Traces of the Platonic Theory of Evil in the Theaetetus
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Beyond Good and Evil—1
Nietzsche & Asian Philosophy Beyond Good and Evil—1 Beyond good and Evil Preface supposing truth is a woman philosophers like love-sick suitors who don’t understand the woman-truth central problem of philosophy is Plato’s error: denying perspective, the basic condition of all life On the Prejudices of Philosophers 1) questioning the will to truth who is it that really wants truth? What in us wants truth? Why not untruth? 2) origin of the will to truth out of the will to untruth, deception can anything arise out of its opposite? A dangerous questioning? Nietzsche sees new philosophers coming up who have the strength for the dangerous “maybe.” Note in general Nietzsche’s preference for the conditional tense, his penchant for beginning his questioning with “perhaps” or “suppose” or “maybe.” In many of the passages throughout this book Nietzsche takes up a perspective which perhaps none had dared take up before, a perspective to question what had seemed previously to be unquestionable. He seems to constantly be tempting the reader with a dangerous thought experiment. This begins with the questioning of the will to truth and the supposition that, perhaps, the will to truth may have arisen out of its opposite, the will to untruth, ignorance, deception. 3) the supposition that the greater part of conscious thinking must be included among instinctive activities Nietzsche emphasizes that consciousness is a surface phenomenon conscious thinking is directed by what goes on beneath the surface contrary to Plato’s notion of pure reason, the conscious -
The Problem of Evil in Augustine's Confessions
University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2011 The rP oblem of Evil in Augustine's Confessions Edward Matusek University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Philosophy Commons Scholar Commons Citation Matusek, Edward, "The rP oblem of Evil in Augustine's Confessions" (2011). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3733 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Problem of Evil in Augustine’s Confessions by Edward A. Matusek A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Thomas Williams, Ph.D. Roger Ariew, Ph.D. Joanne Waugh, Ph.D. Charles B. Guignon, Ph.D. Date of Approval: November 14, 2011 Keywords: theodicy, privation, metaphysical evil, Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism Copyright © 2011, Edward A. Matusek i TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Chapter One: Introduction to Augustine’s Confessions and the Present Study 1 Purpose and Background of the Study 2 Literary and Historical Considerations of Confessions 4 Relevance of the Study for Various -
God and the Problem of Evil Notes
Theodicy: God and the Problem of Evil Introduction Theodicy: From the Greek words for God (theos) and justice (dikē) - It is an attempt to vindicate divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil. Three facts that seem to be in tension: 1. God is all-good 2. God is all-powerful 3. Evil exists “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” – David Hume Summary: How do we defend the facts that God is good and God is powerful if he allows the holocaust, child-molestation, infanticide, wars, terrorism, cancer, rape, etc. Attempts to solve this tension 1. Simply deny that God is good. Problems 1 John 1:5 - This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. Psalm 106:1 - Praise the Lord! Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! Psalm 119:68 - You are good and do good; teach me your statutes. Nahum 1:7 - The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him. James 1:13 - Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. -
Theodicy: an Overview
1 Theodicy: An Overview Introduction All of us struggle at one time or another in life with why evil happens to someone, either ourselves, our family, our friends, our nation, or perhaps some particularly disturbing instance in the news—a child raped, a school shooting, genocide in another country, a terrorist bombing. The following material is meant to give an overview of the discussion of this issue as it takes place in several circles, especially that of the Christian church. I. The Problem of Evil Defined Three terms, "the problem of evil," "theodicy," and "defense" are important to our discussion. The first two are often used as synonyms, but strictly speaking the problem of evil is the larger issue of which theodicy is a subset because one