Review for Mid-Term Exam

REVIEW FOR EXAM #1, PHILOSOPHY 02

My Valentine’s thought today, since it’s Valentine’s Day, the book of Proverbs.  What’s it say:  “A good wife is to be sought.”  

[Audience: I thought you were going to say “good wife, good life” (laughter)]

That would be a simplification of the statement. She’s worth more, a good wife is worth more than rubies, precious metal, gold, diamond.  You see--no kidding around there.  Seek first the things that are most valuable in this lifetime. Career is important.  Yeah, sort of, but family is going to be #1 in your lifetime.  

Okay, now I want to talk with some seriousness about the exam.  We need a strategy.  You need a strategy when you’re going to be examined, right, and when you’re going to be tested on knowledge, skills, whatever you’re going to have to face.  Now listen, the function of examination, from my side, it’s not to snare, it’s not to create an obstacle to you.  This is just the culmination, the consolidation of our learning process.  So it’s a very important part of the pedagogy of this class this week.  Today we’re going to have a full-scale review, and I love reviews, because reviews kind of bring up themes that we’ve seen and we may have forgotten about already.  So we’re going to have another good look at them.  

Now, you know how important lecture notes are. This is the chance to really demonstrate your note-taking ability.  You take good notes today, I can guarantee you that that will correlate with a better grade, for sure. There’s no doubt about that. I can prove it scientifically. The correlation of good note-taking with the exam.  Question:

[Audience: Will we have to write a lecture note on this?]

No.  This is more than a lecture note because this is an exam.  If you look at the rubric, you’re going to see it’s worth a lot more in terms of your grade.  So here’s a chance to get yourself a nice score by taking very good notes today.  Also, we’re going to be consolidating our knowledge, bringing it together, and then I’m going to ascertain fields of knowledge that are important, and they’re going to be on your exam.  I cannot examine you on everything that we’ve presented in class. So much of our class has been spiritual, has been intuitive, has been emotional, has been inchoate understanding.  And you take that with you. That’s eternal. But the exam, we’re here, we’re after what can I recognize as a fair sense that I know that my students are doing well enough to have learned the material and to where I feel confident about the class in general and your learning.  

One more thing. The material that we’ll cover in this review today will be the material that you will be facing on your exam.  So don’t fret over the fact, you may be thinking, “How is he going to test us with all that lecture material and so forth?”  Today, focus on what I’m saying today, is the clue.  I have a study guide for us.  It’s the review study for this exam.  And this, more or less, ascertains and establishes that knowledge base that we’re looking for.  

[Audience: Question from the audience: Will it be multiple choice?]

Yes.  There may be to a certain extent, but I’ll point that out during this review.  Incidentally, here’s another page that is a review of Medieval Philosophy that kind of will also help you with your lecture notes.  By the way, I thought of something. When I studied philosophy, we had a practice of sharing notes with each other. Some people were better, more gifted at taking notes.  If in your team or other classmates somebody’s a good note-taking, by all means, share, have a study group.  

[Audience: We just did that right before you walked in.]

Well, it’s going to take a couple hours probably to prepare. Perfect.  Good stuff, Jeff.  That’s very, very important.  Jeff, can you share that with Adam, too.   The notes, your notes.

[Audience:  Yeah, I have his email down already.]

Just help each other out, okay. Thank you.  By the way, I really want to introduce this, I call it The Machiavellian Refutation.  And that was what I was to deliver to you on Thursday.  I put it down here.  I’m going to give this to you before the end of our class, and Michael has some reading.  He’s going to be our lecturer on Thursday.  So we’re already to the point where we’re having our guest lecturer, Michael Vicario.  He’s got two readings here, and these are going to be a reading assignment that I want you to have prepared for next Tuesday.  You don’t necessarily have to have read it by Thursday.  It’s going to have nothing to do with the exam.  Are1 there any review notes left over?  This is what he needs.  You can sign there.  That one.  Is there another one, the Medieval Philosophy review?  Okay.  Can you give one to Tom?  I’ll get those at the end with the Machiavellian Refutation.  Here it is Tom.  I think you’re going to like that.  

If we have time at the end of the class – you know how I am with that – then we’ll look at the Machiavellian Refutation. Somehow I think this review is going to take up most of the class.  

Okay, let’s just start with the review sheet, the one that has at the top “Review Study Guide for Exam #1 Philosophy 02.”  There’s going to be a section on lexicon terms.  I’m going to give you a bunch of terms, let’s say 10.  You’re going to have to select 5 of those.  So I’m going to give you, in every category you will have an option. There may be one essay though, however, that is required for everybody – there won’t be an option.  But in all of the other parts of this exam, you will have an option to choose and select.  So the lexicon terms here, I’ve got quite a bit of them. We’re just going to start going down through these.  I want you to try to raise your hands and give us the answer.  

Hermeneutic.  That was on that spot quiz.  

[Audience: Interpretation.] 

Hermeneutic, ‘hermeneuein’ is your Greek verb.  So it’s etymology is Greek.  I’ll write this down.  Here’s the term in English today that we use, hermeneutic, and it’s adjective is hermeneutical.  There’s even a discipline called hermeneutics, plural. So, those are the ways you’ll see it.  But it comes from the Greek term which is to understand, this verb ‘hermeneuein’. And is that not one of the more important terms of this course? Yes.  Both in English and in Greek.  

Telos.  

[Audience: The good or the goal.]

Okay.  Let’s get a couple more meanings for that one.  What I want you to think first is end, goal, good.  You said objective, and that’s a broad interpretation, but yes, it’s correct.  That which is aimed for would be really precise.  That which is aimed for – the telos.  And, of course, it’s Greek.  It is the key word in Aristotle’s ethics, and it is today, can anybody think of a modern day cognate that uses that root telos in our language.  Teleological, teleocentric.  This telos is kind of goal.  Jesus said on the cross,  “It’s finished.”  ‘telestai  in Greek, perfectum est in latin.  It’s done. Game over.  It’s the end, finish, goal, good, aim, that which is aimed for.  Telos.  You get a good feel for that word.

Arete.  Back to another Aristotelian term.  Huh?

[Audience: Excellence.]

Oh boy. But what else does it mean that is kind of counterintuitive.  Yes.

[Audience: Function.]

Yeah, you’re like “what?”  Excellence, function. That doesn’t make sense.  But it does, and when you think it through, you’ll understand a lot already about Aristotle’s way of thinking.  Function is excellence. A good flute plays well. A good guitar plays well.  You see. Its function is its excellence.  But what is the function of man? What is the function of human being?  Anybody able to guess. 

[Audience: To understand.]

To understand.  And I like that, too.  It’s not just thinking because understanding is so much broader.  Very good. All right, let’s keep going though here.  

Philosophy.  Our key term.  We really want to get a good etymology of this word.  It’s Greek.  

[Audience: Can we use Plato’s definition?  I think he said, “a search for wisdom and a love for learning.”  I think that’s what he said.] 

Now we can re-qualify that term learning as true learning or good learning, not just multiple choice exams.   They call that learning.  Philosophy has two roots, philia, the verb to love.  But love has a meaning of yearning, questing, searching.  Like the holy grail. The quest.  Note the root of the quest, question.  Philia – love. Sophia – wisdom.  Literally.  But often philosophy is translated as the love of truth or the search for truth. So wisdom, yes, but truth and true wisdom.  Good, now let’s keep going.  

Aristotle’s treatise politics, politiki.  Now we also too, I want to say the next term dialectic.  Remember how we looked at that, and also it’s related to what other word, what’s the genre of Plato’s plays, his literary works?  What were they called?  

[Audience: Dialogues?]

Dialogues.  Yes.  So you see the relationship of dialogue and dialectic.  We can say that in Socrates, dialectic is different in Socrates.  We’re going to get to this below, so just note “Socratic method,” and we’ll get back to that.  In Plato we have the dialogue form; 33 out of 36 of Plato’s dialogues have Socrates as the interlocutor which simply means character, interlocutor, a mouthpiece, in one sense.  

[Audience: Does politiki define the city-state definition?]

I just wanted to show you that the root of politics, which is the key term also in the course title, has city-state as its meaning. Michael, can you think of any other meaning for that, politike?  

[Audience: There’s political?]

There’s politike. This is a typical adjectival ending, politike.  

