Re: Great Books

[bsrkz@xxxxxxxxxx]

> Western philosophy from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are a religion
> just like Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism are religions. As I proved in
> the earlier email, there's nothing particularly secular about them.
> Buddhism and Taoism also encourage rational inquiry.

Western philosophy is not a religion. At the very least, a religion must
involve some set of beliefs, and philosophers differ greatly in their beliefs.
Aristotle also disagreed much with Plato, so even if you are limiting your
claim to those three philosophers, they do not share a religion (at least not
one that can be identified with their philosophical work).

If you want to claim that Socrates or Plato established a religion, then
Aristotle seems to have rejected it. Is the claim that Aristotle established a
new religion? This is even less plausible.

> The founder is Socrates. Like other religious prophets, he claims a
> divine calling. The Oracle of Delphi declared Socrates the wisest of
> men, and by the calling of Apollo, Socrates was to act as a gadfly to
> the people of Athens. His mission as prophet was to expose the ignorance
> of his fellow citizens so that they might care for their souls. In all
> this, Socrates was guided by his inner daimonion.

Believing oneself to have a divine calling, and claiming to have certain
doctrines through divine inspiration or some similar source is of course very
different.

> In Phaedo, Socrates outlines his doctrine of reincarnation. Life comes
> from death, so that souls are continuously reincarnated into new bodies
> based on their conduct in previous lives. This is argued through the
> cycling of contraries, a yin/yang duality. Learning is remembering
> something from the past life. Souls mastered by bodily pleasures are
> punished with reincarnation into lower animals like donkeys or wolves.
> Souls dedicated to Socrates' religion achieve Nirvana.

Reincarnation is rationally argued for in _Phaedo_. I will admit that there
are various myths in Plato and sometimes characters invoke the gods, but I do
not think that any of this was intended to be taken on faith. Aristotle
certainly did not take such things on faith, despite being a student of Plato.
If Plato was a religious leader, it seems that Plato was not a very successful
one.

In _Timaeus_, the aid of Gods is asked for, but there is no claim of special
knowledge:

'TIMAEUS: All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the
beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call
upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the
universe, how created or how existing without creation, if we be not
altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of Gods and Goddesses
and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with
themselves. Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I
add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most
intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.'

This does not sound like Timaeus is claiming to be a prophet.

Another problem with the claim that Socrates claims to be a religious prophet
is that in the _Apology_, Socrates claims not to know anything:

'So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not
suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am
better off than he is,--for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I
neither know nor think that I know.'

> Socrates outlines his creation myth in Timaeus. An all-good, divine
> architect, the Demiurge, brings order out of a chaotic cosmos. The
> material world is based on a heavenly realm of eternal, perfect Forms.
> After this pattern, harmonious worlds are created, and the heavenly
> bodies are set in periodic orbit.

In _Timaeus_, the creation myth is spoken by Timaeus, not Socrates.

The Theory of Forms is attributed by Aristotle to Plato, not to Socrates (see
_Metaphysics_, Book I, section 6):

'Socrates, however, was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting
the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical
matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions; Plato accepted
his teaching, but held that the problem applied not to any sensible thing but
to entities of another kindâ??for this reason, that the common definition could
not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing.
Things of this other sort, then, he called Ideas, and sensible things, he
said, were apart from these, and were all called after these; for the
multitude of things which have the same name as the Form exist by
participation in it. Only the name â??participationâ?? was new; for the
Pythagoreans say that things exist by imitation of numbers, and Plato says
they exist by participation, changing the name. But what the participation or
the imitation of the Forms could be they left an open question.'

In section 9, Aristotle criticises the theory of Forms. Aristotle says
'Further, of the ways in which we prove that the Forms exist, none is
convincing[...]'. The theory of Forms was not a religious doctrine, but
something that was argued for. Aristotle does believe in forms of a sort,
although Aristotle's view differs from that of Plato's. But again, this is not
based on some sort of religious tradition.

Clearly Aristotle did not treat Plato as a religious prophet, but instead just
another philosopher, whose theories were open to criticism. Nor does Aristotle
claim to be restoring the true religion of Socrates. Aristotle does not say
much about Socrates. If your quotation really is attributing those views to
Socrates, then since Aristotle was critical of the views, Aristotle must not
have taken those views to be divinely inspired.

There are even post-Socratic ancient philosophers who diverge more from Plato
than Aristotle does, like Epicurus, who was a materialist.

Modern philosophers since Descartes clearly do not treat Plato or Aristotle as
prophets. Contemporary philosophy does not have anything like sects. Sometimes
a division is made into analytic and Continental philosophy, but this division
is not based on beliefs. There is a lot of diversity in views and even
combinations of views within analytic philosophy. Of course, there are some
belief clusters, but that is in part simply due to the fact that some views
work better together than others. Some philosophers might adopt worldviews
inspired by, for example, Aristotle or other particular philosophers, but they
do not justify this based on a mere appeal to authority, and generally do not
dogmatically adhere to the original teachings.

Even if Plato was a religious leader, this would tell us little about Western
philosophy generally. Philosophy is not a religion even if one of its founders
was also a religious leader.