Philosopher of the Week

[Cain]

With my vast philosophical library doing nothing but gather dust, I have decided what better way to raise the extelligence of our forum by putting them to good use and having a sort of weekly discussion on one philosopher or another?

My idea is quite simple.  Every week we pick a philosopher (I might pick them myself, to keep it surprising), we look at their ideas, kick around anything we find interesting and, if we get lucky and find something truly useful, try to integrate it into a large philosophical system.  I can also upload papers or works I have, either discussing the philosopher in question or by the philosopher themselves, for those who want to read them, and not merely extracts I am cribbing from Wikipedia or the Stanford Philosophical Dictionary.

Sound interesting?

[Raphaella]

Sounds great! I like to read philosophy and I would love see what results from this type of thread. I may not be able to contribute much, but I will defiantly be lurking here. 

[Cramulus]

That sounds fun! Isuggest that we shouldn't pick exclusively from self-identified "philosophers". We should also squint at modern spags like George Carlin and Nixon and JJ Abrams and average joe on the street.

[Triple Zero]

definitely interesting, i loved the two extra-curricular philosophy-courses i took in university (one about Ethics, one about "Overview of Philosophy" or something).

it's just that, i'm pretty sure i won't have the time to read and/or participate.

[Cain]

Urgh, thats a shame.

I'll try and throw in some unconventional 'philosophers' as well - literature is an area ripe for this, as is social commentary (disguised as humour or not), but the main focus will be on the well known heavies.

[Requia ☣]

So why is the philosopher of this week?

[Cain]

One of the pre-Socratics.  I'm still browsing my source texts and trying to decide.  Its probably going to progress historically, simply because so many of the topics and ideas were pioneered by the Greeks and so became later talking points among other philosophers.  This is especially the case with many 20th century European thinkers, who went back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophies to try their different methodologies and approaches.

Also, each philosopher may not last a week.  If we exhaust the topic early, I'll try to shift onto the new one as soon as possible.

[nostalgicBadger]

All right. I'm down. I have not read much pre-Socratic philosophy anyway, so that might be a good way to round things out.

[Kai]

I'll join in. By the end of the week I'll have 24/7 internets again, plenty of time to do this.

[Cain]

OK, our first philosopher of the week will be:

HERACLITUS



Here is what Wikipedia has to say about him.


Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος — Hērákleitos ho Ephésios, English Heraclitus the Ephesian) (ca. 535–475 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor.

Heraclitus is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and that the Logos is the fundamental order of all.

[..]

According to Hegel, "Heraclitus is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite and first grasped nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process. The origin of philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus. He is the persistent Idea that is the same in all philosophers up to the present day, as it was the Idea of Plato and Aristotle." For Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood the nature of the infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the inherent contradictoriness and negativity of reality, and to have grasped that reality is becoming or process, and that "being" and "nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel, Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his being a true (in Hegel's terms "speculative") philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth and therefore expressed himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract and limited nature of common sense and is difficult to grasp by those who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in Heraclitus he had an antecedent for his logic: "... there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic."


What follows next will be essays and quotations on his thinking and worldview.

[That One Guy]

Sweet! This whole thing sounds like a lot of fun - can't wait to get this going and Heraclitus sounds like a good place to start!

[Cramulus]

My old roommate Nomad was studying Heraclitus in his Intro to Philosophy class.

"Yeah, what is Heraclitus about?" I asked him when he mentioned it.

"Fire," said Nomad. "Everything is fire."


I don't really know what that means, but it was very inspirational to Nomad.

[Cain]

The complete fragments of Heraclitus's works can be found here http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/Heraclitus.html

This is what the Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy says about him:

The meaning and purpose of Heraclitus book has always been found to be problematic, even by those who read it in its entirety. The Peripatetic Theophrastus diagnosed Heraclitus as "melancholic (manic-depressive), on the grounds that he left some things half-finished, and contradicted himself; later Greeks named him "the obscure. Certainly Heraclitus did not always aim at expository order and clarity as usually understood. What remains shows that he often was deliberately unclear. Like a riddle or an oracle, he practised a deliberate half-concealment of his meanings, goading the reader to participate in a game of hide-and-seek.

The overt content of Heraclitus remarks ranges from the internal politics of his native city to the nature and composition of the soul and the cosmos. He is repeatedly polemical, scornfully rejecting the beliefs of "the many" and the authority of those they follow, principally the poets. Others, less popular but with claims to wisdom or knowledge (Xenophanes, Hecataeus, and Pythagoras), are attacked also.  In one place Heraclitus explicitly claims to have made an advance in understanding on all previous authorities known to him. Only one person is praised for wisdom: the obscure sage Bias of Priene.

Such polemics imply that Heraclitus is addressing himself to all who will listen, and has himself some positive teaching, with grounds for rejecting the traditional authorities and claiming a better access to the truth - on the same subjects that they had dealt with. In fact,
the fragments contain many positive statements too as well as clear signs of a systematic way of thinking.

Since Aristotle, Heraclitus has often been grouped with the Ionian "natural philosophers" (physiologoi).  This is at least partly correct.
Heraclitus was concerned with cosmic processes, and with the "natures" of things: he describes himself as "marking off each thing according to its nature, and pointing out how it is". It may be significant that he does not attack any of the Milesians by name.  Yet the great range of his subject matter suggests that he is more than a natural philosopher. This chapter presents the evidence for seeing Heraclitus as pursuing a broader and a recognisably philosophical project: a radical critique and reformulation of cosmology, and indeed of all knowledge, on a new and surer foundation. In the process, he tries to overcome the systematic problems that dogged the Milesian enterprise: those of monism and pluralism and of the foundations of knowledge.