Medieval, medieval.  Now this is Latin.  Make a little note, say this is Latin.  And here’s how you spell it; media-eval.  Does anybody remember how this term came to be, the expression in Latin?  Yes.

[Audience: Medium aevum.]

Very good.  In medium aevum. And what does it mean?

[Audience: In between era.]

Yes.  In between era, in between ages.   And is that term a positive expression or is it pejorative?

[Audience: It kind of looks down on the era’s importance.]

Opprobrium, is the term Pieper used.  It’s pejorative.  It’s a put-down.  Very good.  And what are the two ages that it’s in between?

[Audience: One’s Renaissance but I can’t remember what the other name was.]

Well, how about, what do we call the time of Greek philosophy and  Rome?

[Audience: The Classical Age.]

And how about this, Classical Antiquity would be a wonderful expression for that.  

All right.  Then we have our next term, Renaissance. 

[Audience:  Dr. Wolf.  Looking back to the dialectic and dialogue, so dialectic is the Socratic method and then the dialogue form in Plato?

Yes, it transforms into the dialogue in Plato.  Here’s how I would like to boil it down.  With Socrates, there’s no writing, so it’s just like us talking on the street. You have seen old timers struggling to make a point and the other guy is like: I beg to differ, you know, back and forth.  It was Socrates asking questions, refining and interrogating, like Trey Gowdy on the Senate oversight committee grilling James Comey or Hilary Clinton.  With Plato the dialectic gets formulating this literary genus.  And then with Aristotle, it takes an even different meaning where it becomes more of a systematic classification of all kinds of taxonomic genus species for knowledge.  That’s not all that’s in Aristotle, but that’s a unique difference.  

Renaissance is a French term.  Yes, rebirth, born again.  But rebirth of classical learning, especially the rediscovery of Plato’s works in the Florentine Academy and their translation into vernacular.  Renaissance begins in Italy, real close to the time of Machiavelli, and then it develops further later.  The Renaissance develops in Germany and in England and a little bit later throughout Europe.  And each country kind of discovers its own unique approach to the renaissance.  

Anthropological.   What’s the root of that?  And we could also say a couple things about that term. The key to that term is anthropos.  What is anthropos?

[Audience: Does it have to do with humans?]

Yes, human being, anthropological.  But it’s also a period of ancient Greek philosophy, the second period, the one that goes from 450 to 400, and its characterized by the great period of Socrates and the sophists.  The Anthropological Period.  We’re going to come back to these periods, because I think they’re important. So you guys can get something to hold onto.  Socrates and The Sophists, which is a fascinating lecture in itself, but unfortunately we didn’t get into it. That would have been, if we had more time, there were so many more things I would love to say.  

Systematic.  Do you want to try that one?  Tell us everything you know about it. 

[Audience: It’s another period.]

It’s another period. Do you know the dates?

[Audience: They are on this review sheet, so 400-322 BC.]

Two deaths are characterized there.  Which ones?

[Audience: Socrates and Aristotle.]

Yes, Socrates and Aristotle.  And, what does system mean?  What does it mean to be systematic?  I sort of mentioned it with regard to Aristotle’s dialectic. 

[Audience: Classification.]

Classification, taxonomy, ordering, categorizing.  That’s not my favorite word.  We live in an age of major systematization.  Let me put it that way.  You may not realize it but that’s what the whole ballgame is about.  It’s a way of controlling.  It’s fascistic, it’s totalitarian, it’s top-down and that kind of thing. But that’s neither here nor there.  

Ethos.  Now we get a real solid Greek word, ethos.  You can see it’s cognate today in our word.  

[Audience: Is it truth?]

No.  What’s the discipline of philosophy it looks at?  Yes, the science of values, given value. The philosophically relevant science of human behavior.  The philosophically relevant science of meaningful human behavior. That’s the definition that I was given about this.  The philosophically relevant science of meaningful human behavior.  You could say psychology is a science of human behavior too, but it’s not meaningful behavior.  Because it already puts it in the spiritual, hermeneutic realm when we talk about meaningfulness and understanding.  

But ethos, you know what it means in Greek, the word just straight out?  Anybody know?  It doesn’t have any value connotation the way we do. When we say ethics today, we think that’s the government ethics office, the review.  It has to do with good and bad. It has to do with screw-ups and things like that, indiscretions and corruption.  The word didn’t have the connotation in Greek.  Ethos means custom.  Customary.  What’s customary?  When I lived in France, we drank wine with children.  In Rome, do as the Romans do.  Customs.  You say, “Isn’t that bad?”  Yeah, in State College, you give your little kid a taste of wine; but I was at a wine farm, and the wine master, the vingeron, was training his children in the art of wine.  So he was teaching them how to learn how to taste at a very early age so they could become masters.  Not a crime.  Ethos, custom.  And we do things here that the French would find highly problematic. And it’s the same when we travel the world. We’re always going to find little customary differences. 

Rhetoric.  Remember St. Augustine was the master of rhetoric and studied rhetoric.  And we have a rhetoric program here at Penn State that has been important over the years.  Go ahead, Adam.

[Audience: Persuasion.]

Yeah, good job.  Persuasion. An art of persuasion. Does anybody know who Trey Gowdy is?  Congressman Trey Gowdy from South Carolina?  Look him up.  That’s enough on that. 

Accoutrement.  Now here we kind of have to get our own little tweaky definition.  

[Audience: Object.   Instrument.]

Yeah, accoutrement. Instrument.  Very good.  And it’s those little instruments and objects and things that Dr. Wolf uses to help his students learn.  Pedagogical accoutrements.  And an example of that, a couple of them? 

[Audience: Eyeglass.]

Yes, these are accoutrements.  Remember my binoculars, my magnifying glass, my harmonica.  Was that an accoutrement?  That was an entertaining accoutrement.  Good, good, good, good, good. 

Etymology.  

[Audience: History of words.]

And science of words, too.  History and science of words.  Good job.  And then, this is its meaning, but we know how it’s used, and we know how powerful it is.  Because that’s all we’re doing here. All these definitions of words that we’re gaining here, I’m showing you some etymologies.  When you understand the etymology, you understand the word.  When you go to your online dictionary and you memorize the definition, that’s not understanding the language.  We need to understand roots.  And it’s also part of our philosophical tool kit.  The use of etymology is part of our tool kit.  

I’m going to send around.  This is just a, it’s not an accoutrement.  What do you call these?  Show-and-Tell.  My kindergarten report card.  I found that.  1968-69.  Look at all those S’s – Satisfactory.  It says I weighed 42 pounds.  Look where I got in trouble, the one here.  I take responsibility.  I listen when others are speaking.  I was a problem child, to be honest with you.  It took a lot of discipline for me to get educated.  That’s why I love teaching so much.  

Association.  Remember, this is the key word that Aristotle uses on the beginning of the politics.  And its root is socius.    Let’s think it through clearly.  Socius, friend, ally.  So when we think of associations in the most simple sense, where Aristotle begins his politics, we’re thinking of just that. The fact that we say, “Hey, I’m going down to the store.  Would you like to come with me?”  You have a primitive association. A family is a primitive association. But from those primitive associations grew much more formal associations which grew up to become political associations.  You see?  So, association, a bonding together, a working together, living together in the broadest sense.  

So you’ll have like ten of those terms, and I’ll ask you to do some number of them, say, five.  What is full credit on one of these terms on an exam?  You will give the etymology, where it’s relevant.  Where you’ll identify the original language, say Greek.  And you’ll say what it meant in the original language. And, where possible, give us the current term that we still use in our language.  Three points that I’m looking for in a lexicon answer on an exam:

1)  The term

2)  Its root language

3)  The meanings, the original meanings in its root language

4)  Is there a term that we use today that is a cognate? 

For example:  Telos; Greek; end, aim, goal, good; teleological, teleocentric.

[Audience: Was your teacher really Helen Keller?]

Yes, but it wasn’t “the” Helen Keller.  Isn’t that ironic, Helen Keller was my kindergarten teacher.  And I think she was a sweet woman. I have mostly fond memories.  I was just a kid though.  I do remember those days.  And there was a song called, “Love is Blue.”  Remember that?  [Humming the tune.]  When I heard that song, I almost would cry, even as a kid.  It already moved me, the melancholy. That’s odd.  You don’t see that usually in 6-year-old kids, that melancholy sense.  But I already had it.  And Leavin’ on a Jet Plane, when I first heard that song, I wept.  You remember that, too?

[Audience: Such a good song.]

