Philosopher's Fight

I have been studying Philosophy lately and I found an on line intro course by Richard Brown so I decided I would take it.  It's just a series of videos outlining some of the basics.

What I have been trying to do is understand each person's view without immediately finding all the faults with it (if I am arrogant enough to do that, which unfortunately I think I am).

I was fascinated by Plato's ontological dualism, and his elevated thoughts of Forms or Ideas.  I liked the thought of there being an ideal beauty, an ideal justice, an ideal circle for that matter.  It seemed romantic and rich to think of an intelligible world.

That lead me to consider God's attributes and I wanted to jam pack Plato's Forms into who God is and frankly I did and you can argue that with me later.

The glory of God being one of the Ideals.

Stepping forward I considered that we fall short of the glory and really that was Plato's idea of the physical world.  It was merely a copy, a shadow, of the Ideal world.  Or in essence, it was the falling short of the Glory/Form.

So right when I was about to get "Plato Rules" tattooed on my shoulder, I ran into Aristotle. (I don't have any tattoos)
Aristotle basically said (and I am colloquially paraphrasing) - Hey don't dis the physical world because without it things like beauty, justice, goodness, roundness, redness, being, etc would have nowhere to express themselves!

So I joined the ranks of Aristotelian army and shouted "Yeah Plato!" from my rooftop with a sweat band across my forehead and 3 pages of well practiced syllogisms in my hands.

Aristotle was where it was at!  He was bringing it home with the concrete concepts and something that made me feel safe and secure.  I ditched to romantic ideas of Plato and held tightly to my deductive argument!

I couldn't help but think though that both of them brought something beautiful to the table (which we aren't sure exists, but we'll get to that).

I skipped ahead to Descartes and I have to be honest.  I had an attitude.  Knowing very little about him, I just thought he was going to take me on mental journey and disprove everything in life and I would be left disillusioned and frustrated.   I found the same type of feeling I did with Aristotle.   Using his Method of Doubt he brought things down to a small list of things that we can know are necessarily true.   Though the list was small, it gave me a sense of security for some reason.

It was a good thing because along came Locke, Berkeley and Hume and let's just say if our mind was a house, they took it and tipped it upside down, shook it and placed it back where it was. All three are Empiricists and believe that we can only come to know things through our senses, the exact opposite of Descartes.  Good job boys!

Locke raised some points that I liked thinking about, Berkeley was ridiculous and infuriating and Hume I liked but... well... Let's just say I was ready for whoever was gonna come and bring an argument against all this stuff.

And onto the scene walked Kant.  I have to say, part of the reason I started the whole thing was because I wanted to get to Kant.  I'm not sure why, but something about him intrigued me.

To explain what he did for the whole barnyard is a little bit difficult without using a bunch of big words that won't make sense so I will just say that he told those experience oriented lunatics that they could have all the fun they wanted in their land of sensing but that they too should appreciate the physical world because it creates the place for the experience to happen.

Bottom line, the romance of philosophy and the logic of it have somehow been wed together in my mind.
I am still only a baby on the topic and have far too much to learn, but I wrote this song yesterday after listening to Kant tell the empiricists that they needed to appreciate the physical world and a priori knowledge because it allowed them to "know" using their senses.

I've held off on the tattoo for now.  I'm realizing I'm fickle and if I'm not careful I might end up with a full sleeve by the time this study is over!