The early philosophers were more than just thinkers pondering over the

existence of reality, although they did this very well; they were physicists,
innovators, and pioneers of science. They bridged the gap between a reality that was
known only by prophets and seers, to a reality that was knowable by all rational
minds. The development of the philosophical paradigm over the mythological
paradigm was essential in creating the world we know today.
Before philosophy, there was the mythological paradigm. Reality was the will
of the gods. Their mercurial temperaments very much decided the workings of
nature. When Agamemnon disregarded the staff and ribbons of the priest Chryses,
the wrath of Apollo came down upon him, burning the ships and men inside. When
Achilles called the people t assembly, it was Hera, who had taken pity upon the
Greeks, who gave him his words. The only knower of reality was the prophet
someone like Homer, who would begin a story with Sing, Goddess (Iliad), asking
for divine inspiration or someone like Hesiod, who would invoke the power of the
muses to explain the creation of the world. By telling stories, or mythos, these
prophets sought to explain the mysteries of the natural world around them in a
creative albeit illogical way. Although the mythological paradigm thrived, it was
only about 100 years after Homer that philosophers emerged with an alternate
explanation of reality.
Championed by Thucydides and Thales, a new era of exploring reality
emerged with the philosophical paradigm. Unlike the prophets and seers of before,
these new philosophers proposed the radical notion that reality is not alien to the
majority of mankind, but it is in fact knowable to any rational mind that is to say,
any person can know reality so long as they are working to be rational. Thales, a
Milesian who taught at around 585 BC, less than 100 years later than Homer who
wrote the Iliad and Odyssey around 750-650 BC, was the first to accurately predict a
solar eclipse using observations. By walking due east and due west, recording
peoples observations on the path of the sun, his findings challenged the notion that
it was the will of the gods that directed nature. His apt predictions of the fruitfulness
of olive gardens proved that philosophers were not simply unrealistic thinkers, but
were capable of thriving in the material world. Thucydides, at around 460 BC,
described in incredible scientific detail the path of the black plague, knowing that
millennia away from his initial observations, someone would diagnose the disease
not from the thumos (anger) or kosmos (power) of the gods, but by the symptoms.
Skeptic of the mythological explanations of reality, these rational minds sought to
discover the reality of physis, or the essence of nature through the genre of Logos,
rational explanations, using observations and rational analysis as their means. Thus
the philosophical paradigm was born.
Without the advent of philosophy, our world would be drastically different
from today. The early philosophers were not just rational thinkers, but were
scientists who predicted eclipses (Thales), discovered atoms (Democritus), and
even postulated the conservation of mass theorem (Anaxogoras). Innovators in their
own right, using the philosophical paradigm, these philosophers set the stage for the
progression of rational thought.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

Reaction 1: Sophocles
a. Clung to mythological world view
b. Oedipus shows that gods are angry, and will punish people who
dont worship them/turn to philosophy
Reaction 2: Socrates
a. Changes the entire focus of philosophy away from physis to self
knowledge, psyche
b. Elenchos
i. Elenchos cross examination, also refers to evidence,
refutation (important to Sophocles)
ii. Aporia confusion/bewilderment (alpha prefix that neglects
the rest of the word)
iii. Psychagogia to lead along (first purge the mind of false ideas
and then lead them to the truth)
iv. Shifts the emphasis to ethics/excellence Arete
1. Arete excellence, anything that performs well its
function
2. Sophocles: wisdom, courage, justice, moderation, piety
c. Way to find self knowledge
d. Knowledge
i. Define x
ii. Furnish a logos
iii. Each proposition cannot contradict another
e. Socrates: I know nothing
f. Dialectic:
i. Person claims to know x
ii. Socrates
Plato
a. Shift from psyche to explaining physis catalogue natural world
b. Cataloguing/categorizing the natural world
i. Objects participate in there forms
c. Forms
d. Divided line
i. Objects/states of mind
e. Tried to explain everything
i. Justified true belief
f. Tripartite soul parts that explain whole
Aristotle
a. Formal logic
b. Ethics: what makes a moral disposition?
i. Wealth
ii. Performance of function
1. Aim of every action
iii. Virtue: finding the middle
1. 2/3 examples

c. Moral excellence is the habitual dispositional control of appetites,

emotions, desires to a moderate
d. Happiness is not instrumental it is the end, the goal
e. To define Happiness
i. Account for you functions, then your highest function thats
rationality
ii. Engagement of your rationality
iii. Performance of your function has to be excellent, virtuous no
ones pleased by
V.
Using philosophy to explain theology
a. Philo: Hermeneutics
i. Literal what do the letters of this word say
ii. Allegorical translate every feature of an obvious story into a
secondary symbolic meaning
iii. Tropological
1. Tropos to turn the mind away from the world to a
moral/ethical point of view and ideal
2. Ethical interpretation
iv. Anagogical
1. Ana up
2. Focuses on the salvation of the soul
VI. Augustine
A.
The quarrel b/w faith and reason is really a fight between authorities to
which paradigm deserves our loyalty first and foremost
B.
Answer: both, but not equally
C.
First and foremost the revelation of Christianity
D.
Faith ratio, fides (latin for trustworthy)
E.
Our rationality is defective by Adam and Eve
F.
What instrument makes up for defective reason: faith
G.
Faith is prior
a. Reason must defer to faith
H.
Obligation of every Christian to seek rational knowledge (justified true
belief)
a. Fides guaerens intellectum
i. Faith and seek understanding
b. Augustine takes Platos metaphysical hierarchy from the good and
orders it differently
i. Everything that exists is in a hierarchy
ii. Ordinatio particular function
1. God
2. Rational Souls
a. Include human beings with: ratio, memoria,
voluntas
3. Animalia
4. Plants
5. Matter