Great.  You know who wrote it?  Not the ones who made it famous. That was Peter, Paul, and Mary who had a #1 hit.  But who wrote it?  John Denver.  Colorado Rocky Mountain High.  

[Audience: I just want to ask you a question.  For terms like medieval and renaissance there’s not really a modern cognate.]

Just know that medieval and medium aevum is the root.  It means in between ages, literally.  It’s Latin.  And the term in our language is medieval. That’s sufficient. Again, there might be a word on there that you might not during the exam know, but that you will have option to look at the ones you do know. 

[Audience: So it’s going to be set up as a fill-in-the-blank for the ten terms?]

Yeah, for those, for the lexicon. 

[Audience: Is it a word bank or is it just straight?]

Straight.  You’ll just get the term from me.  You’re just going to get the word.  You’re going to get  this.  Now, by the way.  Did I mention that I want a Blue Book.  Does everyone know how to get a Blue Book?  Does anybody have a Blue Book with them so they can hold it up?  Show the rest of the class what we’re looking for. Gotta have it.  This is a Blue Book. They are for sale in the vending machine in the library.  Go to The Bookstore.  Get a couple of them because you’ll need them. Make sure you bring one. There will be a penalty if you don’t have a Blue Book.  It’s where you write your answer.  I’ll give you the exam.

[Audience: Wait, it’s not like a cheat sheet?]

No the Blue Book is a blank notebook that you’re expected to write your exam in.  And it has all kinds of valuable pedagogical thing, and it’s a convenience for me. It helps me keep everything kind of tight.  Work on your writing. Boy, there’s nothing worse than when I can’t read your writing. It’s not going to help your score.  So do your very best. 

[Audience: Are we allowed to use pen on this?]

Yeah, you can.  Whichever you prefer.  I like pencil, but you can use pen.  And I’m going to let you use your lecture notes.  I’m going to let you use your lecture notes.  [Audience: Oh, my God.  You’re a saint!]

Yeah, like I said, my point is not to create an obstacle and to trip you up but to help the learning process here. And I’ve found, you’d be surprised, even with all lecture notes, you’d be surprised that all the students don’t ace.  You’d think if they had lecture notes, they’d all ace it.   But that’s not the case.  

[Audience: When you say lecture notes, do you mean the thing that we hand in or the things we write down while in class?]

Your notebook.  Your notes.  We better keep on this.  I’m not going to belabor the next section, Tool Kit.  The Periods of Ancient Greek Philosophy, Windelband.  You had a handout.  You had that page copied out of Windelband in your handout that I gave you for the Medieval Period. Remember the readings.  There’s a page in there, you can find it – that’s your task. Cosmological, Anthropological, and Systematic.  Okay.  What would be a correct answer for – first of all, who or according to whom; periods of ancient Greek philosophy according to whom?  

[Audience: Windelband]

Windelband, okay.  Get that right.  Okay.  The dates.  Let’s do it this way.  

1)  Windelband

2)  The name of the period: Cosmological, Anthropological, Systematic

3)  The dates of the period

4)  At least a philosophy or two associated with the period 

And you’ll already know, good enough.   For example, Anaxagoras, which period was he associated with?  What’s the Cosmological, the basic question of the Cosmological Period, what was the pre-Socratic question?  Yes.

[Audience:  Was it wise, was it a phenomenon or why does it exist?]

How is it that things come to be and they stand there and they pass away.  Notice there’s three parts to that.  The coming to be – the genesis of it – the standing there – that’s its being in the presence – and then its passing away, I think it’s called pthora.  

[Audience: And that’s cosmological?]

That’s the question of the cosmological philosophers.  In one word, it’s phenomenon or, plural, phenomena. 

[Audience: So our cosmos is the phenomenon, also will have . . .]

Let me just add this.  The word cosmos, the root of cosmological, is beautiful or well-ordered. The universe is cosmotes cosmos. It means universe, too. We use the word universe.  Cosmos is a better word because it means beautiful and well-ordered.  The universe and well-ordered.  You see it today in the word cosmetology.  Isn’t that a word?  But still, it’s beauty.  Beauty school.  Beauty school is cosmetology or cosmetician. The word cosmos. Cosmological.  Okay. 

Socrates, 470-399 BC.  Those are our dates. The Socratic method. Let me make a remark on the Socratic method.  I’ll give you three steps right here.  Remember Socrates didn’t write anything.  That’s why I said Trey Gowdy. Does anybody know Trey Gowdy who is a prosecuting attorney.  He does that in the Congress. But he’s a master.  He’s got that Socratic gift.  And they have videos of Trey Gowdy online.  The Socratic method is a method of interrogation, a method of questioning.  Questioning, interrogating, investigating.  In the Socratic method, Socrates is, for the most part, he is not looking just for definitions of any kind of word.  He is usually looking for definitions of the virtues.  

The first step of the Socratic method is to say, “Well, what’s courage?”  And to give us an example, a vernacular.  Well, what do we think of courage?  It’s courageous when somebody, a firefighter goes in there and saves that little kid.  So you start with the everyday, ordinary vernacular use of the word.  

Two, Socrates, through his investigation, through his question, he finds inconsistencies, contradictions in these ordinary use of the word.  The usual term. For example, the definition of courage includes saving lives? Yes, but is every life saved an example of courage? Well, no. Then we need to improve our definition---refine it, tweak it.

Three, refine the definition.  Having seen these consistencies, now we try to tweak or refine the definition.  And, you know what, this process is dialectic. This is Socrates’ dialectic.  And, by the way, it’s the practice of philosophy.  That’s what Socrates did. That’s the whole sum total of it. We try to get the true meaning of words.  So this goes on and on.  You see, we tweak and redefine it, and then we set forth a definition. We say, “Are there any more problems?”  And we continue to search and quest, can we find anymore?  Yeah.  Let’s refine and refine and refine.  Next: The socratic problem.  

I haven’t talked about this, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few things about it.  First of all, here’s the Socratic problem in three steps.  

1)  Socrates didn’t write anything.  Didn’t write his philosophy.  

2)  Plato uses Socrates as the interlocutor of 33 out of 36 dialogues.  Plato’s use of Socrates as interlocutor.  Hence, the Socratic problem.

3)  How do we know what Socrates’ true teachings were?  Because if Plato uses Socrates as his mouthpiece, then maybe what we’re getting is Plato’s views and not Socrates.  So, how do we know the authentic teachings of Socrates?  By the way, if you study the Bible, you can parallel this to Jesus.  Jesus didn’t write anything either. Everything we know of Jesus is from the Gospel writers.  Then how do we know that the teachings of Jesus were being brought about through the gospels?  Because we don’t have a bibliography of Jesus. But actually we do.  

Here’s the solution. Two possible solutions to the Socratic problem.  When he was young, Plato was an eyewitness to Socrates’ trial in 399.  So his account of that is the dialogue called Apology where he gives an eyewitness account.  That gives us a clear picture. That gives us a picture of Socrates, an eyewitness account.  Plato’s eyewitness account.  Bear with me, this is a little bit nuanced.  Well, Socrates is gone. Years go by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.  Do you think that the later dialogues that Plato wrote would be more like the eyewitness account or maybe more of Plato’s ideas as he got older.  His teacher was gone.  

[Audience: More of Plato.]

More Plato, correct!.  So some people are saying, “Wait a second. By the time you get through these later platonic dialogues, you’re getting ideas in there that seem to contradict the ideas that were brought about concerning authentic teachings of Socrates.  So one way of resolving the Socratic problem is to contrast the early and the middle and late dialogues of Plato. By comparing. And we say the earliest dialogues present a more authentic picture of Socrates and that the middle, you start to see more of Plato.  By the later dialogues – for example, The Republic and later dialogue like Timaeus – you see doctrines and teachings that certainly seem to contradict Socrates’ most authentic teaching which is “I only know that I do not know anything.”  That’s Socratic agnosticism.  I don’t know anything.  So there’s the first possible solution to that Socratic problem.  It’s called the order of dialogues.  