can have a secular problem of evil. Evil is understood as a problem when we seek to explain why it exists (Unde malum?) and what its relationship is to the world as a whole. Indeed, something might be considered evil when it calls into question our basic trust in the order and structure of our world. Peter Berger in particular has argued that explanations of evil are necessary for social structures to stay themselves against chaotic forces. It follows, then, that such an explanation has an impact on the whole person. As David Blumenthal observes, a good theodicy is one that has three characteristics: 1. "[I]t should leave one with one’s sense of reality intact." (It tells the truth about reality.) 2. "[I]t should leave one empowered within the intellectual-moral system in which one lives." (Namely, it should not deny God’s basic power or goodness.) 3. -
Evil in the Personal Experience of St. Augustine
RUCH FILOZOFICZNY LXXVI 2020 2 Agnieszka Biegalska University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn, Poland ORCID: 0000-0002-5653-9684 e-mail: [email protected] DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/RF.2020.024 Our heart is restless until it rests in you. St. Augustine, Confessions* Evil in the Personal Experience of St. Augustine The most disturbing issue that permeates all of St. Augustine’s work is the question of the existence of evil, experiencing it and inflicting it. Giovanni Papini claims that Augustine, “before he found himself in finding God, […] had to exhaust the experience of evil to the very depths”.1 This remark redirects our thinking about Augustine’s under- standing of evil from the field of theoretical considerations to the realm of his personal experience of evil, where his philosophical and theologi- cal thought seems to be rooted. For many years, Augustine experienced evil and inflicted it himself. In the Confessions we read: “our life was one of being seduced and seducing, being deceived and deceiving, in a vari- ety of desires. Publicly I was a teacher of the arts which they call liberal; privately I professed a false religion – in the former role arrogant, in the latter superstitious, in everything vain”.2 A sense of persistence in false- hood and iniquity, noticed by Augustine quite late, a few years before his death in 430 (if one can consider his Confessions as a testimony to this important moment) and his desire to know the truth about himself, * Saint Augustine, Confessions, transl. with an introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick (USA: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1, i (1). -
The Highest Good for Plato Goodness Is an Abstract Concept That Is Very
The Highest Good for Plato Goodness is an abstract concept that is very difficult to define, and saying what counts as the highest good is perhaps even more so. In Republic, Plato attempts to say something about what makes things good, but his answer is very vague in the end. Still, we can get some clarity on what he would have answered if asked what the highest good is, from what he says in this text. What counts as the highest good for Plato can be said to be knowledge of the Form of the Good, because it is necessary for knowing and using the other Forms well. The nature of the Forms is not clear in Republic; Plato writes about them as if his audience already knows what they are. Still, we can get some sense of what forms are like from the text. In several places he says that when two or more things share the same name, then they share a form. For example, in Book IV Socrates and Glaucon talk about the form of justice: “…are things called by the same name, whether they are bigger or smaller than one another, like or unlike with respect to that to which the name applies? Alike. Then a just man won’t differ at all from a just city in respect to the form of justice; rather he’ll be like the city” (435 a-b). But what is a Form, exactly? We can start to get a sense of what Plato means by a Form by looking back at Euthyphro. -
Metempsychosis (Tanasukh) in Mulla Sadra's Thought*
