Week 2: the Greeks, Bacon and the Middle Ages

Schadewaldt · where techne belongs

1 Schadewaldt places techne between two other kinds of knowing. Which two, and what makes techne different from the higher one?

1. ABetween doxa and dialektike. Techne differs because it can be taught.

   Doxa is opinion and dialectic is Plato's method. Neither is in the quoted passage.

2. BBetween empeiria, mere experience or know-how, and episteme, theoretical knowledge.

   Techne differs because episteme concerns what is immutable and primary, while techne bears on what is mutable and in the process of becoming. The passage she quoted from page 29. Techne is productive knowledge, so it works on things that are still changing. So it ranks below episteme and above raw experience.

3. CBetween physis and telos. Techne differs because it has no goal of its own.

   Physis and telos are not kinds of knowing.

4. DBetween craft and art. Techne differs because it produces useful things.

   Both English words translate techne itself, so this is circular.

Schadewaldt · atechnia

2 What is atechnia?

1. AKnowledge that is productive and rich, but which has a false idea of the thing itself: a blunder.

   Her gloss on the slide was that atechnia is a false idea of the thing, held confidently. Note that it can be rich and diverse and still be a blunder, which is the uncomfortable part.

2. BThe loss of a craft when nobody is left who can practise it.

   Not a claim in the lecture.

3. CNature acting without human involvement.

   That is physis.

4. DThe refusal to use technology at all.

   The word names a failure of knowledge. Nobody in it is refusing to act.

The Greeks · Heraclitus

3 Heraclitus, sixth century BCE, wrote that sound thinking is man's greatest power, and that his highest aptitude is being able to say what is and “fashion creatively by hearkening to nature”. What does that assume about nature?

1. AThe unexamined life is not worth living.

   Socrates, in the Apology.

2. BNature is in harmony.

   Her summary line, written under the quotation. It matters because both Plato and Aristotle accept it and then split over what follows. All three agree there is an order out there. Heraclitus says you reach it by listening to nature. Plato keeps the order and throws out the method: the senses show you shadows, the real order is the Forms in a realm outside this one, and you get there by dialectic. Aristotle keeps both: the order is in the things around you, as form and an end they grow toward, so looking at the world is exactly how you find it. That is the disagreement the whole of week 2 is about, and the thing nobody disputes is that there is an order at all.

3. CEverything is in flux.

   The famous Heraclitus line about stepping into the same river twice. She used a different one.

4. DMan is the measure of all things.

   Protagoras.

Plato · who is speaking

4 What has to be kept in mind when reading any line out of one of Plato's dialogues?

1. AThe dialogues were written down by students from memory.

   Not claimed anywhere in the lecture.

2. BEach dialogue is set in a different city, so the arguments are local.

   Not a claim she made.

3. CSocrates wrote nothing, so the dialogues are our only record of his real views.

   The opposite of her point. She said Socrates was a real person, and this is Plato's Socrates.

4. DPlato does not speak in his own texts. Socrates was a real person, but the Socrates in the dialogues is Plato's.

   Which means you can never quote a line as Plato's own opinion. It is a character's. She ran the Academy point alongside it: twenty-six dialogues, and a school.

Plato · dialectic

5 What is dialectic, in Plato?

1. AThe ranking of the crafts below theoretical knowledge.

   A conclusion Plato reaches. The question asks for the method he reaches it by.

2. BA debate in which two speakers argue opposite sides to entertain an audience.

   That is closer to the sophists, whom Plato is attacking.

3. CThe Platonic method of inquiry, the best way to get to the truth, and the process of separating opinion from knowledge and understanding.

   Her definition. It is a method, which is why it belongs in a course on scientific method: Plato's answer to the question of how you find out anything at all. The cave is the picture of it, and dialectic is the procedure.

4. DThe historical process by which one idea gives rise to its opposite.

   Hegel and Marx, and about two thousand years later.

Plato · philosopher kings

6 Why should philosophers rule, and what does their education require?

1. ABecause they are the wealthiest class and can afford to govern without payment.

   Not a claim in the lecture.

