Their Works
By: Mark Anthony A. Cabanlit
1. Socrates
“Unexamined life is not worth living”
If a person is not open for others to question his or her thoughts and action, or lives in denial of the motivations that prompt his or her thoughts and action, then it is a waste of his or her life. Such a life is a superficial act, revealing nothing new, nothing unique. Such a life is not “real.”
As an addition to the above response, a very good point at that, let us also point out that Socrates’ careful choice of words give much color to this quote. “Examined” has many definitions, including: To observe or inspect carefully or critically; To study or analyse; To check the health or condition of something or someone; To inquire into; et cetera. We could imagine that Socrates would insist that asking other people what the quote means goes against its very nature; it’s best to take your own meaning from it. Since this is an answer site, Socrates also suggests that, in addition to the above response, the “unexamined life” refers to a life whose purpose has never been questioned; a life that has never been analyzed, inquired into or inspected; a life that has not been appreciated beyond face value. By suggesting this, Socrates gives praise to questions such as, “Is there more to reality than that which we can see and touch?;” “Am I living my life according to my own rules, or the rules set for me by others?;”
Finally, the quote may suggest Socrates’ belief that a human who does not examine (in every sense of the term) their own life, nature, reality, relationships, motivations, and thoughts, is wasting the experience, therefore such a life is not worth living.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/According_to_Socrates_the_’unexamined_life_is_not_worth_living’_what_did_he_mean
2. Plato
“Déjà vu Phenomena and Anamnesis”
Anamnesis
The word anamnesis is commonly translated as “recollection.” Anamnesis is a noun derived from the verb anamimneskein, which means “to be reminded.” According to Plato, what we call learning is actually recollection of facts which we possessed before incarnation into human form.
Plato argues for the theory of recollection in two dialogues—the Meno, and the Phaedo—and mentions it in one other—the Phaedrus. His basic strategy of argument is that human beings know certain things, or possess certain concepts, which could not have been gotten from sense experience. Plato’s explanation is that the human soul knew these things before it was born, so that learning these things is really just a matter of remembering them.
It is important to see that anamnesis is not meant to explain all learning. The Greek word translated “learning,” manthanein, (from which the English ‘mathematics’ is derived) does not pertain to information acquired through the senses, or knowledge of skills. So, for example, ananmnesis is not meant to explain the acquisition of skills such as being able to play the guitar, or with simple factual information such as the dates of the battle of Marathon. The claim that learning is anamnesis appears to be restricted to a priori knowledge, that is knowledge which does not depend on experience for its justification.
All of this ties in with Plato’s anemnesis.’ This is an philosophical paradox of sorts. Here’s the gist: If you know something, you will not search for it, but if you do not know something, how will you recognize it when you see it? The root of this problem involves the matter of learning, and Plato’s position that because this seems to be the case, we must have a priori knowledge, that is; all learning is actually relearning, or recalling. Plato might have described Dj vu’s as episodes in which we are for some reason exposed directly to that source of prior knowledge
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anamnesis
3. Aristotle
“Golden Mean”
In philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, the golden mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. For example courage, a virtue, if taken to excess would manifest as recklessness and if deficient as cowardice.
To the Greek mentality, it was an attribute of beauty. Both ancients and moderns realized that “there is a close association in mathematics between beauty and truth”. The poet John Keats, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, put it this way:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The Greeks believed there to be three ‘ingredients’ to beauty: symmetry, proportion, and harmony. This triad of principles infused their life. They were very much attuned to beauty as an object of love and something that was to be imitated and reproduced in their lives, architecture, Paideia and politics. They judged life by this mentality.
In Chinese philosophy, a similar concept, Doctrine of the Mean, was propounded by Confucius; Buddhist philosophy also includes the concept of the middle way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)
4. Thomas Acquainas
So his best known work, the Summa theologiae, is often cited by philosophers when Thomas’s position on this or that issue is sought. How can a theological work provide grist for philosophical mills? How did Thomas distinguish between philosophy and theology?
Sometimes Thomas puts the difference this way: “… the believer and the philosopher consider creatures differently. The philosopher considers what belongs to their proper natures, while the believer considers only what is true of creatures insofar as they are related to God, for example, that they are created by God and are subject to him, and the like.” (Summa contra gentiles, bk II, chap. 4) Since the philosopher too, according to Thomas, considers things as they relate to God, this statement does not put the difference in a formal light.
