Socrates : Life and personality

Although the sources provide only a small amount of information about the life and personality of Socrates, a unique and vivid picture of him shines through, particularly in some of the works of Plato. We know the names of his father, Sophroniscus (probably a stonemason), his mother, Phaenarete, and his wife, Xanthippe, and we know that he had three sons. (In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates likens his way of philosophizing to the occupation of his mother, who was a midwife: not pregnant with ideas himself, he assists others with the delivery of their ideas, though they are often stillborn.) With a snub nose and bulging eyes, which made him always appear to be staring, he was unattractive by conventional standards. He served as a hoplite (a heavily armed soldier) in the Athenian army and fought bravely in several important battles. Unlike many of the thinkers of his time, he did not travel to other cities in order to pursue his intellectual interests. Although he did not seek high office, did not regularly attend meetings of the Athenian Assembly (Ecclesia), the city’s principal governing body (as was his privilege as an adult male citizen), and was not active in any political faction, he discharged his duties as a citizen, which included not only military service but occasional membership in the Council of Five Hundred, which prepared the Assembly’s agenda.

Socrates was not well-born or Athenian citizen. When the democratic constitution of Athens was overthrown for a brief time in 403, four years before his trial, he did not leave the city, as did many devoted supporters of democratic wealthy, but many of his admirers were, and they included several of the most politically prominent  rule, including his friend Chaerephon, who had gone to Delphi many years earlier to ask the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. (The answer was no.)

The expression of same-sex love was not unusual in Athens at this time, and Socrates was physically attracted to beautiful young men. This aspect of his personality is most vividly conveyed in the opening pages of Charmides and in the speech of the young and ambitious general Alcibiades at the end of Symposium. Socrates’ long fits of abstraction, his courage in battle, his resistance to hunger and cold, his ability to consume wine without apparent inebriation, and his extraordinary self-control in the presence of sensual attractions are all described with consummate artistry in the opening and closing pages of Symposium.

Socrates’ personality was in some ways closely connected to his philosophical outlook. He was remarkable for the absolute command he maintained over his emotions and his apparent indifference to physical hardships. Corresponding to these personal qualities was his commitment to the doctrine that reason, properly cultivated, can and ought to be the all-controlling factor in human life. Thus he has no fear of death, he says in Plato’s Apology, because he has no knowledge of what comes after it, and he holds that, if anyone does fear death, his fear can be based only on a pretense of knowledge. The assumption underlying this claim is that, once one has given sufficient thought to some matter, one’s emotions will follow suit. Fear will be dispelled by intellectual clarity. Similarly, according to Socrates, if one believes, upon reflection, that one should act in a particular way, then, necessarily, one’s feelings about the act in question will accommodate themselves to one’s belief—one will desire to act in that way. (Thus, Socrates denies the possibility of what has been called “weakness of will”—knowingly acting in a way one believes to be wrong.) It follows that, once one knows what virtue is, it is impossible not to act virtuously. Anyone who fails to act virtuously does so because he incorrectly identifies virtue with something it is not. This is what is meant by the thesis, attributed to Socrates by Aristotle, that virtue is a form of knowledge.

Socrates’ conception of virtue as a form of knowledge explains why he takes it to be of the greatest importance to seek answers to questions such as “What is courage?” and “What is piety?” If we could just discover the answers to these questions, we would have all we need to live our lives well. The fact that Socrates achieved a complete rational control of his emotions no doubt encouraged him to suppose that his own case was indicative of what human beings at their best can achieve.

But if virtue is a form of knowledge, does that mean that each of the virtues—courage, piety, justice—constitutes a separate branch of knowledge, and should we infer that it is possible to acquire knowledge of one of these branches but not of the others? This is an issue that emerges in several of Plato’s dialogues; it is most fully discussed in Protagoras. It was a piece of conventional Greek wisdom, and is still widely assumed, that one can have some admirable qualities but lack others. One might, for example, be courageous but unjust. Socrates challenges this assumption; he believes that the many virtues form a kind of unity—though, not being able to define any of the virtues, he is in no position to say whether they are all the same thing or instead constitute some looser kind of unification. But he unequivocally rejects the conventional idea that one can possess one virtue without possessing them all.

Another prominent feature of the personality of Socrates, one that often creates problems about how best to interpret him, is (to use the ancient Greek term) his eirôneia. Although this is the term from which the English word irony is derived, there is a difference between the two. To speak ironically is to use words to mean the opposite of what they normally convey, but it is not necessarily to aim at deception, for the speaker may expect and even want the audience to recognize this reversal. In contrast, for the ancient Greeks eirôneia meant “dissembling”—a user of eirôneia is trying to hide something. This is the accusation that is made against Socrates several times in Plato’s works (though never in Xenophon’s). Socrates says in Plato’s Apology, for example, that the jurors hearing his case will not accept the reason he offers for being unable to stop his philosophizing in the marketplace—that to do so would be to disobey the god who presides at Delphi. (Socrates’ audience understood him to be referring to Apollo, though he does not himself use this name. Throughout his speech, he affirms his obedience to the god or to the gods but not specifically to one or more of the familiar gods or goddesses of the Greek pantheon). The cause of their incredulity, he adds, will be their assumption that he is engaging in eirôneia. In effect, Socrates is admitting that he has acquired a reputation for insincerity—for giving people to understand that his words mean what they are ordinarily taken to mean when in fact they do not. Similarly, in Book I of Republic, Socrates is accused by a hostile interlocutor, Thrasymachus, of “habitual eirôneia.” Although Socrates says that he does not have a good answer to the question “What is justice?,” Thrasymachus thinks that this is just a pose. Socrates, he alleges, is concealing his favoured answer. And in Symposium, Alcibiades accuses Socrates of “spending his whole life engaged in eirôneia and playing with people” and compares him to a carved figurine whose outer shell conceals its inner contents. The heart of Alcibiades’ accusation is that Socrates pretends to care about people and to offer them advantages but withholds what he knows because he is full of disdain.

Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as an “ironist” shows how conversation with him could easily lead to a frustrating impasse and how the possibility of resentment was ever present. Socrates was in this sense a masked interlocutor—an aspect of his self-presentation that made him more fascinating and alluring to his audiences but that also added to their distrust and suspicion. And readers, who come to know Socrates through the intervention of Plato, are in somewhat the same situation. Our efforts to interpret him are sometimes not as sound as we would like, because we must rely on judgments, often difficult to justify, about when he means what he says and when he does not.

