Momolature

  PRE-SOCRATICS FINISHED   SOCRATES, PLATO: Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance rather than a literary creation of one of his admirers. His students, Xenophon’s and Plato’s major concern in his memoirs was to exonerate Socrates from the charges made against him at his trial, and to show that his life was such that conservative Athenians should have revered him rather than condemned him to death.   The search for definitions serves different purposes in different dialogues: 1.       A definition of justice is sought in Republic in order to determine whether justice benefits its possessor, and a definition of piety is sought in the Euthyphro in order to settle a particular difficult case of conscience. 2.       Plato’s Socrates does not claim to have a watertight definition of techne, or craft; but over and over again he ...

  PRINCIPLE BEYOND THE SENSES: (METAPHYSICAL THEOLOGY) ANAXIMANDER: Anaximander of Miletus left behind a book entitled ‘On Nature’, written in prose, a medium just beginning to come into fashion. 1.       He thinks it is an error to identify the ultimate material of the universe with any of the elements we can see around us in the contemporary world, such as water or fire. 2.       The fundamental principle of things, he said, must be boundless or undefined (apeiron). 3.       He may or may not have thought that his principle extended for ever in space; what we do know is that he thought it had no beginning and no end in time and that it did not belong to any particular kind or class of things.   PARMANIDES: Like Xenophanes, Parmanides was a poet: he wrote a philosophical poem in clumsy verse, of which we possess about 120 lines. He is the first philosopher whose writing has come down to u...