History of Philosophy and Christian Thought



Yüklə 124,89 Kb.
səhifə1/3
tarix01.12.2017
ölçüsü124,89 Kb.
#13233
  1   2   3


History of Philosophy and Christian Thought
John M. Frame
Lecture Outline

Part One: Ancient and Medieval





  1. Why Study Philosophy?

    1. To learn how to think with more clarity, cogency, and profundity.

    2. To understand better the intellectual background of Christian thought.

      1. Other disciplines also useful: history, the arts, science, etc.

      2. But philosophers have been most influential in the formulation of worldviews.

    3. To become acquainted with the most formidable adversaries of Christianity: non-Christian thought in its most cogent form.

    4. In this course we shall also study Christian thought, focusing on Christianity as a worldview.



II. Philosophy: General Observations


A. Basic point: the philosophical quest is religious in character.

1. Historically, philosophers have addressed the religious issues of their day.

2. Typical questions of philosophers are religious:

a. Metaphysics  the nature of reality

(1) Why is there something rather than nothing? (creation)

(2) Why are things the way they are? (providence)

(3) What are the most basic features of reality? (quest for what is ultimate)

b. Epistemology (cf. Doctrine of the Knowledge of God)

(1) What is knowledge?

(2) How is knowledge possible?

(3) How do we go about knowing?

(4) How do we distinguish truth from falsity? reality from appearance?



  1. Ethics  how ought we to live?

  2. Perspectival relation of these.

B. Christian philosophy: an attempt to answer these questions humbly before God and obediently to his revelation.

C. NonChristian philosophy: an attempt to answer these questions autonomously, hindering the truth in unrighteousness.

D. Distinctives of a Biblical Worldview

1. The creator-creature distinction




  1. Distinct

  2. Not separable (Chalcedon)

  3. Nothing between

2. Absolute personality

a. Some worldviews have absolute beings (Hinduism,

Buddhism, Gnosticism, Aristotelianism, Hegelianism),

but these are not personal.

b. Others acknowledge superhuman persons (polytheisms),

but these are not absolute.


  1. Only in biblical religion is the supreme being personal, therefore capable of knowledge, love, judgment, speech.

3. Lordship: God’s relation to his creation.

a. Control

b. Authority

c. Presence

4. Transcendence and Immanence

a. Christian

1. Transcendence: control and authority (1, below).

2. Immanence: presence, clear revelation (2, below).

b. Non-Christian

1. Transcendence: Supreme being, if he exists, is so

far from us that we cannot know him, speak of

him (3, below).

2. Immanence: So the world is ultimate, divine (4,

below).


c.Relations of these (diagonal lines below)

1. Christian transcendence opposes non-Christian

immanence.

2. Christian immanence opposes non-Christian

transcendence.

Biblical Non-biblical


Transcendence: God’s control and authority Transcendence: God not present

(1) (3)


(2) (4)

Immanence: God’s covenant presence Immanence: something in the world has divine control and authority1


5. Irrationalism and Rationalism

a. Christian

1. “Irrationalism:” our knowledge limited by God’s

ultimate authority (“incomprehensibility”)

2. “Rationalism:” we can know certain truth by God’s

revelation.

b. Non-Christian

1. Irrationalism: it is impossible to know absolute truth.

2. Rationalism (autonomy): human thought is the

ultimate standard of truth and right.

3. Tension

4. Mutual necessity

c.Relations of these (diagonal lines):


  1. Christian “irrationalism” opposes non-Christian

Rationalism.

  1. Christian “rationalism” opposes non-Christian

Irrationalism.


Greek Philosophy

Attempting to find a rational substitute for the popular religions (Dooyeweerd, Twilight of Western Thought)


A. The Milesians (6th century B.C.)

1. Figures

a. Thales: "All is water"

b. Anaximander: "All is indefinite (apeiron)"

c. Aneximenes: "All is air"

2. Significance

a. Rationalism

(1) Mind is competent, apart from revelation, to determine the most basic principle in the universe, the ultimate explanation.

