Author: philoparadoxia

These notes cover Plato’s three great metaphors from the Republic in full: the Divided Line with its four stages (Eikasia — illusion; Pistis — belief; Dianoia — discursive thinking with its two problems of indirect medium and unproven axioms; Noesis — direct intuition with backward dialectical reasoning), including the science-vs-philosophy contrast and the First Principle;…

These notes cover Plato’s Theory of Forms in full: the crucial distinction between mental concepts and objective Forms; the Seventh Letter’s five classes (name, definition, image, knowledge, the Form itself); the shift from Socrates (what) to Plato (why); five arguments for Forms (epistemological, metaphysical, semantic, imperfection, opposite predicates); the reality and non-spatiotemporal existence of Forms;…

These notes cover Plato’s epistemology as a four-stage argument: Stage One proves knowledge is possible by refuting Relativism (3 arguments: self-refutation, opposites, expert opinion) and Skepticism (2 arguments: self-refutation, mathematical certainty); Stage Two shows knowledge is neither sense perception (6 arguments) nor mere belief, and introduces the JTB definition with the anchor metaphor and blind-man…

These notes cover Socrates in full: biographical overview and the source problem in Plato’s dialogues; personality and the Oracle of Delphi story; the Socratic method in seven stages with three logical techniques (circular definition, reductio ad absurdum, counterexample); epistemology including inductive arguments, universal definitions, the midwife analogy, innate knowledge, and the Meno slave demonstration; metaphysics…

These notes cover Sophist philosophy in full: the historical context of rhetoric in Athenian democracy; types of scepticism (common-sense, philosophical, absolute); Protagoras’s relativism and ‘man is the measure of all things’; Gorgias’s three nihilist theses; the physis-nomos distinction and its application to justice, religion, and morality; Callicles on natural justice and the strong; Thrasymachus on…

These notes provide the essential historical context for classical Greek philosophy: the evolution of Athenian democracy from Draco through Solon to Cleisthenes; the Persian Wars and the rise of Athens under Pericles; the nature of direct democracy and its vulnerability to rhetoric; the arrival of the Sophists; the contrast between Athens and Sparta; the Peloponnesian…

These notes cover ancient atomism across four philosophers — Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. Topics include: core atomic theory (atoms, void, change as rearrangement), the three problems atomism solved, Lucretius’s five principles from observation, the motion debate (eternal motion vs free fall vs the swerve), how qualities arise from quality-less atoms (Epicurus’s properties/accidents vs Democritus’s…

These notes cover Anaxagoras — his critique of Empedocles’s four elements, the concept of infinite qualitatively distinct seeds, the homoiomerous test for ultimate elements, ‘everything is in everything’, the nature and role of Nous, the primordial mixture and its separation into the cosmos, internal tensions in his system, his scientific observations, and his legacy as…

These notes cover Empedocles of Akragas — how he reconciled Parmenides and Heraclitus using four permanent elements and two forces (Love and Strife), his experimental refutation of Parmenides’s denial of motion, his shift from monism to pluralism, the cyclical world process, his proto-evolutionary theory of biological diversity, his theory of sense perception, transmigration of the…

These notes cover Zeno of Elea — his method of reductio ad absurdum, what a paradox is, and his four categories of argument: against the senses (Millet Argument), against plurality (infinite size and infinite number), against space (infinite regress of containers), and against motion (the Racecourse, Achilles and the Tortoise, and the Flying Arrow). Also…