METEMPSYCHOSIS (TANASUKH) IN MULLA SADRA'S THOUGHT* Shigeru KAMADA** I The idea of metempsychosis (tanasukh)(1) with its complicated manifesta- tions appeared in the various aspects of Islamic thought and gave rise to heated controversies on its position in the Islamic framework among Muslim scholars. The idea can be divided into two types.(2) The first is that on its separation from a body one's soul takes a different form by its new at- tachment to another body of a higher or a lower species according to one's conduct in the life just ended. This type is found in Indian and Greek thought, which may be termed as metempsychosis in a general sense. The second is that the divine soul permeates through and indwells in all or particular existents in the physical world, which may be termed as metempsychosis in a special sense. The latter type of the metempsychosis often finds its expression in extreme Shi'te thought (ghulat) and Islamic mysticism, the manner in which it appears is that the Imam inherits a spark of the divine light (nur ilahi) through his preceding prophets or Imams from the first prophet Adam, or embodies Divinity through the incarnation (hulul) of the divine spirit in him.(3) The idea of incarnation gave birth to a series of incarnationists condemned among Islamic mystics.(4) The main purpose of this paper is to clarify Mulla Sadra's concept of metempsychosis. Mulla Sadra (d. 1050/1640) was a mystic philosopher in Safavid Iran.(5) First we would like to survey the common understanding of metempsychosis in Islam before our reading of Mulla Sadra's text. -
The Human Conscience As a Determinant of Morality: It’S Implication for the Nigerian Society
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology September 2014, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 219-234 ISSN: 2333-5750 (Print), 2333-5769 (Online) Copyright © The Author(s). 2014. All Rights Reserved. Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development DOI: 10.15640/ijpt.v2n3a15 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.15640/ijpt.v2n3a15 The Human Conscience as a Determinant of Morality: It’s Implication for the Nigerian Society Patrick Eluke1 Abstract Human conscience has been severally described as the judge of human morality in every society. The way individuals in the Nigerian Society behave is predicated on the type of conscience they possess. Human conscience is that part of one’s mind that tells one whether his or her actions are right or wrong. Conscience varies from certain, doubtful, and perplexed, scrupulous to lax conscience. The good conscience undoubtedly implies the absence of fault, constant practice of good works and insistence on honorable behavior. This paper, therefore, seeks to survey types and they directly correlate with our different actions in the Nigerian Society today. This paper adopts descriptive method in order to achieve its objectives. 1. Preamble “Conscience is seen by some scholars as the source of moral knowledge or the source of moral reason, while others see it merely as a name for more feelings approval or disapproval of actions either as a result of psychological or social conditioning.”1 (Peschke K.H. Christian Ethics, moral Theology in the light of Vat. 2 Vol. 1 1986 p. 152.) This view is held by various scholars especially by both philosophers and non- philosophers. -
The Philosophy of the Good and the Evil in the Teachings of Leo Tolstoy and Hannah Arendt
Svetlana Klimova THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GOOD AND THE EVIL IN THE TEACHINGS OF LEO TOLSTOY AND HANNAH ARENDT BASIC RESEARCH PROGRAM WORKING PAPERS SERIES: HUMANITIES WP BRP 150/HUM/2017 This Working Paper is an output of a research project implemented at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE). Any opinions or claims contained in this Working Paper do not necessarily reflect the views of HSE Svetlana Klimova1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GOOD AND THE EVIL IN THE TEACHINGS OF LEO TOLSTOY AND HANNAH ARENDT2 The main subject of this article is devited of analyses a problem of Good and Evil in the teaching of Leo Tolstoy and Hannah Arendt. each in his epoch and by a similar way, got to the back of contradictions between “reasonableness”, “morality” and a human behavior in the state and society though they approached them from the opposing points of view. The approach of Tolstoy was Christian-ethical while that of Arendt was philosophic-political. Their congeniality is attributed to the fact that the ethics of Tolstoy and the policy of Arendt are built on a common theoretical ground, i.e. the philosophical anthropology of Kant. In the “man-state” opposition, Tolstoy revealed the ethical prerequisites to creation of the totalitarian ideology, and Arendt showed up the historical, political and inhuman essence of the totalitarianism phenomenon as such. Key words: Good, Evil, radical and banality evil, a philosophical anthropology of Kant , consciousness, the mass society and the mass man, “Eichmann as man” and “Eichmann as Nazi official,” independent thinking. JEL Classification: Z 1 National Research University Higher School of Economic (Moscow, Russia); Department of Philosophy. -