2. BBecause they have left the cave and will not return to it.

   In the allegory the one who has left is made to go back down.

3. CBecause they are the only ones who want power, and their education requires rhetoric and law.

   Plato's point is close to the reverse: the people fit to rule are the ones not hungry for it.

4. DBecause they are awake while everyone else is dreaming, and their education needs geometry and astronomy.

   Her quotation described them exactly that way. The geometry and astronomy matter: for Plato mathematics is a way to gain access to the abstract, which is the contrast she later drew with Bacon, for whom mathematics predicts what physical bodies will do.

Metaphysics · where the word comes from

7 Where does the word metaphysics come from, and what does the field ask?

1. AFrom the title of Aristotle's book, which compilers placed after his Physics in the order of the works.

   The field asks what the origin and nature of all things in the cosmos are, and how we investigate them. A filing decision became the name of a discipline. Worth having, because it is a small concrete case of the course thesis: a category in science got its name from a filing accident. The subject's own nature had nothing to do with it.

2. BFrom Plato's Academy, where it named the final year of study.

   Not claimed anywhere.

3. CFrom the Latin for the study of first causes, coined in the Middle Ages.

   The word is Greek and predates the Middle Ages.

4. DFrom the Greek for beyond nature, because the subject deals with what is supernatural.

   The popular explanation, and she gave the other one. The supernatural never comes into it.

Which theory matches which philosopher

8 In a simile from Bacon's Novum Organum, the ant, the spider and the bee stand for three ways of working. Who is the spider?

1. AThe Aristotelians, who spin webs out of their own entrails.

   The dogmatists, in Bacon's word. The insult is precise: they produce elaborate systems out of themselves and take nothing in from the world. Ant collects and does not think, spider thinks and does not collect, bee does both. From Novum Organum I.95, quoted in full on her slide.

2. BThe Greeks, who let ethics and politics dominate philosophy.

   A real Bacon complaint, and a separate one.

3. CThe alchemists, who only store things up and use them.

   That is the ant. Bacon calls them the empirics: they collect, and nothing happens to what they collect.

4. DThe proper natural philosopher, who gathers material and then digests it.

   That is the bee, and it is the one Bacon wants you to be.

Bacon · his complaint about the ancients

9 What did Bacon say had gone wrong with philosophy in Greece and Rome?

1. AEthics and politics dominated philosophy, with the consequence that natural philosophy performed the role of a servant.

   The word to stop on is servant. A servant does what the household asks and nothing else. So in Greece and Rome, when anybody studied nature, they did it because an ethical or a political question needed an answer, and they stopped once it had one. Nature was never the subject. It was a supply of material for the subjects people actually cared about.
   
   What went wrong, in Bacon's view: this is why a thousand years of extremely clever people left almost nothing you could use. He rates the Greeks highly. His complaint is about where they aimed. The best minds spent their lives on how to live and how to govern, so nobody stayed on nature long enough for findings to pile up into anything. He wants natural philosophy promoted out of service and made the main business, because it is the part that gives you power over the physical world.

2. BThey had no mathematics capable of describing motion.

   Not his complaint, and the Greeks had a great deal of mathematics.

3. CThey wrote in dialogue form, which hides the author's own view.

   A fair observation about Plato and not a Bacon complaint.

4. DThey relied on experiment without any theory to guide it.

   That is his charge against the alchemists, the ants.

The Middle Ages · Deism

10 Around 1300 the first ideas of Deism start to develop. What is the picture, and why does it matter for science?

1. AGod as a judge who intervenes constantly, which makes natural law impossible.

   This is the view Deism moves away from.

2. BThe denial that God exists, which frees science from the Church.

   Deism is not atheism. There is a maker in the picture.

3. CThe claim that the world is eternal and had no beginning.

   That is closer to Aristotle, and it is what Christian thought rejected.

4. DGod as a clockmaker who set the world in motion, which makes studying the mechanism a pious act.

   Once God winds the world up and steps back, the world is a mechanism, and taking it apart to see how it runs becomes a way of admiring the maker. That is how a religious worldview ends up licensing mechanical science.

