The Canon of Western Philosophy: Ancient and Medieval

I have a fair sense of the key works in Western philosophy. If a person wanted to read these key works, what would they be? This and two more posts are my attempt. What am I missing?

Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (fragments, here is a possible source)

Plato
One can of course read all of Plato's surviving dialogs. However, here is a selection I might suggest:

• Start with the trio: Apology, Crito, Phaedo (the first is the account of Socrates' trial, the second about justice as he is in jail, the third speaks of the immortality of the soul as Socrates dies)
• Euthyphro
  (just prior to the Apology, Socrates addresses whether good is good because the gods say so or whether the gods say things are good because they are good independent of them)
• The Republic
  (perhaps his most important work, giving the myths of the cave and Gyges' ring)
• The Symposium
  (Plato's dialog on eros, love, giving insights into Greek banquets and sexuality)
• The Timaeus
  (Plato's best known dialog on cosmology)
• Meno
  (Plato's theory of knowledge as remembrance)
• Phaedrus
  (gives Plato's opinions of writing)

Aristotle
Here is the standard two volume collection of Aristotle's surviving writings: volume 1 and volume 2.

• I suppose for me the Nicomachean Ethics is the most important work, especially book X.
• A second work of interest are his Metaphysics, so named because they came after the Physics. It begins with Aristotle's sense of the pre-socratics.
• His Politics are of interest for me especially as background to the household codes of the New Testament. "Man is a political animal."
• His Rhetoric is important background for understanding ancient rhetoric. His Poetics is perhaps the oldest surviving work of literary criticism.
• Another work of interest to me are the Categories, in which he sets up a system for categorizing everything. His Prior Analytics presents the syllogism.
• De Anima gives Aristotle's view of the soul.

The Stoics and Middle Platonists
I suggest two secondary works to get a sense of these thinkers:

• F. H. Sandbach's, The Stoics
• John Dillon's The Middle Platonists

Other Stoics

• Cicero (Roman, mid-first century BC): On Friendship, On Old Age, On Duties, On the Nature of the Gods 
• Epictetus (Greek, late first, early second AD): Enchiridion 
• Marcus Aurelius (Roman, late 100s AD): Meditations

Lucretius (Roman Epicurean, first century BC) - On the Nature of Things
Plotinus (Neo-Platonist, 200s AD) - Enneads

Medieval Philosophy
Augustine (late 300s, early 400s)

• The Confessions (story of his conversion)
• On Christian Doctrine (gives his hermeneutic)
• City of God (his philosophy of history, political philosophy)

Boethius (late 400s, early 500s) - Consolation of Philosophy
Thomas Aquinas (1200s) - Summa Theologica
Duns Scotus (late 1200s) - Ordinatio
     (his commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, the standard theological work for four centuries)
William of Ockham (early 1300s, nominalism) - Summa Logicae

Three Ways of Thinking...

This is just one dimension...

Platonic
First, there are those for whom the world is really an entry point to talk about ideas. There is this thing called worldview and presupposition, and that is when you're really talking about what's important and real. The things around us are really just pointers toward that world of truth.

The Bible is all about this world of absolute truth. Its purpose is to tell us about God's worldview and the right presuppositions to have about the world. The Bible is a world of ideas, a window into God's mind. Individual words hold all kinds of secrets, as do the biblical texts if you have spiritual understanding.

If you've studied church history or philosophy, this should sound familiar. For Plato, the world of ideas is the true world, and the things around us are only shadows of the real world. If you look at the world around you, the world of senses, you are bound to be mislead. Only if you look on the heavenly ideals, will you know for sure how to interpret the world around you.

Platonism was an antecedent of Gnosticism, where the initiated gain insight into secret truths. Today, the Calvinist tradition tends toward the presuppositional. It talks a lot about worldview and "warranted philosophical beliefs" that do not need to be substantiated by evidence. I believe in order to understand. Post-liberalism, I think, has some tendencies in this direction

Aristotilean
The second approach is more evidentiary in nature. It infers absolute truths from looking at the world around us. It looks for "evidence that demands a verdict." It expects (or makes) the evidence of science, archaeology, etc. to add up to the absolute truth that is also in the Bible. That truth, however, is not detached from evidence. It is supported and pointed to by the evidence. The real world thus embodies absolute truth, rather than us needing Platonic presuppositions to come up with the right answers.

