Jacques-Louis David "The Death of Socrates" 1787

I should say first that this course does not cover the whole of philosophy. We will only be looking at what is known as:

• "Ancient Philosophy" (up to & including "Stoic Philosophy") & at
• "Western Philosophy" (not "Eastern/Middle Eastern Philosophy")

The word philosophy comes from the Greek term meaning love of wisdom.

In spite of the many different ways we may use the words philosophy & philosophical in ordinary speech we often think of philosophy as a complicated intellectual activity. We often imagine the philosopher (as in Rodin's statue of "The Thinker" pictured on the earlier page) as someone who sits & thinks about difficult questions such as the ultimate meaning of life while others get on & live it.

Regardless of how remote we may think philosophy is from our immediate concerns, the philosopher has been engaged in considering problems that are of importance to all of us directly & indirectly.

Through careful critical examination, the philosopher has tried to evaluate the information & beliefs we have about the universe & the world of human affairs. The understanding achieved provides an outlook or framework in which the ordinary person can place her/his own conception of the world & human affairs.

From the very beginnings of western philosophy in ancient Greece, over two and a half thousand years ago, it has been the belief of philosophers, that it is necessary to look closely (or critically) at the views that we accept about our world & ourselves to see if they are defensible. Socrates, at his trial in 399 B.C., maintained that the reason he philosophized was that "the unexamined life was not worth living". He found that nearly all of his contemporaries spent their lives pursuing various goals (such as fame, riches, pleasure) without ever asking themselves whether these are important.

All of us have some general outlook about the kind of world we think we live in, the sort of things that are worthwhile in such a world, and so on. Most of us, like Socrates' contemporaries, have not bothered to examine whether we have adequate or acceptable reasons for believing what we do. Hence, most of us, in one sense, have some kind of a philosophy, but we have not done any philosophizing to see if it is justified. The philosopher, following Socrates' thinking, insists upon bringing to light what our beliefs are, what assumptions we make about our world & about ourselves.