Introduction of philosophy

Valeria Leycegui Rivera

 MAN, PSYCHO-SOMATIC ENTITY

Man before the world

Génesis

It is discovered as a subject thanks to the

Realizes the world around him
knowledge or experiences that it is acquiring

Rather than feeling one and unique in his irreducible individual personality, he feels like part of
a whole: his tribe, his geographic environment, his ancestors and his collective beliefs.

The primitive man begins to find himself as a subject of knowledge.

The man before himself

The man begins to realize his own emotions and to value. It is then that an ever-deepening gap
begins to open between the self and the surrounding reality. This is what leads man, in a long
process, to assert himself before the world. And before their fellow men.

All of which means that man can only face himself when he succeeds in overcoming the
primitive stages of existence.

The paths of knowledge

The first human knowledge is of a concrete order, because abstraction and generalization only
come after a long evolutionary process of intelligence.

Logic and epistemology are devoted to the study of modes of knowledge

 CONCEPT AND ESSENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

Science: set of explanations that serve for the rational understanding of a phenomenon or a
series of phenomena

Philosophy: Generalizing mental discipline, within which there are innumerable questions
related to the being, the essential and the accidental, knowledge itself and its validity, axiology,
etc.
There are many philosophies that are or want to be "methods" for rational knowledge. And
others that seek "the absolute", that is, that world of values in which it is possible to formulate
hypotheses, more or less abstract, of a universal nature.

The goals of philosophical thought. They are and have been multiple, precisely because there is
no one philosophy, but many philosophies.

You are a philosopher when you reason by generalizing or trying to arrive, through an
articulated series of reasonings, at a legitimate generalization

 CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Los sofistas

Pedagogy ( |paideia): Science is an art that allows you to achieve personal happiness. This
theme, that of personal happiness, does not take long to replace that of the nature or essence of
the material. At this historical moment, the | sophists emerge and, with them, the | rhetoric

 Protáqoras: "el hombre es la medida de todas las cosas". He affirmed that truth is a
relationship and that in such a relationship man makes the measure.

 Gorgias: Sobre el no ser o sobre la filosofía. He claimed that nothing is; that if something
were to become, it would be unknowable and that if it were knowable it would be
incommunicable

Oppositional
Absolute skepticism
philosophy

Sophistry was a kind of inversion of philosophy: philosophy had been concerned with being, and
sophistry is concerned with opinion

Socrates and anthropocentric philosophy

 Socrates' ethical position

Socrates, was born in Athens in 470 and died in the same city in 399 BC. Opposing the sophists,
Socrates starts from an ethical position before life. Man can approach beings, that is, he can
know the truth. And he must know it through an ethical effort, which at the same time
presupposes intellectual activity includes volitional powers.

Socrates thus experiences a fundamental concern for man, a subject aware of his own actions.
And he believes that the individual of the human species has a radical disposition or capacity,
different for each one, which is "his virtue", strength or disposition that can be perfected.
  Introspection

The problem is to discover that individual strength or virtue. To do this, Socrates advises
introspection: - "Know yourself." And this is where the pedagogue arises: Socrates was the first
of the great educators of the Western world.

 The maieutics

Socrates invented an indirect didactic procedure: the | maieutics or "art of giving birth to
spirits." This procedure is based on the principle that science or "wisdom" is not communicated,
but that each one can discover it in himself as long as he knows how to search for it
methodically. In what can be helped by skillfully formulated and graded questions

Platón and Idealism

 The being of ideas

Platon recorded the doctrines of his teacher Socrates, developing them quite possibly on his
own. Platon lived in a time of political and moral crisis, in which skepticism reigned and moral
values gave way. When there are no | values, but simple | opinions, the true philosopher has to
find a way to find the truth. And this path, for Platon, was the | episteme, science of what things
in themselves are. As for his teacher, for Plato to know a thing is to delimit it, define it, which
allows us to reach its essence.

The word idea (| eidos) means "aspect". But Plato affirms that if I see an object of white color it
is because I already have the idea of white. The idea of things is what allows us to perceive
them.

