Philosophy

First off, to announce the winner of this week's most helpful posts, Stephen, thank you. I'll bring you your prize the next time I see you.

I recently picked up a book titled "Philosophy: 100 essential thinkers," and have been spending a little bit of time going through it, re-aquainting myself with some of the better known great minds of history. (If you ask me, there have been a lot more great minds in history than are written about in the books...there has to be.) I find that a great many of them were talked about in my ancient science and technology class I took second year. I was surprised over the course of that class to find that we were talking about philosophy, as it has not often been counted among the sciences, but in ancient times, what we now consider philosophy WAS science.

These great men, and yes, apparently only men did any kind of worthwhile thinking in ancient times (as always, a post for another day: the women missing in much of history), were not trying to contemplate their own existence, not originally. My favorite example was the discussion of nothingness, today considered to be a purely philosophical concept because we have a better understanding of what constitutes nothingness. Early on in the history of philosophy however, nothingness wasn't something that COULD be talked about, and why not? Because it didn't exist. You couldn't talk about what DIDN'T exist, it simply made no sense.

Today, we see this as a way of hindering process, we love to think about the things that don't exist, because that is the only way to bring them into existence. We have an understanding of being left with nothing when you take everything else away, and in numerical terms, we express that through the number Zero. We don't often think about this nice round little number, because we have an understanding of nothing. We know what nothing is, and so we can contemplate nothingness. The power of the absence of something has been removed from our world, but this was not always the case.

The thinker that this is attributed to is known as Parmenides of Elea, and it was his work that gave rise to the idea that to even consider something is to give it an existence. Therefore, we cannot discuss anything that doesn't exist, because purely by discussing it, we are giving it an existence, even if that existence is only in our minds. So the question is, which is the correct thought process, that nothing can be discussed that doesn't exist, because then it would exist, or that the things which we cannot see and touch and understand cannot exist? Is an existence in our mind enough to sustain something, or does it need a material existence to actually exist? Can I use the world exist any more times in this post?

As with just about everything else in life, I find lovely ways to tie this into my writing. It's always entertaining to find a way to think something into existence, and that is just what I intend to do. I promise to include a post in the coming week or so that ties into this. Hoorah, my avid readers, you will get to see some of my fiction on here.

As always, I hope to get lots of feedback on this.

Lisa

"One cannot know that which is not - that is impossible." Parmenides Of Elea