Philosophical Break-Up Lines, Infographic

Aristotle and the Seven Immortals Walk Into A Bar

The Metaphysics of Aristotle opens with these words: 

To satisfy this common urge the unfolding human intellect has explored the extremities of imaginable space outside and the extremities of imaginable space within, searching for a relationship between the one and the all; the grand effect and the cause; the spirit and the substance of the spirit; the illusion and that which we may effectively label as the reality. 

Regarding reality a little closer to home, Plato wrote: "He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy, is a God among men." 

Essentially our role in the natural world is determined by the quality of the thoughts we consider. If our minds are enslaved to bestial instincts we are on par with the brute. Those whose rational faculties ponder domestic human affairs belong to the category of common man or common woman (i.e., ordinary, average); but those whose intellects are elevated to the consideration of higher realities is already a demigod, for this individual's mind is in proximity to the luminosity his or her reason has considered. 

In other words, the grander our thoughts, the closer our minds to the grandeur we call existence. In his encomium of "the science of the sciences" Cicero exclaims: "O philosophy, life's guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee? Thou has produced cities; thou hast called men scattered about into the social enjoyment of life." 

In other words, we would be lost without the ability to philosophize, organize, categorize, rationalize, consider, and then act in relation to those summations. But unless you're speaking with a professor of philosophy, the word philosophy has little meaning in modern society. Even among philosophers it has little meaning unless accompanied by some other qualifying term. 

Philosophy is the proverbial elephant one must eat one bite at a time. (Creighton William Abrams, Jr.), which means: Start small. 

The whole of philosophy is broken up into numerous isms; each more concerned with disproving each other's fallacies than considering the sublimer issues of cosmic order and humanity's role (or, lack thereof) in it. Ideally philosophy is to serve as the stabilizing influence in human thought. By virtue of its intrinsic nature philosophy should prevent the mind from establishing unreasonable codes of life. 

Philographics

Genis Carreras

Philosophers and philosophy students delve headfirst into narrow paths which are supposed to illuminate the straight path of rational thinking, but really most just get lost in a Wonderland of their own making, without understanding the overall map and its outstanding systems of philosophic discipline which have kept philosophers questioning since ancient times (some twenty-seven centuries). 

So, Avatar Alice, where do we begin? 

Aristotle &

The Seven Immortals

Walk into a Bar

Or, so the story goes, according to the Greek busybody Diogenes Laertius: 

Feeling parched, Thales, Solon, Chilon, Pittacus, Bias, Cleobulus, and Periander decided to go to a local tavern in Turkey. Wet-blanket Thales wanted a glass of water, served in a tall glass with a little floating boat umbrella: "To replicate the primal principle or element, upon which the earth itself floats like a ship. Look ... If I shake my glass, the little quakes hitting the edges of my glass are the result of this universal sea."  

"Oh, Thales, give it a rest, already!" exclaims Anaximander, the first of the last Ionian philosophers (Anaximenes, Anaxogoras, and Archelaus). That joke was dead in the water when the Ionic school ended. 

Reminder: 

The Greek school of philosophy had its inception when upon the seven immortalized thinkers the appellation of Sophos, "the wise" was first conferred. 

"Soph?" asked Avatar Alice, "Are you named after the Sophos?" 

"The Sophos had an empty spot on their bench, I just sat down," said Soph. "I guess you could say that my mind is in proximity to the luminosity their reason has considered." 

And with that, Soph laughed, and is still Laughing. 

Truth-Value

Finding an answer to a question these days is not as easy as one might think; you can't just type in a question on Google and expect to find a factual answer. The reality is that for any given subject you might encounter at least 162,375,678 results! The point is that we're confronted with a variety of conflicting results every time we access the Internet for answers to our questions. 

We do not value the memorization of information in the way we once did. We value storage space and connectivity over content. Why bother? There is far more content - which is growing exponentially - than ever before. Even Einstein didn't know his phone number at the University saying at the time, "Why should I memorize it when I know where to find it?" 

Educating ourselves in facts is far easier today than ever before. Pretty soon, we'll all have the same amount of "knowledge" downloaded (or uploaded) into us. What then? 

We'll have millions of answers to any given question. We'll be walking Googles. We'll go from Human 1.0 to Google Human 2.0. But how will we access knowledge's truth-value? Will we invent an algorithm to alert us when a file has been modified by editing software or written with ulterior motives? 

Accessing the value of data has long-since required critical thinking, reflection and artistry. Just as artists do, we work with meanings of society to express something new - to see and then show the world. 

Someday: (Neither) Seeing, hearing, reading, nor downloading will be believing. In our last factual age, we valued facts. In our post-factual age, we value what people do with those facts. What will be of increasing value in the future will not be combinations of new information but rather philosophical and artistic creations that help us synthesize information. 

There will be a rise in philosophical and artistic education as we move forward into the connected age. With information no longer being a treasured jewel of the elite, the ample body of individuals we have on this planet will begin creating more and more artistic expressions of their lives, which others will inherently be interested in learning more about. 

In the future, most of our information will be about each other.