PERFORMANCE TASK

IN
PHILOSOPHY

ALYSSA EMER DEL RIO

GRADE 12 ST. PETER- STEM
FR. EDWIN M. SEMILLA
 2 Philosophers in Ancient Time
THALES OF MILETUS
The ancient Greek philosopher Thales
was born in Miletus in Greek
Ionia. Aristotle, the major source for
Thales's philosophy and science,
identified Thales as the first person to
investigate the basic principles, the
question of the originating substances of
matter and, therefore, as the founder of
the school of natural philosophy. Thales
was interested in almost everything, investigating almost all areas of knowledge,
philosophy, history, science, mathematics, engineering, geography, and politics. He
proposed theories to explain many of the events of nature, the primary substance,
the support of the earth, and the cause of change. Thales was much involved in the
problems of astronomy and provided a number of explanations of cosmological
events which traditionally involved supernatural entities. His questioning approach
to the understanding of heavenly phenomena was the beginning of Greek
astronomy. Thales' hypotheses were new and bold, and in freeing phenomena from
godly intervention, he paved the way towards scientific endeavor. He founded the
Milesian school of natural philosophy, developed the scientific method, and
initiated the first western enlightenment. A number of anecdotes is closely
connected to Thales' investigations of the cosmos. When considered in association
with his hypotheses they take on added meaning and are most enlightening. Thales
was highly esteemed in ancient times, and a letter cited by Diogenes Laertius, and
purporting to be from Anaximenes to Pythagoras, advised that all our discourse
should begin with a reference to Thales.

SOURCE: https://www.iep.utm.edu/thales/
I chose Thales of Miletus because he is part of the Seven Sages which means
even though there’s a lot of philosophers, he’s one of those philosophers who’s
been entitled as one of the Seven Wise Men. Also his involvement in local politics
is also rather anecdotal in nature but Thales apparently impressed both sides of the
ongoing conflict between the Lydians, Medes and Persians over the fate of the
version of Ionia, when he predicted an eclipse of the sun brought fighting to a
standstill and his political views were generally in favor of Benign Tyranny. The main
reason why I chose him is that because of his famous quotation that I totally agree
an I can relate, “The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself”.

MARCUS AURELIUS
The philosophy of the Roman Emperor Marcus
Aurelius can be found in a collection of
personal writings known as the Meditations.
These reflect the influence of Stoicism and, in
particular, the philosophy of Epictetus, the
Stoic. The Meditations may be read as a series
of practical philosophical exercises, following
Epictetus' three topics of study, designed to
digest and put into practice philosophical
theory. Central to these exercises is a concern
with the analysis of one's judgements and a
desire to cultivate a "cosmic perspective." From a modern perspective Marcus
Aurelius is certainly not in the first rank of ancient philosophers. He is no Plato or
Aristotle, nor even a Sextus Empiricus or Alexander of Aphrodisias. To a certain
extent this judgement is perfectly fair and reasonable. However, in order to assess
the philosophical qualities that Marcus does have and that are displayed in
the Meditations it is necessary to emphasize that in antiquity philosophy was not
conceived merely as a matter of theoretical arguments. Such arguments existed
and were important, but they were framed within a broader conception of
philosophy as a way of life. The aim was not merely to gain a rational understanding
of the world but to allow that rational understanding to inform the way in which
one lived. If one keeps this understanding of 'philosophy' in mind, then one
becomes able to appreciate the function and the philosophical value of
Marcus' Meditations.

SOURCE: https://www.iep.utm.edu/marcus/
 I chose him because He was an intelligent, serious-minded and hardworking
youth, and at quite an early age he became fond of the "Diatribai" ("Discourses")
of Epictetus, an important moral philosopher of the Stoic school.
He also started to have an increasing public role at the side of Antoninus, holding
the position of consul three times in A.D. 140, A.D. 145 and A.D. 161, and
increasingly involved in decisions. In A.D. 147 he received the proconsular
imperium outside Rome and the tribunicia potestas, the main formal powers of
emperorship. In A.D. 145, he married Annia Galeria Faustina (Faustina the
Younger), who was Antoninus' daughter and Marcus Aurelius' own paternal cousin,
and they were to bear 13 children, although only one son (Lucius Aurelius
Commodus Antoninus, who would succeed him) and four daughters
would outlive their father. When he married, he took the name Marcus Annius
Verus.
When Antoninus Pius died in A.D. 161, Marcus Aurelius (or Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus Augustus as he was then officially named) and Lucius Verus became joint
Emperors, as had been arranged previously by Hadrian, although Verus (ten years
younger and less popular) was probably subordinate in practice. During his reign,
Marcus Aurelius was almost constantly at war with various peoples outside the
empire, and having joint emperorship was probably a practical boon as well: Verus
was authoritative enough to command the full loyalty of the troops, but already
powerful enough that he had little incentive to try to overthrow Marcus Aurelius,
and he remained loyal until his death during a pandemic of smallpox or measles
while on campaign in A.D. 169, at which time Marcus Aurelius assumed sole
emperorship. As Emperor, he continued on the path of his predecessors by issuing
numerous law reforms, and maintaining the status of Christians as legally
punishable, although rarely persecuted in practice. The war with the
revitalized Parthian Empire in Asia was essentially won by the end of the A.D. 160s,
but the continuing battles against various Germanic tribes and other nomadic
peoples along the northern borderand into Gaul and across the Danube (as well
as minor revolts by ambitious generals) plagued Marcus Aurelius for the greater
part of his remaining life. I chose him because of his famous quotation “Everything
we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”.
 2 Philosophers in Medieval Period

Boethius (The Philosopher Theologian)

One of the least known but most significant

Christian thinkers of antiquity was a sixth-century
layman called Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus
Boethius, or simply Boethius for short. The son of
an old senatorial family, he lived between 480 and
524, being consul (a largely ceremonial political
position) in 510, and then Master of the Offices at
the Ostrogothic court in Ravenna in 522. It was
while serving in this latter capacity that Boethius
was accused of treason, imprisoned, tried, and executed. It remains unclear to this
day whether he was actually guilty of treason or, as seems more likely, was simply
the victim of the instability of imperial politics at the time. He was later canonized
by the Catholic Church as Saint Severinus. Boethius’ contributions to Western
civilization in general and theology in particular are wide-ranging and significant.
Indeed, he adapted a number of Greek works into Latin, probably including
Euclid’s Geometry; these works laid the ground work for the so-called quadrivium,
or group of four academic disciplines (music, arithmetic, geometry, and
astronomy). The quadrivium combined with the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and
dialectic), to form the seven liberal arts (though we should remember that each of
the subjects then covered much more ground than that with which we would
typically associate them today).

SOURCE: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/boethius-philosopher-theologian/

I chose him because translated numerous logical works of the Greek

philosopher, Aristotle, into Latin. Given the general lack of knowledge of the
Greek language in medieval Western Europe, Boethius’ work in this area was
highly influential, both in terms of providing one of the only ways of accessing
Aristotle’s thought until the twelfth century, and also of the limits it placed upon
such access, with the result that Aristotle was primarily known as a logician and
not as a metaphysician. Thus, Boethius inadvertently helped pave the way for the
great crisis that occurred in Christian thinking in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries when it was suddenly discovered that Aristotle the authoritative
logician arguably held to numerous metaphyical positions (such as the eternity of
the world) that were not so easy to accommodate within a Christian framework.
It was this problem that brought forth the great work of Thomas Aquinas.
Theologically, Boethius’ great contributions lie in his five Opuscula Sacra (Little
Sacred Works) and his magnum opus, The Consolation of Philosophy. The former
group of five little tracts, the Opuscula Sacra, covers issues relating to the
doctrines of the Trinity, the nature of the Catholic Faith, and the Incarnation. The
most significant of these are undoubtedly nos. 1–3, which deal with the Trinity.
Given the fact that Boethius’ work on the Trinity was to be a standard textbook in
the Middle Ages, and that writing a commentary upon it was to be a basic part of
theological education, the importance of his work in this area cannot be
overestimated. His contribution on this matter can be seen as twofold. First, he
operates within a basic Augustinian framework, which assumes the substantial
unity of God at the outset and then works from this basis to explain the threeness
in terms of relation. As such, his work stands within an established Western
tradition that it then helps to reinforce. Second, he demonstrates how the logical
analysis of language can be used to explore and explain Christian doctrine, a point
that had wide implications for the development of theological training in the
West. unity and multiplicity can be applied to the Godhead.

GREGORY THE GREAT

Gregory was born in troubled times. Cities and
commerce had declined, and cycles of famine and
the plague had depopulated the countryside in the
wake of the emperor Justinian’s reconquest
of Italy (535–554). The Lombard invasion of 568
triggered several more decades of war.
Centralized bureaucratic control over civil matters
continued to fragment, and this gave rise to local
strongmen who held power at the expense of the
civilian senatorial aristocracy. Usurpations of
the property, rights, authority, and even regalia of
others marked this fluid society. The church in
these times either could act as a check against this new military aristocracy—
in Rome the Senate was defunct, and the papacy assumed civic
responsibilities—or could serve the secular ambitions of the strongmen and their
patronage networks; Gregory fought tirelessly against these latter corruptions.
Gregory was well placed in society. His family held the Caelian Hill in Rome,
properties outside the city, and estates in Sicily, and he may have shared distant
links to gens Anicia, an eminent patrician family. His ancestors had held
illustrious ecclesiastical positions: Pope Felix III (reigned 483–492) was his great-
great grandfather, and Pope Agapetus I (535–536) also may have been a relative.
Gregory’s father, Gordianus, held an office, possibly defensor, but no record of
secular office exists for the family before 573, when Gregory became urban
prefect, an office that eventually fell into desuetude. Germanicus, who succeeded
Gregory, may also have been his brother. Gregory’s mother, Silvia, took vows on
the death of her husband, and three of his aunts also entered religious life.

SOURCE: https://www.britannica.com/biography/St-Gregory-the-Great

I chose him because I admire his achievements as a Pope. As a Pope,

Gregory faced numerous challenges, including those posed by the Lombards, who
sought to control Italy and practiced Arianism, and those posed by the Byzantines,
who employed strategies that were designed to protect Ravenna, the
administrative centre of Byzantine government in Italy, at the expense of Rome.
Indeed, both Lombards and Byzantines posed threats: the sedition of imperial
soldiers was as troubling as the swords of the Lombards. Forced to orchestrate an
independent policy, Gregory saw himself as the “treasurer” who paid the daily
expenses of Rome and the “paymaster” of the Lombards, whose swords were
held back only by daily ransom from the church. In conducting war, he planned
strategies, funded soldiers, and directed diplomacy, twice preventing Rome from
being sacked by the Lombards. He also ransomed hostages, supported refugees,
secured the grain supply, and repaired aqueducts. Realizing he could neither
defeat the Lombards militarily nor continue a cycle of warfare and ransom,
Gregory repeatedly sought peace. However, a Roman alliance with the Lombards
(and Gauls) would have threatened the independence of Ravenna, and Byzantine
opposition to Gregory’s efforts undermined the peace in Italy. Nevertheless, there
was a rapprochement with the Lombards. Through Gregory’s relationship with
Theodelinda, the Catholic wife of the Lombard king Agilulf, Catholics became
welcome at court. After 600, relations between Lombard and Roman Italy
improved greatly. Friendship and patronage had thus accomplished what military
strategy and imperial policies could not.
 2 Philosophers in Modern Era
Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20

March 1727) was the greatest scientist of his
time and, according to many, of all time: he
perfected the theory of mechanics, created the
first dynamical theory of gravity, and made
fundamental experimental discoveries in optics.
He also discovered the calculus and made a host
of contributions to other branches of
mathematics. His principal work was the Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy (1687), in which he set out the laws of motion that since bear
his name, and deduced from astronomical observations (and)
particularly Kepler’s laws) both the universality of gravity as a force
function and its form: the inverse square law.
Of Newton’s three laws of motion, only the third was original to Newton:
the first was due to Descartes and the second to Huygens, who had also
arrived at the law for centripetal acceleration. Throughout his life Newton
distinguished himself by antagonism with his rivals, notably Descartes,
Hooke, and Leibniz. His most extended published philosophical
commentary on motion, the Scholium to the Definitions of Book 1 of
the Principles, was in large part directed to refuting Descartes’ relationalist
theory of motion. Newton held not only that ‘true’ or ‘absolute’ motion
must be presupposed, in order that dynamical laws may defined, but that
they were motions with respect to space itself, viewed as an immaterial,
immovable substance, pervading the entire universe.

SOURCE: http://philosophy-of-cosmology.ox.ac.uk/newton.html
 I chose Isaac Newton because he was an established physicist and
mathematician, and is credited as one of the great minds of the 17th
century Scientific Revolution. With discoveries in optics, motion and
mathematics, Newton developed the principles of modern physics. In 1687,
he published his most acclaimed work, Philosophiae, Natrualis, Principia
Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which has
been called the single-most influential book on physics. Newton died in
London on March 31, 1727. One of the most influential thinkers and natural
philosophers in history, let alone the modern era.

David Hume
He was a Scottish philosopher, economist
and historian of the Age of
Enlightenment. He was an important
figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and,
along with John Locke and Bishop George
Berkeley, one of the three main
figureheads of the influential British
Empiricism movement. He was a fierce
opponent of the Rationalism of
Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, as well as
an atheist and a skeptic. He has come to
be considered as one of the most important British philosophers of all time,
and he was a huge influence on later philosophers, from Immanuel Kant
and Arthur Schopenhauer to the Logical Positivists and Analytic
Philosophers of the 20th Century, as well as on intellectuals in other fields
(including Albert Einstein, who claimed to have been inspired by Hume's
skepticism of the established order). Even today, Hume's philosophical
work remains refreshingly modern, challenging and provocative. In later
life, however, he largely turned away from philosophy in favor of
economics and his other great love, history, and it was only then that he
achieved recognition in his own lifetime.

SOURCE: https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_hume.html
 I chose David Hume because He gave the classic criticism of the
teleological argument for the existence of God (also known as the
argument from design, that order and apparent purpose in the world
bespeaks a divine origin - see the Arguments for the Existence of God
section of the Philosophy of Religion page for more details), arguing that,
for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and
purpose are observed only when they result from design (whereas, on the
contrary, we see order in presumably mindless processes like the
generation of snowflakes and crystals). Furthermore, he argued that the
design argument is based on an incomplete analogy (that of the universe to
a designed machine), and that to deduce that our universe is designed, we
would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. Even if
the design argument were to be successful, he questioned why we should
assume that the designer is God, and, if there is indeed a designer god,
then who designed the designer? Also, he asked, if we could be happy with
an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind, why should we not rest content
with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world? When faced with Leibniz's
contention that the only answer to the question "why is there something
rather than nothing?" was God, and that God was a necessary being with
no need of explanation, Hume responded that there was no such thing as a
necessary being, and that anything that could be conceived of as existent
could just as easily be conceived of as non-existent. However, he was not
willing to propose a convincing alternative answer to the riddle of
existence, taking refuge in the argument that any answer to such a
question would be necessarily meaningless, as it could never be grounded
in our experience.
 2 Philosophers in Contemporary One

Leo Tolstoy

In the 1860s, he wrote his first great

novel, War and Peace. In 1873,
Tolstoy set to work on the second
of his best known novels, Anna
Karenina. He continued to write
fiction throughout the 1880s and
1890s. One of his most successful
later works was The Death of Ivan
Ilyich. Tolstoy died on November
20, 1910 in Astapovo, Russia.During
quiet periods while Tolstoy was a junker in the Army, he worked
on an autobiographical story called Childhood. In it, he wrote of
his fondest childhood memories. In 1852, Tolstoy submitted the
sketch to The Contemporary, the most popular journal of the
time. The story was eagerly accepted and became Tolstoy's very
first published work.

SOURCE: https://www.biography.com/scholar/leo-tolstoy

The reason why I chose Leo Tolstoy is because after he completed

Childhood, Tolstoy started writing about his day-to-day life at the Army
outpost in the Caucasus still managed to continue writing while at battle
during the Crimean War. During that time, he composed Boyhood (1854), a
sequel to Childhood, the second book in what was to become Tolstoy's
autobiographical trilogy. In the midst of the Crimean War, Tolstoy also
expressed his views on the striking contradictions of war through a three-
part series, Sevastopol Tales. In the second Sevastopol Tales book, Tolstoy
experimented with a relatively new writing technique: Part of the story is
presented in the form of a soldier's stream of consciousness. Once the
Crimean War ended and Tolstoy left the Army, he returned to Russia. Back
home, the burgeoning author found himself in high demand on the St.
Petersburg literary scene. Stubborn and arrogant, Tolstoy refused to ally
himself with any particular intellectual school of thought. Declaring himself
an anarchist, he made off to Paris in 1857. Once there, he gambled away all
of his money and was forced to return home to Russia. He also managed to
publish Youth, the third part of his autobiographical trilogy, in 1857.

Edmund Husserl
He then studied physics, mathematics,
astronomy, and philosophy at the universities
of Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. In Vienna he
received his doctor of philosophy degree in
1882 with a dissertation entitled Beiträge zur
Theorie der Variationsrechnung
(“Contributions to the Theory of the Calculus of
Variations”). In the autumn of 1883, Husserl
moved to Vienna to study with the philosopher
and psychologist Franz Brentano. Brentano’s
critique of any psychology oriented purely
along scientific and psychophysical lines and his claim that he had grounded
philosophy on his new descriptive psychology had a widespread influence.
Husserl received a decisive impetus from Brentano and from his circle of
students. The spirit of the Enlightenment, with its religious tolerance and its
quest for a rational philosophy, was very much alive in this circle. Husserl’s
striving for a more strictly rational foundation found its corroboration here.
From the outset, such a foundation meant for him not only a theoretical act
but the moral meaning of responsibility in the sense of ethical autonomy
daily life.

SOURCE: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Husserl
 I choose him because he had developed an individual style of working: all of
his thoughts were conceived in writing—the minutes, so to speak, of the movement
of his thought. During his life he produced more than 40,000 pages written in
Gabelberger stenographic script. Husserl was still at Göttingen when Max Scheler,
who was at that time a Privatdozent (unsalaried university lecturer) in Jena and
who later became an important Phenomenologist, came in contact with Husserl
(1910–11). Husserl’s friendship with Wilhelm Dilthey, a pioneering theoretician of
the human sciences, also falls within the Göttingen period. Dilthey saw the
publication of the Logische Untersuchungen as a new encouragement to the
further development of his own philosophical theory of the human sciences; and
Husserl himself later acknowledged that his encounter with Dilthey had turned his
attention to the historical life out of which all of the sciences originated and that,
in so doing, it had opened for him the dimension of history as the foundation of
every theory of knowledge.