Even when Socrates goes to court to defend himself against the most serious of charges, he seems to be engaged in eirôneia. After listening to the speeches given by his accusers, he says, in the opening sentence of Plato’s Apology: “I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.” Is this the habitual eirôneia of Socrates? Or did the speeches of his accusers really have this effect on him? It is difficult to be sure. But, by Socrates’ own admission, the suspicion that anything he says might be a pose undermines his ability to persuade the jurors of his good intentions. His eirôneia may even have lent support to one of the accusations made against him, that he corrupted the young. For if Socrates really did engage in eirôneia, and if his youthful followers delighted in and imitated this aspect of his character, then to that extent he encouraged them to become dissembling and untrustworthy, just like himself.

Raimund Popper - One of the greatest philosophers of science

Karl Raimund Popper was born July 28, 1902 in Vienna and died in London on September 17, 1994. He was an Austrian-British philosopher. Karl

The son of a lawyer, Karl Raimund Popper was raised in an intellectual family where philosophy, music, and politics were a part of his everyday life. He was raised Protestant as both his parents had converted from Judaism to Protestantism. Popper started off at a traditional Gymnasium, but dropped out of school by the age of sixteen in order to attend lectures at the University of Vienna. In 1919, he joined the “Association of Socialist School Students” and became a Marxist, though only for a short period of time. Soon he abandoned Marxism in favour of social liberalism, which he remained aligned with for the rest of his life.

In 1925, Karl Raimund Popper received a teaching diploma for elementary school from the University of Vienna. He then went on to obtain a Ph.D in philosophy in 1928. The following year he attained the qualifications to teach both mathematics and physics in secondary school. Karl Raimund Popper then taught at the university for six years, between 1930 and 1936. Popper was quite critical against the then dominant positivist school Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle), amongst whose members were Rudolf Carnap and Victor Kraft. Likewise he opposed Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, instead supporting Einstein, whose lecture in Vienna he had attended.

Popper’s first published book was Logik der Forschung (translated by Popper himself twenty-five years later under the title The Logic of Scientific Discovery) in 1934, which gained him an enormous reputation and had a tremendous impact on the scientific community. Although published in a series of the positivist Vienna Circle, the book is to be read as a counter reaction to logical positivism. It is here where Popper for the first time uses critical rationalism as a philosophical approach:

“In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental results and the theory are only apparent and that they will disappear with the advance of our understanding. If you insist on strict proof (or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are.”

Karl Raimund Popper breaks with the traditional scientific method and distinguishes between empirical and non-empirical sciences such as logic, psychoanalysis and Marxism. He argues in favor of a scientific methodology based on falsification: only if scientific hypotheses can be shown to be false, that is, if they cannot be observed empirically, can they claim to be scientific, for experiments do not necessarily "prove" a theory. To the contrary, a single experiment can falsify a theory.

Karl Raimund Popper clearly rejects the method of induction and replaces it by a method of deductive falsifiability. To test a theory is to try to falsify it, as truth cannot be verified, but only falsified. Falsifiability, therefore, is the sole criterion to distinguish between science (empirical) and “non-science” (non-empirical). Such differentiation, in general one of Popper’s main aims, is possible only by means of “problem-solving”. He elaborates on this in one of his last books, All Life is Problem Solving, where he argues in favour of an evolutionary progress as far as knowledge is concerned.

Due to the rise of (Austro) fascism and the constant threat of the Anschluss (annexation to Germany), Popper was forced to leave Austria, leaving behind his family, many of whose members were murdered by the Nazis. In 1937, he went to New Zealand and taught philosophy as a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury. After the Second World War, he went to London, first as reader in logic and scientific method, then in 1949 became a professor of logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, a post which he held until 1969. Many visits as a guest professor in the United States followed, amongst them the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1950.

Popper received many accolades and honors. In 1958 Popper became a fellow of the British Academy and in 1958/59 he was named president of the Aristotelian Society. Popper was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965 and became a Royal Society fellow in 1976. In 1982, Popper received the insignia of the Order of the Companions of Honour.1961 was an important year for Popper when the so-called “positivism dispute” began—a debate between critical rationalism (Popper and Hans Albert) and the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse). Its origin dates back to a conference in Tübingen in the social sciences, where both Popper and Theodor W. Adorno were in attendance. Although the debate dominated the discussion within German sociology until 1969, Popper remained outside of it as he had, after all, written his Logic against positivism.

Though greatly known as a philosopher of science, Karl Popper also wrote social, political, and historical works. Arguably his most famous treatise is The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), written during the Second World War. The text coins the term “open society” and stands for a pluralistic society with little governmental influence and a free market. In this book Popper, defending his concept of a liberal open democratic society, accuses Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx of propagating totalitarian systems (i.e. closed societies) and criticizes both utopianism and historicism because of their reference to abstract truths. In 1947, Popper was amongst the founders of the “Mont Pelerin Society,” which aimed to defend liberalism and work towards a free “open” society. Popper criticizes the idea of historicism (that is, the idea of historical prediction or general laws), in The Poverty of Historicism (1957), arguing in favour of “piecemeal social engineering”—small changes to society.

In the collection Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), Popper develops the concept of verisimilitude. All scientific theories (and knowledge in general) are to be understood as mere approximations or conjectures. A theory possesses verisimilitude the more refutations it has to face. “Ultimately, the idea of verisimilitude is most important in cases where we know that we have to work with theories which are at best approximations—that is to say, theories of which we know that they cannot be true.” This idea is not limited to science for Popper, as he applies it to all sorts of problems, amongst them history and language.

In Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972) Popper elaborates on Alfred Tarski’s “semantic theory of truth” and the impact it had on him. It is here where he made his famous statement: “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.” In this book Popper also develops a theory of reality that differentiates between three worlds, thereby intending to develop a new approach to the mind-body dualism:

World 1 is the world of physical objects/states.

World 2 is the world of mental states, such as feelings or experiences.

World 3 is the world of theories, institutions, language and so on - in short, everything that stems from the human mind.

