SOCRATES UP TO POPPER

Overview And Evaluation Of Philosopher's Theories About Science From Socrates Up To Popper



Overview And Evaluation Of Philosopher's Theories About Science From Socrates Up To Popper

Philosophy from an etymological point of view is the love of wisdom (from Greek phileo [I love], and sophia [wisdom, knowledge]). Pythagoras (570 BC) was the first philosopher to use this world in this specific meaning, but he did mot consider himself a philosopher.

Philosophers before Pythagoras were wise and the philosophized without knowing they were doing philosophy, they were simply interested in finding answers to questions they raised as important or even fundamental for the explanation and understanding the universe and man.

They were transgressing this popular way of thinking; coming to a conclusion that what was a real job for a thinker was to theorize. Theorizing and theory as its product is something different from what we would think a theory is. Now days a "theory" is mostly associated with sciences.

According to Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.) Lovers of wisdom (philosophers) are seekers after wisdom. They are between the ignorant, who are not interested in wisdom, and gods, who are wise already. Plato (428-347 B.C.) thought that philosophy is the quest for truth, but he also thought that astonishment is the beginning of philosophy: "for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder)." His disciple Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) repeated his opinion: "For through astonishment men have begun to philosophise both in our times and at the beginning"

A Greek noun theoria, and a verb theoreo, [to look at, to behold, to observe; to consider, to contemplate, to examine; to perceive], has a root theos [god, deity, divine being], means "to contemplate the divine". Therefore, the original meaning of 'theory' or 'to theorize' was 'contemplation of the divine' or 'to contemplate the divine'. Those ancient thinkers were not theologians or simply believers.

They were convinced that wisdom is a contemplation not of gods but of the divine, which was for them the 'cosmos' Greek kosmos, [the order (of things, or of the universe)], an opposite of 'chaos', [the undordered, unformed, undifferentiated beginning of things]. 'Chaos' is one of the most important notions in the Greek mythology, as Greeks believed that 'chaos' was in the beginning of anything existing, before time [chronos, Kronos] and matter, 'the stuff' of the universe [Gaia or earth in mythology].

Contemplation is an unbiased, disinterested (selfless) attitude towards sthg one wants to know. It's not just awe, but a pursuit to understand the superhuman order, its regularities or laws, and therefore its rational nature. This is the reason why Greek thinkers thought of cosmos as logos [word, statement, principle, law, reason, proportion], or nous [mind, reason, the faculty of intellectual vs. empirical apprehension]. We can know the rule-governed, rational universe because there is a fundamental affinity between human reason and rational nature of ...