The idea is the | ontos on, what it really is. Thus begins the foundation of his idealistic doctrine.
These approaches led the great thinker to study the critical and essential problem of philosophy:
| that of knowledge.

 Platonic love

The love consists in looking for what you do not have. It is a movement of attraction. The lover
looks for what he lacks and this is how he pursues beauty. he beauty is something more easily
perceptible than the truth and that can lead us to it. It is thus, therefore, how love takes us to
the world of ideas: - "One does not enter into philosophy except through eros."

 The human entity

Plato is a supporter of the thesis of the immortality of the human soul

 The structure of reality

Myth: The cave is the sensible world, with its shadows that are things. the outside world, which
the prisoners cannot see because they have their backs to it, is the real world, which is that of
ideas.

 The two platonic worlds

They are, in Platon's concept, the sensible world of things (appearances) and the intelligible
world of ideas (transcendent realities). By sensitive perception we know the former; by
intelligible perception, we ascend to the latter.

 Platonic ethics

Platon affirms that each area of the human soul has a virtue that is its own: temperance,
strength and prudence. The first allows us to regulate our appetites; the second, to give
constructive meaning to our affective impulses, and the third, to proceed methodically and in an
orderly manner along the path of knowledge.

Aristotles and Systematic Philosophy

Aristotles, a disciple of Plato, was born in 384 and died in 322 BC. He was a universal scholar and
systematized all the knowledge of the time in a series of treatises and works that can be
classified into three groups:

a) Those that deal with logic, or instrument for the knowledge of science;
b) Those relating to theoretical sciences, such as Physics, and the fourteen books of the
First Philosophy
c) Those relating to practical sciences, such as Ethics and politics Aristotle also dealt with
Rhetoric and Poetics.

 Aristotelian ideology

There is a hierarchy of modes of knowledge

a) Sensation, which man shares with animals

b) Experience, which proceeds primarily by memory accumulation and direct
observation
c) Technique, which consists of knowing how to do certain things
d) Science or wisdom, which allows us to go back to the essence of things.

 The modes of being, or "categories"

Aristotles distinguishes four ways of "being": a) being by essence or being by accident; b) be by

reason of the category to which it belongs; c) be true or false, and d) be in potential or act.
Aristotle's systematic criterion descends to the formulation of ten types of predicates that we
can attribute to the subject: | substance, quantity, quality, relationship, place, time, position,
state, action and passion. Examples, in their order: man, a thousand, white, son, in Athens,
yesterday, sitting, clothed or naked, teach, learn. Some of these predicates or "categories" refer
to the essence of being, and others do not, but purely and simply to its appearance.

 Atheria and shape

The substance is the support of accidents, according to Aristotle. There are | first substances
(separate, independent) and | second substances, only mentally separable. Starting from this
distinction, the philosopher elaborates his theory of | matter and form.

 Theory of causes

Aristoteles distinguishes four species or types of causes: material, formal, efficient, and final.
Material cause is that of which a thing is made; formal cause, what makes a being what it is and
not something else; efficient cause, the principle or force that makes something go from power
or possibility to act or reality; final cause, the end of a being, the "for what" exists or is made.

 Aristotelian logic

It is the discipline that deals with studying logos; what things are. But Aristotelian logic is simple
ontology. Thus, "logical" principles, such as those of identity and contradiction, are more
properly ontological, because they refer to "the behavior" of entities in their mutual
relationships.

 Ethics and characterology

The characteriology of the virtues, their characterization, occupies a large part of Aristotelian
ethics. There are virtues | dianoetic (typical of thinking) and properly ethical (of character). The
latter, examined in the | Nicomachean Ethics, are the following: courage, moderation, nobility,
independence, fair estimation of oneself, sweetness, truthfulness, joy, friendship and justice

Man is a political animal (| zoon politikon) by nature. And the city (the "City-State") is a natural
reality. Society and State are identified precisely because man is a sociable entity. On the other
hand, the political ideal of the City-State will be autarky, which can be self-sufficient.