The objects of World 3 are abstract and do not need a physical object as in World 1. In contrast to World 2, whose objects are subjective, World 3 objects are objective. Yet, for any “object” in these two worlds, World 2 and 3 have to be real and World 2 and 3 have to interact with World 1.

Furthering his interest in the duality between mind and body, Popper worked with together with the neurophysiologist John Eccles Popper co-publishing the text, The Self and its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (1977), as a mutual exchange on the traditionally long-standing duality.

His later publications include: Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography (1976), The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (1982), In Search of a Better World (1984), Realism and the Aim of Science (1983), The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (1994), and Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interactionism (1994).

It was also due to Popper that the philosophy of science was established as its own discipline. Among his students at the London School of Economics were Paul Feyerabend and the billionaire George Soros, who named his think-tank after Popper´s “open society.” Friedrich Hayek was among his closest friends.

Karl Popper died at the age of 92 in Croydon, south London. He was buried in Vienna next to his wife.

Empedocles , outstanding Pre- socratic Greek Philosopher

 (c. 492—432 B.C.E.)

Empedocles (of Acagras in Sicily) was a philosopher and poet: one of the most important of the philosophers working before Socrates (the Presocratics), and a poet of outstanding ability and of great influence upon later poets such as Lucretius. His works On Nature and Purifications (whether they are two poems or only one – see below) exist in more than 150 fragments. He has been regarded variously as a materialist physicist, a shamanic magician, a mystical theologian, a healer, a democratic politician, a living god, and a fraud. To him is attributed the invention of the four-element theory of matter (earth, air, fire, and water), one of the earliest theories of particle physics, put forward seemingly to rescue the phenomenal world from the static monism of Parmenides. Empedocles’ world-view is of a cosmic cycle of eternal change, growth and decay, in which two personified cosmic forces, Love and Strife, engage in an eternal battle for supremacy. In psychology and ethics Empedocles was a follower of Pythagoras, hence a believer in the transmigration of souls, and hence also a vegetarian. He claims to be a daimôn, a divine or potentially divine being, who, having been banished from the immortals gods for ‘three times countless years’ for committing the sin of meat-eating and forced to suffer successive reincarnations in an purificatory journey through the different orders of nature and elements of the cosmos, has now achieved the most perfect of human states and will be reborn as an immortal. He also claims seemingly magical powers including the ability to revive the dead and to control the winds and rains.

1. Life

The most detailed source for Empedocles' life is Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 8.51-75. Perhaps because of his claims to divine status and magical powers a remarkable number of apocryphal stories gathered around the life of Empedocles in antiquity. His death in particular attracted attention and is reported to have occurred in several, clearly bathetic, ways: that he fell overboard from a ship and drowned; that he fell from his carriage, broke his leg and died; that he hanged himself; or the most famous account that, when he felt he was shortly to die and because he wished to appear to have been apotheosized, he leapt into the crater of Etna. In this story the ruse was unfortunately discovered when one of his trademark bronze sandals was thrown up by the volcano.

From more reliable sources it seems that he was born at Acragas in Sicily around 492 B.C.E. and died at the age of sixty. He was the son of a certain Meton, and was from an important and wealthy local aristocratic family: his grandfather, also called Empedocles, is reported to have been victorious in horse-racing at the Olympic Games in 496 B.C.E. It is not known where or with whom he studied philosophy, but various teachers are assigned to him by ancient sources, among them Parmenides, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras and Anaximander (from whom he is said to have inherited his extravagant mode of dress). Whether or not he was his pupil, Empedocles was certainly very familiar with the work of Parmenides from whom he took the inspiration to write in hexameter verse, and whose physical system he adopts in part, and partly seeks to rectify.

He is reported to have been wealthy and to have kept a train of boy attendants and also to have provided dowries for many girls of Acragas. In dress he affected a purple robe with a golden girdle, bronze sandals, and a Delphic laurel-wreath, and in his manner he was grave and cultivated a regal public persona. These attributes contrast with his political outlook which is uniformly reported to have been actively pro-democratic. He began his political career with the prosecution of two state officials for their arrogant behaviour towards foreign guests which was seen as a sign of incipient tyrannical tendencies. He is also credited with activities against other anti-democratic citizens, and even with putting down an oligarchy and instituting a democracy at Acragas by use of his powers of rhetorical persuasion. Two speeches of his in favour of equality are also mentioned. His surviving poetry certainly shows considerable rhetorical skills, and indeed he is credited by Aristotle with the invention of rhetoric itself. Another report is of his breaking up a shadowy aristocratic political organisation called the 'Thousand'. As a whole the tradition presents a picture of Empedocles as a popular politician, rhetorician, and champion of democracy and equality. This appears to fit in with the known history of Acragas where after the death of the popular and enlightened tyrant Theron in 473 B.C.E. his son Thrasydaeus proved to be a violent despot. After his forcible removal a democracy was established despite continuing political tensions.

As well as a being a philosopher, poet and politician, Empedocles was famous for his medical skills and healing powers. In his works he presents himself as a wandering healer offering to thousands of eager followers 'prophecies' and ‘words of healing for all kinds of illnesses' (fr. 112 (Fragment numbers are those of Diels-Kranz)). He also promises his addressee Pausanias 'you will learn remedies (pharmaka) for ills and help against old age' and even ‘you will lead from Hades the life-force of a dead man'. To what degree this represents the real Empedocles is not known, but a tradition grew up of him as both a renowned physician and a practitioner of more magical cures, or as a charlatan. These stories however, may well derive from Empedocles' own words in his poetry. On the other hand his work does show considerable interest in biology and especially in embryology and he was eminent enough as a writer on medicine to be attack ed by the writer of the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine who attempts to separate medicine from philosophy and rejects Empedocles' work along with all philosophical medical works as irrelevant. The stories of his wonder-working such as curing entire plagues, reviving the dead and controlling the elements are clearly exaggerated at least, but it is becoming clearer, especially since the discovery of the Strasbourg fragments (see below), that, contrary to many former interpretations, Empedocles did not make a clear separation between his philosophy of nature and the more mystical, theological aspects of his philosophy, and so may well have seen no great difference in kind between healing ills through empirical understanding of human physiognomy and healing by means of sacred incantations and ritual purifications. His public as well may have made no great distinction between 'scientific' and sacred medicine as is suggested by the account of Empedocles curing a plague by restoring a fresh water-supply, after which he was venerated as a god.