By what authority does Heraclitus claim to know better than the many and the poets? In the first place, he appeals to the knowledge gained by firsthand experience: All of which the learning is seeing and hearing: that I value most.  [Those who seek wisdom] must be inquirers into a good many things.  Here Heraclitus aligns himself with the empiricism of two contemporaries, Xenophanes and Hecataeus of Miletus. The practice of firsthand inquiry (histohe), and the criticism of tradition and myth on the basis of common experience, were part of their programme.  Xenophanes' parsimonious empiricism refused, in the realm of nature, to postulate any unobserved entities, or to contradict or go beyond the realm of common experience in its explanations. It demythologised the natural world implicitly, as Hecataeus of Miletus did explicitly. These same epistemic attitudes can be observed in Heraclitus' cosmology and psychology.

Yet Heraclitus also singles out these two by name for criticism, coupling them (a twist of the knife) with two others of whom they themselves were highly critical:

Much learning does not teach the mind; otherwise it would have taught
Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.

Though "much learning" is necessary, it is not sufficient to "teach the mind"; that is, to produce genuine understanding. This point marks the second stage in Heraclitus' construction of new foundations.

The mind must be properly "taught," or equivalently the soul must "speak the right language": otherwise the evidence presented to the senses, on which all else depends, will not only not be understood, but it also will be mistakenly reported even by the senses themselves:

Bad witnesses are eyes and ears to people, when they have souls that do not speak the right language

Heraclitus is aware that the testimony of the senses is already shaped by our preconceptions. This makes it easier for him to explain how people, paradoxically, can fail to see what is before their eyes and hear what is filling their ears, as he thinks they constantly do:

The fools hear but are as though deaf; as the saying has it, they are absent though present.
They do not know how to listen nor to speak.

The analogy with language turns out to be omnipresent in Heraclitus, who himself exploits all the resources of the Greek language in his effort to represent the way things are. The possibility of understanding is correlated with the existence of a meaning. It implies the need for interpretation of what is given in experience, as though it were a riddle or an oracle:

The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals: he gives a sign.
People are deceived in the knowledge of what is manifest, much as Homer was
(though he was the wisest of the Greeks);
he too was deceived by boyswho were killing lice, when they said
"those we took we left behind, thosewe did not take we carry with us.

If important messages come in the shape of riddles or oracles, the implications look discouraging: the true reality of things must be hidden, and there can be no system or fixed rules for discovering it - even though, when discovered, it will turn out to be something that
in a sense has been known all along. One must be open to every hint.

Latent structure [harmonie] is master of visible structure.
Nature [physis] likes to conceal itself.
If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for,- it is not to be tracked down or reached by any path.

The finding of the "latent structure," of the "nature" of things, is the solving of the riddle. Heraclitus himself claims to have read the riddles of the world and of human existence. He is asking his audience to listen to his solution. Once again the question of authority presents itself: what guarantee can he give that he has guessed right? Heraclitus, who so brutally dismisses the claims of traditional
authorities, cannot evade this demand:

When one listens, not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree [homologein] that all things are one.

Logos, which appears here and elsewhere in significant contexts in Heraclitus, was a commonly used Greek word. It basically meant "what is said," that is, "word" or "story"; however, even in ordinary Greek speech it had rich ramifications of meaning. It had acquired the secondary senses of "mathematical ratio," and more generally "proportion," "measure" or "calculation"; in a further extension from these senses, it appears by around the time of Heraclitus in compounds with the sense of "right reckoning," or "reasonable proportion."

Characteristically, Heraclitus both revels in the multiplicity of senses, and wants to bind them together into one. For him, logos has a special significance, in which each of its ordinary uses is allowed some resonance and is exploited as occasion serves. At the most basic level, Heraclitus' logos coincides with what Heraclitus is saying: it is his story about the way things are. Yet, as in the remark just cited, it must also be distinguished from Heraclitus words: it is not as Heraclitus "story" that it commands assent, but because it shows what it is wise to think. (It is, though, still something that speaks, and that can be listened to; it still is the story of somebody or something, with language as its vehicle.) Heraclitus is not laying claim to any merely private revelation or purely personal authority.  Just what kind of authority does he claim for the logos?

Though the logos is shared, the many live as though they had a private source of understanding.
Those who speak with mind must affirm themselves with what is shared by all-as the city does with a law, and much more strongly...

The logos is something "shared by all": publicly accessible, not the product of private fantasy. Its authority, deriving from these properties, makes those who use it "strong" in their affirmations, as the law makes a city strong by being impersonal, universal, and impartial. The oppositions between these properties and the private illusions and misunderstandings of "people," are elaborated in the programmatic declaration which stood at the beginning of the book:

Of this logos which is always people prove to have no understanding, both before they hear it and when once they have heard it. For though all things come about according to this logos, [people] are as though they had no experience, though they experience such words and deeds as I set forth, marking off each thing according to its nature and pointing out how it is. But other people do not notice what they do when awake - just as they do not notice all the things they forget about when asleep.

The oblivion of the public, shared world in sleep is shown by the substitution for it of private, unshared, and illusory dreams (a supposed
"private source of understanding"), as confirmed by a later paraphrase:

"Heraclitus says that for those who are awake there is one shared world, but that each sleeper turns aside into a private world"



More later, as that is plenty enough to go on for now.

[Iason Ouabache]

This is a great idea, btw.  I only took one philosophy class in college but I enjoyed it greatly.  I've been trying to get into philosophy more lately and this seems like as good a way to do it as any.  Very good pick for the first POTW.  I've used a (slightly altered) Heraclitus quote as my signature several times.  Might need to put it back for the occasion.

[Requia ☣]

I'd forgotten how much commentary on philosophical works makes my eyes bleed.