The plan for the week is as follows. There are three lectures per evening, beginning at 5 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 7 o'clock, and 8 o'clock, and then two on Saturday morning, starting at 9 o'clock, 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock. This evening, in the first lecture here, I intend to talk about the question, what is philosophy? The second hour, I intend to talk about the question, what good is philosophy? And then the third hour, what does the Bible say about philosophy? Now, obviously, we won't be able to get that all into the third hour. That will be coming up again and again through the week, what the Bible has to say about philosophy. But we'll take a stab at it during the third hour anyway. Tomorrow night, the topic will be politics. or political philosophy, as it ought to be called, not political science, but political philosophy. Political science is a different animal altogether, and I don't intend to talk about that at all. But I will be talking about political philosophy, we'll be discussing Aristotle, we'll be discussing anarchism, we'll be discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and we'll be talking about the other social contract theorists, and finally, the third hour again, what the Bible has to say about government. Wednesday evening, the topic is ethics, and we'll talk about some non-Christian systems of ethics for the first two hours, and then the third hour again at 8 o'clock, what the Bible has to say about ethics. On Thursday, the topic is metaphysics. Is there a God? If there is a God, what sort of God is he? Are there more gods than one? questions of that sort. And we'll examine again some non-Christian answers in the first two hours, and then what the Bible says in the third hour. Friday evening and Saturday morning, we'll be discussing science and epistemology, the theory of knowledge. And again, we'll be going through what some of the non-Christian answers are, and then what the Bible has to say about these topics. Obviously, in the short space of time as this We cannot go very deeply into any one subject, but I did want to give you a broad overview of philosophy, and I thought this was one of the better ways of doing it. The text, of course, which you all have read, I assume, and are ready for the test on, is Gordon Clark's The Christian View of Men and Things. And the book is laid out almost exactly as I've planned the week. Not quite, but almost. But it has a chapter on politics, a chapter on ethics, a chapter on religion, a chapter on science, and a chapter on epistemology. And I hope you do read this. If you don't read it all this week, at least finish it after the course is over. And I will be giving you additional material, not just what's in here. Well, I'll be giving you some additional information as well, but we'll be referring to the text from time to time as well. Well, this evening, to begin with, I want to talk about the question, what is philosophy? And I'll be giving you the answers that several different people have given. We're going to find out that philosophers don't agree among themselves about what philosophy is, let alone the answers to these questions. But that's normal. You'll find that theologians don't agree among themselves what theology is. You'll find that economists don't agree among themselves what economists are supposed to do. And the same for every discipline. There's disagreement everywhere. Let's start with a few non-philosophers to see what they had to say about philosophy. We have, of course, William Shakespeare. I'm sure you all know who William Shakespeare is. In Romeo and Juliet, he refers to philosophy as adversity's sweet milk. Adversity's sweet milk. You've probably never thought of philosophy as milk before, but that's the way that Shakespeare describes it. What does he mean by that? Well, he means very simply that philosophy is what results when we have trouble. It's the fruit or the result of trouble. So you have Job's friends sitting around with him in the face of adversity, philosophizing, trying to explain why these calamities have come upon Job. Or, to use a non-biblical example, in the 5th century you have Boethius. He writes a little book that's spelled—I'll pause and spell some of these words. I see many people are taking notes, which is good. because you won't remember any of this a week from now unless you have notes. Berutius is B-O-E-T-H-I-U-S. And he wrote a little book when he was in prison called The Consolation of Philosophy. He was supposed to have been a Christian, but it doesn't mention Christ in the book. But he saw philosophy as a consolation for the adversity, the troubles he was suffering. And that's the same idea that Shakespeare has in Romeo and Juliet. Well, we'll pick on another Englishman in the 19th century, John Cates, the romantic poet, famous for much of his poetry, Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, in which he wrote that truth is beauty and beauty truth, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know, of course, which is absolutely false, but that's what poets write. He described the philosophy in this way, that philosophy will clip an angel's wings. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. You see, his romanticism is coming out. He objects to analytic thought. He objects to an effort to be precise in one's thinking. We all have to remain rather blurry and have warm feelings. one of the founders of modern empiricism and the scientific method, Francis Bacon, who said, A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind to religion. A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion. Well, perhaps some philosophies do. Other philosophies, the further depth you have, the more atheistic you become. He had the notion that philosophy, just considered as philosophy, would somehow lead us to Christianity. A very common notion in the history of theology, to that matter, but again, completely false. John Milton, 17th century. I'm sure you know Milton, Paradise Lost, the Areopagitica, the defense of free speech and a free press. How charming is divine philosophy, he wrote, not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of sweets where no crude surfeit reigns. Again, he sees philosophy as sweet. just as Shakespeare did. He refers to it as divine, divine philosophy. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has this line, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. To which the modern Englishman J.B.S. in the 20th century said, I suspect there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy. J.B.S. Haldane was not a dumb fellow, but this is a rather foolish statement in his book Possible World. Every man may not have a systematic philosophy, but every man makes certain assumptions about the world, about himself, about God. So to say I have no philosophy myself, in one sense, you might be saying I have no systematic or organized philosophy, which would be fine, if that's what he means, but if he means to deny that he has made any assumptions Then he's misleading himself as well. Now, also in the 17th century, Newton referred to science as experimental philosophy, and this is what science was originally called, experimental philosophy. If you go back and you read the history of philosophy, you'll read about the pre-Socratics, and they were nature philosophers. They had a philosophy of nature. Here with the development of science, Newton calls it experimental philosophy. The gentleman who is usually given the credit for starting the discipline of economics, Adam Smith, in the 18th century, did not have the title of economist. In fact, there wasn't a university that gave anyone a degree in economics or had a professor in that discipline until a little over 100 years ago. Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy, and as a professor of moral philosophy, he wrote about economics. He wrote about social conditions and politics as well. Now, you know the etymological root of the word philosophy is the love of wisdom. The love of wisdom, that's the etymological root of it. Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher, and I'll spell that one in case you need that, it's N-I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E, Friedrich Nietzsche, he said that we really should give philosophy its proper translation. It's the love of one's own wisdom. He thought very little of the perennial philosophy. the idea that the philosophers were discovering truth through the pursuit of objective, cold thought. It's the love of one's own wisdom. Going back to Bacon again, he says, all good philosophy, here he's making a distinction apparently between philosophy and good philosophy, all good philosophy is but the handmaid to religion. And this is a typical view during the Middle Ages. Theology was the queen of the sciences, and philosophy was the handmaid, or one of the handmaids, to the queen. And that was the job. Philosophy was to serve theology. It was not an independent discipline. In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, I'm sure you've seen, perhaps you've read, Les Miserables, one of his most famous novels. He described philosophy as the microscope of thought. The microscope of thought. And that's more on track, I think, because philosophy is an attempt to be precise in one's definition and to be clear in one's argument. He refers to it as the microscope of thought. Descartes, Rene Descartes, another Frenchman, only in the 17th century this time. Descartes is D-E-S-T-A-R-T-E-S. He commented in his Discourse on Methods, one cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another. One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not been already said by one philosopher or another. And we have 300 years on Descartes, so it goes and stays 300 years later. Another 17th century Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, a great mathematician. Here's what he says about philosophy. To take no heed of philosophy is truly to philosophize. To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize. That was Pascal's judgment on philosophy. If you read his Pensees, it's not a systematic statement of philosophy. They're paragraphs, essentially. At most, several paragraphs strung together on various topics. The title is French for thoughts. They're his thoughts. And he had very little use for what the philosophers had done over the centuries. Perhaps one of his more famous statements is, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, is not the God of the philosophers. And that's absolutely true. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob is not the God of the philosophers. If we look at the gods of the philosophers, as we will do, at least a few of them, you'll see how much difference there is between the two, or the several. Plato, the greatest of the great philosophers, writing in the fourth century before Christ, A defined philosophy is the art of dying. The art of dying. It's learning to die. What did he mean by that? Plato is one of the clearest writings of the philosophers. And when he wrote something like this, he had something very definite in mind. He saw this world, he believed in what we would call reincarnation, or some sort of pre-existence. That our souls existed in the world of the ideas before they were incarnated on earth at our birth, and when we die we will pass out of this world, this visible world, into another world, back into the world of ideas. And what we do when we're here on earth, is learn about the world of ideas, the world that we will inhabit after our death. And so philosophy becomes the art of dying, learning how to think about the world to come, not about the present world. One of the better philosophers, American philosophers of the 20th century was named Brand Blanchard, B-L-A-N-S-H-A-R-D. If you haven't read his Nature of Thought, read The Nature of Thought. I'm going to be mentioning books all week, so if all I can hope to do in this week is to skin the surface and point you in one direction as to where to go depending upon your interest. A non-Christian philosopher, this is how he defines philosophy. He says it's business. is to analyze fundamental concepts such as self, matter, mind, good, truth, to examine fundamental assumptions such as that all events have causes, and to sit the conclusions together into a coherent view of nature and man's place in it. That's probably about as good a short definition of the subject as you're going to find. And to quote another 20th century American, Ayn Rand. This is what she said about philosophy. Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists, in the realm of cognition, The special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil, which makes the forest possible. It's the most basic of the disciplines. It is not a special science. They grow out of it. And in the history, you can see this going on in history. Science grows out of philosophy. It begins as experimental philosophy. Economics grows out of philosophy. It begins as moral philosophy. Psychology grows out of philosophy. This is the soil, as Rand describes it, from which the trees grow, the special sciences grow. Now, philosophy is usually divided into four different sub-disciplines, and these are what we're going to be talking about later in the week. The most basic is epistemology. This is a theory of knowledge. This is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. This is the most basic of the sub-disciplines in philosophy, because if anybody asserts anything, if they say, a monarchy is a good system of government, and the proper response is, how do you know? If they say, the world is made of atoms in motion, the proper response is, how do you know? If they say, the good of the greatest number is the right thing to do, you say, how do you know? This is the most basic of the sub-disciplines of philosophy, epistemology. Unfortunately, philosophy in the 20th century is very much opposed to the study of epistemology. They don't want to give an account of how they know in many cases, so they just assume that they have knowledge. The next discipline arranged in a hierarchical structure is metaphysics. This is a big word that simply grew out of the way that Aristotle's books were arranged when he wrote them. He wrote a book called Physics. And then the next bit was what was beyond the physics, the meta, beyond, and it became known as the metaphysics. This is the nature of reality. Is reality matter in motion? Is it ideas? Is it spiritual, physical? What is reality, the nature of the universe? In the hierarchy, the next category is ethics. What is right? Is there a right and wrong? Does it make sense to make that distinction? How do we know what's right, if there is a difference? How do we tell which action is right or wrong? And finally, politics. The study of government. Which government is right or wrong? What should governments do? Should there be governments at all? There are also a few other A couple of other sub-disciplines that are sometimes mentioned. One is aesthetics. We won't study that at all. This is the study of beauty, aesthetics. People who write about aesthetics many times have difficulty defining what beauty is, and they revert to something like Keynes' Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth. And you can't tell the difference. Another possible sub-discipline is economics. Economics, as I tried to explain last year, is quite different from what the secular universities say it is. It's a deductive system that concerns all human action. It's not an empirical discipline at all. are the major sub-disciplines of philosophy. Those four. Now, if you're going to continue reading in the field, and I hope you do, even though you'll never become a philosopher, yes sir? Well, it's a sub-discipline of metaphysics. There's ontology, which is the science of being, as you can tell from the root, and then there's cosmology, which is what you read about and what astronomers do when they speculate about the Big Bang and all of that sort of thing. Those are really just divisions of metaphysics, ontology and cosmology. And you'll notice that We really sound very learned if we use the Latin and the Greek words, the English derivatives from those words. You can even sound more learned if you use the actual Latin and Greek. So remember, if you want to be impressive, always use Latin and Greek words in the original languages if possible. I'd recommend one