a short tour of the basis of classic western philosophy

For the longest time that I could remember , I have had serious concerns. Concerns that my simple mother who has fasted during special occasions for the Gods for our family's health, concerns that the trip to the temple that we took for 8+ hours was not just another family outing but had something much more sinister behind it's meaning - we were subservient to God and we are making this trip to ask for his blessings/grace for our greedy(okay i am being harsh somewhat, ig) selves.

I think you (yes reader you, now please read with attention) might have understood that this is not a simple thing for me. While people might have accepted theism as a default "mode" of this puzzle which is this world, I have been not so sure. I don't know whether it is my inbuilt rebellious nature (maybe it is ), or my hubris that is talking, but I feel that folks are seldom curious about the nature of reality around them i.e to say and I quote directly from Buddha "What is the meaning of life , if not just suffering?". Okay , well hold your horses Buddha, cause I am not so sure that my hedonistic self would want that.

I lot of eastern religions and philosophies are based on God being supreme and the humans being subservient to him - ideas that I have read countless times from Mahabharata to Ramayana to Upanishads. Okay, to be fair , there are schools of thoughts in Hinduism that believes in no God , but most of the series focuses on Western Classical Philosophy as I have no idea of what they contains , apart from some Nihilistic memes sent between friends(yes you know know who you are 😏).

Fair I'll get straight to the point.
I have been curious about the nature of reality ,what is the reality of being happy, isn't Nature the master of all or can I be a supra-human - like the Titans of the greek mythology that are not quite Gods, but are a mythical race about humans, what does it mean to defeat death philosophically - or in the case of Bryan Johnson using his $333 diet - to delay aging as long as possible.

So just like any sane person would think, I went to youtube for solution. I discovered Micheal Sugrue's channel and I have to only say one word for it - incredible. The treasure trove of information that is that channel, provided me with some much knowledge that I have been able to construct my own reasons after going through its lectures , and I am planning to write down my thoughts and understanding of the lectures so as to have an audience with whom I can share my secret(not so secret anymore, ig) passion of philosophy.

Before starting , like any good scientist, it's necessary to define to the axioms of the system , so as to understand the subject a bit more clearly.

Philosophy:

• comes from the Greek word philos which means wisdom and sophus which means to study i.e the study the wisdom.
• define freely we would say that philosophy is studying the common set of problems/ similar set of issues with a common set of vocabulary that we enquire about common topics.

Physics and Metaphysics:

• Since the matters of the mind and heart cannot be only solved in a logical plane , philosophy also tolerates the ideas of working with something which is not tanglible.
• Physics defined here is the study of the theory of Nature and the way of explaining the world around us like trees, chairs etc.
• MetaPhysics is the study of the theory of Nature that is "above" physics - things like God, soul, creatures etc. i.e a set of ideas that exist out of the domains of space and time.

Ontology and Logic:

• Ontology analyses and understands the kind of things that different beings have and their correlation with each other.
• Eg: Gods exists on a different plane than humans, humans exist on different planes than chairs.
• In ontology, we attribute different status and sort of hierarchy bw the species and reason about that.
• Logic is a system of rules or deriving true inferences. It is a series of rules that when started from the same axioms and following the same set of rules to the teeth, you would reach the same outcome.

Epistemology:

• It is the theory about speech and reasoning about knowledge itself.
• Thinking about thinking.
• Here we could differentiate this bw 2 different kinds:
  • Trying to account for what sort of things that we can know about.
  • Trying to account for what kind of knowledge that we can have about for different kinds of things.
  • Eg: Your knowledge of ethics is vastly different from your knowledge of quantum mechanics. Similarly, your knowledge of ethics is vastly different from your knowledge of political theory.
• It accounts for different kinds of thinking and "thinking abouts".
• Micheal tells that philosophers do this often to provide a clear example of their thinking to the readers on how thinking works and what thinking can itself do.
• Epistemology about a thinking is the philosopher trying to do a little thinking about what it means to be rational in that context.

Aesthetics:

• The theory of series of reasons and thoughts which leads human to believe what is beautiful. Whether the beauty they feel is in the subject or within the pysche of the mind.
• What the role of beauty is in the rest of our judgement ?
  • how does it affect our judgements of right and wrong.
  • how does it affect our judgements of political order and change.
  • and how does it affect our judgements of how we live our particular lives.

Ethics:

• The theory of right and wrong and our moral obligations and enquiries of what we are to do or not to do.
• Ethics asks what does it means to be a human being and take actions appropriate that of a human being and how can make adequate or certain judgements of the behaviour of other people.
• Ethics investigates the part of human which is free, has soul, of the sort of actions that we take, of the sort of people that we may become.

Politics:

• This is connected to ethics , as in Ancient Greece , the society was seen as connected to the human soul but just bigger in size.
• If it is true that the society is based on the ethics of the humans comprising the society, then politics is like the extension of human will on a large scale, theory of how society and governments must be organised , how justice is to be authorized and dispensed and how proper human behaviour should be as a whole.
• Both ethics and politics investigates what is good and ethical, ethics investigates it at the level of individual, politics at the level of society.

These definitions for the time being define the term succinctly , at least at the level of getting into the subject matter.
In the next post we shall discuss how the growth of Western Classical Philosophy occurred and how 2 cities which had such a major influence that it defined most of the Western Classical Philosophy for most of the time periods.