Evangelicalism has often been more of this sort, more concrete, more inductive Bible study oriented. To be sure, there has often been some "steering" of the evidence in the desired direction. But what everyone says they are doing is letting the text say what it says inductively. This is a more Aristotelian approach to putting the details together. It believes that absolute truths are embodied in all the particulars. You get to the universals by seeing them in every particular.

So God embodies certain truths in his person. This approach tends to be more concrete, with less dreamy abstractions. You look for the universal principles that are embodied in each particular text of Scripture.

Modified nominalism
I hate to call this approach nominalism, because then attacks of medieval nominalism may distract from the concept. I do not wish to deny the existence of universal truth. I do wish to say that our finitude makes it quite presumptuous for us to think we can accurately think in those terms. The worldviews and absolute truths you hear so many Christians talking about are bound to be a source of much embarrassment and joke telling in the kingdom. "And you actually thought you had it figured out," and the angels slap you on the back and start laughing uproariously.

There are universal truths that are a matter of definition. "A person who is single is unmarried" is true by definition. However, when you are talking inductively, about the world, from the standpoint of our finite, human perspective, universal truths are aggregates of particular truths. That is to say, unless you are talking about something that is true by definition, universal truths are things that are true in all particular situations. In our current, fallen, finite situation, we are more or less forced to start with each particular and to connect them to each other in more limited ways.

To put it another way, you build up to universal truth by counting particulars and eventually coming to the conclusion that those particulars all point the same way. This is, by the way, what those are saying who say that context isn't everything. They are saying that all particular contexts all point in the same direction. But the underlying principle still stands.

In many cases, particulars probably will not build up to universals. Rather, one particular will be similar to another in some ways but not others. We will look for the ways in which different things resemble each other, looking for points of continuity and discontinuity but without any certainty that there will be some common core overlap. Some Schencks have big noses. Some have big ears, but there are no universal Schencky characteristics, only a collection of general family resemblances.

This approach gives full embodiment to each particular revelation, and requires us to map all those particular revelations to each other if we want then to speak of universal truths in Scripture. It is more complicated to be sure, but it is as far superior to the other approaches as the heaven is higher than the earth. This is the approach that gives the fullest sense to incarnation, for each individual truth is given its full significance.

I frankly can't see any possible way to argue for the other approaches. I can account for the other two, but the other two will inevitably end up trying to force some disparate data into a foreign mould. That is to say, there will be no "naughty data" in this modified nominalist approach, but there will always be disparate data with the others. That is to say, the aggregate of all particular discussions of ideology will suggest that this modified nominalist approach is a universal truth.

I get very frustrated with the prevalence of the other two approaches, for they seem sophomorish and kindergartenish. To me, they make Christians look stupid and inevitably undersell the profundity of God.

A Case for Brief Pastoral Counseling 1

I've been summarizing a few chapters from a book called Strategies for Brief Pastoral Counseling. Although clearly the author, Howard Stone, is fighting a battle I don't know, much of what he says fits my intuitions across the board about the penchant of many Christian personalities to want to determine "who you are" before they address "what you do." The result is often narcissistic navel gazing of which I did a plenty in college. This is one personality preference, but not the only one.

The prevailing model of counseling in the United States for a century has been long term counseling. Especially in the model inspired by Freud, the goal was to dig down deep into a person's head and find the underlying causes of problems. The idea was that a person may not even be aware of the real reasons for their current struggles and that if you cannot get at the root, you are just treating the symptoms rather than the real causes. Any solution would at best be short term. You may have heard the stereotypical question, "Now tell me about your mother."

Research does not bear out this approach. Howard Stone, the editor and primary voice behind this book, argues strongly for brief rather than long-term counseling.  Research shows that long-term, get at the root models are no more effective than shorter, get moving models.