I.

iii. What is evil? It has no positive existence no effective cause

1. It is just a will turned to something lower than itself on
the hierarchy
2. Privation boni depravation of goodness
c. Do you know yourself to be alive? (Augustine wants to make sure that
Evodius is not a skeptic)
i. Sifallor Sum if you are deceived about your existence, you are
ii. I think, therefore I am
d. First Premise (in Gods existence): You know for certain that you
yourself exist. I am
i. You have to have life
ii. You sense the external world
1. External perception/seeing
2. Internal - in conjunction with reason
iii. Ratio you have a mind that reasons
1. When we reason well, we discover something called
truth
2. The truths discovered by rationality have a particular
nature:
a. Eternal, unchanging, a-temporal,
b. What does this remind you of? GOD
c. But 2+2=4 isnt God, even though it is truth
d. Thus we must prove that wisdom exists b/c
wisdom has a certain nature that is identified
with God
iv. There is such a thing as rules/laws of the universe
1. Are there not laws that are morally?
v. Human beings are designed to be happy, happiness is
contingent upon wisdom, which is contingent upon moral
action. These moral rules are eternal and generate our
happiness that is the rudimentary concept of God.
vi. There must be such a thing as wisdom behaving in
accordance to moral wisdom
Anselm
i. Instead of using formal logic to analyze problems, there was a
movement to use grammar linguistic manipulation to
resolve theological problems
ii. Instead of Augustine inspecting nature of self, I see, I ration, I
use logic and recognize rules which are eternal and morality,
etc, St. Anselm uses a grammatical proof
b. God is that being than which none greater can be thought
c. If a fool accepts the premise and formulates an image of God in his
mind, but refuses to say that person exists in reality,
i. Then you are not thinking of God
ii. If you only think of God as a mental concept, then you can think
of something greater

J.

iii. Therefore you are not thinking of God because the thing that is
greater than what we think is what is real
iv. God is real because he exists outside the mental construct as
something greater than what we can think
v. A being whos nature is inconceivable is greater than a
conceivable being
d. This generates a problem
i. I can be skeptical/cynical
e. Distinction between cogitare (to think) and intellegere (to
understand)
i. Understanding is thinking that maps reality thinking that is
tethered to reality
f. So when you think of Gods non-existence, you are not connected with
reality
i. You are not understanding
ii. Your thoughts are not veridical (true)
St Thomas Aquinas
a. Justify the importance of Theology as a discipline
b. Gradation to be found in things (Cosmological Argument)
1. Cosmos order, gradation
2. There are some more/less good, true, noble and like.
3. There are the things that are hottest, noblest, etc
4. In order for us to make those judgements, there has to
be a maximum that we can judge by
5. There must be something as beauty itself, which is the
cause of everything that is beautiful
6. Since our existence includes moral existence, there
must be such thing as moral itself something
maximally perfect morally God
a. Because our minds recognize moral goodness or
moral excellence
7. If there were no perfect morality/perfect beauty, we
could not judge what is moral/beautiful
c. Teleogical Argument
1. Things w/p minds and reason act for an end, designed
to achieve an end
2. The intelligent being exists by whom all natural things
are directed to their end
3. God directs unintelligent things
4. Nature behaves teleologically according to their
function - but they lack intelligence
5. So there must be a creator that created and gave
functionality that is not self causing
6. Functionality requires intelligence to design the
world/universe in a logical functioning way God
ii. Aristotelian: form and function

iii. Argument for motion: whatever is in motion must be put in

motion by something else
1. Motion is the reduction of potentiality to actuality
2. The first mover, put in motion by no other is God
3. There is not an infinite series of moving causes the
first cause must be unmoved God
iv. Nature of Efficient Causes:
1. Statues are made by people, made by mothers and
fathers, made by grandparents, etc
2. Everything has an efficient cause
3. If something is its own efficient cause, it must exist
before itself
4. If there is no first efficient cause, there will be no
intermediate cause or ultimate cause
5. The first efficient cause is God
v. Possibility and Necessity
1. St. Anselm: Gods existence is necessary it is logically
impossible for him not to
2. Distinction b/w contingent and necessary existence
a. Our existence is contingent depends on
something else
b. Everything in the universe can possibly not exist
c. There isnt a single atom whose non-existence is
impossible
d. Gods existence is necessary b/c it is not
contingent upon anything
e. What is cause of the box of contingent
existences? God.
3. If everything in existence can possibly not be, there was
a time when nothing was in existence
4. Thus, because no box of unnecessary existence can
create itself, there must exist a necessary existence that
brings about the box
5. If Gods existence is not necessary but contingent, then
he would be in the box, and thus there needs to exist
another being that is necessary to cause the existence of
God
a. Lets just call that being God