PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Section One: Philosophical Language and Thought
Ancient Philosophical Influences: Plato
‘All philosophy is footnotes on Plato’ (Whitehead)
Reality
- Bipartite vision of reality: realm of forms and sensible realm
- Sensible Realm
- Accessed through the five senses which can be deceiving – such as when one
observes a rod that appears bent in a glass of water but isn’t really
- Shadowy elements of truths
- Doxa (opinions) may be formed here
▪ Subjectivity is at play
- Realm of Forms
- Accessed through the soul’s engagement of reason
- We can collect snippets of forms, but never fully comprehend them in full
- The soul is born here and returns here after the body’s death
- Episteme (true knowledge) is formed here
▪ Objective facts that all make perfect sense
Forms
- Everyday knowledge, such as what a dog is, can be held as one can identify the
attributes of an animal
- Abstract forms cannot be fully comprehended, but can in part
- Despite never having experienced it in its perfect form, we can access the
idea of equality and justice
- Hierarchy of forms
1. The good – ‘the parent of light and the source of the truth’
▪ Sustaining life force
▪ Like the sun in the analogy (below)
▪ The source of all other forms
2. Forms of qualities or concepts
▪ Beauty, justice, courage
▪ Can be replicated in some form (although fallible and flawed) on earth
3. Forms of material objects
The Analogy of the cave
- (1) prisoners sit in a cave, chained and unable to escape, watching a puppet show
- (2) the puppets are shadows cast by a great fire that they cannot see burning behind
them, and the prisoners really think they are watching the actual show
- (3) one prisoner is released and exits the cave, only to be blinded by the sun
, -(4) after having physically been enlightened, they return to the cave to enlighten the
other prisoners who reject him
- Light represents the painful truth that we live in a shadowy and incomplete world
- Escaped prisoner represents the philosopher who lives the rest of his life alienated –
like Socrates who was executed under the very Athenian Law he drafted
- Empirical knowledge is shown to be flawed and pone to misleading the subject
- Senses as imprisoning
Weaknesses of Plato
- Moral relativists would deny the existence of any definitive truths, rather arguing
that ‘truths’ meld into a society and change cross-culturally
- This is vs any notion of a Form of a truth
- Feminists could use a similar line of thinking as the moral relativists in that it is only
recently that women have been treated better, therefore the implication of Plato’s
would be null as rights are uncovered as time passes, not as reason becomes more
reasonable – reason of the soul is a constant
- ‘Goodness exists but never apart from good people’ (Russell)
Ancient Philosophical Influences: Aristotle
‘Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth’
‘All men by nature desire to know’
Reality
- Rejects Plato’s idea that there must be another realm of perfection, and argues that
this world is of inexhaustible fascination
- Extra-empirical matters are irrelevant
- Where Plato sought a transcendent explanation for existence, Aristotle though that a
deep observation of environmental and physical conditions could do just that
- As the ‘first biologist’, he codified the ‘per genus et per differentia’ method
- Look at the genus/species, then look at the difference within that category
- Using empirical observation, Aristotle discovered that the earth was round, and
predicted the moon’s eclipse
- Everything moves constantly from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality
- Scientific knowledge as ‘necessary’ and objects of perception as ‘contingent’
(Bronstein)
The Four Causes
1. Material cause
- Bronze
- Immanent and of this world
2. Formal cause
- Old Testament David
- Its shape / how it presents
3. Efficient cause
- Donatello
- Its maker
, 4. Final cause
- Art
- Its telos/end
- Aristotle was interested in ‘the why’ of the world (Jonathan Lear)
Teleology
- Aristotle thought that everything that exists has a cause, a telos that it reaches
- Humans → eudaimonia (flourishing)
- Acorn →tree
- There is an intrinsic drive in all things to reach their end
Prime Mover
- The final cause of all existence, that makes all things gravitate towards their own
teloses
- A totally self-absorbed being which spurs motion of the universe through the energy
it uses to think about itself
- ‘time cannot come into being or pass away, for that would involve the paradox of a
moment before time’ (Bradshaw)
- Wholly transcendent and inaccessible, unlike the Abrahamic God which is thoroughly
personal
- Pure actuality, incapable of going through change
- ‘every action has its equal, opposite reaction’ (Newton)
- Prime Mover causes movement by the equal attraction to it
Weaknesses
- Lack of empirical evidence for the Prime Mover is self-contradictory for someone so
passionate about empirical biology
- Fallacy of composition (Jesper Jesperson) – just because parts may have a telos, does
not mean the whole must have one too
- Telos of a singular human may be a gradual revelation, rather than a homogenous
achievement of all humans to some obscure flourishing
Soul, Mind and Body
- The mind/soul and body problem seeks to solve the issue of how the immaterial
soul/mind can interact with and impact the material body
1. Monism
- Idealist Monism
▪ Eleatic school of Greek Philosophy – Parmenides ‘what is, is’
• All reality is an unchanging fact of logical necessity, not based
on sensory experience
▪ Berkeley argued that ‘esse est percipi’ (essence is to be perceived)
and all materialities are figments of the mind
• Reality consists of finite minds (men), the infinite mind (God)
and ideas (objects of perception)
▪ Hegel was an idealist, viewing all of history as a graduation of ideas
and ideal states
