Humanities II

Today the goal was to review theories up to and including Kant and then use that to apply it to art - primarily Islamic. Since Kant only makes sense when you see what his philosophy was in response to I did a quick review starting with Plato and Aristotle (in the classic interpretation of Plato as an Idealist and Aristotle as an Empiricist. I stressed that Augustine was the essential developer of Christian dogma and was Platonist. Then when Aristotle was reintroduced to the west during the Crusades the impact forced a change in the dogma which was achieved by Aquinas (and we looked at Article 1 of the Summa Theologica.) While Aquinas solved the problem it was a very complex philosophical point of view and opened the way for Descartes who wanted to establish knowledge on a firm basis - cogito ergo sum. Then I skipped to Locke who develops what is called the problem of empiricism regarding what we can know of the empirical world since we cannot trust our senses. Primary and secondary qualities are fairly common sense today. Quiz one for today was what is your favorite sense! But how do we know if the real world (the primary qualities of a thing) are anything like the secondary qualities of a thing? This brings up Berkeley and the famous question of the tree falling in the forest. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it does it make a sound? So in short, we never got to Kant today. So we should pick up there on Thursday because you can't go on without doing Kant.