Philosophical Insights from Plato to Ortega

PLATO: BACKGROUND: Historical Cultural 427 BC, Gerra Peloponnese tyranny thirties, sentenced to death Socrates, enfrentamiento between the most powerful states, Aristophanes, Xenophon, beautiful style, education, Syracuse Dionysius II. Philosophical: Sophists, rhetoric, fenomenism, subjectivism and relativism, Socrates, concept and reasoning, inductive intellectualism, moral Presocratics, Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Heraclitus, mechanistic atomistic teleology near Anaxagoras. 5 Topics. PRESENT: Education and values, human rights, merits of the system, prison, politics and ethics, media, new caves: the commercial centers. Developed Further: 1) Theory of ideas: (intellectual, ethical, political, scientific). 2) Cosmology (demiurge, eternal model, material mass, space). 3) The soul (rational, irascible, appetitive). 4) Knowledge: (reminiscence, dialectics). 5) Virtue (as wisdom, purification, harmony). 6) State: (governors rational, prudence, irascible-guards-strength, temperance appetitive craftsman-har-justice).

DESCARTES: BACKGROUND: 1637, Holland, Thirty Years' War, Baroque Lutheran Reformation, loss of the author of the Catholic faith, Nominalism of Ockham, scholastic philosophy, humanism, Renaissance, anthropocentric, Copernican and Galilean, Scientific Revolutions, heliocentric, skepticism of Francis Bacon, induction, method of resolution-composition of Galileo. THEMES: Ontology, epistemology, anthropology, and the project of philosophical method. PRESENT: Mathematization and unfolding of scientific and informatics, autonomy of reason, social sciences, and humanization, autonomy of reason and individualism, truth and evil genius. Unfolding: 1) Need for method: (intuition, deduction). 2) The method in Descartes: (universal, methodical, theoretical) (question of senses, the exterior world, reasoning itself). 3) Rules of method: (evidence, analysis, synthesis, enumeration). 4) The doubt: "the cogito." 5) The actual Descartes: 6) Origin of the substance (res cogitans, extensive finite) explain each of them.

NIETZSCHE: BACKGROUND: Nihilism: Comte's positivism, Marxism, Impressionism, Wagner, symbolism of Verlaine and Rimbaud, bohemian, Oscar Wilde, Degas, Lautrec, Toulouse. Eternal return against history: Dostoyevsky, vanguards, anarchists, and enlightened socialists Christians. Ombre theory of Darwin, social Darwinism, imperialism. Recuperation of innocence: Gauguin, freshness. Will to power: Freud, psychoanalysis. THEMES: Ontology, epistemology, ethics (morality versus vitalism). PRESENT: Atheism or antitheism, vitalism, image to the concept, value of education for life. Unfolding: 1) Critique of the Western tradition. 2) Critique of traditional morality (morality of lords, slaves). 3) Critique of the traditional edge (Socrates, Plato). 4) Nihilism (positive face, negative) (doubt, reflection, new valuation). 5) The realities: "willingness to prune." 6) The idea of the superman: (courage, strength, child) (the craving for life, overcoming, superiority, securities, land).

ORTEGA: BACKGROUND: Ortega, the issue of our time, Bourbon restoration, cacique, disaster of '98, great war, annual disaster, totalitarianism, silver age, regenerationism of Joaquín, Generation of '98, neokantism, idealism, vitalism, and existentialism, Nietzsche and Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, categories of life, Dilthey, vital reason. THEMES: Ontology, epistemology, anthropology. PRESENT: Role of culture and education, political life, international relations, cultural diversity, values in history. Unfolding: The human being and circumstance. 1) The edge in Ortega. 2) Critique of realism and idealism: (modern and ancient edges). 3) How life realities. Truth and perspective. 4) Dramatism of the problem: (skepticism and dogmatism). 5) Opposition to the previous two. 6) Truth as perspective. 7) Ontological foundation of perspectivism. 8) Vital reason. 9) Key of the shadow.