▪ Leibniz’s monads
Section One: Philosophical Language and Thought
Ancient Philosophical Influences: Plato
‘All philosophy is footnotes on Plato’ (Whitehead)
Reality
- Bipartite vision of reality: realm of forms and sensible realm
- Sensible Realm
- Accessed through the five senses which can be deceiving – such as when one
observes a rod that appears bent in a glass of water but isn’t really
- Shadowy elements of truths
- Doxa (opinions) may be formed here
▪ Subjectivity is at play
- Realm of Forms
- Accessed through the soul’s engagement of reason
- We can collect snippets of forms, but never fully comprehend them in full
- The soul is born here and returns here after the body’s death
- Episteme (true knowledge) is formed here
▪ Objective facts that all make perfect sense
Forms
- Everyday knowledge, such as what a dog is, can be held as one can identify the
attributes of an animal
- Abstract forms cannot be fully comprehended, but can in part
- Despite never having experienced it in its perfect form, we can access the
idea of equality and justice
- Hierarchy of forms
1. The good – ‘the parent of light and the source of the truth’
▪ Sustaining life force
▪ Like the sun in the analogy (below)
▪ The source of all other forms
2. Forms of qualities or concepts
▪ Beauty, justice, courage
▪ Can be replicated in some form (although fallible and flawed) on earth
3. Forms of material objects
The Analogy of the cave
- (1) prisoners sit in a cave, chained and unable to escape, watching a puppet show
- (2) the puppets are shadows cast by a great fire that they cannot see burning behind
them, and the prisoners really think they are watching the actual show
- (3) one prisoner is released and exits the cave, only to be blinded by the sun
, -(4) after having physically been enlightened, they return to the cave to enlighten the
other prisoners who reject him
- Light represents the painful truth that we live in a shadowy and incomplete world
- Escaped prisoner represents the philosopher who lives the rest of his life alienated –
like Socrates who was executed under the very Athenian Law he drafted
- Empirical knowledge is shown to be flawed and pone to misleading the subject
- Senses as imprisoning
Weaknesses of Plato
- Moral relativists would deny the existence of any definitive truths, rather arguing
that ‘truths’ meld into a society and change cross-culturally
- This is vs any notion of a Form of a truth
- Feminists could use a similar line of thinking as the moral relativists in that it is only
recently that women have been treated better, therefore the implication of Plato’s
would be null as rights are uncovered as time passes, not as reason becomes more
reasonable – reason of the soul is a constant
- ‘Goodness exists but never apart from good people’ (Russell)
Ancient Philosophical Influences: Aristotle
‘Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth’
‘All men by nature desire to know’
Reality
- Rejects Plato’s idea that there must be another realm of perfection, and argues that
this world is of inexhaustible fascination
- Extra-empirical matters are irrelevant
- Where Plato sought a transcendent explanation for existence, Aristotle though that a
deep observation of environmental and physical conditions could do just that
- As the ‘first biologist’, he codified the ‘per genus et per differentia’ method
- Look at the genus/species, then look at the difference within that category
- Using empirical observation, Aristotle discovered that the earth was round, and
predicted the moon’s eclipse
- Everything moves constantly from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality
- Scientific knowledge as ‘necessary’ and objects of perception as ‘contingent’
(Bronstein)
The Four Causes
1. Material cause
- Bronze
- Immanent and of this world
2. Formal cause
- Old Testament David
- Its shape / how it presents
3. Efficient cause
- Donatello
- Its maker
, 4. Final cause
- Art
- Its telos/end
- Aristotle was interested in ‘the why’ of the world (Jonathan Lear)
Teleology
- Aristotle thought that everything that exists has a cause, a telos that it reaches
- Humans → eudaimonia (flourishing)
- Acorn →tree
- There is an intrinsic drive in all things to reach their end
Prime Mover
- The final cause of all existence, that makes all things gravitate towards their own
teloses
- A totally self-absorbed being which spurs motion of the universe through the energy
it uses to think about itself
- ‘time cannot come into being or pass away, for that would involve the paradox of a
moment before time’ (Bradshaw)
- Wholly transcendent and inaccessible, unlike the Abrahamic God which is thoroughly
personal
- Pure actuality, incapable of going through change
- ‘every action has its equal, opposite reaction’ (Newton)
- Prime Mover causes movement by the equal attraction to it
Weaknesses
- Lack of empirical evidence for the Prime Mover is self-contradictory for someone so
passionate about empirical biology
- Fallacy of composition (Jesper Jesperson) – just because parts may have a telos, does
not mean the whole must have one too
- Telos of a singular human may be a gradual revelation, rather than a homogenous
achievement of all humans to some obscure flourishing
Soul, Mind and Body
- The mind/soul and body problem seeks to solve the issue of how the immaterial
soul/mind can interact with and impact the material body
1. Monism
- Idealist Monism
▪ Eleatic school of Greek Philosophy – Parmenides ‘what is, is’
• All reality is an unchanging fact of logical necessity, not based
on sensory experience
▪ Berkeley argued that ‘esse est percipi’ (essence is to be perceived)
and all materialities are figments of the mind
• Reality consists of finite minds (men), the infinite mind (God)
and ideas (objects of perception)
▪ Hegel was an idealist, viewing all of history as a graduation of ideas
and ideal states
▪ Leibniz’s monads
