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Egypt as precursor to some of Greek Philosophy
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by zarahan: [QB] I think Unfinished could certainly make a case that Greek philosophy is not identical to that of Egypt or the Near East. Sure. But no one is arguing that. Everyone knows that the Greeks developed their own unique brand and signature on certain items of philosophical thought. But his notion of religion being so separated from reason in the Greek world is questionable. Indeed, religion is woven throughout the discourse of the Greek philosophers. See for exampl the book below which shows that the origins of Greek philosophy were closely tied to religion: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> http://www.archive.org/details/fromreligiontoph002453mbp [b]From Religion To Philosophy (1957), Author: F.M. Cornford, Publisher: Harper & Row review blurb: This book is a very special publication in the context of the history of ancient philosophy. Cornford presented us with a great new horison of interpretation of the origins of Greek philosophy. The author not only shows us a new view but lets us to accompany him in this inquiry. "From Religion to Philosophy" is a fascinating book about the origins and continuity of human thought. It unveils before us the "great link" between religion and philosophy. Cornford's interpretation shows us ancient world as it was: full of spirits and gods, not all-rationalistic. Cornford allows us to see that this religious view was so natural for the Greeks that the origins of philosophy could not change it radically.[/b] >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Also to be taken into account is that Greek philosophy, science, art etc did not develop in a vacuum. The Greeks were massive borrowers. Their well known alphabet for example was borrowed and adapted from a Phonecian one. They also borrowed and adapted from the current of ideas and theories of Egypt and the Near East as well. In fact the link below gives a detailed breakdown of some borrowings. It acknowledges that the Greeks made their own refinements, adaptations and extensions to their borrowings an developed their own distinctive brand. But they also borrowed massively. The two things go together, distressing as this is to "pure" Medicentrists. Also to be considered is that the people popularly known as "Greeks" were relative latecomers to the Aegean. The Cretan/Minoan culture flourished there before, and shared several commonalities with the religious thought of Egypt. As the link says: http://www.maat.sofiatopia.org/hermes1.htm [i]Three important features of the Minoan religious experience stand out : the sacrality of the tree : the tree marks a sanctuary and is surrounded by a sacred enclosure. During processions, the anthropomorphic Great Goddess is enthroned beneath it. The same holds for pillars, columns and stones ; the chthonic powers : sacrifice of the bull (symbol of the fecundity of nature, the male god of vegetation), bull-games, double axe and sacral horns point to the mastering of the chthonic powers of the mother goddess, who played a central role ; the epiphany of the deity from above in the sacred dance : it seems that mystical communion with the god (i.e. the direct experience of the Divine) was important and momentary scenes of epiphany show the deity besides the sacred tree, in front of shrines, next to a stepped altar or on a mountain peak. Although obvious differences are present, Minoan and Egyptian religion are of the same family. Both are based on nature, the exhaltation of life and divine kingship. They share identical iconography : the bull as symbol of permanence, the sacrality of trees and elevated places, the ample use of colorful representations of fauna and flora and similar jewelry. On Crete, nature at times was a rumbling, bull-like underground which knocked down their best palaces. Hence, to find and keep the proper "equilibrium" was what was needed to allow the acrobat to jump over the back of the bull. In Egypt, were chaotic Nile-floods could cause famine and wreck social order, the image of the balance expressed a solidarity with nature, despite its darker, destructive sides.[/i] Does this mean they were identical or that the Minoans "stole" anything? Of course not, but it shows a number of shared elements. So the notion of the "Greeks" as these pristine folks who developed philosophy all by themselves is deeply flawed, both on the notion that they dispensed with religion and on the notion that they did it all independently. Some of that massive borrowing by the relative latecomers to the Agean, is also from the older Minoan civilization as well. http://www.maat.sofiatopia.org/hermes1.htm Now I have already presented several threads of evidence supporting the above points. Can Unfinished or AP prove that: (a)Greek philosophy is massively separate from religion? If so when and how? (b) That the Greeks were not massive borrowers on numerous things? (c) That the precursors to the late coming Greeks, the Minoans shared no contacts with Greece, or had commonalities in religion? (d) That Egyptian law, philosophy or religion had no influence on Greece? Unfinished also claimed that: "Philosophy explains the nature of things without the recourse to gods." Here he fails to account for the different phases of Greek philosophy. The link below undermines his claim, offering detailed examples showing that religion and philosophy was not as separate as he would have them. http://everything2.com/e2node/Theology%2520in%2520ancient%2520Greek%2520natural%2520philosophy QUOTES: It has been argued that Greek natural philosophy began when philosophers rejected religious explanations for natural phenomena, favoring physical explanations instead. This early science was not marked by this bold rejection, though, because it developed gradually from other Greek philosophical traditions, which frequently included theological elements. Even the philosophers who most influenced the later development of science, Plato and Aristotle, referred to gods in their natural philosophies. Their works were in many ways less theological than those of their predecessors, but they nonetheless never declared theology to be a separate enterprise from natural science. Instead, these philosophers tried to understand all that they could about the world, unconstrained by modern concepts about the purely empirical nature of science and modern distinctions between intellectual occupations. They thus wrote about mathematics, theology, political theory, biology, psychology, ethics, and a range of other topics without regard to the boundaries that have since developed between these disciplines. These subjects do not all intermingle in Greek philosophy chaotically, though; instead, certain subjects tend to relate to each other. A dialogue like Plato’s Republic that focuses on an ethical question—what is justice?