So, hooray for all of Western philosophy in 4 weeks and 400 pages! I'm reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. I'm not getting any younger doing this, so I have given myself permission not to read every single word of every single page....
Plato Vs. Aristotle:
My perception is that Plato thought in airy abstractions, while completely ignoring what could be learned of human nature from his own companions, for example in their appalling treatment of their slaves. Plato proposed an ideal society that would begin by sending away every adult from a city, thus treating only with children 10 and under... and those few enlightened adults deemed fit to train them up in the utopian way they should go. On the other hand, he also came up with the well-known and profound Allegory of the Cave, and what has been said of Shakespeare could well be said of him: "He's full of quotes!" He provided one of my father-in-law's epitaphs: "How shall we find a gentle nature that also has great courage?" And that's what the goal of his Utopia was, to produce such natures. Will Durant argues that the theocracy of the Catholic church that obtained from about 400-1500 AD was modeled, in many aspects consciously, on Plato's utopia and its philosopher-kings.
Aristotle, however, was a concrete and practical thinker. I am especially happy to know that he founded modern library science by organizing the famous collection at Alexandria. He set to work demolishing Plato's Utopia, (unless you count the aforementioned Holy Roman Empire as an exemplar) and furthermore interested himself in every aspect of knowledge available to him. He studied biology, being the first to classify man with the other mammals; he studied theater, being the first to define its value in providing catharsis to the viewer-- Plato thought it was a pernicious waste of time. He also came up with the concept of every virtue as the golden mean between two vices; for example, generosity lies between stinginess and financial recklessness. This may seem blindingly obvious to us, but only because Aristotle thought of it; the Greek tradition before him is full of heroes whose virtues are excessive.
I like Aristotle better, myself. It seems like when he's wrong, it's an honest mistake that came from just getting the wrong end of the stick as he walked around and observed things, whereas when Plato is right it seems like the accident of a stopped clock. But if you read this book you can get a foundation for making your own judgement!
Francis Bacon-- Not Just for Shakespeare
Or so I gather from the whole chapter devoted to him. BTW, he's the very next dude studied after Aristotle, so there are about 1500 years that go by pretty quickly in this book. Just saying. Hard to believe nothing whatsoever happened philosophically in that time period.
Spinoza and Voltaire
Here's a fun fact: Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue his family attended in Holland because he taught against the resurrection of the dead. Of course it's quite usual for Jews not to believe in the afterlife, but apparently at that time such a stance was perceived as threatening the uneasy cordiality between Jews and Christians in Northern Europe, so they needed to distance themselves from him. He sounds like a nice guy personally, even though he laid the foundation for the Higher Criticism that was later taken to ridiculous extremes. Much of what he said has been said since by the most orthodox of monotheists, for example: God is at work not only in the miraculous but in the usual. George MacDonald has a lovely sermon about how making water into wine in 15 seconds at a wedding is no greater work than turning water into wine in 15 years on a hillside in France-- he may have learned that point from Spinoza.
Voltaire, another guy who would be a total blast to hang out with, would, however, have been appalled to think that any of his thought was useful to any believer. He was absolutely not a fan of organized religion, but some of the men he sent up, such as Dr. Pangloss with his health-and-wealth insistence that "all's for the best in the best of all possible worlds," were certainly made of straw. I myself was fascinated by Candide at one point in my youth, and loved the "moral," which seemed to me to be that the world is full of unanswerable questions, and so there's nothing for it but to just do whatever work we can right now.
However, if that's what philosophers really believed, they'd all be out of work... so I'm off to see what the rest of them have to say about life, the universe and everything.