Two.  Plato was not the only, though he was the most significant presenter and interpreter of Socrates, there were other writers.  Namely Aristophanes and Xenophon.  And by comparing Plato’s works with Xenophon’s account of Socrates, which is called Memorabilia, the memorable things of Socrates which is a beautiful book, and there’s some nice copies, too, in the library here; Xenophon's Memorabilia. We can corroborate the authentic picture of Socrates.  Aristophanes was a playwright, and his picture of Socrates is not as rigorous as Memorabilia.  The Clouds, where he kind of mocks Socrates.  You say, “Well, what about that parallel with Jesus?”  Those historians who talked about Jesus, Josephus, the Jewish historian talks about Jesus.  Why is this important, and then we’ll move on?  Because I could show you this. I have a  Soviet production, academic production which basically denied that Socrates even, basically even existed.  And you know that there are thinkers today who would say the same thing about Jesus.  They will try to undermine the authenticity of his teaching by saying, “Well, He didn’t write anything.  The gospel writers did.  So how do we know if he actually existed?”  Because there were other historians, namely Josephus for Jesus’ time.  And for Socrates it was Xenophon, especially Xenophon and Aristophanes also.  

[Audience: What did you say next to Aristophanes’’ name?]

Clouds.  That was theme of his play, The Clouds.  Can anybody tell me Cicero’s quote concerning Socrates.  Did this get into your notes?  Yes.  Can you do it verbatim?  Did you copy it verbatim?  See this is good.  I know he got this in his lecture note.  

[Audience: He tells us that Socrates was the first to reign in  philosophy from the heavens into earth.]

What does that mean?

[Audience: It was the shift from cosmological to anthropologic.]

Good. Who specifically, whose specifically cosmological theory?  Go one step further. Who was the philosopher?

[Audience: Anaxagoras.]

Let’s start at the beginning.

[Audience: Cicero tells us Socrates drew philosophy from the heavens, cosmology, and into earth, anthropology.]

And Nathan interpreted it.  Go ahead.

[Audience: It was the shift from the Cosmological era to the Anthropological era.

And what does that mean?  What is the Cosmological era?  It is the era looking for that root arete of the phenomenon.  For example, Anaxagoras.  I may just give you that quote.  I may give you that quote on your exam and say you interpret it.  You tell me what this means, using all the information that you have. That’s a nice challenging type of question. I think I may include two quotes.  One from Plato, because remember I read from the Seventh Letter.  And then the one from Cicero.  

[Audience: One question about that.  While it was turning from the cosmological to anthropological to systematic, who is it going toward?]

Socrates himself. I mean his teaching but not only that. We didn’t get into the sophists.  It was not just Socrates, but there were other thinkers at that time who put away, they put away that mind-boggling quest to figure out the origin of the universe.  Let’s just focus on how we should figure out how to vote or to operate our government.  That was kind of what happened during the Anthropological Period.  It brought the focus of philosophy away from the cosmos down to the human being, down to ethics.  

[Audience: So it went from a broad view to the focus point where instead of thinking of the cosmos as a giant thing, now we are focusing on one minute little thing inside that cosmos – us.]

Yes, the anthropological.  You’re right.  Well-put.  What would Socrates do?  WWSD?  That’s one of my old jokes.  Everybody should have a bracelet that says WWSD, what would Socrates do?  I would interrogate them and make them give me a better definition.  

Who is Anaxagoras?  The pre-Socratic philosopher, the cosmological philosopher, the philosopher who Socrates studied and became disgusted with because he said Anaxagoras does not give, when he mentions the mind as his fundamental basis for Cosmology, he thought that he was going to discover there what was good, how things had been established for the good.  But there was no such thing to be found in Anaxagoras philosophy of ‘mind’.  So Socrates said, “I’m looking for the good.  I’m looking for the arete.  I’m looking for the function of the good.”  Really, you can see that.  

[Audience: So if Socrates was looking for the function of the good, what was it that Anaxagoras was looking for?]

He was looking for; I don’t know Anaxagoras that well.  And all that we have of him is fragmentary, right. We don’t have any treatises, per se.  But I think his view of mind was probably not that different from what is called neuroscience today. It’s the attempt to reduce the human being and evolution to say that basically our sciences can figure out how your mind works and how you think.  No, you can’t.  Because you can’t even tell me what is good for.  What is our mind, how to truly understand.  You see that.  If all the neurophysiologists and neuroscientists in the world told me everything that they could, lots of stuff about Jeff’s thoughts and his mind, you would have told me nothing essential. Nothing.  Neuroscience tells me nothing, remember, about the miracle of our own understanding. I challenge anyone here, go find me some scientific data that is going to help me understand my own understanding.  There’s your life goal. Don’t waste your time.  Just study philosophy.  Just practice philosophy.  I’ll tell you, don’t go looking.  There’s no intelligence in science because you cannot reduce intelligence to reducible substratum because intelligence is that which is the thing that looks for what’s to be. You see that.  The intelligence is the one who is searching.  That’s the interior core of who you really are.  It’s transcendental.  I think it’s eternal.  It’s non-spatial.  You can’t reduce this to any materialistic substrate.  That’s not going to be on the test.  But that’s valuable knowledge.  That’s valuable.  Remember that, Amanda.  In case anybody ever tries to con you into thinking there’s something like artificial intelligence, because there can’t be.  It’s a lie.  Yes.

[Audience:  I have a question about the Cosmological Period.  In my notes, I had  Thales and his phenomenon about, or is it intuition about the importance of water.  So in the Cosmological Period, do we see a shift from that to Anaxagoras looking at the mind?]

Yes.  And you have quite a number of philosophers in that period, the Cosmological Period.  Traditionally Thales is taken as the first, traditionally, and you have usually.  He provides that one element, water, right, is the foundation for all things of the phenomenon.  Then you have another philosopher who says no, it’s not water, it’s fire.  And Anaximenes says no, it’s air.  You see.  And so that there are different candidates, different solutions given to the cosmological and pre-Socratic question which we looked at Thales and we looked just a tiny bit at Anaxagoras. But there’s more there.  And that would be, again, a whole series of lectures on those thinkers.  But what they all have in common is they seem to be looking for some unique individual substrate that is going to account for all the given phenomena that populate the universe.  And then once you get to Socrates, you don’t see him doing that anymore.  You  just don’t.  He’s not doing that. He’s trying to say, “What is virtue, what is courage, how do we improve our lives?  What’s good for man?”  Then that gets translated even further.  But you do start to see, in the systematic period, you start to see a return to that looking for, giving an account of how the universe is constructed systematically.  And at the same time taking into consideration how human being is situated in the cosmos.  And the way the pre-Socratic view again, is kind of the grandfather of scientific physics – big bang is not much different.  It’s a pre-Socratic thing.  You’re saying, “Oh, it all comes down to this.”  Right.  It all comes down to this big bang.  That’s the cause of all material of the universe.  But it’s irrational.  They start in the middle of anywhere and say there is a big bang.  Well, what caused the big bang?  How did spirituality start to exist?  Why am I thinking?  Why am I being asked this question?  See, I’m understanding right there.  If you have a purely cosmological view, a physics view, or an engineering view, you will not be able to account for your own thinking process, because it’s not materially reducible.  It’s not scientific and it never will be.  It’s a spiritual faculty.  It’s the soul, and you can’t prove that with science.  Science is ignorant when it comes to the soul.  Sorry.  

Okay, 36 dialogues of Plato, 33 with Socrates. We mentioned that. Academy closes in 529 AD. They shut the school down.  This is Plato’s school. So I’m now sort of shifting over to looking to Plato a little bit.  It’s on the second page. There’s a quote there from Whitehead:  “All philosophy is a footnote to Plato.”  That’s how important Plato is.  Anything you’re studying today in this university, if you want to find the root of it and enhance your ability to research it, go back to Plato.  It won’t be easy.  But your professors will think you’re brilliant.  Then the miracle of understanding for us.  For us, not for Plato. We’re the ones because thought is living.  We are the livers, the ones who live.  

Aristotle, 388-322 BC, that right square in the Systematic Period.  His ethics is the science of the individual telos – the end or aim or function or goal for man.  That’s ethics.  He has this term that is crucial to the ethics – hierarchy.  It is a Greek word, hierarchia.  Politics is the master science.  Aristotle defines politics in the Nichomachean Ethics as the master science of the good, of the telos of the politike.  That makes sense.  It makes sense that our political government should try, if they had the method of lining things up the best possible way so that the good for human being, that’s what politics would do. It doesn’t do that. Isn’t it ironic?  Aristotle’s systematic taxonomic classification of all genus species, there’s the sense of systematic, system, ordering, classification, hierarchy.  Question?

