Critical References and Chronological History

I.  Epistemology (and Human Nature) – The Core of Philosophy; The Quest for Knowledge and its Rational Association with Human Nature.

II.  Nine Philosophers who Moved the World and Two Institutions of Higher Education and Sets of Courses.

III.  Historical Inflection Points.

I.  Epistemology (and Human Nature)

Epistemology – the study or theory of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge.

I always take the Practical Meaning of Epistemology as if it meant both in the Objective sense the way everyone human uses his mind to sincerely arrive at that which he sincerely believes is RIGHT (both GOOD and TRUE to him); and also in the Subjective sense the way everyone human through Speech and Actions lets those TRUE BELIEFS be known to others.  In every society there ever was or ever could be there will always be the Faithfully-Believed Standards and Values that Inform and Motivate People in their Public Speech and Actions.

[Hence, the Social Protocols.  And within the Social Oligarchy there will always be the self-same 4 categories of people I described back in Socrates vs. Plato – Part II.  Most get along by going along; some are predatory and exploitative; some are incompetent; and Social Justice Idealists are always pushing their prevalent Social Justice Ideals as the faithful beliefs of all of society.]

Sometimes those faithful beliefs derive from non-rationally evaluated (i.e., sincerely religious or alternatively sincerely superstitious) Unexamined Accepted Beliefs of Right (Both Good and True).

Alternatively, sometimes those faithful beliefs are the Accepted Beliefs because what is believed to be irrefutably rational scientific methods and procedures justify the “rational” (i.e., non-delusional) acceptance of those faithful beliefs that inform and motivate people.  If the judgment is RATIONAL, then there is no debate because PEER REVIEW has UNIVERSALLY failed to raise the slightest doubt about methods (and procedures) or the entire universe of relevant data.  Errors, when found, must always be not just corrected, but inferentially studied for past errors as yet unnoticed or future errors to come.  Only a moron chooses to go through life making the same misjudgments over and over again.  [Such constitutes the definition of insanity as so defined by the great Physical Scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) way back in Modern Times.]

Everyone always believes that everything they believe and unashamedly show as their beliefs to others is Totally Rationally-Based or MORALLY (formerly limited to transcendentally Religiously) Faithfully Accepted without Doubts.  No one can really rationally discuss the right of anyone to RELIGIOUSLY believe what they choose to religiously believe.  And if everyone’s “rational” beliefs were truly rational we would be living in UTOPIA.

But we are not living in Utopia.  We are living in a world in which the world-wide Social Oligarchy (i.e., the elites) sincerely believe their imposed Social Protocols are faithfully-rooted in Rational (believed to be Peer-Reviewed, therefore Scientific) Judgment processes.  Those ever-proliferating “New Idea” inspiring “newer” sophisticated fields [some still as yet to be elevated to the bogus status of yet another (ersatz) Science] such as MacroEconomics, Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Ecology and Environmentalism to name the better-known PRETENDERS – those SPECULATIVE fields as taught and propagated through the absolute most prestigious universities and professions.

[As anyone with common-sense can see, we live in a world at least as full of bullshit as the last half of Socrates’ life – 434-399BCE.]

When Socrates was almost 35 years old, the year 435BCE was the last year before it is certain that the first two of the 8 Rational Philosophers (as listed in the next section below) were physically removed from Athens forever.

The 8 Rational (of the 9 famous philosophers) were the ones who have done the “philosophically heavy lifting” that has carried Rational Thought from the Classical Era through the Medieval Ages into the early “Renaissance” and then into Modern Times.  It is this (now rapidly disappearing formerly) Rational world of Modern Times which seems to be dying out “not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Modern Times (in varying locations from the Renaissance through the contemporary socializing “Progressive” Social Justice “Post-Modern” reality) was truly materially and morally Progressing exclusively due to the limitations of Rational Thought holding to rigorous standards of scientific and engineering methods and procedures in the material world.  [I am speaking of a Modern world wherein Peer Review operated with a universal skepticism that only facts and logic could overcome with “persuasion.”  Petitions circulated by the “politically active” used to be an indicator of IRRATIONAL COERCION NOT RATIONAL REASONING.]

