Dialog is the Season for the Reason 


The ability to question and to know trumps the need for salvation in my life. 

This blog introduces a new category, titled "Queen of the Sciences." It was inevitable that such a category be posted in my blog. I have a lot of training in philosophy—12 undergraduate hours, 12 graduate hours, and both a masters and a Ph.D. in philosophy of education. More than that, I've personally lingered over many philosophical problems. That doesn't make me particularly wonderful. I'm just telling you that I'm quite philosophically-minded, and I mean that in both the common sense way and the schooled way.

Until the end of the 19th Century, philosophy was called "Queen of the Sciences," partly because down through the ages, philosophers have asked and answered the most basic questions. Today, we live in a culture that sees almost no need for the discipline of philosophy. This can be traced to the promulgation and success of the scientific method, and no one could deny the obvious successes of 20th Century science and technology.

I consider myself to be quite fortunate to have received my philosophical schooling primarily at the hands of a traditionalist, a remarkable woman by the name of Elizabeth Steiner Maccia. I was educated in the public schools of Marietta, Ohio and received my baccalaureate from Marietta College. I had been quite successful in scientific studies. Imagine my surprise when in my first survey course of philosophy, Elizabeth made a shocking point: despite the obvious success of science, science cannot even validate its own method. Science, she said, does not prescribe, but rather describes (and explains) phenomena. By contrast, philosophy is normative. Philosophy questions and sets standards. We don't just want to be doing science, she said, we want to be doing good science. No amount of data or questionnaires on what scientists are actually doing will establish standards for science, or for anything else, for that matter.

This is not to say that scientifically validated information about the facts is completely irrelevant. It's just that when it comes to setting norms, the facts are not enough. We also have to promulgate values, which tell us how to use the facts. To people who haven't thought a lot about it, or haven't seen this as a problem, it may come as a surprise that there is a whole body of study on how to make good value choices. Certain traditional categories of philosophical inquiry are very much with us today—ethics (what is good), epistemology (literally "knowledge about knowledge"), aesthetics and metaphysics are four such domains of inquiry.

I chose as the icon for this category a gif file I found on the internet. I actually swiped it from the MyFonts website, and it is used in an ad for a font family from Wilton Foundry. The verses on the gif file are from the Aster epigrams:

To Aster I

Sweet Child, thou star of love and beauty bright,
Alone thou lookest on the midnight skies;
Oh! That my spirit were yon Heaven of light
To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes.

To Aster II

Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled; –
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendour to the dead.

According to the website The World History of Male Love, these were translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and express Plato's mourning and love for his recently deceased friend.

Plato is arguably a good image for this category for several reasons. First of all, he is perhaps the candidate for "father of Western philosophy" who is most often and most vigorously touted. Plato's dialogs are masterpieces of both literature and philosophy. People are still asking and answering the same questions enshrined in his writing, seldom with as much sophistication or artistic merit. If you have never read a Platonic dialog, you should. The Meno is a very good place to start, whether or not you go further. In this dialog, Socrates (Plato's teacher) leads Meno through a series of questions in an effort to pin down a clear meaning for virtue. Socrates seeks for a definition of virtue, and uses/illustrates several standard philosophical techniques throughout the dialog.

Second, Plato's philosophizing turned out to be very important for church history. The Neo-Platonic strain of thought in Hellenistic culture—fueled by a distrust of the human, living as such in the changing world of appearance—was a central driving force toward the deification of Jesus Christ. However, this second emergent face of God in the Judeo-Christian heritage opened up charges of polytheism, and hence paganism, from other traditions. The concept of the Holy Trinity was offered as a solution to the problem. Jesus Christ and the Father, two persons, one substance. At Nicea in 325 B.C., it was the Alexandrian school which won out over the Arians at Antioch, i.e. the Platonists over the Aristotelians.

Third, while you certainly don't have to be homosexual or male to do or appreciate philosophy, you gotta hand it to those ancient Greeks, they certainly knew a good thing when they saw it. Which is more than you can say for a lot of contemporary folks, who often mistake their own bungholes for a hole in the ground.

Now as to the title of this piece, which is also a pun (to which Plato was no stranger), it should be obvious. But just in case someone is suffering from hole confusion, here it is made explicit. We all have seen "Jesus is the Reason for the Season." In other words, Christmas is the official birthday for Jesus Christ, the divine God in human form. The title "Dialog is the Season for the Reason" is my way of saying that there is no time (IMNSHO—in my not so humble opinion) when reason, i.e. philosophical dialog, is inappropriate. Critical thought is always in season. "God said it, I believe it, and that's that!" is definitely NOT my credo. But we CAN talk about it. 'Nuf said. 

Posted: Thu - March 30, 2006 at 10:48 AM          

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