[travel] Tell me more about the dead white people

[mattbell]

My college humanities courses tended to avoid the canon of dead white people at all costs, instead focusing on alternative voices, indigenous cultures, oppressed peoples and the like. Some of it was very interesting, some of it wasn't. However, after a visit to the stunning Athens Archaeological museum, which showed me firsthand the achievement's of Athens' Golden Age, I want to learn more about the intellectual culture that spawned the world's first democracy, a rich theatrical tradition, and numerous other achievements. To those of you who sought out the traditional classics, I ask what you would recommend, keeping in mind that I'm on the road so online material is preferred. I assume it's all well out of copyright, even the translations.

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Also, there's the question of whether Aristotle's chapter following physics called "metaphysics" was named that and positioned in that way for the (seemingly most straightforward) reason that it was intended to address questions raised but not addressed in the previous chapter.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I suspect that's the most likely answer. Although even part of this idea is anachronistic, because we only use the word "physics" because of this strange historical path by which one book of Aristotle's became seen as the foundation of a discipline 2000 years later, when people were dividing things into disciplines (I mean, what counts as physics, vs. chemistry or something else, is often quite arbitrary - physics talks about the small, the large, and the medium sized, so it's hard to do the simple things in saying how it's "more fundamental" than chemistry). So it's not surprising that two disciplines that got similar names because they were named after consecutive books by Aristotle, are actually similar, perhaps because he specifically intended to address foundational issues left open by one when writing the next.

Anyway, "phusein" is a Greek word that translates as something like "subsist" or "exist", or something like that. (I never actually studied enough Greek to see that word used more than once or twice, so I don't have a clear idea of its distinction from "exeinai" (third person: "exesti", from which we get "exist") or "einai" (which is the generic "to be" verb) or various others that Greek had.

I see the idea of metaphysics as saying how things fundamentally are, as opposed to what we can know about them, or how they ought to be, or how they are in more complex and less fundamental senses. Standard questions include whether properties and relations are actually things that exist beyond just the objects that have the properties; what it means for something to be part of something else (and when some things compose another thing); what the nature is of possibility and necessity, and whether there really are other ways things could have been, or whether actuality is the only possible world. But also there are lots of more specialized metaphysical questions, for instance in the metaphysics of mind, where there's a lot of work addressing issues of whether there are mental objects in addition to the physical objects that make up brains and bodies, and in either case, what the connection is between the physical stuff and the stuff of thought. (Similar questions arise in the metaphysics of language or mathematics - do propositions exist as entities separate from the sentences that have them as meanings, and do numbers and sets exist as entities separate from the things that can be counted.)

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Ok, that's pretty much exactly the definition I had in mind and what I presented to my friend as what I thought of as metaphysics. I think what happened is that he heard a few talks in a row by philosophers visiting his school which were all centered around a particular set of questions, and he got a more narrow view of what metaphysics was than what it is. This is what we both decided was probably the case after our discussion, but this helps confirm it.