II.  Nine Philosophers (8 of whom were RATIONAL) who Directly and Indirectly Informed and Motivated People.

1.  ANAXAGORAS of Clazomenae (510-428BCE)

• tutor of Pericles
• resident teacher in Athens (464-434BCE)
• the first to rationally study the heavens and first to explain the “eclipse”
• INDICTED FOR IMPIETY (434BCE)
• emigrated and died in exile
• all textbooks lost (rumored to have had all writings burned).

 

2.  PROTAGORAS of Abdera (490?-420BCE)

• itinerant teacher (full-time resident in Athens 440-434BCE)
• master logician
• invents grammar as the logic of language
• perfects use of “elenchus” (Socratic dialectic or cross-examination) as a teaching mechanism
• rumor has him begin life as a humble porter whose genius is recognized and educated by a predecessor teacher in Abdera, a Thracian port
• charged with IMPIETY in 434BCE
• permanently left Athens
• ALL TEXTBOOKS ARE LOST (rumored to have had all writings burned).

3.  SOCRATES (469-399BCE)

• INDICTED, TRIED AND EXECUTED FOR IMPIETY

4.  PLATO (430?-347BCE)

• perfected his 47 dialogue written legacy (still worshiped today)
• opened first and most prestigious institution of Higher Education, The Academy (385?BCE – 525CE)

5.  ARISTOTLE (384-322BCE)

• student and subsequently senior scholar at Plato’s Academy (367-347BCE)
• itinerant teacher (347-335BCE) (tutored adolescent Alexander the Great before his ascent to the throne)
• came to Athens 335BCE and opened Lyceum (a School to rival Plato’s Academy and, uniquely, a Research Center for the Rational study of Nature, including Human Nature)
• when Alexander the Great died in 323BCE, Aristotle is indicted for IMPIETY
• he went into exile on nearby Euboeia and within the year (as a healthy and vigorous 62-year old) died (of unknown causes).

[Like the Socrates of my book, The Memoirs of Socrates, I have my suspicions about quite a lot of the Conventional Wisdom of “Official” History.  When Aristotle left the Lyceum, his students had accumulated the constitutional Rule of Law and political history of all of Hellas in the form of 158 jurisdictions.  Only 1 out of 158, after centuries of non-existence, resurfaced in the 1880’s – the Athenian Constitution – book #25 on my list of 27 Sources of Information.

[The emotionally appealing Non-Rational or Platonic “VISION” of Human Nature always seems to dominate a more Rational view – even among supremely rational people.  CICERO (Marcus Tullius Cicero 106-43BCE) a supremely rational and educated contemporary of Gaius Julius Caesar was well-read in his Plato when he endured a brief coerced exile in Greece.  In studying Plato’s bullshit there, he encountered the huge corpus of Aristotle’s imperfect Encyclopedic documentation of Nature (including Human Nature) and the Rational thought beyond the “Physical” world – namely the field of METAPHYSICS.  At first he was profoundly impressed.  Then he returned to Rome.  Out of sight – out of mind!  He returned to political and social competition among the Roman Social Oligarchy.  Too bad – isn’t it?]

As the centuries passed, Plato’s Vision of Human Nature was overwhelmingly dominant everywhere except for Syria, the richest and most dominant of the 4 areas that Alexander the Great conquered and left behind as a legal jurisdiction when he died.  Syria largely followed the Christian teaching of Nestor (Nestorian Christianity) and also the corpus of research and teaching that Aristotle left behind at his School and Research Center (the Lyceum).  That carries the RATIONAL VISION narrative to the medieval world and shifts the focus eastward.  Over the centuries,  while Europe was perfecting the Social Protocols of Medieval Feudalism – Platonic philosophy was most useful as it always is for IRRATIONAL POWER IMPOSED TO ARREST OR CONTROL CHANGE BY THE SOCIAL OLIGARCHY WHO QUIETLY RULE OVER THE FECKLESS SOCIAL MAJORITY.