[Audience: I had a question about the setup of the test.  I understand that the first part is going to be mainly the lexicon.  It is going to be that you give five out or ten. What about the different philosophers?  Will you give us a key phrase from something they’ve done or something they worked on, and then we have to elaborate?]

Look for those, as I said, there will be two or three extended quotes, like that one from Cicero and one from Plato.  There will be a lexicon part, a short answer part – interpreting those texts part – and there will be an essay.  I will probably give you two or three options.  

Okay that was in Aristotle.  Aristotle’s view of the good is a radical revolution of his teacher Plato.  Plato’s full philosophy aims at the good.  Remember I said in brief this would require a lot more of lecturing.  But, in brief, we might just say that something Plato was looking for, the good, he means the ultimate, immortal, unchanging truth, the fundamental basis – the good – of how we know the truth. It’s kind of like God.  Aristotle, in a way, brings that platonic philosophy of “the good” down from the sky to say, remember, the telos is just merely how well something works, its function.  Not the Good, capital G, Good, superlative, transendental, but  the experienceable good. A good arrow, a good horse.  These are goodz. Plural :good(s) as contrast  that with Plato’s Good---capital G!  

Now, use this.  When we get to the Medieval Period, you see St. Augustine, The City of God, 410 the sack of Rome. The court called The City of God the first philosophy of history.  Utilize this other page that I have given you, the review of Medieval philosophy.  This is more or less the lecture, this is the meat from that lecture.  

I mentioned, and it’s in the reading packet from Windelband, that section on St. Augustine’s view of the metaphysics of inter-experience.  And in the DeCorta passages and the lecture notes that are in that packet, the philosophia Christiania that St. Augustine says, “Christianity is the true philosophy.”  It’s philosophia Christiania, the true philosophy is Christianity.  This was in Professor DeCorte‘s lecture notes.  My mentor in Belgium.  

Philosophy gets a new definition in the Middle Ages with St. Augustine, and it still has the sense of a search for wisdom, but it gets ordered this way. This expression from St. Augustine:  “I believe, in order that I might understand.”  That’s what I think the positivity is, frankly.  I told you I feel that we don’t really see the positive sense of Medieval philosophy until we’re disenchanted with the modern times.  And when we see that the modern time leads us to gaps, walls, blanks, lacunae.  Why?  Because it eliminates this.  Our world eliminates faith as the means of truth.  For Augustine, you can’t get to truth without faith.  And I agree with that.   But I don’t mean faith in a narrow, parochial sense.  I mean that there is already initial – by the time you woke up this morning, you already made a radical leap of faith to the reality of today. You just didn’t cognitively acknowledge that.  You are already bathed in a total ocean of faith. When you get on the elevator, you have faith that the engineers who built that didn’t build it in such a way that you’re going to get crushed.  When you stand in this building today, you have faith that this floor – you take everything for granted – when you get in your car, you have the faith that that car is going to go.  Faith is the first activity of the intellect.  Reason comes after this. That’s the point in Augustine’s way of thinking, in his formula.  We could talk about that more. That’s very important.  Please, sometime hopefully before the semester is over, somebody will ask that question, and we can get deep into that. Because it’s the most important thing. 

[Audience: Could you go over what you just said about how faith comes before reason.  I was just thinking that isn’t it faith because you know that it’s not going to break?  The building and elevator and that kind of stuff, there’s physics and stuff like that that works in order to keep it working. Therefore, we believe that it’s going to work.]

Yeah, that’s what I think.  And I think it’s that kind of – take a little kid.  Just a little kid.  And you said let’s think, and it’s hard for us to think back when you got your driver’s permit. There was a day when you thought, “I can’t do that.’  You didn’t have any faith.  You thought, “I can’t do that.”  The teacher said, “I know you can do that.  It’ll take time and you’ll have to go through this discipline in learning, but you’ll get there.”  But then once you get there, you forgot all the steps that led you there.  You forgot the fact that you didn’t possess faith.  I won’t get into this now because it’s such a rich point that we need to excavate.

[Audience: This is post-test, but because of the class we missed last Thursday, how will that affect our presentations?]

Thanks for that, because I want to clarify that.  Here’s what I would like to do. We missed a presentation last Thursday.  We missed #2 presentation.  Next Thursday, we will have presentation #2 first of all and then we will have presentation #3.  We’ll be right back on our schedule.  Because there was no presentation scheduled this week, full period exam on Thursday, Michael guest lecturer on Tuesday, two presentations on Thursday.  We have one more week after that, an ordinary week where I will lecture, and then Spring Break. So we have a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.  Hold on before you go.  I’ve got more things to hand out here.  These are the readings for Michael’s lecture for next Tuesday.  

The other reading here, “What is Freedom?”  for next Tuesday.  And one more.  This is the Machiavellian Refutations I promised you last Thursday.  It will not be on the test.  Did everybody get three handouts; two for Michael’s lecture and the Machiavellian Refutations?  I know that you want to talk about engineering.  We will do that.  

Class dismissed.  

[Audience; I took down everyone’s emails that wanted this.]

You got everybody?  If you send it to me, I could send it to the whole class. 

[Audience:  I’ll do that as well.  I was just saying because I was going to do it on Google Docs, so if anyone had an extra note, they can put it on.  I could just send it to you.]

What does ethos mean?

[Audience: Ethical.]

That’s its cognate but what’s its function?

[Audience: Custom, I’m sorry.] 

You know, all this is interrelated, but how do we relate that to people?  This looks good.  Hold on.  Okay, I’m going to say here “thoughts.”  

[Audience: I’ll send that to you once I get to my next class.]

[Audience: Just for certain things.  I won’t finish writing a word, if I want to write “really = rly.”]  

Okay.  I added a couple of corrections.  That’s fine. 

[Audience: Alright.  Thank you, Dr. Wolf.  I’ll send this to you after I’ve made some changes.] 

What Positive Value can Medieval Philosophy Offer to Us in the Contemporary Scene? Fourth Lecture (1-31-17)

What we can expect from today’s lecture and what we should be focusing on especially.  Today I have a thesis that I would like to state.  Originally in the syllabus, the title was The Tale of Two Cities for this lecture, borrowing from Dickens.  But I would like to add another, even more-focused title.   And the title is What Positive Value can Medieval Philosophy Offer to Us in the Contemporary Scene.  What of value can medieval philosophy offer to us concerning the 21^st century?   So we’ll be looking at some examples of medieval philosophy today and, in particular, how they may be of use to us, the value that they would have for us today in terms of our thinking, in terms of our grasping of human being, understanding, truth.  I’m looking for the starting point here.  

The positive value of the middle ages and medieval philosophy for the 21^st century that is for us.  What does it give us to think?  What does it give us of positive value to think about?  

My thesis today is that the legacy of medieval philosophy is that it provides a coherent view of the human being within the cosmos. Ironically, this value can only be seen when the enchantment of modernity and its technological progress has been called into question, to some extent overcome.  As long as we still believe in this enchantment of a modern time with progress in technological equipment and improvement, we do not see the value of the medieval philosophy.  But it seems to be the case right now that we’re starting to see beyond that fascination, that enchantment with modern philosophy and its technological accoutrements.  Therefore, the medieval philosophy now becomes more clear, it offers itself, its positive value and what it has to offer to us.   So my thesis is that by looking at the philosophies that I am going to be presenting today, that we will get a clue as to some positive value from the medieval philosophy, what it has to offer us to think about. Essential thinking.  Nothing has changed. We’re still engaged in the same undertaking that has been described in the first three lectures.  That essential understanding of ourselves, our being in the world, grasping for truth.  Trying to come up with a coherent grasp of who we really are.  

By the way, I have decided that there is just so much material in the medieval philosophy that I want to present, I have decided that this week I want to do things a little bit differently, and I want to split this lecture up into two parts and on Thursday continue with this lecture.  So that this gives me a freedom that I know today I will be able to cut off short and not be so pressed for time. Then on Thursday I will have additional time.  I also want to interact more with the class as far as question-answer because I think it is important.  

[Audience:  We’re presenting on Thursday.] 

Oh, you’re presenting on Thursday. Okay.  That’s not going to take the whole class though.  I may use half of the class for the second part of this lecture, but I will let you present first.  Okay.  

[Audience:  Would you like two lecture notes then, one to do for Thursday and then one for the next?]

No.  Just one lecture note this week, please. 

[Audience: Do you want the lecture note for the re-write of the last lecture that we just did or this one?]