Plato · the shape of the journey

11 Leaving the cave means moving upward, out of one realm and into another. What are the two realms, and what is the climb?

1. AOut of the city and into the countryside, where there are fewer distractions.

   No geography is involved.

2. BOut of childhood and into adulthood.

   Age does nothing in the allegory. A grown prisoner is as chained as a young one.

3. COut of the sensible world, where the shadows are, and up into the intelligible realm.

   Plato calls the climb the journey of the soul. Sensible means what the senses reach: what you can see, hear and touch. Intelligible means what only thought reaches. The cave floor is the first and the sunlight is the second. Calling it a journey of the soul tells you the change is in the person and not in the scenery, which is why education is a turning around and not a delivery of facts.

4. DOut of the private world of opinion and into the shared world of agreement.

   Agreement is not his test. A whole cave agreeing about the shadows would still be wrong.

Plato · what it feels like

12 The freed prisoner is turned around, stood up and made to walk toward the light. What does the text say about the experience?

1. AIt makes no difference to the prisoner, who sees the same things either way.

   He is dazzled and cannot see properly at first, which is the opposite of no difference.

2. BIt is immediately liberating.

   If it were pleasant, nobody would need to be made to do it.

3. CIt is painful, and the prisoner has to be compelled.

   Learning as painful. This is the reason education needs a city built around it: left alone, nobody chooses the climb. It also explains the ending, since a person who found the ascent agonising has to be sent back down, and the ones below have no reason to believe him.

4. DIt is impossible without a teacher present at every stage.

   A guide appears in the story and the pain is the detail the text dwells on.

Plato · what the cave is for

13 The allegory of the cave is usually read as a story about reality. What questions is it actually built to answer?

1. AHow a city should be governed and by whom.

   That follows later from the answer, and it is not what the allegory itself is working on.

2. BHow we know what is true, how we check a fact, how we know where our information came from, and what methods of inquiry to use.

   Which makes it a text about method, and that is why it opens a course on scientific method. The shadows are a picture of taking the readily available evidence for the thing itself. Everything after it in this course is another answer to the same four questions.

3. CWhether the gods exist and what they are like.

   No theology in the allegory.

4. DWhy people disagree about politics.

   Not the subject.

Plato · the Academy

14 Plato ran a school in Athens. What was it, and what is notable about who attended?

1. AThe Lyceum, and only Athenian citizens could enrol.

   The Lyceum is Aristotle's school, founded later.

2. BThe Academy, and aristocratic women are known to have attended it.

   Worth holding for two reasons. It is where the word academy comes from. And the presence of women there is a useful fact to have when weeks 4 and 5 argue that science has been a closed shop, because the closure is not a fixed feature of intellectual life.

3. CThe Stoa, open to anyone who turned up.

   The Stoa is where the Stoics taught, two generations later.

4. DA private tutoring arrangement with no fixed premises.

   It was a school with a site and a name.

Schadewaldt · sorting the examples

15 A river, an oak tree, a bronze statue and a ship. Which belong to physis and which to techne?

1. AThe river and the oak are physis; the statue and the ship are techne.

   The test is whether the thing grew out of its own source or whether a person made it be what it is. The oak contains what makes it an oak. A ship is bronze and timber arranged by somebody, so it is a combination of man and nature. Schadewaldt's complaint is that modern thought treats the two as different in kind, where the Greeks saw the second as continuous with the first.

2. BThe river and the ship are physis; the oak and the statue are techne.

   A ship does not build itself and an oak needs nobody.

3. CAll four are techne, because a person has to name them before they count as anything.

   Naming is not the test, and that claim belongs to week 4.

4. DAll four are physis, because the materials are all natural.

   The materials are, and the statue and the ship are not: somebody had to make them what they are.

Aristotle · what follows from where he puts form

16 Aristotle keeps form inside the object. What does that let him do that Plato's theory does not?

1. AProve the existence of God from first principles.

   Not the consequence drawn in the lecture.

