Some Things That Make Me Go "Hmmm..."

by Cliopatria

If you did the Interactive Silk Road Map Exercises that I recommended yesterday, you probably got the same mixed results that I did. I found the"Modern Countries" easy enough, but the rest of the exercises gave me a workout. If you haven't seen it over at Crooked Timber, try The King William's College Quiz, that Chris Bertram calls"the world's most difficult quiz." You can compare your scores with others at Crooked Timber and at Political Animal. Let's just say that I knew less than ten of 180. Hmmm.

Something else makes me go: hmmm. At his Houyhnhnm Land, Brandon Watson says that St. Augustine (354-430 C. E.) was"the single most important philosopher of the seventeenth century." Hmmm ... I'm not saying that he is wrong, mind you. He certainly knows more about it than I do.

Finally, from Chris Brooke's The Virtual Stoa via Josh Cherniss's Sitting on a Fence, I took this quiz that supposedly places you in one of the four Greek schools of philosophy and found that ...

You are a Sceptic.

"You are a Sceptic."

Philosophical skepticism originated in ancient Greek philosophy. One of its first proponents was Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 B.C.), who travelled and studied as far as India, and propounded the adoption of 'practical' skepticism. Subsequently, in the 'New Academy' Arcesilaos (c. 315-241 B.C.) and Carneades (c. 213-129 B.C.) developed more theoretical perspectives, whereby conceptions of absolute truth and falsity were refuted. Carneades criticised the views of the Dogmatists, especially supporters of Stoicism, asserting that absolute certainty of knowledge is impossible. Sextus Empiricus (c. A.D. 200), the main authority for Greek skepticism, developed the position further, incorporating aspects of empiricism into the basis for asserting knowledge.

Greek skeptics criticised the Stoics, accusing them of dogmatism. For the skeptics, the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions which could not be said to be either true or false without relying on further propositions. This was the argument of infinite regress, whereby every proposition must rely on other propositions in order to maintain its validity. In addition, the skeptics argued that two propositions could not rely on each other, as this would create a circular argument (as p implies q and q implies p). For the skeptics logic was thus an inadequate measure of truth which could create as many problems as it claimed to have solved. Truth was not, however, necessarily unobtainable, but rather an idea which did not yet exist in a pure form. Although skepticism was accused of denying the possibility of truth, in actual fact it appears to have mainly been a critical school which merely claimed that logicians had not discovered truth.

Which Hellenistic School of Philosophy Would You Belong To?
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Hmmm.

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More Comments:

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/27/2004

Just a little note. Sextus Empiricus was, probably, a physician, and a member of the Pyrrhonist group from the Methodic school of medecine at Alexandria. He incorporated arguments of the theoretical Academic Skeptics, but in pursuit of Pyrrho's psychological or medical goal -- better health through suspension of judgment (epoche) so as to attain quietude of mind, or ataraxia. Sextus represented something of a synthesis of the two strands of skepticism.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/25/2004

I suspect that we're both borderline Skeptic/Stoic. I think when I took the quiz the first time I came up a Stoic.

Jonathan Dresner - 12/25/2004

I've had such a run of getting the same result as you, I was a bit surprised to be told that

You are a Stoic. Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such Greek philosophers as Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus and with such later Romans as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Organized at Athens in 310 BC by Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus, the Stoics provided a unified account of the world that comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics.

I actually am quite sympathetic to the Stoics: their universalism and agnosticism and emphasis on improving the world without rebelling against it do ring true.

Later Roman Stoics emphasized more exclusively the development of recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one has no direct control. Their group would meet upon the porch of the market at Athens, the stoa poecile. The name stoicism derives from the Greek stoa, meaning porch. The Stoic philosophy developed from that of the Cynics whose founder, Antisthenes, had been a disciple of Socrates.

Are there any major schools of thought whose founders were not disciples of Socrates?

The Stoics emphasized ethics as the main field of knowledge, but they also developed theories of logic and natural science to support their ethical doctrines. Holding a somewhat materialistic conception of nature they followed Heraclitus in believing the primary substance to be fire. They also embraced his concept of Logos which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and providence found throughout nature. They held Logos to be the animating or 'active principle' of all reality. The Logos was conceived as a rational divine power that orders and directs the universe; it was identified with God, nature, and fate. Human reason and the human soul were both considered part of the divine Logos, and therefore immortal.

Without making any grand claims, that's not a bad description of qi (ch'i), the energetic substance which is the substrate of the universe.

The foundation of Stoic ethics is the principle, proclaimed earlier by the Cynics, that good lies in the state of the soul itself, in wisdom and restraint. Stoic ethics stressed the rule "Follow where Reason leads"; one must therefore strive to be free of the passions: love, hate, fear, pain, and pleasure.

Anyone else wonder whether the Vulcans are supposed to be Stoics?

Living according to nature or reason, they held, is living in conformity with the divine order of the universe. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, a classification derived from the teachings of Plato. A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism. All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. They held that external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social relationships. Thus, before the rise of Christianity, Stoics recognized and advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Greco-Roman world and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities.

Yeah, I suppose I could buy that.

I wish these quizzes told you how strong your results were: was I a borderline Skeptic?