Plato's Hypothetical Inquiry in the Meno Naoya Iwata
Plato’s Hypothetical Inquiry in the Meno Naoya Iwata At Meno 86e2–4 Socrates proposes to Meno that they should consider the question whether virtue is teachable on a hypothesis. Partly because its concrete procedure is illustrated by a baffling geometrical example, there has still been wide disagreement among scholars as to how he actually carries out this hypothetical inquiry into virtue. The basic structure of the argument at 87b2–89a5 appears very simple: Socrates converts the original question whether virtue is teachable to the question whether it is knowledge, and then examines the latter on the basis of his agreement with Meno that virtue is good. Apart however from that agreement being, as it is explicitly called, a ‘hypothesis’, opinion is divided on what other hypothesis Socrates posited. Some think of it as the conditional ‘if virtue is knowledge, it is teachable’ or as ‘knowledge is teachable’ (Bedu-Addo 1984, 7–9; Wolfsdorf 2008, 44–6 and 58–60),1 and others as the bi-conditional ‘if virtue is knowledge, it is teachable, but if not, not’ or as ‘knowledge alone is teachable’ (Grgić 1999, 34–6; Weiss 2001, 131; Zyskind and Sternfeld 1976, 132). 2 But most scholars, in contrast, identify it with the simple proposition ‘virtue is knowledge’ (Bedu-Addo 1984, 7–9; Benson 2003, 107–25; Bluck 1961, 17–19 and 85–91; Bostock 1986, 165–6; Canto-Sperber 1991, 98–102; Cherniss 1947, 140; Hackforth 1955, 140–1; Kahn 1996, 310; Robinson 1953, 116–18; Rose 1970, 3–7; Sayre 1969, 29 n. 40; Scott 2006, 137–40 and 221–4; Sharples 1985, 167).3 It is also suggested that Socrates’ new philosophical tool does not involve any process of positing a hypothesis but only aims to establish the equivalence between teachability and knowledge (Ebrey 2013, 76 and 83–4). -
The Form of the Good in Plato's Timaeus
THANASSIS GKATZARAS | 71 One of the many philosophical problems The Form of the Good in that we face in the Timaeus is raised by the Plato’s Timaeus claim that the God who created the world (from now on we shall call him ‘Demiurge’)1 is good (Tim. 29d7-30a2). A satisfying explanation of Demiurge’s goodness is far from easy, and dif- ferent approaches have been proposed. How- ever, in this paper I’ll try to show that a clear, sufficient and relatively simple interpretation is possible, if we are based on the hypothesis that Timaeus follows the theory of causation in the Phaedo (including the distinction between ‘safe’ and ‘elegant’ cause) and the concept of the Thanassis Gkatzaras Form of the Good in the Republic.2 University of Ioannina [email protected] To be more specific, I’ll try to show that the Form of the Good of the Republic is also presupposed in the Timaeus and it plays the same role, and we should consider it as a first principle of platonic cosmology, independ- ent from the existence of Demiurge or even the Divine Paradigm (i.e. the model accord- ing to which the Demiurge creates the world). On first impression, this interpretation looks barely possible, since there is no direct refer- ence in the text to this particular Form, with the possible exception of what is said at Tim. 46c7-d1.3 In my opinion, this absence has to do ABSTRACT with specific purposes Timaeus serves, and not with the abandonment of the Good as a cause. -
Metempsychosis in Aeneid Six Author(S): E
Metempsychosis in Aeneid Six Author(s): E. L. Harrison Reviewed work(s): Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb. - Mar., 1978), pp. 193-197 Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296685 . Accessed: 12/02/2013 21:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Classical Association of the Middle West and South is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Classical Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions METEMPSYCHOSISIN AENEID SIX The purposeof this note is to suggest that, in orderto understandmore clearly the lines in which Virgil preparesthe way for his paradeof heroes in Book Six (679-755), we need to appreciatethe difficulties presentedby the introduction of such an episode, and consider how he handled them.' Although we can only surmise, it seems highly probablethat, influencedby the practice at the funerals of prominentRomans of having relatives walk in processionwearing portrait-masks of the dead man's ancestors,2Virgil decided to stage a similar spectacle on a granderscale, including in its scope the great figures of Rome's past.