The Church Fathers

Tertullian

The North African church father Tertullian is very critical of attempts of Christian Platonism or a Christian Aristoteleanism because of what he sees the influence of Gnosticism to Christian theology. It’s Tertullian who said I believe what is absurd in his work “The Body of Christ”. In the context that the gnostic said the idea of divine incarnation is absurd. He has taken to Stoic philosophical ideas. He maintains that the goodness of the material world by virtue of the Logos who orders the material world.

Cyrenaics & Epicurean

Cyrenaics

Cyrenaics are egoistic hedonists, which means they pursue individualized pleasure. In the history of ethics, they stand as the first clear cut school of thought advocating the maximum pleasure of the maximum intensity of the maximum immediacy. To get to that, one need to “know thyself”, the purpose is to understand what will give you enjoyment, so self understanding becomes an instrument for hedonistic purposes. Knowing is a matter of sense experience and its in our sense experience that we enjoy pleasure or feel pain. There is no universal law of what all people find pleasurable, it’s just the individual seeks to pleasure to maximize for herself or himself. They recognize unrestrained access produces pain the morning after and want to avoid such things. That is a description of characteristic of Aristippus of Cyrene.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Aristotle was a student of Plato’s, which means where he disagrees with Plato’s, he was forced to give reasons. He shared Plato’s concern of the improvement of the soul, he distinguishes between what appears to be good for some people and what is really good in itself, and he distinguishes between opinion and knowledge, appearance and reality, like Plato, he is concerned that the Good is our purpose. He agrees with Plato about there being unchanging Forms or essences that represent what is ideal. But he is also quite critical of Plato. Aristotle’s style is quite different from Plato’s since it is more scientific and analytic rather than literary.

Plato’s Epistemology

There are two lines of thought emerges in the pre-Socratics, one has to do with pre-scientific cosmology, in which Sophists raised the question about the epistemology, about the possibility of knowing anything about the reality that governs the nature at all. The other one was the notion of the moral order, which also raised an epistemological question, can we really know objective truth in ethical matters, are there universal moral ideals or man is the measure of all things. The same question of knowledge vs. skepticism develop in both lines of thought. Plato inherits the question from the pre-Socratics. His Meno is trying to address specifically this issue, it focuses on the question “can virtue be taught” as we still talked about today. In asking whether virtue can be taught, we first need to know what is virtue, and in turn what is knowledge.

The Beginning of Greek Philosophy

Early Greek philosophers are pre-scientific scientists. They asks about questions of origins of cosmos as we know it. Early Greek poets, dramatists had the conviction that the cosmic order is also a moral order, there is a notion of cosmic justice in Odyssey and Iliad, Hesiod etc. The question is whether there is an order to the cosmos that includes a moral order and if it is a moral universe, how do we explain that effect. We have two philosophical lines of thought in accounting for the origin of Greek philosophy here, one that focus on reflection of the physical universe, and the other on the moral order.