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Ancient Philosophical Influences Summary for Philosophy A-Level
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Ancient philosophical influencesForms A name Plato gave to ideal concepts.
Reason Using logical steps and thought processes in order to reach conclusions.
Rationalist Someone who thinks that the primary source of knowledge is reason.
Empiricist Someone who thinks that the primary source of knowledge is experience
gained through the five senses.
Prime mover Aristotle’s concept of the ultimate cause of movement and change in the
universe.
Socratic The method of philosophical reasoning which involves critical meaning.
method
Analogy A comparison between one thing and another in an attempt to clarify
meaning.
Transcendent Being beyond this world and outside the realms of ordinary experience.
Dualism The belief that reality can be divided into two distinct parts, such as good
and evil, or physical and non-physical.
Aetion An explanatory factor, a reason or cause for something.
Telos The end, or purpose, of something.
Theist Someone who believes in God or Gods.
How have ancient Greek ideas become influential for the Christian philosophy of religion?
Ideas from Greek philosophy greatly influenced the writers of the New Testament, because
the writers were raised in the context of Greek culture, even though they were living in Israel.
Before Jesus was born, Israel had been a Jewish nation. However, Israel was located as a
key point for trade routes, forming a land bridge between continents, and throughout history,
it has rarely been at peace. Whenever a nation in the Near East rose to power, its rulers
wanted Israel.
Alexander the Great was no exception. He had been tutored by Aristotle and raised in Greek
culture, so when his armies moved into Israel, Greek culture became predominant. The
Jews were allowed to keep practicing their religion and keep their own customs as long as
they did not cause trouble. There were some who stuck to their own culture without making
many concessions or who completely abandoned it in favour of the Greek culture but the
majority of people combined the two cultures.
The earliest Christians were people whose understanding of the world had been shaped by
Greek thinking. They adopted concepts from Plato and Aristotle when they conceptualised
ideas about the nature of God, the soul, life after death and morality, but sometimes, these
concepts did not quite fit with the ideas and imagery of the Bible.
Socrates (470-399BC)
Socrates is often considered to be the founder of philosophy. Before him, there were lots of
interesting ideas circulating, but there seemed to be no way to know which ones were right.
Socrates felt that there needed to be a critical method of uncovering the truth. People
needed to be trained to look beneath the surface and learn how to ask questions, how to
challenge their own assumptions and how to form their own judgements.
One of the key features of Socrates’ teaching was his habit of using questions to help find an
answer to a problem. For instance, he would take a concept such as ‘justice’ and think about
what people meant by that rather than just assuming that everyone has a common
understanding of what it is.
, Socrates did not assume that he knew all the right answers, but thought that people needed
to know the limitations of their knowledge and be prepared for no definite final answers.
He did not only use questions to clarify but to also challenge; he used it as a way of
exposing ignorance as his questions forced people into admitting that they did not really
know what they were talking about, or that their views did not make sense. Eventually, to
much of Plato’s horror, Socrates was put to death with hemlock after he was found guilty of
corrupting the young and not believing in the Greek Gods.
Plato
Plato is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher who ever lived. His writings are clear,
interesting and accessible. He came from an aristocratic Athenian family whose members
were closely involved with politics. Plato was still a young man when Socrates died, and the
death had a profound effect on him. After the death, Plato began to write, as a way of
keeping the memory of Socrates alive and as a way of defending him against those who
tried to spread rumours to discredit him. When he returned to Athens, he founded the
Academy, where he taught both male and female students until his death at the age of 81.
Plato and the Theory of the Forms
Plato notices that the physical world is always changing, and that nothing ever stays the
same. Plato questioned how people could attain true and certain knowledge, if the objects
they wanted to know about were never the same from one moment to the next. As soon as
people thought they had understood something, it was different again.
Plato came to the conclusion that the things we see around us in the physical world are
always in a state of process and change, and therefore they can never be the objects of
completely true knowledge. However, he argued that there are also other realities of which
we can have certain knowledge, which are eternal and always stay the same. These realities
are concepts, which Plato called ‘Forms’. We gain true knowledge through our reason.
In Plato’s view, the different things we see in the physical world are imitations and examples
of their ideal Form. When we see someone do an act of justice, we recognise it as justice
because we know what ‘true justice’ really is as a concept. We realise that the human
example of justice is not perfect because in this changing world, nothing is perfect, but for
Plato, the very fact that we recognise that it is not perfect shows that we have an inner
understanding of what ‘ideal justice’ or the ‘Form of justice’ might be.
This also applies to mathematics. For example, in our head, we know the ‘Form of a circle’
is, and we recognise it as a perfect circle, but once we translate that into the real world, it is
no longer perfect as it mathematically impossible.
Plato believed that the physical world is full of these imperfect imitations. We recognise
things for what they are because of our knowledge of their Forms. For instance, if we see a
tree, we know what it is even if we have never seen that particular tree before, because we
recognise it as something which reflects the ‘Form of tree’.
For Plato, the tree that we see is inferior to its Form as it is constantly undergoing a process
of change, and eventually, the tree will die and rot away. However, the Form of tree is
eternal and never changes. it does not depend on physical circumstances for its existence
and for this reason, the Form is the object of true knowledge, not the physical tree.
According to Plato, material things are given their reality by the Forms. He also thought that
we have an understanding of the Forms from birth, even if we do not realise it. We just know,
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