Philosophy

When Diogenes the Cynic was asked why one should study philosophy he replied: "Why do you wish to live, if you do not wish to live well?"

I'm going to begin this section by thanking those that made my proper introduction to the discipline and tradition of Philosophy and to whom I owe a boundless debt.

Miraleste High School:

Willy Hall, Jim Maechling

University of the Pacific:

Gwen Browne, Robert Orpinela, Jim Heffernan, Larry Meredith, Herbert Reinelt

Claremont Graduate University:

Father Eleutherius Winance, Eric Miller, Jack Vickers, Alfred Louch, Patricia Easton, Charles Young, Tad Beckman, Richard McKirahan (Please see his excellent book Philosophy Before Socrates)

And most importantly, the family members and dear friends that helped me to work though the materials and the ideas that gave me the gift of deeper understanding, and most importantly, perspective:

Dan La Caze, Joe Carey, Mike Ryan, Greg Keese, Zoltan Gyurko, Andy Foster, Greg Miller, Erik Burgers, Rey Rivera, Will Bunn, Victor Greeson, Jan Marzcuk

Intellectual Influences:

Fredrick Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein have to be at the top of the list of philosophers who set us free from perpetual toil. Men who took over two thousand years of intellectual history here in the West, turned it on its head and provided us with an profoundly expanded perspective of what it means to do philosophy. Perhaps Newton was being too modest when he claimed he could see further only because he stood on the shoulders of giants. We can all be the beneficiaries of this wisdom and knowledge if we so choose. some of the giants I see when I gaze out...

Ancients:

Lao Tzu, Thales (c. 624-546 BCE), Siddartha Gautama (c. 563-483 BCE), Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), Parmenides of Elea (c. 515-450 BCE), Democritus (c. 460-370 BCE), Pythagoras (c. 570-490 BCE), Socrates (469-399 BCE), Plato (c. 429-347 BCE), Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE), Lucretius (c. 99-55 BCE), Ovid (43 BCE-17), Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE -50), Pliny the Elder (23-79), Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Simplicius of Cilicia (c. 490-560), Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815-877), Avicenna (c. 980-1037),

Medievals:

Peter Abelard (1079-1142), Averroes (1126-1198), Maimonides (1138-1204), Roger Bacon (1220-1292), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), William of Ockham (1288-1347)

Moderns (Englightenment, Scientific Revolution):

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), John Locke (1632-1704), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), Voltaire (1694-1778), David Hume (1711-1776), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), John Adams (1735-1826), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1830), Alexis de Toqueville (1805-1859), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855),

Contemporary:

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), John Dewey (1859-1952), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Learned Hand (1872-1961), George Edward Moore (1873-1958), Will Durant (1885-1981), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), Mortimer Adler (1902-2001), Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980), Karl Popper (1902-1994), Joseph Campbell (1904-1997), Daniel Boorstin (1914-2004), Donald Davidson (1917-2003), Smith (1919-), Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), Hilary Putnam (1926-), Richard Rorty (1931-2007), Noam Chomsky (1928-), Saul Kripke (1940-), George Lakoff (1941-), Daniel Dennett (1942-), Robert Nesta Marley Jr. (1945-1981), Peter Singer (1946-), Quentin Smith (1952-)

Natural Philosophers:

Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230 BCE), Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294), Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Max Planck (1858-1947), Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Hawkins, Richard Feynman (1918-1988), Graham Greene, Robert Wright, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, Niall Ferguson (1964-)

Literary Figures:

Chretien de Troyes (12th Century), Wolfram von Eschenbauch (c. 1170-1220), Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), John Milton (1608-1674), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Stendahl (1783-1842), Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), James Joyce (1882-1941), Salman Rushdie (1947-),

For further reading: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

And of course one cannot have heros without villans. The greats come too easy...

Karl Marx & Fredrick Engles, FDR, Che Guevara, Sayyid Qutb, Michael Moore (from the Leni Riefenstahl school of propagandists), Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, The House of Saud, Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, George Bush, Pat Robertson, Abu Hamza, James Dobson, Michael Behe,

And lest we forget modern history's true monsters... It's worth pointing out that in every one of their cases the savagery was undertaken in the name of the good of the collective.

