2022-05-20 - Philosophy and Religion in the West

Lecture 1: Philosophical tradition

Each major religion is in part a traditon with institutions.

Each answers "why" it exists.

Each is intellectually alive, answering current questions.

Western philosophy is also a tradition starting with Plato.

Philosophy is a tradition of asking questions in spirit of critical inquiry.

Ontology - What is the nature of reality?

older notions of self didn't have body - mind dualism

older platonists thought world was working out of the mind of God

modern scientists don't

to know God you look not with the body's eye, but with the mind's eye,

a platonist concept

Before Plato the question how should we live would be asked of an Oracle.

Most philosophy was spoken (later written) as poetry often in oracular form.

Plato wrote philosophy as dialog, the main character being Socrates.

Early Plato was written as plays. Typically Socrates would ask a fundemental

question like "what is justice?" and would lead the conversation to a

conclusion of perplexity.

Lecturor is a conservative orthodox Protestant.

Lecture 2: Plato's inquiry, Gods and the Good

The form of the dialogs:

What is X? where X is some virtue needed to live a good life

Socrates isn't an oracle, he doesn't have the answer. He would dialog

with someone who claimed to know. The dialogs always ended in perplexity.

In the early dialog "What is Piety?" between Socrates and Euthyphro

Piety now an insult, but wasn't originally. Roughly meant "very religious".

Euthyphro was pious in a pompous sense. Socrates asks questions and

Euthyphro flails around. He was proud of persecuting his father in

court. Sample question: "Do the gods love piety because piety is

good, or is piety good because the gods love it?" There is a sense

that there is a piety "form" that instances of piety instantiate. In

monotheism, a related question is "Are good deeds good because God

says they are, or are they good in themselves?" The piety "form" is

eternal, not made. Analogous to eternal idea of a triangle vs.

the poor imitation of lines on a chalkboard. Same distinciton is made

between ideal piety vs. instances of piety in this world. The ideal

piety is seen with the mind's eye, the intellect. The highest form is

the "form of the good", aka the sun. The parable of the cave is

about education. Returning to the cave, the benighted people will

kill the enlightened one (as the Athenians killed Socrates).

Christians and Jews would associate God with the parable's sun and

gave us the language of god being the True, the Good, Love, and so

forth.