"In actual practice, the extensive exploration of a person’s history and the discovery of a problem’s sources generally are not prerequisites for effective and lasting change" (7). Stone is not arguing that a counselor should ignore or gloss over history. Rather, he is claiming that remarkable progress can be made with little or no focus on underlying causes. Indeed, even if one knows the underlying causes of a problem, it is in no way a guarantee that a person will make any progress in solving it.

The task of the counselor is not to make a person perfect but to get them moving in the right direction. Most people resolve their problems by themselves without intervention. The goal is not to change the personality of the counseled or to resolve even most of people’s problems. “Brief pastoral counseling has a considerably more modest goal: to get people moving in a positive direction of their own choosing and then get out of the way” (16).
_________________
"Motion brings emotion."  Theory is an abstraction from doing, and it is only one personality that wants to complete the whole abstraction before actually doing anything. That is a legitimate personality (and one that often dominates academics and theology), but it often assumes it is the only valid approach. Treatment can begin before the diagnosis is completed--because when it comes to the human psyche, the diagnosis may never be completed.

The "theory, then practice" approach tends to dominate academics, but we can raise some theoretical questions about it. Ideas do not exist apart from the world of which they are abstractions (Plato was a moron). The purpose of ideas is to help us manipulate the real world. The larger the ideological system, the greater the skew of the real world. (By the way, the Bible is a collection of local ideas--the grander the theological system of reading the Bible, the less of the real Bible it actually is)

A more effective pedagogical (as well as theoretical) model is to present a critical mass of ideas in order to begin to engage the real world. Then return to ideas and refine. Then return to the real world. For most people this cycle of "running the car, looking at the engine, then running the car again" will be the most effective style of pedagogy... or counseling.

The Flexibility of a Christian Worldview

I'm reading The Unintended Reformation with the Monday reading group and will probably post about it regularly for the next month or so.  I came across a good point today that I wanted to emphasize:

"Because the central claims of Christianity were not based or dependent on any philosophy but rather on God's putative actions in history, inherited assumptions and practices provided a framework for the testing, debate, and discriminating assimilation of philosophical ideas compatible with the faith" (39-40).

Brad Gregory is talking about the late Middle Ages here and about how Christian thinkers could appropriate elements from Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, even Epicureanism without also adopting their clearly non-Christian elements.  It is also true that "inherited assumptions and practices" at that time would have included a good deal of Roman Catholic ritual and tradition.  One of the reasons the Anglican church can house such a diversity of belief (from charismatic to evangelical to Anglo-Catholic to Sea of Faith non-literalists) is because they all share the liturgy in common.

All of that is introduction. What I want to jump on is the "because" part.  The central claims of Christianity are based in God's actions in history, not on a philosophical system.  This fact has historically made it possible--and I believe continues to make it possible--for there to be some flexibility in the philosophical framework within which Christian faith is housed.

Are there some basics to a Christian worldview?  Yes, I believe there are.  For example, a Christian worldview believes in a God that literally exists, created the world, and acts in the world.  But the basics are event-focused and a relatively short list.

What this means is that those who talk extensively in terms of biblical or Christian worldview are really doing what Augustine did with Platonism or Thomas did with Aristotelianism or Luther or Calvin or Van Til have done.  They are not presenting the biblical or Christian worldview but presenting a Christian worldview that places the core events into some philosophical framework that is not actually part of the core.

Philosophical Paraphrases 1: Socrates

I'm tidying up some paraphrases of philosophers.  Here's the first from Plato's Apology, 37-38:
__________
Someone might say, “Surely if you leave the city, Socrates, you can spend the rest of your life in peace, minding your own business.”

It is really hard to make some of you understand my answer to this. If I tell you it would be disobedience to the god to do as you say, and therefore that I cannot mind my own business, you will not believe that I am serious. But if on the other hand I tell you to that the best thing you can do is to discuss virtue daily, along with the other subjects about which you hear me examining myself and others, if I tell you that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are even less likely to believe me.

Yet what I say is true, even if it is not easy to convince you.