What is philosophy? How does it differ from science, religion, and other modes of human discourse? This course traces the origins of philosophy in the Western tradition in the thinkers of Ancient Greece. We begin with the Presocratic natural philosophers who were active in Ionia in the 6th century BCE and are also credited with being the first scientists. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines made bold proposals about the ultimate constituents of reality, while Heraclitus insisted that there is an underlying order to the changing world. Parmenides of Elea formulated a powerful objection to all these proposals, while later Greek theorists (such as Anaxagoras and the atomist Democritus) attempted to answer that objection. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates insisted on the importance of the fundamental ethical question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, developed elaborate philosophical systems to explain the nature of reality, knowledge, and human happiness. After the death of Aristotle, in the Hellenistic period, Epicureans and Stoics developed and transformed that earlier tradition. We will study the major doctrines of all these thinkers. Part I will cover Plato and his predecessors. Part II will cover Aristotle and his successors.
God in Nature
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来自 University of Pennsylvania 的课程
Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors
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从本节课中
Stoicism
A providential god is at work in every detail of the cosmos, where everything happens by fate. Our goal in life is to accommodate ourselves to this divine nature by giving up our concern for (but not our pursuit of) worldly objectives.
与讲师见面
Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
The Stoic god is everywhere in the cosmos.
Everything that exists, including the cosmos itself,
can be analyzed into two principles.
The active principle, or LOGOS, which makes anything what it is,
and the passive principle, or matter.
As Diogenes reports their view,
there are two principles of the universe, the active and the passive.
The passive then, is unqualified substance, that is matter.
Whereas the active is the LOGOS in it, that is, god.
Now in some ways, the distinction between the active and the passive principle
is like the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter.
But there are some significant differences.
Unlike Aristotelian form, the Stoic active principle or LOGOS is fully material.
It is a warm breath or PNEUMA that pervades the passive material,
giving it unity, cohesion, and all its other features.
This active principle or LOGOS is god, and it is at work everywhere in the cosmos.
And the sense of LOGOS as reason is operative here.
The Stoic god is divine reason pervading the cosmos.
It doesn't however manifest itself as reason everywhere it is at work.
At its most basic level, it is the cohesive power, or
hexis, that holds together inanimate bodies, like rocks.
In plants, it is the nature, or phusis, that is responsible for
their growth and reproduction.
In animals, it is the soul, psuche, that is active in perception and locomotion.
And in rational animals, it is once more itself the power of reason,
which we use to figure things out and decide what to do.
So human reason is quite literally a portion of the divine LOGOS that
animates the universe.
Now this schema is a familiar one, which we can recognize from Aristotle.
Although the terminology is somewhat different.
Whereas Aristotle uses soul as the label for the internal principle of
both plants and animals, the Stoics attribute soul only to animals,
and use nature for the principle of growth in plants.
They do however, also use nature in a wider sense,
to apply to the entirety of the divine pneuma that pervades the cosmos.
God is both the reason that governs the world, as well as the nature of the world.
Now in one way of looking at it, the active pneuma that the Stoics
identify as god is distributed throughout the universe.
Some of it is holding rocks together, some of it is making plants grow,
some of it is animating animals, and some of it is manifest as our own individual
intellects as we think about things, and try to arrive at correct answers.
But the divine pneuma is not simply the sum total of all these individual
portions, the cosmos itself as the Stoics understand it,
is a unified interactive whole.
All the individual constituents, animals, plants,
inanimate entities, as well as larger scale phenomena like oceans,
rivers, tides and seasons, along with the celestial bodies.
All these form a complex,
interconnected system like the parts of a natural organism.
The divine pneuma is what holds all this together, and animates it.
It is thus, quite literally, the nature of the cosmos, as well as its soul.
It is in effect, the world's soul.
And like the world's soul in Plato's Timaeus, it is a rational soul.
So for the Stoics, the cosmos as a whole is guided by divine reason.
Now, divine reason, unlike the human variety, is perfect.
It doesn't make mistakes, and so
the cosmos is organized in the best way possible.
The world order is what they call a providential order.
Unfolding according to the excellent plan of its governing deity.
Although this governing deity is not an anthropomorphic or
supernatural deity, looking in on the natural world from the outside.
Rather, the Stoic god is fully a feature of the natural world.
A rational principle that animates the cosmos from the inside.
The universe, so conceived, has a teleological structure.
Reason, the divine principle that animates the cosmos, is the best thing in it.
And ultimately, everything in the world is organized for its sake.
More precisely, everything in the world is organized for
the sake of humans, and humans have as their goal or telos,
achieving conformity with the divine reason that animates the world.
Now, we may not always be in a position to appreciate how we are benefited by
the way the world is, as we find it.
But the Stoics reassure us that this is always the case.
Chrysippus, we are told, even proposed that bed bugs are beneficial to humans,
since they keep us from sleeping too late.
And mice provide the useful function of encouraging us to be tidy.
Now this is not to say that the world is organized to give us everything we might
want or pursue, far from it.
But if we properly understand our good, the Stoics claim, we will see that
the universe is set up in such a way as to make it possible for each of us,
for every human being, to achieve the only thing that is genuinely good, which is to
bring our individual reason in line with the reason that guides the universe.
This is what the Stoics mean when they say that our goal in life
is to live in agreement, or to live in agreement with nature.
Here, they are not using nature in the strict sense that corresponds
to the pneuma that animates plants, as opposed to animals.
Rather, they are using nature in the broad sense to refer
to the rational principle that governs the whole cosmos.
Just what it means to have our reason agree with that of the cosmos,
will be be the subject of another lecture.