A brief and incomplete chronology of early Islam is necessary to understand what happens next.  After uniting Islamic rule over Mecca and Medina, Mohammed dies in 632CE.  Shortly thereafter, the 2-year conquest of Syria occurs (634-636).  Damascus was arguably the most advanced city in the world.  Persia is then conquered between 637-650.

In 750, the Caliphate that ruled from Damascus was overthrown and a new capital was created at Baghdad.  Over time the once little village at the narrowing between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of Mesopotamia became the first or second richest city in the world.  Many Persian scholars came to Baghdad.  They brought the invention of the ZERO which made decimal arithmetic evermore useful for calculations, especially in the science and engineering RATIONAL VISION with which nature becomes reliably comprehensible due to a truly RATIONAL AND OPEN-MINDED INQUIRY.  (They got the zero from India.  Bertrand Russel ironically says we ought to call them Indian Numbers instead of Arabic Numbers.  It is one of his weaker witticisms.  He was the most witty intellectual I have ever read.)

The original knowledge of Astronomy in the Islamic world entered in the 8th century via Persian translations of Sanskrit research.  About 830, Mohammed ibn Musa al-KHWARZAMI, a translator of mathematical and astronomical books, published a book subsequently translated into Latin in the 12th century as Algorithmi di numeri Indorum.  The same author’s textbook on ALGEBRA was used (in Latin) in Europe until the 16th century.)

Don’t ignore the astronomy stuff!  Studying the heavens got Anaxagoras to begin the Rational Inquiry Narrative – and improved technology always re-invigorates it.  From Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) through Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to the mutually independent and secret invention of CALCULUS to make rational sense of the entire universe of (Peer-Reviewed) scientific data about “the Heavens” [by both Isaac Newton (1642-1726) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1645-1716)] so enabled real SCIENCE in Western Civilization to make real PROGRESS for mankind in Understanding and Harnessing the Forces of Natural Law.  (Scientific and technological progress eventually made the universal and abusive utilization of enslaved human labor into a financially impractical, therefore irrational, imposition in all but the most primitive areas of human life.)

What a pity MacroEconomists go down  so many irrational roads with their perpetually out-of-context misapplications of the precision of calculus.  It should not take too many more years for such out-of-context misapplications of calculus to proliferate in prestige higher education.  They are already widely and frequently misusing Statistical Probability Theory coupled with an Ignoramus’ non-Rational Misapplication of “Induction by Simple Enumeration” and selectively arbitrary and incomplete choices of misrepresented “Data” in their innumerable (ersatz) “Scientific Studies” (with and without Bullshit “Peer-Review”).

These politicized BULLSHIT professional class fields, especially among the Social Oligarchy at its apex at prestigious universities like Harvard, Stanford, etc., are just made up of the same 4 categories of Human Nature that exist in every identifiable grouping.  I first mentioned this eternal truth about Human Nature way back in Socrates vs. Plato – Part II (Introduction to Free Will and Economics) in explaining why American Education is overwhelmingly OVERPRICED and IRRATIONAL.  It goes like this:

-most people “get along by going along” most all of the time.  (Most families need a “paycheck.”)

-Predatory Evil is always Present to some Degree. (The Good stereotype vs. Bad stereotype narrative is a universal error in judgment – INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER ALWAYS MATTERS!)

-Incompetence and Negligence will always exist – the commutatively fairer, therefore the better, the “system,” the less of it exists but it is eternal in Human Nature too!

-Idealists, especially Social Justice Idealists, are universally motivated to force coercive change or force the outlawing of individual Free Will that dares defy their Authority which they always believe is to “make a better world” by promoting their Good kind of “Change” and “Progress.”  If these assholes were limited to facts and logic, their motivation would be harmless – maybe even beneficial.  But they are never limited to facts and logic.  These Assholes use cliches and generalities and emotional appeals and every other kind of Bullshit  they can dream up.  And they are always organizing and pushing everyone else around.