2. Physics and Cosmology

a. Physics

The foundations of Empedocles' physics lie in the assumption that there are four 'elements’ of matter, or ‘roots’ as he calls them, using a botanical metaphor that stresses their creative potential: earth, air, fire and water. These are able to create all things, including all living creatures, by being 'mixed' in different combinations and proportions. Each of the elements however, retains its own characteristics in the mixture, and each is eternal and unchanging. The positing of these four roots of matter forms part of a tradition of opposite material creative principles in Presocratic philosophy, but it also has its origins in an attempt to counter the theories of Parmenides who had argued that the world is single and unchanging since nothing can come from nothing and nothing can be destroyed into nothing: the theory known as Eleatic monism. Empedocles' response was to appropriate Parmenides’ ideas and to use them against themselves. Nothing can come from nothing nor be destroyed into nothing (fr. 12), and therefore, in order to rescue the reality of the phenomenal world, there must be assumed to exist something eternal and unchanging beneath the constant change, growth and decay of the visible world. Empedocles then, transfers the changelessness that Parmenides attributes to the entire world to his four elements, and replaces the static singularity Parmenides' world with a dynamic plurality. The four elements correspond closely to their expression at the macroscopic level of nature, with the traditional quadripartite division of the cosmos into earth, sea, air, and the fiery aether of the heavenly bodies: these four naturally occurring 'elements' of the cosmos clearly represent a fundamental natural division of matter at the largest scale. This division at the macroscopic level of reality is applied reductively at the microscopic level to produce a parallelism between the constituents of matter and the fundamental constituents of the cosmos, but the reduction of the world into four types of material particles does not deny the reality of the world we see, but instead validates it. Empedocles stresses this parallel between the elements at the different levels of reality by using the terms 'sun' ‘sea’ and ‘Earth’ interchangeably with ‘fire’, ‘water’ and ‘earth’. Of the four elements, although Empedocles stresses their equality of powers, fire is also granted a special role both in its hardening effect on mixtures of the other elements and also as the fundamental principle of living things.

b. Cosmology

Empedocles also posits two cosmic forces which work upon the elements in both creative and destructive ways. These he personifies as Love (Philia) - a force of attraction and combination – and Strife (Neikos) – a force of repulsion and separation. Whether these cosmic forces are to be envisaged in simply mechanistic terms as descriptions of the way things happen, or as expressions of internal properties of the elements, or as external forces that act upon the elements, is not clear. It is also unclear whether the two forces are to be seen as impersonal mechanistic physical forces or as intelligent divinities that act in purposive ways in creation and destruction. Evidence can be found for all these interpretations. What is clear is that these two forces are engaged in an eternal battle for domination of the cosmos and that they each prevail in turn in an endless cosmic cycle.

Beginning from the top of the diagram and proceeding clockwise, when Love is completely dominant she draws all the elements fully together into a Sphere in which, although the elements are not fused together into a single mass, each is indistinguishable from the others. The Sphere then, is an a-cosmic state during which no matter can exist, and no life is possible. Then as Love's power gradually weakens and Strife begins to grow in power, he gradually separates out the elements from the Sphere until there is enough separation for matter to come into existence, for the world to be created and for all life to be born. When Strife has achieved total domination we again get an a-cosmic state in which the elements are separated completely and the world and all life is destroyed in a Whirl. Then Love begins to increase in power and to draw the elements together again, and as she does so the world is again created and life is again born. When Love has achieved full dominan ce we return once more to the sphere. As Empedocles puts it in fr. 17.1-8:

A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time it grew to be one only from many, and at another again it divided to be many from one. There is a double birth of what is mortal, and a double passing away; for the uniting of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it, and the other is reared and scattered as they are again being divided. And these things never cease their continuous exchange of position, at one time all coming together into one through Love, at another again being borne away from each other by Strife's repulsion.

The cosmos exists in a state of constant flux then, beneath which there is a certain sort of stability in the eternity of the elements. The world is in a constant state of organic evolution, and there appear to be two different creations and two different worlds which have no direct link between them. According the most widely accepted interpretation Empedocles considered that we ourselves inhabit the world under the increasing power of Strife.

2. Biology

Empedocles' physics have a particularly biological focus as is indicated by his choice of the botanical metaphor of 'roots’ for what were later called 'elements'. The term ‘roots’ stresses the creative potential of the roots rather than illustrating the way they create things by being mixed in different combinations: 'elements' (stoicheia in Greek, elementa in Latin) is the word for the letters of the alphabet, and is a metaphor that stresses the ability of the elements of matter to form different types of matter by interchange of position just as a limited number of letters are able to form all sorts of different words on the page. To illustrate this aspect of the creative abilities of his roots Empedocles uses an analogy with the way painters can use a limited number of colours to create all sorts of different colours and represent all the different productions of nature.

Fr. 23:

“As painters, men well taught by wisdom in the practice of their art, decorate temple offerings when they take in their hands pigments of various colours, and after fitting them in close combination - more of some and less of others – they produce from them shapes resembling all things, creating trees and men and women, animals and birds and water-nourished fish, and long-lived gods too, highest in honor; so let not error convince you in your mind that there is any other source for the countless perishables that are seen, but know this clearly, since the account you have heard is divinely revealed.”

Among other aspects, this analogy exhibits Empedocles' tendency to think about the creative abilities of the elements in terms of their biological products, here a characteristically Empedoclean list of creatures representing the different orders of nature: plants, humans, land animals, birds, and fish, as well as gods. If painters use a mixture of a small number of pigments to produce copies of the works of nature, then the same process is productive of those works of nature. In other ways as well in his presentation of the cosmic cycle and the endless combination and separation of the elements he tends to elide the distinction between the elements and the life-forms they produce. Just as in the parallel he draws between the elements of the cosmos on both microscopic and macroscopic levels, so a close parallel is drawn between living creatures and their constituent elements.

a. Origin of Species

Empedocles presents us with the earliest extant attempt at producing a detailed rational mechanism for the origin of species. Greek traditions include the aetiological myths of the origin of a particular species of animal by transformation from a human being (many of these ancient mythological aetiologies are collected by Ovid in the Metamorphoses). The origins of humans, or of particular heroes, founders of cities or of races is frequently explained by what I term a botanical analogy: they originally emerged autochthonously from the ground just as plants do today, and this is also standard in ancient scientific theories as well: the original spontaneous generation of life from the earth, with all creatures emerging in their present species. Empedocles attempts to provide a comprehensive mechanism for the origins not simply of humans or of a particular animal but of all animal life, including humans, and a rational mechanism that would seem to do away with the need for any design in creatures or any external agency to order them and separate them into their individual species.

