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The Foundations of Religion PLATO a brief introduction • Plato was a follower of Socrates. • Socrates execution was a crushing blow to him. • Plato left Athens, believing that “until kings were philosophers or philosophers were kings” all would not go well with the world. • In 387 BCE he • They are a useful returned to Athens foundation for an and founded the understanding of key Academy (first concepts which are of university). perennial concern to religious thought and • Plato's work consist of philosophy, a series of dialogues particularly the nature between Socrates of reality and and others presented knowledge, and the in a highly distinction between characteristic style, body and soul. known as the Socratic method. the difference between the world of appearances and the real world. • H.D.F. Kitto observed that:' It was Greek philosophy, notably, Plato's conception of the absolute, eternal • Only what is deity, which prepared permanent can be the the world for the source of true reception of a universal knowledge, not the religion’. objects of the physical world, which are • Plato used his famous always changing. ‘analogy/allegory’ of the cave to draw attention to • The unchanging realities are those that Plato believed could only be apprehended by the mind, since those we experience through the sense are only imperfect copies. • The truly unchanging, imperfect and ultimately unknowable reality should therefore be man’s goal, despite the difficulties of achieving it. In the allegory/analogy, Plato described a group of chained prisoners who could only look ahead, although a fire behind them threw shadows on the wall. They know nothing other than a life in the cave, so they naturally perceived it to be reflective of reality. According to Plato, this is like the mind of the unthinking man, who simply accepts what he hears and never questions whether it is valuable, good or true. • Plato's theory of the Forms developed ideas about goodness and reality • The prisoners in the cave would always be condemned to accepting a pale copy of the truth as reality, and so would never be able to apprehend the true, absolute Form of the Good, the highest of the realities which illuminates all others. • Aquinas’s Fourth way,' From the Graduation of Things’, was heavily influenced by Plato and pointed to the need for a highest source of goodness, truth and nobility, which Aquinas identified as God. • These unchanging concepts could never be encountered in the physical world, but Plato believed that we have an instinctive, if imperfect, appreciation of them. • This, he believed, indicates that man has an immortal, preexistent soul, which has encountered these forms before becoming imprisoned in the physical body. • The soul is immortal and immutable, unlike the body, which is a physical entity, and so changeable and imperfect. • Death will bring about the final separation of body and soul, when the soul will be able to re-enter the eternal realm from which it came. ARISTOTLE • At the age of 17, accusation of impiety Aristotle entered against Aristotle, he Plato’s Academy in retired to Chalcis and Athens, and remained died there the there until Plato’s following year. death, later founding • Aristotle was an his own school, the empiricist philosopher Lyceum. who was devoted to • Following the death of deepening his Alexander the Great understanding of in Babylon in 323 experience. BCE, and an • Brian Magee wrote that Aristotle was “working always from inside experience, never trying to impose abstract explanations on it from the outside.” • Aristotle looked for scientific explanations and asked important questions about their nature. • Although none of his works he prepared for publication have survived, for hundreds of years his work constituted the largest systematic body of knowledge in existence. • Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of the Forms since, as an empiricist, he did not believe that true reality could not be encountered in the real world. • On the contrary, he maintained that the only real knowledge we have is of the empirical world, and the only reliable information is that which can be gained from it. • One of the key questions that Aristotle sought to answer was what it means for something to exist. • He identified four causes, culminating in a complete explanation of what causes something to exist. 1. The material cause of something answers the question “What does it consist of?” 2. The efficient cause answers the question “How did it happen?” 3. The formal cause answers the question “What are it’s characteristics?” 4. The final cause answers the question “Why is it here? Or what is it’s purpose or telos? • Aristotle was also interested in tracing all movements back to a first mover and it is clear that the first of Aquinas’s Five Ways, an important part of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, is directly dependent on the thought of Aristotle. • Aristotle observed that a chain of movers had to begin with an unmoved or prime Mover, something which is not in itself moved, but which could cause other things to move. • He called this first mover God, a final cause in itself, which causes things to be not simply through physical or mechanical momentum, but through an act of love. • Because all things want to be in the image of God’s perfection, they are drawn towards him, the necessary being which is eternally good and on whom all other things depend. • Aristotle saw the relationship between body and soul as a psycho-physical unity, the soul and the body being as inseparable from each other as “the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp.” • The human soul is essentially the body and it’s organisation, but Aristotle did identify another quality that it possesses—reason. • This provides the means by which humans can develop intellectually and morally. • One of the key issues discussed within the Philosophy of Mind (otherwise known as philosophical psychology) is how the mind is related to the body. This is also relevant for the philosophy of religion, because religion is concerned with “selves”, “souls” or “minds”. • Questions are asked such as: What is the “self”? Is it the same as the “soul”? And are both of them simply ways of describing the “mind”? Does “mind” simply refer to the thinking side of a human being or to something more? • Philosophers have debated how “minds” and “bodies” and “souls” are related to one another for thousands of years. • There are three broad possibilities That “minds” are unreal; there are only “bodies”—Materialism That “bodies” are unreal; there are only “minds”—Idealism There exist both “bodies” and “minds”, distinct from one another, but linked together in some way—Dualism • Dualism “A spiritual soul cannot be corrupted, since it possesses no physical matter . . . The human soul cannot die.” --Maritain, in Range of Reason Those who take the Dualistic view of the body and mind say that the body is an outer shell for the real self, which is within the mind. This is often known as the soul. The body will die, but the soul is separate and immortal and continues after the death of the physical body. PLATO Plato suggested that the body belongs to the physical world and will one day turn to dust. However, the soul belongs to a higher realm where eternal truths, such as justice, love and goodness, will endure forever. The aim of the soul is to break free from the physical world and fly to the realm of ideas—the spiritual realm, where it will be able to spend eternity in contemplation of the truth. • For Plato the body is physical and therefore has extension, i.e. it is located in space, whereas the self is that which thinks, and it has no extension. He thought of the self as a thinking being, and therefore distinct from the body and capable of living without it. So from Plato you have a radical Dualism of thinking self and physical body. ARISTOTLE • Aristotle took a different approach. He considered the soul to be the “form” of the body; it is what turns flesh, bone, and all other components into a living individual. But a soul is one thing and a rational mind quite another; human beings have a soul, or self, that is capable of an intellectual life. Animals may have feelings and sensations, but only humans can reflect on them and grasp general principles as a result of them. • Crucial to both Plato and Aristotle is the mind’s ability to grasp “universals” (general terms, e.g. “goodness” as opposed to individual good things). • For the Greeks it was the rational mind that separated humankind from the beasts. • Humans know general truths by considering universals, which sum up and interpret individual things. • Through the ability to understand universals, people come into touch with eternal truths; without it they would be forever trapped in the world of their immediate experience. • GREEK TERMS Sarx—the physical body (flesh and blood) Soma—the organised body, with it’s activities and characteristics Psyche—the sensations and emotions (also found in animals) Pneuma—the rational, spiritual aspect of humankind; mental activity Nous—the thinking mind. • Note: the important thing here is to note the distinction between psyche (in the sense of animal life, awareness, sensations, etc) and pneuma (mental activity): For the Greeks, sense perception was on the “body” side of the body/mind dualism. Later, Descartes (in the C17th) included in the “mind”, all the feelings and sensations that he could describe, but which he could not locate physically. So, when we come to look at Dualism, we need to be aware that, within Western thought, there have been two distinct forms-- the pre-Cartesian form, with mental activity distinguished from the body and it’s sensations, and the Cartesian (i.e. from Descartes) where everything nonphysical becomes part of the “mind”.