[Why do you think “Climate Change” is a POLITICAL MOVEMENT (and not a scientific truth)?  Do you think that a belief in the truth of Gravity requires a “political movement” with imposed Social Protocols on the public as mandated by the world-wide Social Oligarchy?  (A future post will explain the Social Oligarchy’s reluctance to accept the truth of Gravity and the Planetary System in more detail when I discuss Galileo and the Social Protocols of the Social Oligarchy of the 16th century Inquisition.)]

Let me finish the Aristotle entry before going on to (Rational) Philosophers #6 through #9.  Research Center is an understatement as a description of the Lyceum.  You could say it constituted a Rational University’s Library of Knowledge and Speculative Wisdom.  At a minimum, Aristotle is credited with textbooks on: Physics (the Natural World), Biology, Zoology, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics, Poetry, Theater, Music, Rhetoric, Linguistics, Politics and Government.  (There is not a single textbook that is fun to read!)  Sometimes he is alleging as fact unverified material that is irrefutably wrong.  (Everybody makes mistakes.  Only the sincerely and arrogantly stupid resist the rational choice of learning from mistakes.  Social Justice Idealists along with delusional psychotic sociopaths are the most Motivated form of the “Stupid.”)

There is much reliable “social gossip story” commentary in Aristotle’s era and beyond of Dialogues composed and published by Aristotle, and often reliably reputed to be as artistically beautiful as the Holy Scripture of Western Philosophy, namely the 47 dialogue legacy of Plato, himself.  Not a sentence of Aristotle’s dialogues has been locatable for millenia.

So much for Aristotle.

6.  AVICENNA (Ibn Sina) (980-1037)

A Persian physician of great medical skill, immense curiosity and encyclopedic learning.  He led quite an adventurous and, of course, iconoclastic life.

[The director who made my favorite movie, Gladiator, and also a very interesting movie in 2005 about the Crusader Era and Saladin ought to consider making a two-part movie of Medieval Islamic Rational Thought.  Part I would be the Life and Times of Avicenna, a Rational Philosopher.  Part II would be the Life and Times of the inventor of Mechanical Engineering, the clock and a hundred other forms of Material Progress.  His name was ISMAIL al-JAZARI (1136-1207).  He was, for a time, an employee of SALADIN and likely the inventor or engineering enhancer of those catapults (we now call Trebuchets) that battered down a wall of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven.

[Wikipedia has an excellent entry for this mechanical genius.  Among his inventions, you will find pipes, pumps, valves, crankshaft-connecting rods, cam shafts, etc.  If you learn only one lesson about Human Nature, then learn this – REAL PROGRESS comes from engineering improvements to mankind’s understanding of and harnessing the NATURAL LAW powers of nature.  Any political advocacy about PROGRESS and CHANGE that is not subservient to that truth is BULLSHIT!  And any political advocacy that contradicts that truth is IRRATIONAL (delusional, psychotic, fraudulent or otherwise) and can only enhance EVIL at the expense of GOOD in Human Nature.]

A strange irony of philosophical history is that Avicenna wrote a great encyclopedia of learning (kind of like Aristotle) which was largely ignored in the Islamic world.  He was not a very orthodox Muslim and, therefore, was the victim of posthumous negative propaganda.  However, sometime after his death, Latin translations of his work, especially his Encyclopedia, opened the European world to that RATIONAL VISION of Nature which Platonic thought had all but eradicated.

[The location shifts to Iberia, mostly ruled by Muslims.]

7.  AVERROES (Ibn Rushd) (1126-1198)

An immensely educated man in theology, jurisprudence, medicine, mathematics and philosophy.  (Another highly skilled physician!)  Born in Cordova, he became the Islamic world’s first true expert on Aristotle, and subsequently its last voice of Aristotelian Rational thought.  Persecution by the theologians drove him to Morocco for his later years.  Ironically, it is through subsequent Christian thought that his writings helped create the potential for Modern Times and Real Progress.