(2) "All is... "  The creator/creature distinction is erased. All of reality is composed of the same stuff. Man is divineas divine as anything else.

b. Irrationalism

(1) Looked at from the opposite angle: not only is man divinized, but God is humanized. God is reduced to water, or air, or the indefinite. The most basic principle is mindless, purposeless.

(2) Human thought also, then, is reduced to chance developments of an impersonal cosmic process. Van Til: "The man made out of water trying to climb out of the water on a ladder of water."

B. The Eleatics (6th and 5th centuries B.C.)

1. Figures

a. Xenophanes: religious teacher advocating changeless pantheistic deity over against the anthropomorphism of popular religions.

b. Parmenides: main developer of the Eleatic system.

c. Zeno: Argued for Parmenides' position with paradoxes designed to show the absurdity of its opposite.

d. Melissus: Attempted positive, direct proofs of Parmenides' doctrine.

2. Parmenides' teaching: the goddess reveals that "being is."

a. Anything which can be spoken of or thought of must be. It is impossible to speak or think of anything which is not. Every thought is a thought of something.

b. Negation is a meaningless concept.

c. There is no changefor every change is a change from what is to what is not. (e.g. a change in colorfrom green to nongreen).

d. Being is therefore ungenerated, indestructible, changeless, homogeneous, indivisible, continuous (no parts), perfect, motionless, limitedlike Xenophanes' divinity.

e. Whence the illusion of change? Parmenides' "second philosophy."

3. Analysis

a. Arguments a and c overlook the ambiguities in the concept of "being" and in the concept "think of".

(1) Sometimes being includes nonbeing; sometimes it doesn't. The fact that there are no unicorns is a fact that is the casepart of reality, part of being. To think of a unicorn is in one sense to think of something that is not, but in another sense it is to consider a fact that is the case.

(2) There are many kinds of "being"real, present existence, existence in fiction, existence in the mind, existence in the past, existence in the future, possible existence, necessary existence, contingent existence. Change is, in one sense, change from what is to what is not; but it is also change from one sort of being to another (possible to actual, future to present, etc.)

(3) The idea that every meaningful thought must refer to some object is greatly to oversimplify the functions of thought. Thought does many things other than referring, and thus bears many different relations to "being."

b. Note religious coloring: revelation from a goddess, divinization of the world.

c. Parmenides system attempts to be as consistently rationalistic as possible.

(1) "What can be and what can be thought are one." (Every thought is a thought of something, and what cannot be thought cannot be said to exist. So thought and being are coterminous. Historically typical or rationalism. Cf. Spinoza, "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things" and Hegel, "The real is the rational and the rational is the real.")

(2) Like Parmenides, rationalists historically have had difficulty with the notions of change, motion, nonbeing, plurality, though not all have accepted Parmenides' arguments.

(a) A rational concept ("green," e.g.) denotes a quality common to many individual things. It is difficult through rational concepts to describe what is not commoni.e., what is unique, what distinguishes one thing from everything else. One can attempt this by multiplying concepts ("Only this chair is red and green and purple"), but one never succeeds in describing exhaustively the uniqueness of something. Hence the tendency in rationalism to reduce all things to one, to eliminate uniqueness, plurality.

(b) It is similarly difficult for rational concepts to describe what uniquely pertains to one period of time; hence change and motion become suspect.

(c) "Nonbeing" seems to be the very negation of rational beingthat to which no rational concept applies; yet "nonbeing" itself seems to be a rational concept of some sort. The paradox is too great for a rationalist to swallow.

(d) Having no infallible assurance about the pluralities and changes in the world of experience, the rationalist claims some foothold of absolute knowledge in the bare idea of truth (being) itself. If nothing else is certain at least what's true is true! Thus all differentiation is rejected in the interest of an abstract blank.

(e) Christian alternative: God knows, because he has created, the uniqueness of each thing as well as its commonness with other things. He is himself both one and many and therefore finds no conflict between knowledge of unity and knowledge of diversity.