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Josef Stalin (1878-1953), Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976), Salvador Allende (1908-1973), KimIl-sung (1912-1994), Agusto Pinochet (1915-2006), Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989), Robert Mugabe (1924-), Idi Amin (c. 1925-2003), Pol Pot (1925-1998), Anastasio Somoza (1925-1980), Fidel Castro (1926-), Saddam Hussein (1937-2006), Charles Taylor (1948-), Kim Jong-il (1941-), Jean-Claude Duvalier (1951-)

For further reading see in part Dictator of the Month.

The Appeal of Philosophy

The understand the value and appeal of Philosophy as a distinct and whorthwhile human pursuit, one must grasp the literal etymology of the word. It's derived from the Greek word philosophia (philos or love and sophia or wisdom) which can best be interpreted as The Love of Wisdom. Contrary to the popular connotation the term conjures of bearded recluses pondering the deepest metaphysical mysteries of life and the universe, Philosophy proper is, to my mind, a patient, careful and methodical consideration of the complexity of the World in all its manifestations. It has only been within the last couple centuries that the learned class has made the distinction between Philosophy and Science proper. Prior, what we think of as areas of scientific inquiry were the domain of Natural Philosophy. It's is in this larger and more comprehensive aspect that I think of this millenia old activity. See this page for futher background.

That being said, there's something that either draws one towards a deeper understanding of life and history and the implications of the insights derived in our lived world, or not. In my experience, this comes in the form of a tremendous shock to ones preconceived notion of what life ought to hold in store for us. An event that acts as a catalyst for re-examining our safe and secure old worldview. Think of Augustine's conversion or the all too familiar story of addicts "finding jesus". It's just a shame these mental midgets don't take their inquiry any further than they do.

Unfortunately, our current culture provides too comfortable an existence and largely frowns upon deeper learning and inquisitiveness, reinforced through our completely disfunctional education system. The level of knowledge and understanding represented by many of those young people emerging from even well respected academic institutions in abysmal. But this is necessary to keep the gears of the machine well greased. If we call killed our televisions and gossip magazines and burned all our superfluous possessions in protest at beings slaves whatever would the puppet-masters do with us all?

Fundamentally, Philosophy is about freedom of Mind or Consciousness and gaining a perspective in outlook towards the world that better reflects the reality of who and what we are as well as of what the nature of a live well lived consists. Your choice is a simple one... sheep or shephard.

Historical Subject Matter:

Epistemology - The formal study of ideas/concepts or justified belief. Derived from the Greek term episteme or knowledge. How we know what we claim to know? What is the nature of knowledge?

Metaphysics (REP Entry) - What makes something real or unreal? What is Mind? Does it differ from the brain and if so, how? The classic Mind/Body dualism of the Neo-Platonic tradition is a perennial philosophical issue. Or for many of us, the non-issue.

Logic - Logic is the formal study of reasoning. Of the rules of thought and their mis-applications or fallacies. This is an interesting site devoted to Logical Fallacies.

Moral Philosophy/Ethics - What makes something right or wrong? What are our obligations to fellow organisms, primate or otherwise?

Ontology -

Political Philosophy -

Important Concepts:

Reality vs. Illusion - Free Will vs. Determinism - Induction vs. Deduction - Contingency vs. Necessity - Immanence vs. Transcendence - Good vs. Evil - Logical Implication - Warrant - Certainty -

These are not merely hollow abstractions, the subject matter for late night cocktails or the purview of cloistered academics. They are the distillation of our highest potential and calling and our deepest, most profound insights. The stuff from which the world is ordered and our best guides to truth and wisdom.

In Memoriam:

Rey Rivera (1973-2006) - We miss you bother. See you on the other side.

Gabriel La Caze (1905-2005) - Beloved grandfather and guide.

Willy Hall - A true teacher in the Socratic paradigm.

Robert Orpinela (1932-1999) - Learned, wise and kind.

Eleutherius Winance (1909-2009) - CGU Event & Festschrift.

Robert Scherer (c. 1973-2000) - A potential that was tragically never met.

Hypatia of Alexandria - (c. 350-415) Stoned to death by fanatical Christian mob for defending science against religion.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) - Burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for heresy. Dared to maintain that the universe may be larger than the ecclesiastical authorities were comfortable with.

Mike La Caze