HCJ - Lecture 1

Philosophy is something that I’ve never really been able to get my head around, although I now have to – quickly.  The thing that scares me the most is having to read almost 250 pages of the HWP book by next Tuesday, which I’ve worked out as having to read at least 4 chapters per day, this doesn’t sound like a lot, but added to that I will also have to read chapters 2 - 7 of NcNae’s (plus the seemingly insignificant, but important Key Concepts reading).

From what I could gather from the first 10 – 15 minutes of the lecture, the first literary artefacts were The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (who some believe was actually a series of poets - not one man). Both of these works tell of the migration and the battles that the Saxons endured while being troubled by a monster called Beowulf – yes, that’s a very long and from what I’ve heard - a very complex and boring book.

The Greek Civilisation is an important part of the history of philosophy in the western world, partly because most of the early writers e.g. Plato and Aristotle were from Greece. The languages Greek and Persian/Farsi are very similar; they have a common heritage and the other Indo – European languages link to Greek and Farsi.  In this sense, the major European languages (including English, Italian and Latin) all derive from Greek.  This is contrary to popular belief, as a lot of people think that languages such as English and Italian come from Latin, this is true in some ways, however it can be argued that Latin actually derives from the group of ancient Indo – European languages (inc. Greek).

The Greeks were also ahead of their time, a lot of major scientific discoveries that we attribute to others actually belonged to the Greeks, for example is Earth being round and that everything was made from particles/atoms.  All in all, the Greek civilisation was very advanced.

However as usual, when something is going well and booming, the bust isn’t far around the corner.  That’s exactly what happened to the Greek world; the Romans took over and seized power from the Greeks, leaving almost no trace of the once great Greek civilisation behind – this wasn’t helped by the fact that many of the Greek philosophers hadn’t properly recorded their works.  However, the Romans’ fatal moment was when they believed that their King was a ‘King – God’ - who had all power etc...

Now I’ll move onto the religious aspect of the lecture and the concept that all people are the same derives from Judaeo – Christian ideas, because there is one God, and some people even argue that Christianity, Islam and Judaism are the same... 

Christianity was left unchallenged for over 1000 years, this time period was also known as the ‘dark ages’, especially because in those 1000 years, only 3 BOOKS were published, including the Lindisfarne Bible – the first English translation of the Gospels.  This staggeringly low amount of books contrasts to the amount published in the UK every year – at least 200,000.

Later Christianity ‘re Greekified’ itself, including the building of Winchester Cathedral, many of these late Christians called themselves ‘Late –Zion’ or ‘Late – Jews’.

Back to the philosophy…

Aristotle wrote nearly half of all Greek philosophy, including the concept of logic.  Luckily for us, some Greek science was preserved by Catholics during the time of the Greek civilisation’s decline.  I will explain more on Aristotle and Socrates in my next HCJ blog.

Al Ghazali (a very important Muslim philosopher and thinker) believed that anything not in Muslim’s sacred text (The Qur’an) was ‘the devil’.

Finally, Witchcraft and how Protestants used to practice it.  If a woman was accused of being a witch, the acid test was to throw her into a river, if she floated, then the devil was helping her – therefore she was a witch.  However, if she sank, then she was not a witch.  I’ll leave you to mull over that one….

TB 2011