In Strasbourg fr. a(ii) 23-30 we now find the following lines in which Empedocles seemingly introduces his account of zoogony:

I will show you to your eyes too, where they find a larger body: first the coming together and the unfolding of birth, and as many as are now remaining of this generation. This [is to be seen] among the wilder species of mountain-roaming beasts; this [is to be seen] in the twofold offspring of men, this [is to be seen] in the produce of the root-bearing fields and of the cluster of grapes mounting on the vine. From these convey to your mind unerring proofs of my account: for you will see the coming together and unfolding of birth.

Empedocles promises an exposition of zoogony and the origin of species which, from the examples he gives - wild animals, humans and plants - is clearly intended to encompass all animal and plant life, including humans. He appeals to present day species as proofs of his theories: we can see both the products of this process of zoogony around us in nature today and also, it seems, we can see the same processes still going on today. That the theory refers to present day species rather than creatures in some counter world is underlined by the stress Empedocles puts on 'as many as are now remaining of this generation'. So the theory is intended to explain the origin and development of all life and refers specifically to the animals and plants around us today, both as examples of and as proofs of the theory he will propose. This process of generation he describes by the repeated 'the coming together and the unfolding of birth'. This seems to posit two processes which work, either together or separately, to produce the life we see around us today: a process of coming together and also a process of unfolding or perhaps more strictly 'unleafing' since the metaphor originates from the leaves of plants. So the second part of this process of zoogony involves a botanical metaphor: just as in the traditional botanical analogy of the myths of autochthony, an appeal to the development and growth of plants is used to describe the process of the development of all life.

According to fragments B57, B59, B60, and B61, first of all individual limbs and organs were produced from the earth. These wandered separately at first and then under the combining power of Love they came together in all sorts of wild and seemingly random hybrid combinations, producing double fronted creatures, hermaphrodites, ox-faced man creatures and man-faced ox-creatures. This weird picture is explained by Aristotle in the Physics and later in more detail by Simplicius in his commentary on the Physics as a theory of the origin of species in which, as we would put it, a certain form of natural selection is operative. The creatures assembled wrongly from parts of disparate animals will die out, either immediately, or by being unable to breed, and only the creatures by chance put together from homogeneous limbs will survive and so go on to found the species that we see today. The production of species and their ordering then is explained by a mechanistic process long recognised as a forerunner of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Unlike in Darwin's theory however, there would seem to be no gradual evolution of one species into another, and all of the variety of nature is produced in a great burst of birth in the beginning and is then whittled down by extinctions into the creatures we see today. That this theory intends to account for the origins of both humans and animals is ensured by the component parts of the ox-headed man-creatures and man-headed ox-creatures. There will clearly also be created by this system man-headed man-creatures and ox-headed ox-creatures, that is to say normal oxen and normal humans, although they are not mentioned. Further evidence that this zoogony relates to present day creatures is given by Aristotle and Simplicius who tell us that this process is still going on today.

However, Empedocles also adds to this theory another explanation of the origins of humans very much along the lines of traditional myths of autochthony. In fr. B62 and Strasbourg fr. d he describes the 'shoots' of men and women arising from the earth, drawn up by fire as it separates out from the other elements during the creation under the power of increasing Strife. As his choice of the word 'shoots' indicates these are not yet fully articulated people with distinct limbs but ‘whole-nature forms’ that ‘did not as yet show the lovely shape of limbs, or voice or language native to man'. We may assume that as Strife increases in power these 'shoots’ will, just as plant buds do, gradually become fully articulated with distinct limbs and features. So human origins are accounted for by a botanical analogy, with humans as biological productions of the earth itself. This theory is also intended to account for modern-day as humans, as Strasbourg fr. d tells us 'even now daylight beholds their remains'. So both the creation under Love and the creation under Strife refer to the origins of modern plants, animals, and humans. This is problematic since according to the picture of the cosmic cycle given above the world created by Strife is quite separate from that created by Love, and two quite different explanations are given by Empedocles for each creation of life. Various attempts have been made to account for this, including a radical revision of the cosmic cycle in order to allow both creations of life to take place within the same world, and also seeing the two different worlds of the cosmic cycle as more useful devices for examining different aspects of creation separately than absolutely chronologically separate phases of a cycle: the work of Love in combining creatures and the work of Strife in articulating them would then actually take place at the same time, but are simply described as operative in chronologically separate phases.

b. Embryology

Empedocles is an exponent of the pangenetic theory of embryology. In this theory inheritance of characteristics from both mother and father is explained by each of the two parents' limbs and organs creating tiny copies of themselves. These miniature limbs and organs then flow together in the generative seed and when the two seeds combine in the womb the father's seed may provide the model for the nose, while the mother's seed the model for the eyes and so on. This is an elegant way of accounting for inheritance of characteristics, but this is unlikely to be the whole story. As Aristotle points out there are strong conceptual similarities between Empedocles' embryology and the creation under Love in which we see the coming together of pre-formed limbs creating life. So Empedocles thinks of the original formation of animals as a process analogous to the present day formation of the embryo in the womb. From his description in Strasbourg fr. a (ii) 23-30 'the coming together and unfolding of birth' we seem to have two processes that are at work in the formation of both present day creatures and the original creation of life. The 'coming together' describes both the original coming together of the limbs of the first creatures and also the coming together of the tiny limbs in conception. The other side of the creative process, the 'unfolding' is illustrated by the creation under Strife of the ‘shoots of men and pitiable women’ whose limbs are at first not fully articulated or defined: they will undergo a process of 'unfolding' just like plant buds and become fully developed humans. This 'unfolding' is clearly paralleled in embryology by the gradual development and growth of the embryo in the womb. Therefore it may be best to think of the tiny limbs and organs contained in the generative seed not as fully developed limbs and organs, but as the genetic material that contains the potential for the development of limbs and organs. This is so mewhat speculative, but would provide Empedocles with a much more nearly truly evolutionary theory of the origin of species than had previously been ascribed to him. Certainly the differentiation into the two sexes is described in terms of potential: the warmth of the womb determines whether the embryo will be male or female, cf. fr B 65: 'They were poured in pure places; some met with cold and became women', fr. B 67: 'For the male was warmer . . . this is the reason why men are dark, more powerfully built, and hairier’. It may be that other characteristics are also determined or informed by environmental factors as well.

c. Perception and Thought

Empedocles seems to have been the first philosopher to give a detailed explanation of the mechanism by which we perceive things. His theory, criticised by Aristotle and Theophrastus, is that all things give off effluences and that these enter pores in the sense organs. The pores and the effluences will be of varying shapes and sizes and so only certain effluences enter certain sense-organs if they meet pores of the correct size and shape to admit them. Further, perception is achieved by the attraction of similars: we perceive light colours with fire in the eye, dark colours with water, smell is achieved by the presence of breath in the nostrils etc.