Well, I would like this lecture note fresh on Thursday and then the re-write as well on Thursday.  And the re-write, by the way, is an option you have.  You can take your grade as it stands and not do anything.  

Again, I’m going to tweak my style of presenting.  I want to slow down.  I do have a cold, so I am slowed down somewhat.  

Our last lecture, as we use our memory a little bit, concluded with a look at the term dialectic.  The very last thing we were talking about, how the dialectic transformed and took on new meaning as it moved through the thinking of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the philosophical trinity.  During the period of the Anthropological and Systematic periods of ancient Greek philosophy, according to Windelband. 

Now, let’s turn to our little reading packet, and let me introduce some of the things here.  The very first page, and I’ve written the numbers there with my own hand.  Page 1.  This is where I get these periods.  If you look at the bottom of what in the text is Windelband page 21.  It’s the very first page of our text.  Look at the bottom of his page 21.  The Divisions and the History of Philosophy.  You’ll see here that this is where I have borrowed this material. So now you have it.  You have factual evidence of the periods that I have been presenting.  This is good.  You see the philosophy of the Greeks, which we have looked at.  We really are just going to touch on the Hellenistic Roman philosophy.  We are sort of in a sense moving beyond that when we jump into the Medieval philosophy.  But I will make a few remarks on that. That’s the death of Aristotle to the passing away of Neo-Platonism, about 322 BC to 500, according to Windelband.  Next comes Medieval philosophy, and he marks this from St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa, from the 5^th to the 15^th century.  Now when he says 5^th century, this actually means 400-1400 – 5^th century meaning the year 400 through to the year 500; 15^th century meaning 1400-1500.  

Now different historians come up with different initial marking points to mark the beginning of the Middle Age, and we are going to be looking at several of those today. We have Windelband, the millennial period from the 5^th to the 15^th centuries, but there are others, and we will be touching on it in just a moment.  We will take a close look at the timeline in our toolkit in just a moment.  

Today’s lecture will describe in very broad lines, broad brush – that’s all we can do. When we try to zoom in, we’ll hit some fine points, but broad brush for the most part.  But let’s first of all look at the timeline, and let’s look at the term ‘medieval’.  I want to show you how this timeline, it’s not going to be a single line, but I will create one line to demonstrate this.  Of divisions, and we’re going to look to Windelband‘s book, where he would map the Middle Age. We are going to also map De Corte’s.  So it’s Windelband, and Jos De Corte, the flemish philosopher who taught me Medieval philosophy in Louvain, and also the famous German scholar Josef Pieper.  And this also gives you a sense that there is no-strict agreement on the exact starting point of the Middle Age.  But there are milestones which are characteristically taken to mark the beginning point.  Again, we’ve seen here it helps to say  it is the 5^th to the 15^th century, in Windelband’s reckoning.  

Here are some important historical facts which were integrally linked to the beginning of Medieval philosophy.  In the year 529 in Athens, Plato’s Academy was closed.  The Academy officially closed.  This is a milestone.  One that’s much earlier, another milestone; 410, the sack of Rome by the northern barbarians.  Important philosopher.  Remember Windelband said that this period will take us from the philosophy of Augustine until Nicholas of Cusa. Augustine lived at this time of the sack of Rome. He was eyewitness of it, and he wrote about it in this famous work called The City of God.  I’ll keep populating this timeline as we move on here.  Aurelius Augustinus.  St. Augustine.  Here’s a Latin expression concerning Augustine: Maximus post apostolos ecclesiarum instructor.  Notice how we’re not looking at Greek words anymore, we’re looking at Latin words.  Augustine is the greatest teacher of the church, “instructor ecclesiarum”, after the apostles.  St. Augustine is the most authoritative philosophical voice in the Middle Ages. And he has the authority that is almost at the level of the apostles.  

Having placed the timeline here, and we’re looking at the period of time, a millennium, even more than a millennium. Actually from the death of Aristotle about 1700 years.  The value of Medieval philosophy rings clear. Christianity assimilates aspects of classical and Hellenistic Roman thought, thus safeguarding it until Europe could become cultivated. Cultivated meant this, and I’ll read a little passage from an American author John Herman Randall, Jr.  Let’s find that.  It’s page 5 in this handout that I’ve given you.  I got to spend a little time living in the south of France.  And what I lived and experienced there is a grape-based culture which was basically unchanged for thousands of years and close to the Mediterranean. This was civilized and cultured. This was all held in place, he’s going to tell us.  But as Europe grew, as the northern tribes who had sacked Rome and taken over and then were being tutored by the church, there were still a great deal of forests, of wilderness, of wild beasts and so forth that had not been brought to the level of the kind of civilization, the culture you would have seen in southern France.  Here’s what John Herman Randall, Jr, has to say:

“In Italy and Spain and southern France, there was probably little break in continuity with the ancient culture.” 

You can even find that today.  And that’s why I would recommend that you travel there.  I remember one of the interesting things. We were harvesting grapes for wine, and there was a discovery made of some archeological materials.  You know, when you’re digging up some of the fields.  They called the Ministry of Antiquities in Paris and said, “We found something that’s of value, an object from antiquity.”  They said, “You know what, just keep growing your grapes there, because that’s probably the safest way to keep those antiquities.  We have so many things we have to look into in France.”  Can you imagine if we found an antiquity in America that was 1000 or 2000 years ago or 2500 years ago out here.  Business would stop at Penn State. And that would be considered a very valuable thing.  But in Europe there is so much antiquity there, that they just said to go ahead and the safest thing would be to just keep growing your grapes to preserve antiquities that were archeologically discovered there, that are still buried there.  Although even here the economic basis suffered a period of decline, but in the north – and we’re thinking of  Germany here and what would become Holland and the northern countries – from the days of the first Roman conquest onward, the main problem was to build up an organized social life in a comparatively undeveloped region.  And to assimilate as rapidly as possible the culture of the Mediterranean world.  By the way, the Mediterranean is the most beautiful sea.  The color of the water there and to swim in it is the greatest thing, just so beautiful.  You can see straight down for 20-25 feet, crystal-clear blue water. 

[Audience: Is the Mediterranean assimilating to the Germans and the northern countries, or are the northern countries assimilating to them?]

It’s more a case of, it’s a gradual process of the church becoming more of the dominant political factor and providing its education and philosophy and thought, which would transform all of Europe including the Mediterranean.  

The influx of new barbarians who captured the government delayed a process that had advanced under roman rule.  So at time there is probably a distinct relapse.  We can form some idea of the situation by comparing to what prevailed in America in the beginning of the 19^th century, facing a wilderness that had to be cultivated from the most basic threats and challenges to provide any form of leisure where you could reflect.  If we were having to be struggling with the elements of the wilderness in any real sense, we wouldn’t have the capacity to even have these classes.   To have the freedom and peace of mind that would be required for us to be sitting here talking about this. This is called leisure. This is what leisure is.  By the way, here’s a term to add to your lexicon.  School is a Greek word from a Greek root ‘en schole’.  To be ‘en schole’ means leisure.  So the leisure that had been won through the ancient civilizations that allowed philosophy to ensue and pure thought and speculation was lost.  It was a new ballgame.  Rome collapsed. Greece was no more. The Greek language was almost completely forgotten. The people were struggling with survival issues and did not possess the liesure to pursue philosophical endeavors.

So this period has the task to safeguard what it can from the ancient period and, thank goodness that it did.  Because, as I said, we still have the transmission to some extent of Plato and Aristotle. We’re still able to talk about those ancient works. There is the possibility – I want you to consider this – that we won’t be able to preserve this works in the digital age.  And there have certainly been works of Plato and Aristotle that were lost. We know that Aristotle’s Dialogues were lost forever. We know that there were gospels from the Bible that have been lost.  So it’s not a guarantee that we would have had this transmission of thought and books and ideas.  And an aside, a little footnote, I think we’re facing the same challenge today. Despite the vast facility that the internet provides of collecting.  I can go and find all the works that are extant and available through the computer, through the worldwide web.  I don’t think this will be a stable container.  I think the digital medium is extremely unstable, and we may lose that continuity and what is called patrimony of the ancient works. Ancient thought could be lost, even irreparably.  I think that’s a danger of the 21^st century we have to face up to as libraries “dis-acquisition’ books and entire libraries are transferred to a very unstable digital space. 