2. BStudy actual animals and plants, cut them open, and learn something about what a thing is by examining it.

   He is called the first biologist for exactly this reason. If what makes a dog a dog is in the dog, then the dog is worth examining. If it is in a realm outside this one, examining dogs tells you about copies, and Plato sends his students to mathematics instead.

3. CReject the senses as a source of knowledge.

   That is closer to Plato, who treats the senses as shadows.

4. DExplain why the planets move in circles.

   A later question. The location of form buys him something else.

Aristotle · what explaining consists of

17 If every thing has a telos, an end it grows toward, what does it take to explain something?

1. AShowing which Form it is a copy of.

   That is Plato's kind of explanation.

2. BSaying what it is made of.

   Material is one part of an Aristotelian account. It cannot be the whole of it, because the same bronze makes a statue or a bell.

3. CSaying what it is for, which means naming the end it is heading toward.

   Explanation by purpose. An acorn is explained by oak. This is the habit Bacon attacks: if a thing already carries its own purpose, the knower waits to receive it. And it is the one Kuhn rules out of history, because an event cannot be explained by what it later turned into.

4. DFinding the law that governs its behaviour.

   Explanation by law arrives with the new science of the 1600s.

Schadewaldt · the accounting

18 Schadewaldt sets out what reducing nature to what is calculable has bought, and what it has cost. What are the two sides?

1. AIt bought prediction, and cost nothing worth having.

   The second half is the reverse of his position.

2. BIt bought moral progress, and cost religious belief.

   Neither item is in his accounting.

3. CIt bought nothing, and cost the Greek sense of nature.

   He is far more generous than that, and the generosity is what makes the complaint land.

4. DIt bought the most astounding discoveries and the greatest means of power, and it cost an impoverishment that is hard to estimate.

   Both halves are his. He will not argue that the method fails, because it plainly works. His claim is that something was dropped on the way and nobody can price it. An argument that concedes the opposition's best evidence first is much harder to dismiss.

Schadewaldt · which pairs came apart

19 The dualism Schadewaldt describes split several pairs of things that the Greeks had held together. Which pairs?

1. AThought and extension, nature and spirit, nature and freedom, subject and object.

   Four pairs, and the last one is the one that matters most for this course. Once the observer counts as subject and the world as object, the person doing the looking stands outside what is looked at, and his fix is to put them back in. Weeks 5 and 6 make the same move under the name standpoint theory.

2. BTheory and practice, pure and applied, science and engineering.

   A modern set of distinctions and not his.

3. CFact and value, is and ought.

   A real split, named by Hume. His list is a different one.

4. DMind and body, reason and emotion, male and female.

   Real splits in the history of philosophy and not the ones he lists.

Rousseau · what follows from virtue

20 Rousseau writes that barbarous people are those who lack virtue. Given that he also says progress comes only through education, what does the pair commit him to?

1. AThat barbarians cannot be educated.

   The reverse: education is his remedy.

2. BThat virtue is innate and education is wasted.

   He makes education the only route to progress.

3. CThat a society is judged by its technology, since technology is what education produces.

   He is sceptical about exactly that measure.

4. DThat education has to produce virtue, so a society with great learning and no virtue counts as barbarous however advanced it is.

   Which is why he can be inside the Enlightenment and against its favourite claim. Progress in the sciences and arts is not progress at all unless the people come out better. He points back to Plato, Socrates and Aristotle because they tied education to character.

The era question · the Greeks

21 Put these four in order, earliest first: Aristotle, Heraclitus, Homer, Plato.

1. AHomer, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato

   Aristotle was Plato's student, so Plato comes first.

2. BHomer, Plato, Heraclitus, Aristotle

   Heraclitus is sixth century BCE, well before Plato.

3. CHomer, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle

   Homer eighth century BCE, Heraclitus sixth, Plato 428 to 348, Aristotle 384 to 322. The two philosophers overlap by about thirty years, since Aristotle studied under Plato. The detail standard here is centuries: Homer is first, Heraclitus is two hundred years later, and the other two are a pair at the end.

4. DHeraclitus, Homer, Plato, Aristotle

   Homer is two centuries before Heraclitus.