philosophy book by a Christian. Famous to Dewey, A History of Philosophy by Clark. The best one-volume history of philosophy in English, period. You won't find anything comparable to it. The only serious book of the sort written in the 20th century by Christian philosophers. Also, if you want to read more in the history of philosophy, I don't have the book here, but I'll recommend W.T. Jones. He was not a Christian, and it's simply called A History of Philosophy. Going back to the beginning of the century, there's another two-volume history of philosophy by a gentleman, a German named Wendel Bandt, excellent history of philosophy. There's a Catholic history of philosophy that's very good by Koppelsten, multi-volume history of philosophy written in the 20th century. And then in the 19th century, Hegel, the German philosopher Hegel, wrote an excellent history of philosophy up to his time. And those are books that I recommend for further study. In the Bible itself, perhaps the most philosophical book, and I hope you brought your Bibles, bring your Bibles every evening if you would, is the book of Ecclesiastes. And let's turn to the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes has a lot to teach us. about philosophy. And I'm going to read about the first fifteen verses of the first chapter here, and make some comments, intersperse my comments, and then we'll go further into the book of Ecclesiastes. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun? You begin with the asking of questions. If you read the introduction to Clark's book, The Christian View, you'll see he poses a lot of questions in the introduction, questions that philosophy is supposed to answer. What profit has a man from all his labor? One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, a very famous title. If you know your Bible, you know where the titles of these novels come from sometimes. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes toward the south and turns around to the north. The wind whirls about continually and comes again on its circuit. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again. All things are full of labor. Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be. That which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, see, this is new? It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things." Another title. Will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after? I, the preacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem, and I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven, this grievous task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and indeed all is vanity and grasping for the wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered. Here you have an inspired account of the futility of secular philosophy. This is what Solomon is writing here, very pessimistic about getting any answers by natural means. That is, by means of observation, by means of thinking alone without revelation. He goes on in the second chapter that his first theme is that pleasure is vanity. And he doesn't mean by pleasure simply gorging yourself on chocolate or having sexual pleasure or anything of that sort, anything. He says, look, in chapter two, I made my works great. I built myself houses and planted myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards and I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made myself water pools from which to water the growing trees of the grove. and so on and so forth. Whatever my eyes desired, down in verse 10, I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor, and this was my reward from all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done, and on the labor in which I had toiled, and indeed all was vanity, and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun. And you'll see that phrase appear again and again, Grasping for the Wind, here in Ecclesiastes. I'm surprised that there isn't another book out there already called Grasping for the Wind, because several other titles have come out of this book on Ecclesiastes, of Ecclesiastes. Death, he follows this theme of pleasure being vanity, his contemplation of death in chapter 2 here in verse 15 and 16. I look at some of the most skeptical statements in chapter 3, starting at verse 10. I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does. from beginning to end. Turn over to chapter 8 of Ecclesiastes, if you would, and look at verses 16 and 17. When I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it. Moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it. so you do not know the works of God who makes all things. In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening do not withhold your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, either this or that, or whether both alike will be good." There are many other themes in the short book of Ecclesiastes. Work is vanity, popularity is vanity in verse 4. But you have these statements of skepticism here. about being unable to find out the work of God, how things work in the world. A wise man will not find it, he said. He said it repeatedly. Very important book in the Bible, and very much ignored, because it clearly emphasizes the futility, the vanity of non-Christian thought. That's the whole point of the book. The futility, the vanity, vanity of vanity, it's always vanity, of non-Christian thoughts. It's only by revelation, when he talks about his getting wisdom, it's only by revelation that he knows anything.