Mother Earth and how the Titans fought and lost to Zeus and the other gods for
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Heraclitus threw out the whole concept of stability. His mottoes “War is the father of all things,” “Strife
Instead of stability, Heraclitus said, there is only change: ceaseless, relentless, and without end. In the desperate watercourse of existence, any notion we have of permanent or fixed values, even of our own body, is pure illusion.
To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.
Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed
The soul of reason. The light of truth. The path of dialectic leading to understanding, even of goodness itself. These are Plato’s great ideals. Still, the Myth of the Cave reveals a bitter truth: Most people prefer life in the cave. The world and institutions around us reflect it—and as Glaucon realized, people get upset and even furious when someone challenges their fondest illusions—what
The Pythagorean program was to prove that math and geometry are the starting points of Being itself, and that “all things are numbers.”9
Speusippus had largely given up on Plato’s theory of Forms and the mystical theory of ideal numbers outlined in the Timaeus.3 But Plato’s nephew still clung to the notion that the truth about reality had to be found in mathematical formulae. However, Aristotle saw at once that even if the proposition that math is a certain and exact science is true, and even if the proposition that the first principles in philosophy must be certain and exact is also true, that did not prove that those first principles must be mathematical. The Pythagorean belief that “all things are numbers” was one of the
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The Myth of the Cave in the Republic,
Aristotle’s writings, but he is not a heroic figure or a philosophical role model. He
“We must trust the evidence of the senses rather than theories,” Aristotle says, “and theories as well, as long as their results agree with what is observed.”
Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.
above all, the delight in dealing with tangible objects made of flesh, fur, shell, and bone and the firm feel of organic life instead of the disembodied abstract Forms of the Platonists or numbers of the Pythagoreans: These were fundamental to Aristotle’s way of seeing the world and seeking the truth.
the treatises on logic,
So instead of Plato’s philosophy of transcendence, in which everything is a reflection or a sign of something higher and more real, Aristotle gives us a philosophy of causation.
He was determined to establish the essential role of a divinity who is the final cause of everything, the one who sets the whole system in motion, the master engineer. Aristotle’s term for this God is the Unmoved Mover or Prime Mover, since He presides over everything that changes or moves in the universe, without changing or moving Himself. He alone has already achieved His actuality, or energeia, simply by being. He thinks, and everything moves.
past. Here we arrive at one of the most crucial differences between Plato and Aristotle,
Plato’s philosophy looks constantly backward, to what we were, or what we’ve lost, or to an original of which we are the pale imitation or copy. In that past original, Plato will say, we find the key that unlocks our future.
Aristotle, by contrast, looks steadily forward,
and Plato, creator of the vanished utopia Atlantis, the first great theorist of the idea of decline.
Practical knowledge, praxis, has to do with doing.
But technē, the third kind of knowledge, has to do with making. Its goal is not understanding but production.
technē a valid, even dignified, form of action, because it involves the systematic use of knowledge in order to advance human action—one could even say to advance human purpose.
The Platonist looks at nature and says, “What does it mean?”
Aristotelian, but then he poses an additional question: “What’s it good for?”
Aristotle’s politics is like his ethics. It is rooted in real life, the Greek polis as he knew it, especially Athens, for which he wrote a description of its constitution that we still have. Aristotle believed that the goal of political institutions was man’s improvement rather than his perfection. He believed the way to do this was by encouraging each individual to realize his potential, rather than force him to submit to a collective order.
Over the centuries, Aristotle’s politics will lead the way for Western advocates of individualism and democracy, including America’s Founding Fathers. Plato’s communitarian vision points very much in the other direction, with ugly consequences.
Gorgias preens himself as a teacher of virtue because he teaches men how to speak persuasively on “the most important of human concerns,” as he calls it—namely, politics. However, harried by Socrates’s polite but relentless questions, Gorgias has to admit that as a political consultant, he is concerned only with presenting a persuasive message, even if that message is evil rather than good. “On Gorgias’s own admission,” as A. E. Taylor explains, “oratory is a device by which an ignorant man persuades an audience equally ignorant” as himself, especially in democratic Athens.6 It is precisely
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is concerned only with presenting a persuasive message, even if that message is evil rather than good.
At this moment, two-thirds into Book V of the Republic, an important impulse for Western culture is born—and a clever Greek pun. It is the utopian impulse, after the Greek word utopia, which can mean either the best place to live (eutopia) or nowhere (u-topia), since experience (and Aristotle) will teach us that they are one and the same. Still, in various guises over the centuries, in settings large and small, men and women will try to bring their version of Plato’s Republic to fruition. Some, like Sir Thomas More (who first coined the term utopia) and Sir Francis Bacon, will confine their
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“Men who are utterly superior” to others, Aristotle says at one point in the Politics, are “a law unto themselves.”
Where do we find the key to living a moral life that will protect our souls from vice and corruption, they asked, especially when the traditions we have inherited from the past no longer seem to have any meaning?
Hellenistic Greece triggered a cultural revolution that turned every tradition inside out.
Diogenes’s goal, he said, was “to deface the coinage,” meaning strip away the false conventions on which society was built and expose the raw reality underneath.
Early Academicians, for example, made enormous contributions to the field of astronomy. Plato’s friend Eudoxus devised a working model for showing the movement of the planets and the heavens. Heraclides, another Plato student, may have been the first person to propose that the earth rotated on its axis. He also used calculations of the orbits of Venus and Mars to show that they must be revolving not around the earth, but around the sun—literally an earthshaking hypothesis.‖
Strato made two crucial decisions
The first was to insist that scientific research had to be free from any restraints by theology (he himself seems to have been a materialist and atheist) or philosophy, including ethics.
Strato] devoted himself entirely to the investiga...
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At one stroke Strato was leaving Athens, the ancient city of philosophers, intellectuals, and cosmopolitan aristocrats, for Alexandria, a new city of international businessmen, mathematicians, and engineers.