8.  MAIMONIDES (Moses ben Maimon) (1135-1204)

There were many Jewish and non-orthodox Muslim scholars in 12th century Muslim Spain.  Like his contemporary Averroes, he was also born in Cordova.  He too was an immensely skilled practicing physician.  [Science is preferable to bullshit theorizing in the practice of medicine (as well as everything else that interacts with Human Nature).]  All his writings are in both Arabic and Hebrew.  He was, through Arabic translations, very learned in Aristotle.  His most famous book Guide to Wanderers (or Guide to the Perplexed) was composed to reconcile Aristotle with Jewish Theology.  As with  his Spanish contemporary, Averroes, theological orthodoxy made life in Spain uncomfortable.  At the age of 30 (1165), he migrated to Cairo and lived there and practiced medicine until his death in 1204.

[Saladin (1137-1193) a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish origin was the founder of the AYUBBID Dynasty, ruling as Sultan over Egypt and Syria.  Maimonides was a physician and advisor in Saladin’s Egyptian court.  Ismail al Jazari lived under Saladin’s jurisdiction and that of his subsequent dynasty.]

9.  (St.) THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274)

Aquinas was the son of the Count of Aquino (near Monte Cassino in the area of Naples).  There are 2 facts about Thomas Aquinas that opened the European world to a return to RATIONAL reasoning.  Fact One:  Unlike every European who proceeded him, he had a truly competent knowledge of Aristotle (acquired via the Islamic world).  Fact Two:  Before Aquinas, 100% of all Western thought was Platonic (or neo-Platonic).  A truly RATIONAL “VISION” of Nature, especially Human Nature, could now compete for the mind of Western man with Plato’s theoretical Idealism.

In Europe, the subsequent refinement of lenses made observations more accurate and useful.  Telescopes in the 16th century and microscopes in the 17th century enabled natural science to slowly take root in disorganized political jurisdictions within Europe.

The 12th century invention of clocks for more precise measurement of the time parameter was critical for virtually all subsequent science and engineering.  A fact can only be a fact in a RATIONAL CONTEXT of SPACE and TIME.  In the Syrian domain of Saladin’s Ayubbid Dynasty, Ismail al Jazari made his inventions, documented them in a true scientific textbook, and put them into practice.

It is likely that those Syrian domains would have been the jurisdiction in which scientific progress would have advanced first – not the Europe of the Renaissance and Modern Times to follow.  But foreign conquerors so devastated that world that it never happened.

I would wager that 9 out of 10 in today’s world, in both the Western World and the Muslim World, would lay the blame on the Crusaders (1099-1291).  If anything, minor exchanges of rational knowledge between the Christian world and the Muslim world promoted progress in both areas.

However, in the middle of the 13th century, the Mongols came, conquered, devastated and exterminated Asian Islamic culture.  (In either Damascus or Baghdad, a pyramid of 800,000 heads was constructed or so the plausible story goes.)

For the next 7 1/2 centuries, European civilization rose ever so slowly into Modern Times via Rational Thought and science and technology.

There are always these perversely politically caused ups and downs in history.  Usually the turning points (the inflection points) are minor and ultimately reversible.  In the 1962 David Lean movie of Lawrence of Arabia, there is an historically funny scene after the Turkish evacuation of Damascus in 1917 or 1918.  The Arab war lords, a group of narcissistic and personally competitive ignoramuses, divide up the top jobs to run the city according to personal or tribal prestige.  Nobody understands the Modern Technology of civilization.  Nothing works right – not even the city’s water systems.

Back in the 12th century, the chief engineer, Ismail al Jazari, designed and implemented a highly-advanced water system for Damascus.  He had the inventive genius that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) could use to mostly theorize, mostly in secret, while more motivated to create eternally beautiful architecture and paintings and sculpture for more “practical” use.

III.  Inflection Points

The 13th century was a catastrophic inflection point for Islamic culture due to the Mongols.

The year 1987 was a year I thought was to be a positive inflection point in 3 different ways – personal, educational and cultural.

In 1987, A Conflict of Vision by Thomas Sowell was published.  When I read it a year later, it opened my eyes to the reality of Human Nature, and the 2  eternally conflicting subjective Epistemologies that never understand each other.  (This is my interpretation – not necessarily the author’s design.)  The RATIONAL VISION is based on the Truth about all Nature including Human Nature with all its human imperfections accepted as the Truth as much as any other Truth.  And the IDEALISTIC VISION is based on the better people (“Experts” and “Authorities,” the “Best” and the “Brightest”) through Social Protocols of behavior and speech imposing “positive change” or “progress” on the inferior (in both intellect and morality) common people so as to “make a better world.”  Imposed Social Justice Idealism is simply the most prestigious form of Bullshit there is!