(3) Parmenides' doctrine of "illusion" illustrates the bankruptcy of rationalism. Even Parmenides, the most consistent or rationalists, must appeal to irrationalism at some point. Since his rationalism does not allow for the appearance of change, Parmenides must take refuge in myth.

C. Three Early Alternatives to Parmenides

1. Heraclitus (535475 B.C.)

a. The primacy of change: panta rei, all flows; "you cannot step in the same river twice."

b. Irrationalism?

(1) It would seem that if all things are changing all the time they cannot be captured in rational concepts (recall the rationalist's traditional difficulty with change).

(2) Yet the statement that "all changes" is itself a rational assertion.

(3) Heraclitus acknowledges a logos, a universal reason, governing the changing world according to a pattern.

(4) But then it would seem that the fact of such governance, at least, is an unchanging factthat not everything "flows".

(5) Heraclitus sees himself as more of a rationalist than an irrationalist, because of the logos doctrine. But the doctrine of change has had a strong influence upon philosophical irrationalism. Essentially we have here another unstable mixture.

2. Atomism: Leucippus, Democritus (460370), Epicurus (341270), Lucretius (9454); cf. "qualitative atomists" Empedocles (495-435) and Anaxagoras (500428).

a. The primacy of plurality: the world is composed of vast numbers of tiny "atoms".

(1) Each atom has the qualities of Parmenidean beingit is one, ungenerated, indestructible, changeless (except in its relations to other atoms), indivisible, etc. It is however, in motion, a quality Parmenides denied in being.

(2) Solution to problem of change: the atoms change in their relations to each other, but not in their essential nature. (Cf. later statements about God.)

b. Determinism and chance:

(1) Democritus: all events are determined by the motions of atoms and their resultant relations with each other.

(2) Epicurus modifies the system: atoms occasionally "swerve" from the vertical direction, forcing collisions among them, leading to the formation of objects and accounting for free will.

c. Rationalism and Irrationalism

(1) Attempts to define the ultimate nature of the worldnot by relating all to the whole as Parmenides, but by breaking the world down into its smallest constituents.

(2) But the rationalism of the system is compromised

(a) since mind is reduced to matter and motion,

(b) since the Epicurean "swerve" is a totally irrational event,

(c) since all things happen by change.

3. Sophists: Protagoras (490?), Gorgias, Thrasymachus

a. Relativism is knowledge

(1) No universal truth at all. Only truth "for" the individualsubjective opinion.

(2) Slogan. "Man is the measure of all things."

b. Rationalism

(1) Despite the irrationalistic thrust of sophistic relativism, this approach is highly rationalistic. To say that "man is the measure" is to assert man's reason as the ultimate standard, and as omnicompetent.

(2) Inconsistency: Protagoras did admit that though no opinion was truer than another, some were "better" than others. What criterion of "better" is implicit here?

(3) Like all irrationalism, Protagoras' position is inconsistent at a deeper level: for why should we believe what Protagoras says? Is sophistry only "true for him" while some other position may be "true for me"? Protagoras wants to eliminate all universal truth while claiming that his system has universal truth.

D. Plato, 427347: First great philosophical synthesis, trying to do justice to all sides of the issues. Convinced that there must be absolute truth, but seeking also to do justice to change, plurality, nonbeing, the limits of understanding.

1. The two worlds

a. The world of our senseexperience

(1) From sense experience, no certain knowledge. Senses deceive (a straight stick appears bent in the water, etc.)

(2) Yet somehow wedo have the ability to correct the mistakes of sense experience. By reason, we somehow know how things really are.

(3) We also know, e.g., what a perfect triangle is, although there are no perfect triangles in this world.

Hence:


b. The world of Forms, Ideas

(1) Our world of senseexperience is a faint reproduction of another world in which are the perfect exemplars (forms, ideas), the patterns of which things on earth are copies. The perfect triangle, the perfect tree, perfect greenness, perfect goodness.

