Empedocles. The Party Pooper of all Party Poopers

This reading was especially hard for me to get through.

Why? I'm not exactly sure, actually. It wasn't a matter of density of the text, but rather the content itself. What I love about philosophy is that it expresses a deeper thought and wonder about the world than just everyday perception, and I'm used to seeing philosophy being used to think about dark and uncomfortable topics before.

This was different. I don't know why Empedocles struck such a sensitive nerve with me, but he did. The way he goes about thinking and the language he uses is just so utterly depressing that I had to take breaks reading him. I can see where he gets his ideas about the senses and human knowledge, but his language is vicious.

The way he talks about his own race as hopeless and miserable is very disturbing. He talks about human beings being born among moaning and misery, and it was kind of hard to see the bigger picture of his philosophy through this.

Empedocles. Dude. Lighten up.

Zeno

One thing that really caught my eye about Zeno was his concept of infinity and the argument about midpoints. Zeno argues that we never really experience any motion because we must first reach a midpoint in order to reach the end, but the distances we are trying to get through are infinite, and therefore it is impossible to reach a midpoint.
I feel like this is a very accurate representation of life in general. In a society like ours, where goals and a desirable life are determined by a majority vote rather than personal reflection, I often feel like I am getting nowhere. We can pursue academic goals, but these are infinite. There will always be something that we do not know, and we will surely die almost as ignorant as we were when we started, considering the vastness of the universe. Isn't philosophy a perfect example of this?

Thinkers have spent thousands of years reflecting upon the same dilemmas, and no one can walk away from the discipline saying (with confidence) that they have figured out everything there is to figure out about life and the role of a human being within that life.
In a way, this view is very depressing, because what is the point of trying to move if we will never reach the end? On the other hand, I think it is a great way to tell someone to just chill out for a second. There is no point in stressing out over getting to the finish line when the finish line is impossible to get to. Why not just take a leisurely stroll towards the finish line and appreciate the view instead?

Parmenides

Something that resonated with me about Parmenides was his view on sense perceptions. I can't quite put my finger on who said this (99% sure it was Galileo, though), but there has been plenty of thought on the senses being deceiving.
Galileo had the machine example, where he argued that we cannot trust our senses because things are not accurately represented by what they look/feel/sound/hear/taste like. We could be looking at a person and think it is a person, when in fact it is nothing but a machine. On the one hand, this is true and I have to agree with it, but on the other hand I can't fully get behind such a skeptical point of view.

Heraclitus and the Masses

I really, really love Heraclitus.

He's very sassy in calling out people's logic. He makes the claim that the problem with mob thinking is that people don't realize how incapable of thinking things through they actually are. He says that people will gladly follow the crowd without stopping to think that the majority of people are bad, and shouldn't be leading anyone to begin with.
He repeatedly says that people shouldn't get everything that they want, and refers to animals to portray bad qualities in humans. He seems to support a sort of self-denial that will make the soul more fit for true reason and authentic living. That seems to be a common theme with many philosophers. In order to be a good person, we can't give in to every single inclination that we have.

Xenophanes: Y'all did it wrong.

I really enjoyed reading Xenophanes because he seems like an extremely revolutionary philosopher, even more so than thinkers like Thales and Anaximander. Everything that society thought it knew about god, the nature of things, the universe, and man himself was nothing to Xenophanes. He seems to be the kind of person who does not care what other people have already "established" in philosophy. He came in with a clear mind and made his own conclusions, few of which coincided with previous philosophers.

What struck me most about Xenophanes is that he perceives what other philosophers seem to miss. He senses that if the universe is infinite, it does not make sense for it to continually come into and out of being. He sees the universe as more of an unchanging thing. This to me suggests that Xenophanes might have had an idea of an eternal being or a god similar to the one we have.

Unchanging, eternal, perfect, and most of all, above human flaw. This becomes clear in Xenophanes' description of how unlikely the gods that society has are. It does not make sense for gods to be born or to die because, as he states, it implies that there is a time when gods do not exist. If there is an eternal being along the lines of a god, he thinks, it would not be as petty, vengeful, angry, or basic as human beings are.
We would not have Olympian Soap Operas as a history of the deities, nor would we have as much interaction between gods and mortals. I can understand Xenophanes' need for some stability where philosophy is concerned; as a philosophy major, it is easy to get wrapped up in thinking about so many difficult topics, to the point where anxiety sets in. When this happens, it is very, very, VERY comforting to think of God as I understand Him, because He is constant. He is not subject to human plight, nor will He wrong me in the way humans do.

I think this might have been something Xenophanes craved in his society, one raised on stories of gods that killed off their families and deceived for power over human beings.