A brilliant Philosophy Professor named Alan Bloom also published in 1987 a huge best-seller that caught the Social Justice Idealists completely off-guard for 6 months to a year.  There is an excellent entry on Wikipedia as of several months ago when last I read it – it even includes the organized negative propaganda campaign the Social Oligarchy invented to discredit its fundamental themes and points.  The book was titled: The Closing of the American Mind – How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.  I bought and read it and expected it to reverse the 20 or 30 year palpable degeneration of American Higher Education.  This inflection point never occurred.  Education from now pre-kindergarten through graduate school is vastly more degenerate today.  (Ever hear of the dictatorial contemporary U. S. University “Speech” and “Behavior” “Codes” or rules and regulations?)

The third book was a hugely successful novel, also published in 1987.  I never read the book – I have not read fiction since the early 1980’s.  But I did see the pretty famous movie.

It gave me my first view of how “Due Diligence” in Investment Banking had changed from honest to dishonest between the older generation to the newer generation of “power broker” (played by Tom Hanks).  That was the little point that lingers in my mind.  (And how much worse such unethical behavior has become in the evermore lucrative 3 decades since then.)

By 1987, 2 huge NYC racial hoaxes had been successfully perpetrated by the only public liar who is even more unashamedly blatant a public liar than 2 Clintons and an Obama have proven to be in elective politics.  Cops in the Bronx had nicknamed his shifting chorus of a courtroom entourage as the “Lord Sweet Jesus” sisters for the way they intimidated the cowardly judges (and news-media stooges) with their repetitive and irrational outbursts of “LORD SWEET JESUS!”  There is a scene in the movie that sadly never has happened in life.  The judge, played by Morgan Freeman, resists their Irrational Social Pressure by telling his courtroom to “go home and be decent!“

It worked in the movie, but not in life.  The World’s Greatest Racial Racketeer enhanced his racketeering activities through the 3rd and last (totally demoralized) Ed Koch New York City mayoralty (1985-1989).  Then throughout the feckless David Dinkins catastrophic mayoralty (1989-1993), he improved his work.  In 1991, we experienced the only Pogrom in American History.  Then, in 1993,  he ran into new mayor Rudy Giuliani (1993-2001) and Police Commissioner Bratton who terminated his antics in New York City in early 1994.

NYC recovered significantly in the next 2 decades, but now is heading back to barbarism mislabeled as mere “protesting and demonstrating” under the Progressive Buffoon Mayor known as Bill De Blasio since late 2013.

From 1994, the World’s Greatest Racial Racketeer shifted to the national stage and has flourished ever since, with the assistance of Clintons and even more so the Great Obama!

[The perverse PC concept of enabling Extremist Left-Wing Rioters to be legally tolerated as if they were civilized First Amendment law-abiding “protestors and demonstrators” as they habitually assault helpless victims and destroy (or loot) the property of others first became noticeable to a RATIONAL VISION of Human Nature during the 3-day Crown Heights Pogrom.  The then cowardly governor was the first I noticed to use the now standard BULLSHIT EXCUSE – “Let them vent their rage!”  The ersatz Social and Behavioral so-called “sciences” by then had likely come up with FRAUDULENT PEER-REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC STUDIES purporting to prove such cowardice was the wisest political choice.  If you sincerely believe that Speculative Hypothesis, you are the first asshole to read his way (without rational thought processes) all the way to the end of this essay.]

So much for an Educational or Cultural inflection point that never was, and may never come again.

[The next essay will be about Galileo and the 16th century educated SOCIAL OLIGARCHY’s resistance to a RATIONAL VISION of Nature (via Astronomy and the Natural Law of Gravity).  The Political Movement back then, as today, also opposed Rational Science as a judge of Nature.]