(2) Unlike the world of senseexperience, the world of forms is perfectly knowable, through the faculty of reason.

(3) All of us before birth lived in the world of forms, beholding them.

(4) On earth we arrive at knowledge by recalling our experience of the forms before birth. "Knowledge is reminiscence.” In Meno, Plato shows how mathematical knowledge can be elicited from an uneducated slave simply by asking him the right questions, questions calculated to provoke his reminiscence. Thus certainty is possible, though error also exists.

(5) The forms have characteristics of Parmenidean being: selfexistent, ungenerated, indestructible, religious predicates (!)

2. The "receptacle" (chora, "place"  similar to Aristotle's "matter")

a. If the forms are to be copied on earth, the "receptacle" is the canvas on which the copy is painted. The "receptacle" receives form, takes on the qualities of the forms.

b. Since it receives form, the receptacle is itself formless.

c. As such it has no predicates; it is nonbeing.

d. Yet (and note here the contradiction in Plato's irrationalism) the receptacle must be described somehow, and thus must have some predicates. Plato describes it as having qualities opposite to the forms: perishability, imperfection.

e. The receptacle resists the forms so that the "copies" are inevitably imperfect. It is the source of all imperfection and evil.

3. The demiurge (Plato's "god")

a. Subordinate to and limited by both form and receptaclea finite god.

b. Shapes the world by applying preexistent forms to preexistent receptable. Since the receptacle resists formation, he cannot make perfect copies.

4. Summary: Plato's system is both rationalistic (the forms) and irrationalistic (the receptacle). Review general criticisms of the rationalist/irrationalist dialectic.

a. The forms, Plato admits, do not account for all reality, all qualities in the world, even though they were postulated for precisely that purpose.

b. The forms are supposed to provide absolutely certain knowledge; but the receptacle is a brute, irrational force which produces deviations from "the expected," and thus imperils knowledge.

c. Plato's irrationalism, like other forms of irrationalism, claims knowledge of a purely irrational principle. The receptacle is supposed to be formless and thus indescribable. Yet Plato describes it  either making it into a form or admitting that form is not the sole source of rational quality.

E. Aristotle, 384322

1. General

a. Aristotle demythologizes Plato: the forms are not in another world, but in our world.

b. Forms, except for the divine form, always exist together with matter.

2. Substance: "that which exists in itself"

a. The most common substances are individual things  chairs, tables, trees, animals, persons.

b. Each is composed of both form and matter, except for the divine substance, which is pure form.

3. Form

a. Form gives to every substance its shape, size, its qualities.

b. Things, therefore, are knowable because of their form.

4. Matter

a. Matter is that which is formed, that on which the form operates.

b. As such it has no qualities; it constitutes an irrational principle.

c. Thus things resist formation and knowledge. Matter is the source of imperfection and evil.

5. Potentiality and actuality

a. The acorn grows into an oak as its form is actualized. It is always an oak potentially. But the form is actualized by process.

b. As things become more and more actualized, the form predominates over the matter.

c. The less actualized things are, the more potentiality ("potency") they nave, the more matter predominates over form.

6. The Prime Mover

a. Accounts for change, the constant movement from potentiality to actuality.

b. He is the ultimate cause of motion, but is not himself moved; else he would require a more ultimate cause.

c. He is not a creator in time, for in Aristotle's view the changing world is itself eternal. Rather he "underlies" the whole process. (This is the basis for the "cosmological argument for God's existence." See Thomas Aquinas.)

d. Aristotle refers to this being in personal terms, and describes him as "god" although it is not clear what in his argument justifies this language. His argument itself, if sound, demonstrates only an impersonal principle of change.

e. To this being are ascribed the attributes of Parmenidean being  unchangeability, indestructibility, etc.

f. The prime mover is not personally concerned with the world, to know it or love it. His sole activity is "thought thinking thought": i.e., he thinks, and the sole object of his thought is his own activity of thinking.

