René Descartes

" The common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, everyone thinks it's so well equipped that even the most difficult to please in every other aspect not usually want more of what they own"

René Descartes

From the deepest beggining of the times people has been looking for the true and in the very beggining as far as they were ingnorants, they decided to trust in the idea of gods, magicians, priest. It means the true was given by the authority of other people but not for the reason.

Descartes began a new time, the use of intelligence and the reason. The first step was forgetting everything known as true, and the submition of every idea to the light of reason.

If by any chance the idea could not support the analysis, this idea had to be errased from the mind.

It meant to start the process of knownledge from the most small and simple unity in order to built up the most complex ideas. This is the cartesian method

In the way of this process people had to eliminate any idea born from the religion.

Idols of the mind

Idol of the cave:

In 1936 when the olympic games of Berlin, the American runner Jesse Owens, had been despised by his teammates for being black. When he traveled with his team inside of U.S.A, he had to stay in a hotel for black people and his teammates in a hotel for white people. Sometimes he had to dress like a poor worker and he entered to a hotel of white people in secret. Jesse Owens was discriminated by his teammate and also was discriminated by foreign. When the Olympic games began in Germany under the Nazism, in one day Jesse Owens win four gold medals and humilate white athletes. Adolf Hitler was furious, he left the area without recognizing the superiority of the runner.

It is an idol of the cave because it is the product of what people learnt in that time. It was supposed that black people was inferior and white people was superior. And it demostrate how people is fascinated with themselfs.

How is god adressed in the middle ages?

The perseption that people had of god in the middle ages was the one dictated by the chatolic church.

God was considered like the most powerful being that existed on earth because the power of the church, was so big that influenced the entire populace. Everybody obey the mandates of the church because everybody was convinced that they were going to be severaly punished for the " almighty" if they don't do it. some people tried to rebel against this way of thinking, but inmediately they were repressed, acussed of heresy and sentenced to death. They were burned, mutilated, torturated.

The science of the time, the medicine and the education were dominated, also for this obscurantist way of thinking that promulgated god as the unique truth, then the diseases were not diseases, they were punishments of god, the natural phenomenas also were punishments of god and the solution to all this misfortunes were prays, suplications, and economic offering that were recibed by his representative on earth, the church.

We infer from this that in the Middle Ages everything revolved around the idea of god and his power of make and unmake, the fear that this produced in people makes that during the middle ages people didn't tried to look for new ways of thinking, to discover new things, so people only believed and didn't think.

Is the soul a product of body functions ?

People may have different points of view of this question because this is a very polemic question.

According to the platonics and the christians, the soul is inmortal and the body can died but the soul is eternal and for them the soul is independent form the human body. It is inmaterial .

And aristotelics understood the human soul as something that allow us to have functions in our body like, breathing, the memory, the emotions, and the same perception of the reality.

But for others and for me the soul doesn't exist because for me the soul doesn't make anything because it doesn't exist.

I think that is the brain who has the function of what aristotelics call the soul.

Aristotle

They said that the good student is the one that exceeds the master: and that's what Aristotle did, he was the student of Plato. He modify de Platonic philosophy.

Plato was an idealist, he believed that the most important was the purity and the perfection of the ideas, withoutu the importance of matter. Aristotle considered that the senses and especially the view were fundamental to acces to reality.

Both have diferences in their fundamental concept. To Plato the ideas existed as the mos true and absolut. And for Aristotle that abstract ideas not existed and they have to be linked to other materials.

The philosophic view of Aristotle was the fact of consulting the reality through the senses, to get to knownledge, was know as Empiricism.

Matter and Form

But there was, off course, besides the differences, between the two great philosophers indentities. Both believed that the knownledge must respond to the ¿why? of the phenomena that are studied and must distinguish the esential from the coincidental

To the preplatonics philosophers and to Plato, the substance was more important than the form. And for Aristotle, bases on the senses, was more important the form and he matter that the platonic idea of the substance.

Soul

The idea of the soul that exists in the Christianity has been taked from Plato. He tought that the soul existed independently of the body, that it was inmortal and that only humans have soul.

Aristotle thought that the soul was something that allowed the functions of our body like, breathing, the memory, emotions and the same perception of the reality. The concept of Aristotle is closer to the modern sicology and is similar to what we call now mind.

The Eudaimonia

The word comes form "eu" which means good, nice, armonic, and "daimon" which means espirit. So, it is an armonic and happy spirit. Somehow, it is the big dream of the humans: happiness, peace, succes.. these are some important elements that are part of the eudaimonia but thye are not the eudaimonia. Define and how to achieve eudaimonia is another problem.

The virtue

It consists in adapt our emotions to the circunstances and always do the right thing, it means , the racional. If a person feels the tentation of misbehave, and do it, he or she won't find happiness in a long time. but on the other hand if the person all the time refuse temptations, his life will not be pleasant. The best is not to be tentate by the bad. This is what Aristotle call the virtuouse activity of the soul.

Ethics

Aristotle raises the ethic of the virtue, which is already defined. Besides the other one, the consequentialism which means, meditate in the consecuences of our acts. And the deontology afirms that we must act according to the rules, without having consecuences.

The polict

One of his most famous phrases is: " Man is a political animal" . The base of the convivence in the polis. "politic" derives form this word. The human being must work in favor to the polis, wchis means the collectivity and the polis must offer to the human being the conditions to reach the eudaimonia.

Plato

Everything we know about Socrates is for Plato's writings.

Plato is going to question reality. He said that there's some guys living in a dark cave and they see that the light come and they can see their own shadows, ( back of the cave) reflected.

Plato said that, that's the world ( allegory of the cave).

Plato thing that in this world is no truth so he divided the world in: Gala, were people live. Uranus, sky. Hyperuranus, truth, world of ideas. ( An idea is the perfect escense of things)

Plato is the first rationalist,because to understand the world, we reason.

Plato said that Eros ( cupid) is reflected (body) and psyche (mymph) is real world (mental)- Reality, true and beautiful are the same.

Art is a recreation of mature so is a double fallacy

Socrates

Socrates was one of the most important characters of ancient greece.

He went to the school of the Sophists, where he started to replay everything that the sophists said, so he became the teacher of his own class ( without charging) and he do this because he said that he was a philosopher.

Socrates talked about the society.

Society means that there is a group of people that share things, they share historical times, cultural elements. And societies are not perfect because of their organization, they are not organized in the correct way.

Socrates was the master of argumentation, it means that he give value to all the things that he said. This is very important in philosophy.

He said that man is not nature, and that we do not learn from the nature, also he talked about ethics, it is the disscusion of what is wrong and what ir right.

He said that inside of him he has a divine voice, it was the voice of reasoning that told us what to say or what to do, and for this reason people did not like him because people acussed him of inserting new gods.

Finally he was sentenced to drink hemlock, because of impiety and of corrupting the childs.