Friday evening History of Philosophy I

The quiz question this evening was what did you think of the way I presented the information this evening. How embarrassing! I promised several people I would video the class last night and post it on youtube. But the first part of the class the batteries cut off after only five minutes – which was probably even before we started. And after I changed the batteries for the second half I forgot to turn the camera on. We had quite a few miss because of various things (thank you all for emailing me ahead of time regarding that) but so I thought I would at least try to summarize things I mentioned. To start though I would like to mention the article by Chris Thompson in this morning’s Dispatch News which was all about Creeds! Part of what we discussed last night was the First Church Council at Nicaea and how they resolved on the creed in support of Bishop Athanasius But I started the class reviewing Plotinus to emphasize that during the early Christian period his version of Platonism was the primary philosophical view accepted and so reflected in Christian doctrine as we will see with Saint Augustine (who we will really begin looking at next week.) Plotinus emphasizes the connection between the material world and heaven through beauty which is primarily mathematical and mystical. In describing the beginnings of the Jewish religion I mentioned the book The Bible as it Was to emphasize that scholars consider the Bible (basically library) to be interpreted from the beginning with an attempt to view the variously collected elements to be parts of a single narrative. But the parts are from different groups and different time periods as Richard Friedman describes in his book Who Wrote the Bible and one such portion is beautifully portrayed in the book of J . I mentioned the various versions of stories regarding Abraham which sets up the ongoing conflict between the heirs of his sons Isaac and Ishmael. In talking about the New Testament I referred to the Front Line presentation Jesus to Christ. By the way, as expected, once I got home I remembered the answer to the one question was Massada!