Paradoxically, for example, with a great Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas all of his works at your fingertips.  Has anybody here every accessed the works of Aquinas on the internet?  Yes, we got one in this class.  So what I say is – and this is not an insult – but when we have the greatest facility of access to all the treasures of the ancient world at our fingertips, because you can just carry a little phone around and access – nobody is doing it.  We’re losing the human ability to grasp and understand and care about that patrimony, about that treasure, save for in assignments and things like that.  But I think you should be concerned about this as citizens, having nothing to do with the University. This is humanity, this is our own legacy, our background.  And remember I think it’s very valuable.  There may be clues in Medieval philosophy that are going to be extremely valuable for us in the 21^st century, precisely because we see the veil of delusion concerning progress and technology starting to come off. We’re seeing the mask starting to come off. That experience of the Wizard of Oz, seeing behind the screen and realizing it’s not hunky-dory.  Technology produces as many problems as it solves.  And maybe creates more.  And if it does that, then we can say that is something to think about. 

[Audience: I just wanted to agree with that.  When I wake up in the morning, I grab my phone, I look at it.  I go to the bathroom while I’m viewing my phone.  I walk to class while viewing my phone.] 

Thank you. Thanks for being so honest.  But do you want to change your behavior?  Can you change?

[Audience: I am trying.]

Let me encourage you, let me encourage everyone to change your behavior.  Some of the notes you would say, our culture is too focused on machines.   Speak for yourself.  He did that.  He just did that.  He said, “I do this.”  So I can say to him, “Do you want to change?”  He can change.  But if you are talking about our culture tends to do that, you’re not going to be able to focus.  You yourself are the one who has to become an agent of change. The me I see is the me I’ll be.  Does this class want to be part of the vanguard of the solution to how we’re going to live life in the 21^st century on this planet.  We’re not selling cheap ideas here, ‘paideia’ as Cornell West said.  It’s going to require you to personally, morally change your own way of being in the world. Anybody want to be part of that?  Jeffrey does.  Excellent. Thank you.  How can you say no?  Are you just going to let everything Anschluss?  It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.  

At the upper limit of the Medieval Period we have already stated that this marks the beginning of the Renaissance.  Beautiful term – rebirth of classic antiquity.  Let’s focus on the term medieval.  When we’re focusing on a term, we’re doing definition, we’re doing etymology.  Both of these things and at the same time.  Medieval, and you’ll see it in British, English. It’s like this.  You’ll see mediaeval.  The term medieval comes from this expression, a Latin expression.  In medium (in between, in the middle of) aevum (ages).  In between age.  Medieval is the in-between age.  Pieper tells us that this term is an insult, it’s a put-down, it’s a term of opprobrium.    Here we have Alex and Katherine and in between. It’s kind of like.  Hegel said, “You know what, we should just skip this period and go right ahead to the researches of Descartes.”  The Medieval philosophy was prolix, wordy and didn’t have anything valuable to offer. This has been the characteristic view of Medieval philosophy.  It has been denigrated.  You’ve heard of the Dark Ages.  That’s what we’re talking about. The idea of a dark age, tends to obscure the positive light that we are trying to find.  My thesis is that we’re trying to discover what positive value the Medieval philosophy could have for us.  If we say that’s just a dark age, it doesn’t have any value for us. We’ve just more or less put it into the trashcan of history.  And that was the view that was taken for quite a long time.  Medieval philosophy was looked at as backward, as cloistered, as narrow-minded, parochial, under the service of theology, that it didn’t have it’s own autonomy.  

So this term, the very word itself that we use, has a kind of derogatory connotation, has a bad sense to it.  It’s “in-between,” not important enough to count as like the Classical Age or the Modern Age. Those are the important ones.  That’s the pathos, that’s the feeling of this lecture. The feeling that somehow this has not been given its fair chance.  Now good news was in the 19^th century, there was a kind of a revival of study of Medieval philosophy, and it grew somewhat in the 20^th century to now as we know.  Like I said, all the works of Aquinas, Augustine are available on the internet.  So everything has been, to a great extent, at least the physical materials of the books and thoughts and ideas of these philosophers, has been brought forward to us.  In fact, the school that I studied at in Belgium – I have some more show-and-tell materials I will bring on Thursday – KU Leuven, the university where I studied philosophy is the oldest Catholic university in the world, and it made a specific effort to try to rekindle Medieval thought and to try to bring a harmony between Medieval thought and modern sciences, so that there wouldn’t be this radical divide as we experience here.  For example, as you experienced in your own person.  If you’re an engineering student here at Penn State, you have probably almost no access to any knowledge of Medieval philosophy.  And therefore you’re very deprived, very impoverished, whether you realize it or not.  And we believe, remember part of my critique of our cultural contemporary era, that it does not adequately grasp the human person, it does not fundamentally grasp the truth about the human person, the philosophical anthropology.  Medieval philosophy does! What we need to do is humanize our sciences.  If we could humanize our sciences, bringing them in line with telos, the good, of Aristotle, I think we could produce meaningful scientific activities.  Is sending someone to the moon meaningful to human beings?  It looked really important at the time.  Now it looks like, “I don’t think so.”  Not very much. What did that really assist with anybody on this planet?  I don’t know.  

So many of our scientific discoveries today. What really at the end of the day does it do to help us to grasp what is good for the human being? Socrates’ question again.  And the answer is that there are just billions and trillions of dollars being spent in research that really has no direct relevance to our human life.  The quality of our life and whether we’re happy or not.  So it would behoove us to do that.  That was the attempt at the university where I studied. They were trying to bring those two lines of thought – the value of the human being which is characterized by Medieval thinking – with the more advances in science.  Do you still have a question?

[Audience:   So what was the exact time period of Medieval times?]

Well this is the point. What I want to say is that there are different views of it.  If you talk about Windelband, and we’ll go with Windelband as our historian, it’s from the 5^th century to the 15^th century. That’s it.  It’s a millennial period from 400-1400.  However, De Corte tells us that for historical purposes, he calls it a work-effective unit.  In other words, from historians it’s rather arbitrary.  Not purely arbitrary, but you could start with 400, you could start with 429, the collapse of the Academy.  You could start with St. Augustine and then you would roughly be talking about his lifetime which is 70-80 years.  We don’t have the capacity to precisely determine specific year date or beginning.  Because the beginning of a philosophical period and the end of it are not really necessarily somebody comes up and says, “Boo! Here’s the finish line.  You’ve just completed that.”  In fact, the renaissance thinkers, they didn’t call themselves “renaissance”.  Nobody of the Renaissance Period said, “We are renaissance philosophers.”  Nobody living today knows what we are today. The thinking of today will only be determined after the fact.  Ponder that for a minute.  The cultural thought era that we live in is really not grasped until it has been surpassed. 

Will future historians see this period that we’re living in as a period of instability?  On the precipice, on the edge of some sort of cultural collapse?  Or will they look back and say, “You know those doom-sayers and those critics of culture like Dr. Wolf that existed in 2017 were just lunatic conspiracy fanatics.”  Weigh it up.  You need to weigh this up in your own soul, in your own conscience, in your own way of thinking.  The youth has to be positive.  The youth – you guys – have to be somewhat optimistic.  You understand that.  I was once where you are now.  I was an undergraduate.  I was ambitious.  There were many things about the world that I still believed in. The government, for example, its integrity. The church, Roman Catholicism, to some extent. This is before all of these crises and collapses have been brought about in the ensuing years.  Now I’m 53 years old.  I’m a critic of culture.  To some extent you guys can’t afford to be.  Because if the youth today were actually to look at all the daunting challenges that they’re facing, you may lose your capacity to even act and be overwhelmed by the futility of the world system and its chaos and madness. Especially if you listen to NPR.  I mean, you feel like the end of the world is coming every day.  They just pile it on, crisis after crisis after crisis. The government is falling apart.  They want to impeach the President now, etc, etc, etc.  Are these real threats, challenges?  Is it worth something?  Or is this just all puffery and talk?  You have to decide that. But I’d like for my students, at least, to be a little bit informed to be able to think critically about yourself.   And I think that was Socrates’ goal when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  You must examine your life. 

Adam you mentioned what you said earlier proves to me that you are examining your life, albeit kind of on the surface. But I want you, as much as you can, examine your own lives. As much as you’re capable of being courageous enough to face up to your own being in this world at this time as Adam has done.  

