So why History of Ideas?

“Pure shite”.

Numerous people have told me that to grab the reader’s attention, an essay should always begin with a quote, preferably of the original sort.  That particular one is my friend’s summary of her 1st year subject choice of Philosophy in UCD Arts.  “A load of pretentious eejits (her actual words have been edited for obscenities) waffling on about post-modernism and for some reason rabbit’s fur. Weirdoes the lot of them.”  

In fact, at this stage, I wasn’t even sure that the class was related to philosophy at all; that was just the rumour circulating throughout the Communications class.  I was almost at the stage of playing paper-rock-scissors to decide between History of Ideas and Semiotics.  So I asked the ‘valuable’ opinion of my friend who had (barely) passed the subject.  

Considering her opinions on the bus home, I came to the conclusion that they might be a little biased for various reasons:

  1. She went to a grand total of 5 lectures on the subject in both semesters combined.
  2. She greatly resented the ones that she had actually graced with her presence, as they were at the ungodly hour of 11am- and on a Thursday no less (you may know that Wednesday is student night with lots of drinks promotions).
  3. She was in the pub at the time I asked her, hiding from her Economics lecture, so the cider she had grown to appreciate during her non- attendance last year may have been clouding her judgement.

  So, after a rather wasted trip out to the UCD bar, I decided in the end that there was only one option that would assist me in a decision that may well affect my future: to flip a coin.  Up came heads and with it a decision: Semiotics it was.

  And so I attended the first two lectures of the class.  Having hit my head (both embarrassingly and painfully) against the table after falling asleep in the second week’s class, however, I thought maybe I should reconsider my choice.  I mean no offence towards Martin Croghan, who is actually a very interesting man- it’s just the subject that doesn’t quite inspire me.  After attending the second Ideas lecture and not having fallen asleep, the decision was made to hand in my little orange Change of Module form.  And so ends the story of why it was that I chose the History of Ideas module.  And, so far at least, I’ve enjoyed it considerably more than my friend had warned I would.  Although maybe in sobriety she remembers the course as being more interesting than she said as, bizarrely, she has continued it into second year.

The guys who kicked it all off.

Which came first- the philosopher or the prostitute?  This is one of the things that struck me in the first lecture I attended, which dealt with the original philosophers who pondered what the world is made of.  The latter job description is supposed to be the oldest profession in the world, but I have trouble imagining Stone Age hookers loitering around cave corners in authentic leather thigh- highs.  And how were they paid?  Whatever dignity the prostitutes of today can salvage as they collect their cash once their job is done is surely considerably more than could our ancient ancestors, who were presumably bartered for, what with cash not having been invented back then.  Try to picture it: pimps in bearskins auctioning off their ladies to whoever was willing to part with the most spears.  

  Surely the philosopher has been around an equally long time.  It’s generally agreed that the first philosopher known about- probably Thales, who was fond of water- came on the scene around 600BC.  But in my opinion, there has to have been many fine thinkers before him, who simply went unrecorded.  I’m sure a great person once said that anyone who thinks is a philosopher.  Even if they could only express their thoughts in a series of grunts, I believe that there have been philosophers as long as there has been man.

Outdoor Observers: the natural philosophers

        I found that one of the most interesting stages of this course was learning about the birth of philosophy.  At first I unkindly laughed when I read about the natural philosopher’s thoughts on where everything came from and what we are all made up of.  I decided to be a little more charitable, however, and considered the time they were working in and what little they had to use to observe their world other than their brains and senses- and a lot of the great thinkers didn’t even trust those.

  I mentioned that Thales is charged with being the first philosopher.  He kicked off the debate over what it is that makes up our world.  He looked past the popular myths about the various Gods of his time, concentrating rather on gaining knowledge of the world around him.  And in that process, he came to believe that water was the basic building block of everything in his world.  While this theory of the world’s make-up may seem pretty wide of the mark, even more obscure was his belief that magnets possess a soul, as they are able to move other objects without any outside force acting on them.

  Anaximander was Thales’s contemporary.  He disagreed with Thales’s view that water was the source of all things.  Instead, he believed that all things were made up of another element, which he called ‘apeiron’.  This rather vaguely defined term is literally translated as ‘without limit’.  Anaximander thought that it is an infinite element out of which everything is and always will be made.  

  Then along came Anaximenes.  The last of the Greek natural philosophers, he agreed with Thales that everything originates from one element.  His element of choice, however, was air.  This belief stemmed from his observations that air was in constant motion and was essential to man’s survival.  Not only this, but he claimed that all other elements were the result of air changing form.  When it rarefies, or thins, it becomes fire, and when condensed it becomes wind, then cloud. When it condenses even further, it turns to water, then earth, and eventually stone.  Everything else comes from these elements so by this reasoning, air is the source of all things.  I can see how Thales came to this conclusion- it’s closer to the truth than the other philosophers concerned with our make-up as it’s true that nothing could survive without air.  

  Although they more often than not proposed theories that would now be laughed at by anyone even the slightest bit au fait with modern science, you have to admit that the earliest philosophers investigating our world were doing the best they could with what little they had.  Some of their proposals weren’t too far off the target- many modern day beliefs have been formed by expanding on and making more precise the early theories.  For example, Anaximander, who I mentioned earlier, put forward the first theory of evolution.  He was one of the first philosophers to question the idea that humans had always taken the same form.  Granted, his proposal that we have evolved from fish isn’t exactly Darwinian in its probability, but he tried.  He also came up with the sundial and drew the first map of the world that we know of.

The philosophical version of a ‘grind school’.

As I consider the ‘accuracy’ of these theories, I’m quite glad that eventually philosophers concerned only with our surroundings went out of fashion, as who knows what they might have come up with next (everything is made of marble, perhaps?).  Enter the Sophists (around 480BC), who shifted the emphasis of popular philosophy to humanism, or the study of man.  They were part of the scepticism movement of the time.  Sceptics challenged the existence of the Gods of their ages, and more importantly, the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it.  

The term Sophist comes from the Greek word ‘sophistês’, meaning ‘wisdom.’  And the Sophists were more than happy to share their wisdom with others- at a price.  Unashamedly mercenary, they were the first philosophers to realise that their thoughts and teachings on oration and other subjects were worth a gold coin or two.  Their contemporaries weren’t too impressed with this attitude, however.  While the Sophists jingled their earnings in their toga pockets, those (impoverished) philosophers who imparted their knowledge for society’s gain alone took the moral high road, and made fun of them.  Xenophon wrote of them: “For to offer one’s beauty for money to all comers is called prostitution; so it is with wisdom. Those who offer it to all comers for money are known as Sophists, prostitutors of wisdom.”  From this, we can gather two things: that they were indeed ill- liked amongst their peers, and that there were indeed prostitutes skulking around Ancient Rome’s red candle district.

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Protagaras is considered to be the first, and one of the greatest, Sophist philosophers.  He uttered the famous phrase “Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, how they are, and of things that are not, how they are not.”  This means that knowledge is relative to the knower: what is hot to one person may be cold to another.  I would be a great believer in adding Philosophy to the Leaving Cert curriculum, if only to be able to slip this theory into the answer papers of various other subjects.  How could you argue with ...

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