(1) Thought of a lesser object would compromise his supremacy. If he thought of the world, he would be limited by the world; the world would govern his thought to some extent.

(2) Cf. comment earlier (I) about "more consistent rationalism". Aristotle doesn't deny the world as does the "more consistent rationalist;" but his god behaves as if there were no world. As such the divine thought becomes triviala principle reflecting only itself and explaining nothing outside of itself.

(3) Unlike Aristotle's god, the God of the Bible is not so threatened by the world. He can get involved with the world, because he is a person, not a mere abstract principle. And as a person, he rules all things.

g. The prime mover is pure form  no matter. Thus perfectly actualized, but also abstract.

7. Human Knowledge:

a. A process by which the mind abstracts forms from concrete things.

b. Strictly speaking, only the forms are knowable, intelligible. let somehow we gain a knowledge of matter.

8. Summary

a. Note rationalist (form, prime mover) /irrationalist (matter) dialectic.

b. The prime mover does not make the world process any more rational. Though Aristotle tries to remove him from all limitation, he is profoundly limited by the world ("non-Christian transcendence").

c. "The many swallowing up the one": matter relativizes all rational explanation.

d. "The one swallowing up the many": the ultimate principle, the divine thought, reflects only upon itself as if nothing else existed. The world disappears; there is nothing left to be explained.

F. Plotinus, 204269 A.D.: "Neoplatonism"

1. Rationalism

a. Plotinus tries to do what neither Plato nor Aristotle could doto find a single principle which accounts for everything, including change, plurality, nonbeing.

b. "Intelligence is the first legislator, or rather, it is the very law of existence. Parmenides therefore was right in saying, `Thought is identical with existence.' The knowledge of immaterial things is therefore identical with those things themselves."

c. The most ultimate principle is the One. It has none of the properties of our experience, because it is the principle behind those properties. Not green, for it is the principle of green, etc. It is strictly wrong even to call it "One;" but that is the closest we can get to conceptualizing its nature. Main point: we are agnostic about it, for only thus can it be a truly rational principle.

2. Irrationalism

a. Rationalism which leads to utter agnosticism leads thereby to irrationalism. Concerning the One, we are wholly ignorant.

b. We can say only what it is not, nor what it is. All attributes are limitations.

c. The One is known, not through discursive reasoning, but through mystical experience. In mystical experience, we know through union with the One.

d. In the end, reason is like a ladder which we use to ascend the heights, then throw away. It is a tool in achieving a suprarational experience.

3. Participation

a. The facts of our world are unreal except as they participate in the One, the changeless reality.



  1. "The chain of being": All things "emanate," flow inevitably, from the One, without any diminishing of the source  like light from the sun.

  2. Levels: the One, Nous (mind), Psyche (soul), Hule (Matter).

d. Some things are further from the source (matter), some things closer (souls). There are no sharp breaks in the scale.

e. The concept of participation intends to reconcile rationalism and irrationalism; yet in fact it combines the deficiencies of both.

(1) Insofar as the emanations are real, they are indistinguishable from the One; there is no reason why they should emanate into lower forms. "One swallowing the many."


  1. Insofar as the emanations are less than the One, they are intelligible. They destroy the One as a principle of explanation: "The many swallowing the One."

G. Gnosticism

1.Beginnings in first century. NT writers may refer to proto-

gnosticisms.

2. The highest being: buthos.


  1. Continuum of semi-divine beings (aeons), in pairs: logos and zoe, pneuma and psyche, etc.

  2. An aeon near the bottom of the scale erroneously makes the material world.

  3. The chief purpose of human beings is to get free from the material world, to be reabsorbed into the higher dimensions, eventually into buthos.

  4. We can achieve this salvation by secret knowledge, available through Gnostic teachers.




Yüklə 124,89 Kb.

Dostları ilə paylaş:
  1   2   3




Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©genderi.org 2024
rəhbərliyinə müraciət

    Ana səhifə