Poetry Archive

The Philosopher

An engagement with Greek Philosophy as if it were a single person

In a world of naughty gods
Witchcraft, amulets, and potions
The philosopher finds himself at odds
With mainstream notions

He sits on his big chair
thinks on what he has seen
Sees a world where
It is not as it seems

There must be a perfect pattern
Underneath the chaotic changing
Moons and planets that turn
In perfect circles earth-orbiting

We need to categorize all there is
In geometric forms that bring
All reality into what is
Our answer for everything

And when we have found the truths
Even God must obey our rules
Let no detail spoken by youths
Overthrow our system and its tools

So let us talk and then talk some more
Build perfect cities of the mind
Philosopher kings shall recite our lore
To soldiers, slaves, and the blind

Do not bother me with details
Like my perfect cures do not work
My theories have been weighed on scales
Of pure reason not guesswork

The 1277-Condemnation ▼
Arguably the Greek mindset that had crippled scientific observation by limiting what it could see to Aristotelian categories and had fossilized theology into Platonic forms broke when on March 7, 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, with the support of the pope, forbade the teaching of 219 philosophical and theological theses of such nonsense that presumed to tell God what He could or could not do. However by the time of the Black Death just a century later this mindset had still not been purged in the responses to the plague. Galen and Hippocrates still trumped actual observations and free thought about what might be happening. Stephen Meyer in his brilliant book "The Return of the God Hypothesis" shows amongst a great many other things how the final liberation from the Greco-Roman mindset of the first Christian millennia and the recovery of the doctrine of creation in the Reformation helped reopen the eyes of the Western European world and allow the birth of modern science.