—delves also into political theory, and the easy juxtaposition of these subjects suggests that they are closely related. Similarly, works like Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Metaphysics focus on natural philosophy but also refer to gods, suggesting a relationship between the science and theology of their time. In both of these works, the gods or other eternal, uncreated beings are used to explain phenomena, but are not used to explain all phenomena. Some things have purely naturalistic explanations, but the first, most grand, and most complex phenomena are the works of the divine. The Pre-Socratics The relationship between natural philosophy and theology was a dynamic one, though, and earlier philosophers often focused more on theology than did Plato and Aristotle. Empedocles, who Aristotle credits with claiming that all is made of four elements, also wrote about Aphrodite and Zeus. Many philosophers described the vastness of the infinite, and, according to Theophrastus, Anaximander was the first to claim “that the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite.” This emphasis on the infinite is one that is common within theology to this day, and Anaximander’s statement about the source of matter sounds more like modern religion than modern science. Plato and Aristotle Later Greek philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle, is sometimes more empirical, but even in the rationalist works of Plato there is less reliance on gods than in pre-Socratic natural philosophy. The references that exist to gods are prominent, though, and often suggest a strong link between science and religion. Near the beginning of Timaeus, for instance, Plato makes an important statement about the uncertain nature of the sciences, but includes theology among them. “We won’t be able to produce accounts,” he writes, “on a great many subjects—on gods or the coming to be of the universe—that are completely and perfectly consistent and accurate.” The uncertainty of science has been claimed by many scientists and philosophers as one of its defining characteristics, but if it is uncertainty and imperfect accuracy that distinguish science from religion, Plato claims, theology is as much a science as cosmology. And yet, in part because it was so influential, Plato’s conception of the supreme deity is not all that different from modern Western religious conceptions. The role of the divine that has best endured in Western thought is that of creator, and both Plato and Aristotle claimed that a god created the universe. They did have different views of this creation, though. Plato attributed the creation of the universe to the Demiurge, the “maker and father of the universe” who, following Plato’s doctrine of forms, formed the universe based on “the eternal model.” This being, who Plato sometimes referred to as a god, “was good” and “wanted everything to be good.” It found the natural materials of the universe in chaos, and “the first thing the god then did was to give them their distinctive shapes, using forms and numbers.” The Demiurge is thus credited with creating the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—“to be as perfect and excellent as possible, when they were not so before.” Furthermore, though Plato describes the structures of these elements in detail, he admits that “principles yet more ultimate than these are known only to the god, and to any man he may hold dear.” Aristotle also formulated a theology-dependent natural philosophy. The best known theological element of Aristotle’s worldview is the Prime Mover, which historian of science David C. Lindberg describes as “a living deity representing the highest good, wholly actualized, totally absorbed in self-contemplation, nonspatial, separated from the spheres it moves.” This deity, or actually these deities, as Aristotle concludes that there is one for each celestial sphere, are the final causes of the motion of the spheres, the reasons that the planets move. The nature of theology Aristotle’s theology had other elements too, though. One of these is part of his epistemology, which is introduced in Metaphysics and tightly coupled with his natural philosophy. In Metaphysics, Aristotle determines that “the science which knows to what end each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences.” This science is that which “deals with divine objects,” theology. It is more than this, though. Theology to Aristotle is not only the science of the divine; it is “a divine science,” as it is that which God knows. “God,” wrote Aristotle, “is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and such a science either God alone can have, or God above all others.” Because he has determined that “the divine power cannot be jealous,” the latter must be the case, and theology must be a science accessible to humans but mastered only by God. Aristotle does sense that theology is perhaps more logical and less empirical than other sciences, but it is still clearly a science, as it aims to understand “in order to escape from ignorance.” Furthermore, Aristotle asserts, because this is its only goal, theology is the best and least necessary (or perhaps least practical) science. Historical context Plato, Aristotle, and earlier philosophers share the conclusion that understanding the one or more gods they believed in is part of understanding the world. The idea that science began when philosophers tried to explain nature without recourse to the supernatural does have some truth to it, but this change in method of explanation did not happen suddenly in ancient Greece. On the contrary, for most of the history of science philosophers and scientists have used both natural and supernatural explanations for phenomena. A late example is William Paley’s 1802 Natural Theology, which drew from both science and religion to present a theory of biology. It has only been during the modern era that scientists have made a conscious effort to constrain their theories to the observable world and that science and religion have become, in Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, “non-overlapping magisteria.” The greatest of the ancient Greek natural philosophers may have explained most phenomena naturally, but they also each referred to divine causes when they thought them to be the best explanations. Works Cited Aristotle, Metaphysics. James Fieser, editor, Presocratic Fragments and Testimonials, internet release (1996). David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Platom Timaeus, translated by Donald B. Zeyl (Indianopolis: Hackett, 2000). >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> More on Greek rationality and philosophy [b] "Greek natural philosophy was not 'scientific'. Not only experiment but observation was absent from the work of, for example, Anaximenes, who never tested by inspection his theory that ice is denser than water, and that of Empedocles, who ought to have made the experiment of taking a bath, to see if we really do respire through the pores of the chest. Such thinkers relied, either tacitly or (like Heraclitus) openly, on the claim to exceptional powers of 'inspiration' or 'intuition', which (they thought) enabled them to lay hold of comprehensive truths without attempting to supply detailed evidence. Nor did the Baconian ideals of utility and industrial progress occur to them; if 'science' means the conquest of nature by technology, Greek philosophy cannot be called scientific. Cornford reserves that adjective for the medical writers who proceeded 'empirically' and made no pretence to 'prophetic insight'. What the Ionians and their successors pro- duced was 'a dogmatic structure based on a priori premises' and guaranteed by nothing save the philosopher's confidence in his own superhuman endowments." [/b] FROM: Review: The Origins of Greek Philosophy Author(s): J. Tate "Principium Sapientiae" by F. M. Cornford Source: The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 3/4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 237-240 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association [/QB][/QUOTE]
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