As Gandalf said in The Lord of the Rings to Frodo, “You don’t pick the times you’re living in.”  Frodo said, “I wish I didn’t have to do this (carry this ring).”  You don’t get to pick the times.  But the time that you have been given, which is this time, that’s what you have to work out to the best of your ability.  People could look at me like a fogey when I talk about how great life was in the 70s, here in State College.   Community life was simpler, slower. We didn’t have computers then.  Life was better.  I actually wrote a song, “Back in the Day”---  I remember counting clouds in the meadow where we lay/ playing games with Suzie back in the day/ life was better back in the day."  Students get upset when I tell them that.  You know why?  Because it’s an insult.  You’re saying each young youth group wants to think, “Our time is the best time.” You want to think that the time of your youth was the golden age.  Is every age a golden age?  Is every age of youth a golden age?  Growing up in Germany?  I don’t think so. I know a woman who was born in 1935, friend of mine.  So her first ten years were grown up under the nazi regime.  

Let’s continue here.  But at this end of our historical marker the Middle Age did one thing very, very well and that is that it carried forward, it protected, as it were like a vessel, ancient work from the classical world and brought it forth, so that when the printing press, which is just right here, that that work would be able to be distributed widely.   And now we have the internet which is the printing press squared, if you will.  Here are some of the milestones; the discovery of the American continent that marked the end of this period; the inauguration of the printing press; Martin Luther and the Reformation; the new science of Bacon; the infinitesimal calculus of Descartes. These are milestones that could have marked the waning or closing of the Middle Age and opening of a new era.  But I want to go back even further. 

So now having taken a brief look at those milestones that marked the close of the Middle Ages, let’s go back to the beginning, the opening.  What really characterizes the opening of the Middle Age is the split between ages, and you still reckon time this way –-- B.C.-A.D (anno Domini).  The year one, the birth of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Even if you put it in politically correct terms which is common era (C.E.).  Did they teach that to you guys, that common era, in school?  Back in the day it was BC (before Christ) and AD (anno domini).  But political correctness came in and said, “We can’t talk like that. We have to talk about a common era,” whatever in the world that is!  So they made this up and they called it the CE and what was before that?  BCE.  That’s politically correct.  ‘Politicheski pravitel’nost’  to put it in Russian.  Political correctness.  It’s a Stalinist term.  

[Audience:]  Political correctness is the enemy of the good.

Yeah, it’s one of them.  It’s an example of trying to perfect.  The beauty of our language is not as perfection.  The beauty of our language is it is broken.  Hence why Dylan got the Nobel Prize.  He’s not a perfect poet, as clean and neat, but he actually has the authentic voice.  Our voice is broken. I can’t speak perfectly.  I’m saying things today that I hadn’t quite planned to say. I wish I could manage it more, but I can’t.  Perfect is the enemy of the good.  

So, the split between the ages, BC-AD, it still holds reign.  Even if the common era epithet is employed.  Because you still say something happened. Why is there common era, and why do you say BCE?  Because it’s the birth of Christ, it’s the birth of the Messiah that demarcates these ages. It’s a crucial transformative event.  Now watch. This is amazing.  Since He, like Socrates, wrote nothing, left no writings, and just as it fell to Plato to miniaturize and use Socrates as his interlocutor in 33 out of 36 dialogues, it falls to Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) to publish and establish the teaching of Jesus Christ in his letters.  Note also we were looking at the generic shifts. Socrates just asking questions, his idea of dialectic was, “Hey, how do you define courage or temperance?”  Direct conversation.  In Plato it becomes enshrined in the dialogue.  In Aristotle, the dialectic is transformed into a dry, scientific, taxonomic treatise.  Guess what?  The dialect is going to be transformed one more time into letters (epistles)! The style of communication now will be letters.  Letters and epistles reveal an added dimension to dialectic.  Let’s look at examples. 

I have given you in your reading packet today an example of these letters of St. Paul. This is very important to what we’re looking at.  Because this is really what marks the distinguishing, if you say what is the real ingredient, what’s the novelty, what’s the new ingredient that was added to the ancient Greek thought that produced the philosophy of the Medieval Period.  It’s certainly transformed.  But what was the spark?  It goes clear back to the first century. So the beginning of the Middle Age, we stated, is about the 5^th century.  But still the crucial ingredient that was added to it was added in the 1^st century. That was the Gospel.  Moreover, not just the gospel, because the gospel was the word was spoken and written about the truth of an event that had to do with the cross.  A teacher who taught without any books.  

Let’s look at the column here “Corinthians,” page 3.  These are both from the New Testament, these readings.  What is the relationship – put this question foremost in your mind – what is the relationship between Christianity or Jesus Christ and philosophy?  Paul is addressing that in both of these passages that we’re going to be looking at. The letter to the Corinthians.  

“Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel and to do it without relying on the language of worldly wisdom.”

Sophia=wisdom.  But Paul is not relying on the language of worldly wisdom.  So that the fact of Christ on the cross might have its full weight.  Paul is telling us:

“I am not a philosopher.  I don’t have anything to do with that.  This doctrine of the cross is shear folly, madness, folly, to those on their way to ruin.  But us who are on their way to salvation, it’s the power of God.  Scripture says, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the cleverness of the clever.’  Where is your wise man now?”

Where’s the philosopher?  he might say. You man of learning, you subtle debater, you dialectician.  He doesn’t say that though.  God has made the wisdom of this world foolish.  

Look at the other column from the “Acts of the  Apostles.”  Now this describes St. Paul when he arrives in Athens.  Paul himself now is coming to Athens 390 or 400 years after Aristotle died.  Maybe 65-70 AD.  Paul coming to Athens.  This is fascinating.  I want to look at this.  Paul was exasperated to see this town, Athens, so full of idols.  Of course, it’s ancient Greece.  Same with Rome.  Idols everywhere.  The civic religion demands the worship of idols.  So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and Gentile worshippers and also in the city square every day.  It looks like Socrates again, but there’s a difference, and I want you to mark that difference.  He has talked with casual passers-by.  So he’s just out there dialoguing, practicing dialectic, but it’s a new kind of thing.  He’s not practicing the search for definitions as Socrates and later Aristotle was.  He’s promoting something he calls the gospel.   Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers joined issue with him, and some said, “What can this charlatan be trying to say?”  That was the philosopher’s view of Paul. He would appear to be a propagandist for foreign deities, just because he was preaching about Jesus and the resurrection.  They were trying to see what this guy is talking about.  They said, “You’re introducing ideas that are new and strange to us, and we should like to know what they mean.”  Fair enough.  

Then Paul stood up in the court of Areopagus and said:

“Men of Athens, I see that in everything that concerns religion, you are uncommonly scrupulous. For I was going around looking at the objects of your worship.  I noticed, among other things, an altar bearing the inscription: To an unknown god.  What you worship but do not know,  but this is what I now proclaim: the God who created the world and everything in it, Who is Lord of heaven and earth, Who does not live in shrines made by men.  It is not because he lacks anything that he accepts service at men’s hands, for he is himself the universal giver of life and breath and all else.  He created every race of man from one stalk to inhabit the whole earth’s surface.  He fixed the epics of our history and the limits of their territory.  They were to seek God, and it might be touch and find Him, though, indeed, He is not far from one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being as one of your poets have said.”

“We are also His offspring.  As God’s offspring, we are not to suppose that a deity is like an image of gold or silver.  As for the times of ignorance, God has overlooked them.  Now he commands mankind, all man everywhere, repent because he fixed the day on which He will have the world judged and justly judged by a man of his choosing.”

Paul is presenting something new. This novelty, this specific fact of novelty – we will look at this more carefully as time allows us on Thursday – which marks this unique starting point fro medieval philosophy.  

I think we’re running out of time. Any questions though before you go, or do we even have time?  

          [aside] We’re doing Machiavelli of the Renaissance era, I was wondering if it would be worth doing a session on Machiavelli?

Yes.   But you know what?  Could you communicate this to the team, too?  If anyone has any specific concerns, they should email me so I can give you some consultation advice to give you guys a steady start.  Anything at all you need to know.  

Audience: To the rest of the group I actually started doing the notes that I have (surrounding noise).  I’ll start either doing the political aspects of Machiavelli’s years as a political figure.

Excellent!  It sounds like you’re digging into this.  I want you guys to have a strong confidence when you go in here on Thursday.  Let them know if they need to contact me, don’t hesitate.