The first and major formal difference between philosophy and theology is found in their principles, that is, starting points. The presuppositions of the philosopher, that to which his discussions and arguments are ultimately driven back, are in the public domain. They are things that everyone can know upon reflection; they are where disagreement between us must come to an end. These principles are not themselves the products of proof—which does not of course mean that they are immune to rational analysis and inquiry—and thus they are said to be known by themselves (per se, as opposed to per alia). This is proportionately true of each of the sciences, where the most common principles just alluded to are in the background and the proper principles or starting points of the particular science function regionally as the common principles do across the whole terrain of thought and being.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/
5. Rene Descartes
“Cogito Ergo Sum”
Cogito ergo sum (French: Je pense donc je suis; English: “I think, therefore I am”), often mistakenly stated as Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum (English: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”),[1] is a philosophical statement in Latin used by René Descartes, which became a fundamental element of Western philosophy. The simple meaning of the phrase is that if someone is wondering whether or not they exist, that is in and of itself proof that they do exist (because, at the very least, there is an “I” who is doing the thinking).[2]
Descartes’s original statement was “Je pense donc je suis,” from his Discourse on Method (1637). He wrote it in French, not in Latin, thereby reaching a wider audience in his country than that of scholars. He uses the Latin “Cogito ergo sum” in the later Principles of Philosophy (1644), Part 1, article 7: “Ac proinde hæc cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum, est omnium prima & certissima, quæ cuilibet ordine philosophanti occurrat.” (English: “This proposition, I think, therefore I am, is the first and the most certain which presents itself to whoever conducts his thoughts in order”.). At that time, the argument had become popularly known in the English speaking world as ‘the “Cogito Ergo Sum” argument’, which is usually shortened to “Cogito” when referring to the principle virtually everywhere else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum
6. Paul Ricœur
“Man is a Narrative Subject”
The constitutive features of a narrative form the basis for Ricoeur to hold that personal identity, itself constituted by an idem-identity and an ipse-identity, is a narrative identity. First, narratives draw together disparate and somehow discordant elements into the concordant unity of a plot that has a temporal span. Second, all the elements that a narrative unites are contingencies. All of them could have been different or even nonexistent. Nonetheless, as emplotted, these elements take on the guise of necessity or at least of likelihood. Taken by itself, an element of a story is of interest only if it is surprising. But when it is integrated into a plot it appears as a quasi-necessity. Third, narratives are made up not only of actions and events but also of characters or personages. Plots relate the mutual development of a story and a character or set of characters. Every character in a story of any complexity both acts and is acted upon. Finally, a narrative’s characters only rise to the status of persons—fictional or real—who can initiate action when one evaluates their doings and sufferings and imputes them to the persons as praiseworthy or otherwise. One evaluates how the person responds when confronted by another living being who is in some need that the person can address (OAA, 141-45).[21]
In sum, a narrative about human persons tells of both the connections that unify multiple actions over a span of time performed, in most cases, by a multiplicity of persons and the connections that link multiple viewpoints on and assessments of those actions. “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character” (OAA, 147-48).[22]
We make sense of our own personal identities in much the same way as we do of the identity of characters in stories. First, in the case of stories, we come to understand the characters by way of the plot that ties together what happens to them, the aims and projects they adopt, and what they actually do. Similarly I make sense of my own identity by telling myself a story about my own life. In neither case is the identity like that of a fixed structure or substance. These identities are mobile. “Narrative identity takes part in the story’s movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.”[23] Until the story is finished, the identity of each character or person remains open to revision.
Second, each personage’s individual identity always intersects those of other personages in the narrative. This intersection can give rise to second-order stories, e.g., stories about families, that narrate the intertwining of multiple individual stories. Similarly, the story by which I constitute my own identity shows that my life is always linked to others, not always in the way I would prefer. Hence, other persons are always constituents in my identity and vice versa. Indeed, our individual identities are incorporable into a we-identity, as for example the identity we share as fellow citizens of the United States.
Third, every personage that figures in a story that is not a piece of science fiction does so as a full fledged bodily being, a being of a determinate sex and age as well as the native speaker of a particular language. Each comes from a particular place and is the inheritor of a particular heritage. So it is with us. However cosmopolitan a person may become, he or she has a distinctive heritage that always matters.
Finally, all narratives have ethical dimensions. As narratives that contain promises clearly exemplify, narratives present characters in such a way that evaluations of what they do or suffer are ingredient in the very meaning of these events. But narratives also call for us to evaluate their characters as such. They especially prod us to evaluate their ethical probity by considering their talents and their use of them.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/
7. John Paul Sartre
“Life is what you make it”
Though critical of its bourgeois variety, Sartre does support an existentialist humanism the motto of which could well be his remark that “you can always make something out of what you’ve been made into.” In fact, his entire career could be summarized in these words that carry an ethical as well as a critical message. The first part of his professional life focused on the freedom of the existential individual (you can always make something out of…); the second concentrated on the socioeconomic and historical conditions which limited and modified that freedom (what you’ve been made into), once freedom ceased to be merely the definition of “man” and included the possibility of genuine options in concrete situations. That phase corresponded to Sartre’s political commitment and active involvement in public debates, always in search of the exploitative “systems” such as capitalism, colonialism and racism at work in society and the oppressive practices of individuals who sustained them. As he grew more cognizant of the social dimension of individual life, the political and the ethical tended to coalesce. In fact, he explicitly rejected “Machiavellianism.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#6
8. Friedrich Nietzsche
“God is DEAD”
“God is dead” never meant that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. It may be more appropriate to consider the statement as Nietzsche’s way of saying that the “God” of the times (religion and other such spirituality) is no longer a viable source of any received wisdom. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis which the death of God represents for existing moral considerations, because “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.”[1] This is why in “The Madman”, a work which primarily addresses atheists, the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.
The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is what Nietzsche worked to find a solution for by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values. He would find a basis in the “will to power” that he described as “the essence of reality.”
Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic. He may have seen himself as a historical figure like Zarathustra, Socrates or Jesus, giving a new philosophical orientation to future generations to overcome the impending nihilism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead
