Video Link: mythos
and logos
There are several things I want you to learn from this unit.
This unit will introduce the concepts of Mythos and Logos, show how they are different, show how Logos is the foundation of science & technology, show how Logos can be criticised, and finally, show how (in my view) the two criticisms of Logos are fundamentally misguided. This final discussion of these misguided criticisms should also serve to more precisely deliniate the exact nature of Logos.
Before you get started on the detailed reading,
here's something to give you a broad general idea of what I basically
expect you to get out of this chapter. I also want you to be
able to fill in all the little details and nuances that will come up in
this chapter, but here is the rough outline of what I want you to get. Mythos is kind-of like religion.
It's different from religion in a lot of ways, but it is kind of like a
religious way of "answering" questions about the universe. I'll expect
you to know quite a bit more about mythos when you've finished this
chapter, but thinking it's like religion is one way to get started. Logos is sort of like science.
It's not science, but logos is actually an important part of what makes
science work, One way to think about it is to realize that science
actually can't work without logos. (If that doesn't make
sense to you now, it should make sense after you've finished this
chapter. If it doesn't, go back and read the chapter again, because
it's an important point.) To see the difference, imagine there are two
hospitals where people go to be treated for bacterial infections. In
one, the staff pray to a deity for the patients to recover. In the
other, patients are given doses of compounds, called "antibiotics,"
that have been known, in the recent past,
Some theories turn out to be wrong, and others turn out to be not wrong, or at least not wrong yet. Mythos is a theory of how to generate knowledge, and Mythos is a theory that has never worked, so we tend to say that it is wrong. However, there may be people who think Logos is wrong, and there are two arguments, or "criticisms," that could be used in attemts to dicredit Logos. They are both bad arguments, and, if you read this chapter carefully, you will find it easy to see why they are bad arguments
The first criticism claims that Logos is not superior to Mythos because Logos is just a defective form of mythology, and is thus not any better than Mythos. This criticism is wrong because it ignores the most important thing about Logos is that it can be tested and it produces new knowledge. As your read this chapter, you'll see why this is so, and you'll see all the other details of this issue.
The second criticism is that supporting Logos is the same as ethnocentrism, wich is the idea that one's own (Western) culture is superior to all other cultures. The argument goes that ethnocetrism is bad, so supporting Logos is bad. This argument fails because saying "Logos gets to the truth" is not the same as saying "Western culture is better." Not all Western people use Logos (most do not) and non-Western cultures also sometimes can and do use Logos, so Logos isn't really just a Western thing at all.
Read the rest of the chapter to understand how and why these things are so.
Read Thales Theories and Water as a first principle
I have a strong feeling that people before Thales had technology but did not have science. By this I mean that they knew how to do lots of things, but they did not understand why the way they did things achieved the results they did. They knew that growing parts needed sunlight and water, but they didn't know why. They knew roughly when the rains would come, but they didn't know why. They knew how to build boats, but they didn't know why they floated. They had an enormous amount of practical trial-and-error knowledge, but they had no theoretical knowledge. This was a bad thing, because it made it enormously difficult, and in most cases impossible, to make any improvements in their technology. Medicine, to take the most striking example, was almost completely ineffective. Without even the beginnings of a theoretical understanding of how the body worked, nobody knew how to cure anything, and ailments that modern medicine now treats as trivial routinely killed thousands of people.
This is not to say that the ancient peoples did not have theories that they took to explain the natural world. They had thousands of theories, but none of them represented a theoretical understanding of anything. Instead, these "theories" were comforting stories they told each other to make themselves feel that they understood things. For instance, to give themselves the feeling that they understood the phenomenon of the echo, they told a story of a nymph, called "Echo," who pined away for the self-absorbed youth Narcissus until only her voice was left. To explain the rainbow, they invoked the goddess Iris, and to explain the sun, they told the story of Apollo in his golden chariot taking a daily journey across the heavens.
The way of "explaining" things by telling emotionally satisfying stories is called "mythos." I'd like you to pay a little attention to the idea of "knowledge" that is entailed by mythos.. In mythos thinking,"knowing" means "knowing the story." And similarly, "ignorance" means "not knowing the story." To this kind of thinker, the question "do you know how the sun moves across the sky?" Is most properly answered by "yes, it is a golden chariot of Apollo, charging across the heavens." To the mythos thinker, the investigation stops at the story. Once a satisfying story has been concocted and disseminated, nothing more needs to be done. Indeed, questioning the story is often seen as a bad thing. People who question the story, all wish to offer another explanation, are often seen as impious and even evil.
I bring up this point about knowledge because I want a make a deeper point about the development of philosophy, science, and human civilization. Reading our history books, it might sometimes seem that the history of ideas is merely a history of discoveries and nothing more. History books tell us that one guy discovered one thing, then another guy discovered another thing, and after that a third guy discovered a third thing, and so on. But the history of ideas is much more than that. fundamentally, and particularly at the beginning, it is a history of how people changed their ideas about the thinking process itself. In ancient days, merely knowing the same story as everyone else in your tribe was sufficient to have knowledge. A man called Thales of Miletus was the first person to think in a way that went beyond this idea of "knowledge," and he started a process that is even now still playing itself out in our society.
Thales might not have been the first person to practice the style of thinking that we call logos, but he is the first that we know about, and it suits my purposes to assume he was first. If he was first, he was very, very different from the people who went before him. Thales was not satisfied by stories. He wanted to figure out natural explanations for natural phenomena, and he wanted those explanations to make logical sense. This means that he really made two innovations in the technology of thought. First, he decided that natural phenomena should only be explained by recourse to other natural phenomena. Second, he decided that the standard by which explanation should be judged is whether on not the explanation given makes logical sense on the basis of the evidence available. It is this insistence that explanations make logical sense on the basis of the available evidence that truly marks Thales as the creator of a fundamental innovation in human thought. No development before or since is as important.
Thales tried to explaintwo things. First, Thales attempted to explain why the Nile flooded in summer rather than winter, and second, he attempted to explain how it is various kinds of stuff turn, or at least appear to turn, into each other. Thales tried to explain the flooding of the mile in summer by appeal to the existence of dry desert winds that dried up the river during other seasons, and he attempted to explain observed apparent transformations of one material into another by hypothesizing that they were all fundamentally the same material, which could itself appear in various different forms.
Thales did not start out thinking that there might be a basic stuff. Rather, he started out with a series of puzzles. People in his time believed that they observed a variety of phenomena in the natural world. Some of these "phenomena" sound weird to us now. The "sun drawing water," for instance. Ancient sailors believed that they sometimes saw the sun sucking fog out of the air, and, because the ancients had not yet begun to build the structure of knowledge that allows us to think this idea ridiculous, it seemed reasonable to people at the time. In fact, based on the state of knowledge at the time, nobody could have known that this phenomenon was impossible. To the ancients, it was just as reliable and observation as seeing the Nile dry up in winter. Similarly, the morning dew seemed to appear out of nowhere, which led Thales to think that perhaps it sprang up out of the earth. Looking over the various reported phenomena of the time, Thales noticed that a number of them involved water, and developed a theory that he thought might explain several different observations under one general theory. Nobody really cared whether or not the was a basic stuff, but people were interested in knowing what was really going on when they saw the sun drawing water. This is why Thales's theory caught on, because it enabled people to make sense of the world they thought they were seeing. The fact that Thales had the insight that there could be a basic stuff out of which everything else was made was another brilliant achievement. This led 50 years later to the famous theory of the four elements, and then atomic theory, then modern chemistry, and now, string theory.The history of science is not fundamentally a history of "discoveries," as that term is commonly understood. It is a history of theories. When we say Priestly discovered oxygen, we don't mean to say that he opened up a cupboard, and there it was, next to the sugar. No, what happened was Priestly produced evidence that could only be reasonably explained by assuming the existence of a gas with the properties we now ascribed to the gas we call "oxygen." In other words, Priestly had a successful theory. It wasn't actually the right theory, but it was successful. What we now call "oxygen," Priestly called "dephlogistonated air," but that doesn't matter. Priestly did not understand this substance as a separate element. He saw it as air that had a greater than normal capacity to accept a substance called "phlogiston" from other substances, but that doesn't matter. He was the first person to come up with a theory explaining the phenomena we now describe as combustion and respiration in pure oxygen, and that's why he gets the credit.
The history of science is also the history of method. In science, you observe a phenomenon, either by going out to where it's expected to happen, or by creating the right conditions for it to happen in a laboratory, and then come up with a theory based on other potentially observable natural phenomena to explain it. Thales invented this, and that's why he gets the credit.
This point about basing your explanation on potentially observable natural phenomena is vital. It is what fundamentally distinguishes logos from mythos. Mythos explanations cannot ever be proved wrong. They are not based on evidence, they do not refer to anything you could ever check, and so there is no way to tell whether they are right or wrong. For the exact same reason that they can never be proved wrong, there are absolutely no potential consequences to believing them or not believing them. Believing that Iris created the rainbow does not help you create rainbows, does not help you avoid rainbows, and does not help you predict when rainbows are going to happen. The theory is useless, and therefore, in a fundamental sense, it is meaningless.
Consider the demonic possession theory of mental illness. Suppose we were to take someone who had mental illness and treat him according to this theory. We might try reasoning with the demons, we might try bribing them, we might try scaring them by appeal to a more powerful demon, or a really powerful imaginary friend. If the patient gets better, we of course say that this proves our theory true. If the patient does not get better, we say that the demons are recalcitrant, or that they don't believe in our imaginary friend, and we insist that our complete failure to cure the patient does not mean that his mental illness is not caused by daemons. Now let us say that someone takes two populations of people with mental illness, and subjects one group to treatment based on the demon theory while subjecting the other group to no treatment whatsoever. Let us also say that the progress of the disease in both groups is identical. Just as many people get better in the group that received no treatment as the group that received exorcisms. Do we say that this proves that there are no demons? Of course not! We say that demons are supernatural creatures, and nothing that mere mortals can do to make a demon do something he doesn't want to. At this point, others might ask us what good the demon theory is if it cannot help us help people with mental illness? And we will have no answer. Since the demon theory has no detectable consequences, it is absolutely meaningless in terms of actually getting anything done. It might give some people some emotional satisfaction to believe it, but that's about it.
I think I ought to make some comment about the difference between a scientific and an unscientific theory. At a certain point in history, the demon theory of disease might well have functioned as a scientific theory. At least, it might have been formulated in such a way as to be amenable to empirical testing. We could have done the experiment described above, and to my mind, the ability to have detectable consequences is what distinguishes a scientific theory from a non-scientific theory. So if we compare a theory of demons we detectable consequences to a theory of demons that cannot ever be detected, I think that we should judge the first theory scientific and the second theory meaningless. Of course, we have ample proof that the theory of mental illness by demons with detectable consequences is false, but that's not a problem. Plenty of scientific theories have been proved false. From the point of view of logos, it is much better to be a theory that is proved false, that a theory that cannot be proved one way or the other. And this gives us a deeper understanding of the difference between a "natural" and a "supernatural" explanation. What really makes the difference between a logos explanation and a mythos explanation, is that explanations that can be checked will function inside logos, and explanations that cannot be checked won't. It is this lack of checkability, this essential meaninglessness, that makes supernatural explanations useless as far as logos is concerned.
Is this essential difference between logos and mythos that makes Thales such an important figure. If he, or someone like him, had not started using the style of explanation that we now call logos, we would not have any even half-way advanced technology, our society would be medieval, and we wouldn't have science at all. To understand what that means, imagine that there are two identical countries, Mytholia and Logoland, separated by a range of impassable mountains. At the time our story begins, Mytholia and Logoland both exist as what we would now call "ancient" societies. Both practice slavery, both oppress women and minorities, both had only the most rudimentary technology and both have medicine that is much more likely to kill you, than to make you better. As the story begins, Mytholia is a completely mythos driven society. The only kind of explanations that are ever offered for any kind of phenomena are mythos explanations. Mythos has a rich mythology, with deeply satisfying stories to account for absolutely everything that anybody ever observes in the world. Logoland, on the other hand, adopts a logos driven society. Only logos type explanations are ever accepted. If there is no adequate, checkable explanation available, the citizens of Logoland insist that the phenomenon in question is unexplained, and wait for someone to come up with a good checkable explanation. In Mytholia, they practice mythos, and in Logoland, they practice logos.
Now let us suppose that we go away and drink coffee for a thousand years. What do we expect to find upon our return? Will Logoland be like? And what of Mytholia? The state of Mytholia, actually is pretty easy to predict. It will be exactly like it was a thousand years ago, in every important respect. Oh, probably the population will have increased, unless there was a famine, or a war, or a plague. Certainly, the technology and form of life will be the same, which means that the same groups who were being impressed before, will be impressed now, and medicine will still be lethal. Logoland, on the other hand, is harder to protect. What would a completely rational society be like? Well, the technology will be better, the medicine will be better, the laws will be more liberal, social relations will be more harmonious, whatever religions there are will get along with each other, and people will live better, longer, and like their lives more. Just so long as the political will exists to make things better, the people of Logoland will have had the ability to make things better. And that stuff adds up. And if you're wondering about political will, I will point out that countries that emphasize logos, such as America and the European countries, tend to do better socially than countries that emphasize mythos, such as Saudi Arabia, in which the status of women, minorites, non-muslims, LGBTA people, and guest workers is somewhat less than optimal. (Previous wording referring to Saudi Arabia as a "hell-pit" was removed on 11/15/2017.) Make no mistake, just about everything that is truly good about modern society has come from (repligious and non-religious people) applying logos.
Philosophy is not just about explaining different doctrines. It is also about developing criticisms of doctrines, and logically determining whether or not the criticisms are valid. Just as scientific theories are developed, confirmed, criticized and often discarded on the basis of valid criticism, philosophical doctrines are developed, criticized and, depending on the validity of the criticism, either discarded or accepted until the next criticism comes along. For the rest of this essay, I want to discuss two criticisms of logos. It's not that I think that they are particularly good criticisms. It's that I want you to be able to understand the way philosophy works, a one of the most important features of philosophy is that any doctrine can be criticized at any time. Just like scientific theories, philosophical doctrines are held tentatively. This means that a philosophical doctrine is only accepted until a good reason to discard it comes along. Which means that, like scientific theories, the best you can say about any philosophical doctrine is that it is currently the best logically supported one out there.
We are now going to consider two criticisms of logos. I call them the "ethnocentrism" criticism and the Jung/Strauss "just another mythos" criticism. I find these criticisms easier to discuss if I talk about them in terms of logocentrism. "Logocentrism" is a handy name for the idea that society should be organized in such a way as to base all decisions that affect others on logos. Logocentrism does not seek to ban religion, nor does it seek to keep religious people out of public life. Rather, it insists that government decisions, and public funds should only be allocated on the basis of theories supported by logos thinking. Logocentrism also says that public education should teach logos, and not promote mythological thinking. Logocentrism fundamentally advocates basing society on an understanding of the world that is developed entirely through the process we call logos, which also includes respect for individual decisions and acceptance of differing personal beliefs.
The ethnocentrism criticism holds that Logocentrism is just another form of ethnocentrism. This criticism says that, when I say that every society should organize itself on the basis of an understanding of the world that is developed through logos, I am being ethnocentric. That is, I am doing no more and no less than telling members of every other culture in the world that they should give up their own cultures and adopt my Judeo-Christian based, consumer oriented, liberal democratic, capitalistic, European-style culture.The just-another-mythos criticism holds that logos is nothing more than a rather poor-quality mythos. This criticism holds that when I promote logos, I am merely offering people an alternative mythological understanding of the world that offers them absolutely no advantages over other forms of myth, and which is considerably less satisfying and useful than most.
Ethnocentrism is a very serious charge to level at a doctrine. European ethnocentrism, as it was practiced in the 19th and early 20th centuries, has done enormous harm to the world. Many countries around the globe are still struggling with the long-term effects of colonialism, which was carried out under the ethnocentric assumption that European culture was better than any other, and that European elites were more deserving of control over the resources of the world than the people who happen to be living among and above those resources. At the very least, to accuse a doctrine of being ethnocentric is to accuse it of being profoundly disrespectful to the values and lifeways of others. As far as I can see, the ethnocentrism criticism relies on the fact that most advocates of logocentrism are members of so-called "Western" culture. Indeed, some people believe that Western culture is characterized by logos, and will refer to the logical way of thinking as "Western science." Sometimes, they will even go so far as to contrast it with things like "Eastern mysticism," or "Third World tribalism." But these people, in my view, are just as mistaken as those who think that Logocentrism is just a form of ethnocentrism.
What I am calling "Logocentrism" would be a form of ethnocentrism if it was true that there was nothing in Logocentrism but Western cultural values, and Logocentrism included all Western cultural practices. For Logocentrism to be a form of ethnocentrism, it has to be true that logos is just another word for Western culture. But this is very far from the truth. Logos and Western culture are two very different things. It is true that some people in the West advocate logos, and it may also be true that Logocentrists form a larger proportion of the population in the West than they do in other areas. But this does not mean that Logocentrism is the same as Western culture, and nor does it mean that non-Western cultures are not themselves logocentric. Western culture includes a large proportion of people who still indulge in mythological thinking in many areas of their lives. There are many people in the United States who work very hard to cause the state to impose their brand of religion on other American citizens. There are many people in the United States who makes serious decisions on the basis of astrology, or other contra scientific practices. Furthermore, there have always been plenty of people outside the West who used logos. Any honest history of civilization will recognize the scientific and philosophical accomplishments of non-Western cultures. Therefore, anyone who promotes logos will have to promote it, and defend it, as much inside the West as outside. And anyone who promotes logos outside the West will not be telling anyone to do anything new or different, but will rather be urging the local people to do more of something some of them are doing already.
It is definitely true that some people promote Western ethnocentrism under the guise of promoting logos, but these people are not promoting logos. I have heard that the Dogon people of West Africa once believed that humans were descended from monkeys, but that Western missionaries told them this must be false because the Bible said otherwise, thus ethnocentricly promoting a Western mythos against what might very well have been a local example of logos. The are also stories of missionaries promoting their religion by predicting eclipses, and providing penicillin to local people. The missionary who who consults an almanac created by astronomers, or purchases penicillin invented by medical science, and then falsely claims that these benefits are fruits of his superior religion is not just attacking logos, he is fraudulently appropriating its fruits to deceive people into accepting his own mythological system.
Another possible criticism of Logocentrism, attributed to psychologist Carl Jung and anthropologist Claude Lev-Strauss, is that logos is just another form of mythos, and not a very good one at that. The idea is that when westerners started using logos as a way of describing and managing their worlds, they were simply replacing one set of myths with another set of myths. Gods become physical laws, trees and flowers become particles and waves, and heroes become pathetic imbiciles battered around by forces they still don't understand. This criticism holds that science mystifies and obfuscates the world, making it less understandable and more confusing, and thus less safe and less comfortable to people everywhere. Matter is now empty space instead of solid stuff, light is now a wave and a particle, and no longer the thing that lets us see flowers and sunsets. Jung and Strauss seem to see science as dropping the bottom out of the world, leaving everyone rootless, confused and fearful.
Logos would indeed be just another mythos, if it were the case that the unseen entities appealed to by logos functioned exactly the same way as the unseen entities appealed to by mythos. If logos was just another mythos, it would certainly be a very unsatisfying one. I should imagine that very few people are able to gain a sense of meaning and purpose from reading scientific theories. And people who need to feel a sense that they can rely on an eternal truths will be very unsatisfied with the way science keeps changing his story. People who enjoy gaining a sense of their place in the world from hearing stories about how gods and demons created the world will not be happy with scientific explanations of those things, particularly since those explanations get more complicated and less comprehensible every year. But nobody has ever said the logos was intended to provide these kinds of satisfactions. Religion already does a good job at this for those who need it. No, Logos is intended to provide a deep and potentially usable understanding of the laws that govern the universe. Logos gives us the ability to change the materials of the world into forms that satisfy our needs and desires. Logos, in the form of philosophy, also gives us the tools to figure out what are our most important needs, and which desires we have a right to satisfy. Mythos cannot do this. It is true that mythological thinkers make many, many, many pronouncements about what human beings really need and what desires they should have. But when these claims are based purely in mythological thinking, they are always unfounded.
So it is therefore false in two ways to say that logos is just another form of mythos. First, it is false to say that logos has nothing that mythos doesn't. Logos gives us the ability to actually understand and manipulate our world and ourselves. Mythos cannot possibly provide that. Second, it is false to say that logos is a form of mythos at all. Logos is not intended to provide a spiritual satisfaction of a sense of meaning in the world. Many people seek both scientific and spiritual understanding, and many of our greatest scientists were also deeply religious people. Atheists who are scientists do not turn to science for a sense of something larger than themselves, rather they believe that they do not need such stories to get along in their lives.
The two criticisms are very similar. The difference is that where Jung/Strauss is concerned with the similarities between Logos and various existing mythoi, the ethnocentrism criticism does not care about logos being like mythos. The ethnocentrism criticism points out that logocentrism is basically a product of European culture, whereas other cultures tended to think in different, more mythological ways. The criticism claims that, since no culture is better than any other, it is wrong to say that logos is a better way of thinking than the mythos ways nonwestern peoples generally used. Thus the Jung/Strauss criticism is based on logos being like mythos, while the ethnocentrism criticism is based on logos being a product of western culture.
Write down the following questions on a piece of paper. Then turn off the computer, put away your book and notes, and answer the questions in your own words as best you can. after you're done, open your book and notes, and check your answers.
If there's any questions you can't answer from what's given in this page, please email me or post a question in the FaceBook group.
Thinky questions. (Answer these as well as you can based on your understanding of the above.)
In your own words, what is Mythos?
In your own words, what is Logos?
Criticism Exercise.
Consider the following statements.
A. Logos is better than mythos because it produces knowledge that we can use to make human life better. Logos produces information about the real forces of nature and the real properties of materials. This information can be used to produce advances in industry, agriculture and medicine that have saved or improved the quality of millions upon millions of lives. Thus logos is analogous to mathematics, in that it is a universally applicable way of looking at quantities that allows us to understand and deal with the world much better than other ways of looking at quantities.
B. Logos is a radically different way of doing things. Logos explanations appeal to natural objects and forces whose behavior can be predicted. Logos explanations often allow us to make predictions about future events in specific circumstances. These predictions can be checked. If we are acting according to logos, we will discard those explanations that fail to produce accurate predictions. Mythos explanations cannot be checked because they do not produce predictions. Logos explanations are thus something like mathemetical calculations in that they can be worked out and then checked against the real world to see if they worked. Thus logos is radically different from mythos.
C. Logos is a way of thinking that is effective in all times and places. The fact that it is promoted and valued in the West is irrelevant. While it may have been invented in Europe, it can be, and has been, used by people of all times and all cultures. Some Westerners may think that logos makes the West superior to other cultures, but this is not true because people in other cultures are just as capable of using logos, and besides, the West has plenty of myths of its own. In this respect, logos is like mathematics, which was invented by the ancient Greeks and Arabs. To say that math is superior to random guessing is not the same as saying that the ancient Greeks and Arabs were better than the rest of us.
D. Mythos is better than logos because scientific and philosophical theories are simply too abstract to do justice to the sensuous features of everyday existence. We must deal with a world of sunlight, trees, buildings, thunderstorms and people, but all science gives us is photons, osmosis, valence, low-pressure systems and cognition. Mythos, on the other hand, gives us explanations that mean something to us, that make sense to us in our everyday lives. Logos is thus akin to the gibberings of a madman, a collection of arcane and meaningless phrases, flung together in nonsensical order. Such incredibly complicated wriings are not worth reading because, even if they could be deciphered, the meanings derived from them would be of no earthly use in our lives.
E. What modern people call "logos" is not radically different from old-fashioned mythmaking. Instead of the gods, demons, and spirits of the old myths, the new mythmakers invent new invisible and intangible entities like "electrons," and "strong nuclear force" which they plug in to the new myths in the places that used to be reserved for gods. Thus a logos explanation works exactly like a mythos explanation, and logos is just another kind of mythos. Logos is thus analogous to any mythological scheme, such as Greek Mythology, for instance. The electromagnetic force in logos functions exactly the same way as Zeus in Greek Mythology, nuclear fusion plays the same role as Prometheus, nonlinear thermodynamics plays the part of Eris, the war god's little sister, and so on.
F. The idea that logos is a better way of thinking than mythos is no more than Western ethnocentrism in action. "Logos" is nothing more than a word for the Western way of doing things, and telling non Westerners that logos is a more effective way of thinking is just a cloaked way of telling them that their own cultures are inferior to Western culture. Logos is thus exactly like Christianity, which was illegitimately held to be superior to the native religions of non-western peoples. Just as non-westerners were persuaded to give up their own perfectly valid religions for Christianity on the basis of this false claim of superiority, non-westerners are now being persuaded to give up their own perfectly valid folkways for this alien and wholly western way of logos.
One great danger with online courses is that students can "click-through" the course without studying the material. Without a conscious effort to study the material away from the computer, students risk fooling themselves into thinking they're doing well when in fact they're merely memorizing words and phrases without truly understanding anything.
To ensure a deep understanding of this material, it is important to take the time to do paper-and-pencil study of this reading. So far in this unit you should have created a set of notes based on your answers to the reading questions, your musings over the thinky questions, and your own ideas. Now it's time to deepen your understanding by taking a quiz.
It's important that you do this activity before taking the online practice quiz. That quiz is multiple choice, and so it doesn't require you to compose your own answers. Instead it sets the much shallower task of recognizing riight answers embedded among wrong answers. This is a helpful activity, but it will be much more helpful if you have already struggled with these issues.
This is one of the activities that makes the difference between taking the class and merely skimming it.
Make a note of the questions you have trouble with, and try to answer them more fully as you go on further into the unit.
Correct answers to the above questions represent a very good start at understanding this material. Your ability to answer these comparatively simple questions is essential to allowing you to understand and explain the deeper issues we will study later in this unit.
Potential Exam Questions
The following questions may appear on the next exam. Your
answer should demonstrate that you understand all
the logical relationships between all the
relevant facts for that particular
question. The deeper the understanding
you demonstrate, the better your grade will be.
Many of the topics in this class involve doctrines that are mistakenly
supported or, more interestingly, mistakenly criticized by others.
Understanding is best demonstrated by something like the following:
1. Explaining a doctrine clearly and completely, including all relevant
details and nuances. And,
2. Explaining at least one criticism of that doctrine clearly and
completely. And,
3a. Explaining clearly and completely why that
criticism fails. (This will usually involve showing that the critic has
made some unfounded logical assumption, has mischaracterized or
misunderstood the doctrine he is criticising, or has made some other
logical or factual mistake.) or
3b. Explaining clearly and completely why the
original doctrine fails. (This will usually involve showing that the
thinker involved has made some unfounded logical assumption, has
mischaracterized or misunderstood the doctrine he is criticising, or
has made some other logical or factual mistake.)
It is pointing out people's real logical mistakes that does
the most to demonstrate your understanding of an issue, so do your best
to follow the logic of these issues all the way out to the end.
If you're not sure how to address an exam question, at least try to
fully explain and properly organize all the information relevant to the
question. This will include a variety of ideas developed in response to
the above questions in your personal reading and in class discussions.
I have added some hint questions to the first question to indicate the
kind of things you should think about for your answer. The
hint questions will not appear on the exam.
Expect to write at least a page on each question
1. Explain the significance of Thales in the development of
western civilization.
Your answer should at least include the definitions of Mythos and Logos
and explain the differences between them. It should include discussion
of what kinds of explanations can be checked for accuracy and what kind
can't, and how this issue is related to the possibility of intellectual
progress. It should also include an explanation of how Thales was
different from previous known thinkers and of his role in founding
Western philosophy. This in turn should be followed by discussion of
how philosophy affected the development of western civilization. What
would be different if we had not had someone like Thales to get
philosophy started in the west?
2. Explain and evaluate the Jung/Strauss
defense of Mythos against Logos.
Your answer should define mythos and logos and explain how they're supposed
to be different. It should also explain Jung and Strauss's argument
against that difference, and their argument for the superiority of
mythos. Make sure you include all necessary details. Then you should
explain the defense that your instructor has given against this
criticism. If you disagree with your instructor's defense of
logocentrism, you can say so, and you can potentially enhance your
answer by explaining your reasons why you think the Jung/Strauss
defense of Mythos against Logos works after all.
3. Explain and evaluate the "ethnocentrism"
criticism of Logos.
Last semester, several students answered this question with "Logos is
ethnocentric because it is just the Western way of doing things, and
privileging the Western way of doing things above other ways of doing
things is ethnocentric." This just barely counts as an explanation of
the ethnocentrism criticism of Logos, but it does
not even begin to be an evaluation of that
criticism. An answer to this question that merely repeats the
ethnocentrism criticism of Logos without attempting to evaluate that
criticism will be a failing answer. To prepare for the exam you should
not only may he also able to give a complete explanation of the
ethnocentrism criticism, but you should also be able to give both of
the two main reasons for thinking that the ethnocentrism criticism is
nonsense. If you decide to say that the ethnocentrism criticism is not
nonsense, you had better have answers for the two criticisms. If your
answer to this question is merely a repetition of the ethnocentrism
criticism, you will not get a good mark for that answer.
Any exam answer can be enhanced by addition of any comments that occur
to you. The more you think about a topic, the more likely you are to
come up with something that can earn you a little more credit for your
answer. I never deduct points, so it can't hurt to
add your own thoughts.
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