8 The Origins of Philosophy: The Greeks and Us
At the time of Socrates (472–399 BC) many Greeks were no longer believers in the stories of the gods and goddesses. Those stories had provided them with guidance for their lives. They had believed that they could not go against the decrees of the deities and that they should follow the examples of the gods and goddesses which they knew of through the stories they all heard and memorized and repeated. They accepted ideas such a fate and destiny. Now they were hearing the stories being challenged and some declared their disbelief. The playwrights were raising questions on the stages. Some thought they could choose from among the tales those stories that supported whatever courses of conduct they choose. They believed that they could show that some god or other approved of the conduct because the god had done something similar. There were many who believed that morality was individual and relative.
At the time of Socrates Greek culture was undergoing a major revolution. They were transforming from an oral culture to a literate culture. They were acquiring paper and so they could write down the stories and the plays and important ideas. They no longer needed to memorize what they heard and repeat it as exactly as possible in order to transmit ideas. Plato could write down ideas and examine them. He could write questions and reasoned arguments for readers to reflect upon.
Today, there are many people who no longer effectively believe in the stories of the one god. There are many who are convinced that there are no universal moral codes and people need to determine their own morality. Further, the West is being transformed from a literate culture to an electronic culture. We are at the beginning of a period in which we are attempting to develop a morality for the new age.
Many no longer accept the idea of universal truth. We shall be examining how we arrived at this point starting back with the Greeks at the time of Socrates. What Philosophy became then and offered to people, it is still today and could offer to all of us if we were to pursue the philosophical approach to handling the issues and key questions. All of the key issues in Philosophy were quite apparent in the works of Plato and Aristotle. We shall take a rather brief look at the Greeks in order to understand how Philosophy arises within a culture and at the key issues. We shall also make comparisons to the present time in order to appreciate the relevance of all of this for each of us today.
This text shall make use of a theory about education developed by Alfred North Whitehead. Learning moves through stages. They are:
- Romance
- Precision
- Generalization
It starts with curiosity, a story, a problem. There is not much critical thinking at all. In the second stage there is a great deal of critical thinking focusing on the problem and paying attention to consistency, coherency and the non-contradiction criteria by which thought is to be evalu