As Theophrastus complains, perception is closely linked to thought by Empedocles, cf. fr. B109:

“With earth, we perceive earth, with water water, with air divine fire, with fire destructive fire, with love love, and strife with baneful strife.”

fr. B 107:

“All things are fitted together and constructed out of these, and by means of them they think and feel pleasure and pain.”

In B 109 Empedocles moves from perception of physical elements to ethical perceptions using the same theory of perception by similars, while in B 107 we can see the theory used to account more directly for thought itself. Hence for Empedocles there is a close link between what we perceive and what we think. Further our thoughts will also be affected by our own physical constitutions (B 108). This process of the attraction of like to like is operative from the most fundamental level with the parts of the roots of matter being attracted to their like, right up to the highest level of the purest mixture which is the highest form of thought. Hence it seems that everything in nature has a share in perception and intelligence, cf. fr. 110.10: 'know that all things have intelligence and a share of thought'.

3. Ethics and the Journey of the Soul

a. The Daimôns and Transmigration of Souls

Plutarch cites the following fragment as coming from 'the beginning of Empedocles' philosophy’, fr. B 115:

There is a decree of necessity, ratified long ago by gods, eternal and sealed by broad oaths, that whenever one in error, from fear, defiles his own limbs, having by his error made false the oath he swore - daimôns to whom life long-lasting is apportioned – he wanders from the blessed ones for three-times countless years, being born throughout the time as all kinds of mortal forms, exchanging one hard way of life for another. For the force of air pursues him into the sea, and sea spits him out onto earth's surface, earth casts him in the rays of blazing sun, and sun into the eddies of air; one takes him from another, and all abhor him. I too am now one of these, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving Strife.

Traditionally Plutarch's seeming attribution of this fragment to On Naturewas assumed to be incorrect and it was placed in the Purifications instead. However from the evidence of the Strasbourg fragments it seems that it may well be that Plutarch was correct, since they contain a description of the details of the sin Empedocles accuses himself of in fr. 115, cf. Strasbourg fr. d lines 5-6:

'Alas that merciless day did not destroy me sooner, before I devised with my claws terrible deeds for the sake of food'

In fr. 115 Empedocles describes himself as a 'daimôn', a being to whom long life has been granted, but who has committed the sin of meat-eating and bloodshed and consequently is punished by banishment from the company of the immortal gods. The banishment lasts three myriads of years, either 'three-times countless years' or thirty thousand years. In either case he must atone for his sin by being repeatedly reincarnated into all the different living forms of the different orders of nature. Elsewhere he says: 'For before now I have been at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea' (fr. B 117). Empedocles then, has already suffered this nearly endless cycle of reincarnations having been seemingly hurled down to the lowest rung of the scale of nature but has worked his way up, has been purified at last and, as he tells us in fr. B. 112, is himself now an immortal god. There are others too numbered among the daimôns, those who 'at the end ... come among men on earth as prophets, minstrels, physicians and leaders, and from these they arise as gods, highest in honour.' (fr. 146). It is not entirely clear whether we are meant to imagine the daimôns as an entirely separate class of blessed being with a different creation and a different fate from ourselves, the ordinary mortals, or as people who began as ordinary mortals but who, having purified themselves and having achieved perfection, are now approaching divine status. The latter reading would perhaps make more sense in terms of Empedocles' didactic ethical mission: if we are all potentially perfectable, then his purificatory teaching becomes much more crucial. Empedocles himself, as his life shows, has achieved all four of the states that qualify the daimôns for immortality, he is a prophet, a minstrel, a physician and a leader, and can now pass on his wisdom to those on earth whom he is about to leave behind when he rejoins the company of the immortals. As can be seen from the description above, there are strong similarities between Empedocles and the teachings of Pythagoras on the transmigration of souls. Empedocles is clearly a follower of Pythagoras, in his ethics and psychology at least, and shares his vegetarianism and pacifism.

b. Meat-eating and Sin

Slaughter and meat-eating are the most terrible of sins, indeed for him animal slaughter is murder and meat-eating is cannibalism, as shown by fr. 137:

The father will lift up his dear son in changed form, and blind fool, as he prays he will slay him, and those who take part in the sacrifice bring the victim as he pleads. But the father, deaf to his cries, slays him in his house and prepares an evil feast. In the same way son seizes father, and children their mother, and having bereaved them of life devour the flesh of those they love.

Here, in terms reminiscent of Hesiod's description of the coming horrors of the Iron Age in Works and Days, we see the appalling consequences of meat-eating: murder, cannibalism, the destruction of whole families and, by extrapolation, of entire societies. This is a radical position in both political and religious terms. Plato's Protagoras in the eponymous dialogue can simply assume that all men agree that warfare is 'a fine and noble thing'. For Empedocles warfare, one fundamental plank of the Greek city state, is the most appalling of all evils and is punished by the immortals by hurling the perpetrators not only out of their society, but out of human society and even down to the level of the lowest forms of nature.

c. Theology

In religious terms as well traditional animal sacrifice, another fundamental basis of Greek society, becomes the grossest impiety of all. A probably apocryphal tale reports that Empedocles sacrificed an ox made of honey and meal at Olympia, the religious heart of Greece: a pointed act of criticism of traditional religion. Further evidence for his radical theology lies in his appropriation of the names of the Olympian gods for his roots of matter and his cosmic forces. Implicitly he argues that the Olympian gods came into being as misinterpretations of the natural world: the real 'gods' are the elements of nature and the cosmic forces that direct their endless evolutionary cycle. His religious and ethical teachings then are of purification of the soul in an attempt to achieve perfection and unity with perfect Love. He pictures a time in the past, a sort of golden age, when this universal harmony existed, fr. B 128:

They did not have Ares as god or Kydoimos, nor king Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon but queen Kypris [Love]. Her they propitiated with holy images and painted animal figures, with perfumes of subtle fragrance and offerings of distilled myrrh and sweet-smelling frankincense, and pouring on the earth libations of golden honey. Their altar was not drenched by the unspeakable slaughter of bulls, but this was the greatest defilement among men - to bereave of life and eat noble limbs.

fr. B 130:

“All creatures, both animals and birds, were tame and gentle to men, and bright was the flame of their friendship.”

Originally people worshipped only one god, Love, and this resulted in universal harmony, even between humans and animals. Implicitly the argument runs that the worship of the Olympian gods he mentions, Ares, Zeus and Poseidon, and the sacrifices they demand have destroyed this harmony, resulting in worship also of Kydoimos, the personification of the noise of battle. Traditional religion with their sacrificial slaughter and meat-eating have had a degrading effect on society.

d. Physics and Theology

As I say above it now seems very likely that Empedocles discussed purificatory topics early on in his poem On Nature. Unlike for modern rationalists then, it seems that for Empedocles there was no fundamental divide between physics and religion. Indeed as can be seen from fr. B 115 above the sin of the daimôn results in an expiatory journey of the soul not only through the different orders of living creatures but through the physical elements of the cosmos. Empedocles draws a close analogy between the cycle of the soul and the cycle of the cosmos itself. This is a hallmark of his work: frequently he uses the same language whether describing the journey of the soul or the cycle of the elements. Sometimes in the Strasbourg fragments the description of the elements coming together under the power of Love is rendered as 'we are coming together'. His sin, in fr. 115, he describes as resulting from having put his trust in raving Strife, one of his cosmic forces, and conversely in fr. 130 we see the people of the golden age worshipping the other cosmic force, Love. Clearly there is more than a little cross-over between physics and ethics for Empedocles. How this works in detail is hard to pin down but perhaps the best reading we can give of On Natureis that it represents the detailed expression of the cycle of the soul at the level of the entire cosmos. The endless evolutionary cycling of the elements is in fact part of the cycle of the soul.

Marcus Tullius Cicero - Thought and Influence

Greek philosophy and rhetoric moved fully into Latin for the first time in the speeches, letters and dialogues of Cicero (106-43 B.C.), the greatest orator of the late Roman Republic. A brilliant lawyer and the first of his family to achieve Roman office, Cicero was one of the leading political figures of the era of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Marc Antony and Octavian. A string of misjudged alliances saw him exiled and eventually murdered, but Cicero’s writings barely waned in influence over the centuries. It was through him that the thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment discovered the riches of Classical rhetoric and philosophy.

Cicero’s inventive command of Latin prose provided a model for generations of textbooks and grammars. The Church Fathers explored Greek philosophy through Cicero’s translations, and many historians date the start of the Renaissance to Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters in 1345. Thinkers including John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu  all borrowed thoughts and turns of phrase from Cicero. The first century critic Quintilian said that Cicero was “the name, not of a man, but of eloquence itself.”

Cyrenaic Philosophy

Cyrenaic, adherent of a Greek school of moral philosophy, active around the turn of the 3rd century bc, which held that the pleasure of the moment is the criterion of goodness and that the good life consists in rationally manipulating situations with a view to their hedonistic (or pleasure-producing) utility.

The school was called Cyrenaic because Cyrene in North Africa was the centre of its activity and the birthplace of several of its members. Although the elder Aristippus, a pupil of Socrates, was generally recognized as its founder, its flourishing occurred at a later date, probably at the end of the 4th century bc.

According to the Cyrenaics, a man knows that things external to himself exist because they have an effect upon him, but he can know nothing about their nature. All that he can perceive is the way in which he himself is affected by them; how other men are affected is unknown. The fact that two men give the same name to their experiences is no guarantee of identity. Thus, the only admissible objective of action is to ensure that one’s own affections are pleasant. The three possible conditions of the human constitution are violent change, gentle change, and stability. The first is accompanied by pain, the second by pleasure, the last by neither. Man must avoid the first and seek the second; it is a mistake to suppose that the third is pleasant or desirable. Moreover, the pleasure to be sought is that of the moment; only present experience can give present pleasure. Happiness, the sum of pleasures, is to be valued because it includes momentary pleasures, which are like in kind, their relative value depending only on their intensity. Bodily pleasures (and pains) are more intense than those of the mind. Nevertheless, the latter were recognized and even held to include some that have an altruistic aspect; e.g., joy in the prosperity of one’s country. To be stronger than pleasure is a true Socratic ideal and distinguishes the Cyrenaic from the wastrel.

Three Cyrenaics made innovations important enough to give their names to followers. Theodorus denied that pleasures and pains are good or bad. His aim was mental cheerfulness and the gift of wisdom, which he considered sufficient for happiness. Hegesias, like Theodorus, doubted the power of reason to procure pleasures and so advised avoidance of pain; much pain of mind could be avoided by regarding such things as poverty and riches, slavery and freedom, death and life as matters of indifference. Finally, Anniceris revived the original doctrines with some additions.

The ethical doctrines of the later Cyrenaics were, in due time, incorporated bodily into the teachings 

of Epicurus, founder of a later school of ethical philosophy

The Existentialism of Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre  is the philosopher of human freedom. He build an existentialist philosophy, where man loneliness and responsibility is absolue. Despite this fragile condition, man has to invent his way to define who he is.

Among his philosophical works and literature, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in particular:

– Imagination (1936)

– Nausea (1938)

– The Wall (1939)

– Being and Nothingness (1943)

– Existentialism and Humanism (1946)

– Baudelaire (1947)

– What is literature? (1947)

– Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

– The Words (1964)

– The Family Idiot (1971-1972)

Human consciousness, according to Sartre, is the power of nihilation (explanation to come) and freedom: it is opposed to the in-itself (explained below), a being full, solid and opaque. Thus, condemned to absolute freedom, the man should invent himself.

