Socrates On Trial by Nigel Tubbs;

Author:Nigel Tubbs;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350053724
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Book 12

J1: Philosophy calls itself love of wisdom, so is philosophy also now this love of learning?

S: What is philosophy?

J1: It is the search for truth.

S: Why do we search for truth?

J1: Because we desire to understand.

S: Understand what?

J1: Where we come from, how we should live and what happens when we die – to understand what makes the universe and life possible.

S: Why these questions?

J1: Since we have not created ourselves, they are questions about our origin, about our destination and about life in between.

S: With what then does philosophy in the city begin?

J1: Clearly, with the question of our beginning and end.

S: And what does this question presuppose?

J1: That we need to be alive in order to ask how and why we are alive.

S: So, the question that defines philosophy is already a shape of life. It already presupposes life being lived as its own self-examination. The question is the examined and examining life.

J1: But why does life take shape as a question?

S: As we have seen, life is always already in relation to death.

J1: So the vulnerabili ty of life to death shapes life as a question.

S: Which is presupposed in the love of learning.

J1: And if finite life feels uncertain because of this vulnerability, then for its own protection, it made sense for it to define invulnerability as infinity, infinity as certainty and certainty as truth.

J5: Which is why philosophy’s answer to the question of our vulnerability to death was an uncreated and indestructible eternity that was its own origin, a prime mover, moved by itself, being the cause of everything else, but irreducible to any prior cause or movement by another.

S: If certainty was made the criterion of truth because it resolves the uncertainty of the question, then likewise, independence was the solution to dependence, cause was the solution to effect, simple was the solution to compound, original was the solution to copy and creator was the solution to the created. In short, each is the solution of error by truth. Philosophy’s answers to its questions were already shapes of the life-and-death struggle.

J1: Then what is reason?

S: Reason is this logic of solution.

J1: And what is logic?

S: Logic is reason applied to itself.

J5: So, logic calls reason the overcoming of error with truth, uncertainty with certainty and vulnerability with security.

S: This is the shape of philosophy in the city. It repeats the life-and-death struggle, but it is rarely aware of itself as shapes of life and death.

J4: This reminds me of earlier, Socrates, when we said that life tried to overcome death by means of property, and that truth, nature and freedom were shapes of such property. Now if truth, nature and freedom, or metaphysics, physics and ethics, were the three elements of philosophy in the city, we are saying that philosophy itself is a shape of property, and that the story of philosophy in the city is really the story of property in the city.

J7: And of the powerful, not the powerless.

J6: I’m not sure I want to listen to this.

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