Contents

• 1 Sartre, Nausea and Contingency:
• 2 Sartre and Freedom:
• 3 Sartre, the Other and collective action:
  • 3.1 Go Further on Sartre’s Philosophy:

Sartre, Nausea and Contingency:

The starting point of Sartre’s philosophy does not it would fall in “Nausea”, feeling privileged and has a quasi-ontological significance?

– Antoine Roquentin, hero of the famous story Nausea, experiences himself as something unnecessary in the middle of the world (as a thing among things) is having “Nausea.”

– What I take, then, is the contingency of existence, deprived of reason and necessity, never by itself, its raison d’etre.

The world of existence is not the explanation and reasons.

– To exist is to be here, simply, without any necessity.

Sartre applies also to the existence unnecessary artificiality of the term: it means that things are there, as they are, unnecessarily and without reason.

– I am there among them, and discovers my original facticity.

But on the merits of this first experience, something else will emerge: the awareness of the human project, building freely the meaning and values ​​within the free and the absurd, the absurd defining itself as the which is beyond all reason, which can not be justified rationally.

Sartre and Freedom:

In Sartre’s thought, freedom is a both matter of morality and metaphysics.

Human creation is, indeed, free. Sartre, I exist and I am free, two proposals are rigorously synonymous and equivalent.

– What is that to exist in the vocabulary of Sartre?

► exist is to be there, and in an absurd universe and contingent, build and put his stamp on things.

► There is no human essence fixed and predetermined essence that precede existence.

► The man appeared in the world and there drew his face

– But how this equivalence of the existence and freedom is possible?

► Human freedom means, in Sartre, the opportunity given to us to remotely at any moment, the infinite chain of causes.

► Freedom is the power that is held continuously, the consciousness of annihilation, that is to say nothing of the show on any substantive reality, of breaking the various determinations, or mobile units to choose – the idea of ​​defining choice, basically, with him, by that of consciousness.

► The ability to say “yes” or “no” to choose, can hardly be distinguished under these conditions, consciousness, seizure of ourselves, beyond any reason and any mobile.

This freedom we all experience anxiety in a true metaphysical sense reveals our total freedom, where seizure reflexive consciousness is dizzy before she and her infinite powers.

– Anguish means so that the shock of consciousness to itself, this sense of giddy potential.

– Of course, consciousness can choose pretending not to be free: the lie to self and self, where I fight against anxiety, where I hide my freedom has a name is bad faith.

► Is bad faith, the consciousness that makes a lie to oneself, to escape the anxiety and the difficulty of freedom, who goes blind in his infinite freedom.

► The bad faith and the spirit of seriousness constantly threaten consciousness.

► If bad faith means, in effect, a lie to oneself, by which consciousness seeks to escape its freedom and anxiety, may the spirit of seriousness, too, we are “petrified”.

► What is he? in this attitude by which, banishing the anxiety and anguish, we prefer to set from the object:

→ The spirit of seriousness believes that values ​​are not created, they are independent of human subjectivity

→ Values ​​are in the world before man, it would only pick them.

→ Bad faith and spirit of seriousness: as many leaks in front of our infinite freedom.

► It is in this perspective that we must define the bastard, the Sartrean sense of the word, as one who, in bad faith, hiding the gratuitous and unjustifiable existence:

→ The bastard sees his existence as necessary so that all existence is unjustified and gratuitous

All these analysis on the anxiety, freedom and bad faith refers to the mode of being of the existing human, this for-itself which is opposed in every respect to the in-itself:

– While the in-itself is a fullness of being (it means that things are as they are devoid of conscience) …

– … The for-itself is the way to be an existing one which never coincides with itself.

► Exhaust permanent himself, he is never quite itself.

► Without stopping, he separates himself.

– While the in-itself is opaque to itself, full of himself …

– … The for-itself is the user be aware of a vanishing forever, simple movement of transcendence towards things.

Consciousness is nothing but the outside of itself and it is this absolute leak, this “refusal to be substance” which is as consciousness.

Thus, the for-itself is a being that is characterized as a movement and project to be. This project concept is, indeed, central

– We exist as projects;

– We, we cast perpetually ahead of ourselves, to the future, towards what is not.

– The project (the verb projicere, throw away) is the instrument by which we strive, with all our freedom, to the future and possibilities.

So are we totally free and totally responsible: the responsibility is, in Sartre, the full support of his fate by the existing human nature that creates and creates the world. But in this invention and that this outpouring is the permanent freedom of the for-itself, I seem constantly under threat, one that arises from the presence and emergence of others in the world.

Sartre, the Other and collective action:

That is, for me, others? It basically means, the Other, the different, that is to say, “a self that is not me.”

Another is, in fact anyone who is not me and I’m not. Is there not here the announcement of a threat, even an original fall? That’s what happens in reality according to Sartre.

– The very fact that I offer in the world as a “quasi-object” under the gaze of others, I “fall” truly at things, and this because of the freedom of the subject who looks at me and judge me … “Hell is other people”, according to the famous formula of the camera.

However, if our lives are often “twisted” and “flawed” because of “dual” of consciousness that arise, the man can always find reciprocal relationships with others, especially at the historical action.

– In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre focuses, in fact, common historical praxis, where the subjects come together and look alike.

– This means an excess free praxis collective material conditions and this, in the context of historical action.

► Sartre is indeed close to that time, the Marxist doctrine and praxis is in this perspective, a project organizer common where different minds are working together to achieve an end.

► Within this overall vision, Sartre attaches to the group, gathering unified by a common praxis, a community of action.

→ The crowd stormed the Bastille as a group.

→ On the contrary, social gatherings without true unity, without unifying under internal (eg a queue of passengers waiting for the bus), represent what Sartre calls the series, collections of separate individuals and atomized.

The group embodies the historical project free while the series is living under the sign of praxis mired in a world where freedom, without being lost, is still threatened.

The merit of Sartre is to have attached to historicity, defined as objective belonging to an era. The man is a history, which are temporally and collectively. This interest in human historicity, it appeared very early in the writings of Sartre, is particularly clear after 1960.

Any Sartre’s work revolves around the notion of freedom, described individually, but also in its collective dimension or historical.

Sartre is the philosopher of freedom at work in the world and things, responsibility constructing values ​​and human worlds.