Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts
Page 26
“Know thyself.”
Lao Tzu (circa 604 B.C.E.)
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”
Confucius (circa 551-479 B.C.E.)
“The man of wisdom is never in two minds about right and wrong; the man of benevolence never worries about the future; the man of courage is never afraid.”
Buddha (560-480 B.C.E.)
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
Socrates (470-399 B.C.E.)
“I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can.”
Plato (428/7-348/7 B.C.E.)
“There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)
“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.)
“You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.”
Seneca (4 B.C.E.-65 C.E.)
“The philosopher: he alone knows how to live for himself. He is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing: how to live.”
Epictetus (50-130)
“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.”
Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
“I seek the truth … it is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance that does harm.”
Plotinus (205-270)
“All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.”
Boethius (470-520)
“If chance is defined as an event produced by random motion without any causal nexus, I would say that there is no such thing as chance.”
Peter Abelard (1079-1142)
“We call the intention good which is right in itself, but the action is good, not because it contains within it some good, but because it issues from a good intention.”
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
“Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.”
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
“Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.”
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
“The right of nature … is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.”
René Descartes (1596-1650)
“In the matters we propose to investigate, our inquiries should be directed, not to what others have thought, nor to what we ourselves conjecture, but to what we can clearly and distinctly see and with certainty deduce, for knowledge is not won in any other way.”
Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677)
“Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”
John Locke (1632-1704)
“Where Law ends, Tyranny begins.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
“Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.”
François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778)
“May God, if there is one, save my soul, if I have one.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.”
Thomas Reid (1710-1796)
“This, indeed, has always been the fate of the few that have professed scepticism, that, when they have done what they can to discredit their senses, they find themselves, after all, under a necessity of trusting to them.”
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
“Perils and misadventures are not only the proper school of heroism, they are the only proper theatre which can exhibit its virtue to advantage, and draw upon it the full applause of the world.”
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
“Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
“When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has an age grown old… . The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.”
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
“The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
“Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
“So soon as a table steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.”
William James (1842-1910)
“Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.”
John Dewey (1859-1952)
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it doesn’t occur to him to pull rather than push.”
Karl Popper (1902-1994)
“Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
“Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it’s up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000)
“I see philosophy and science as in the same boat … we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
“Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.”
Robert Nozick (1938-2002)
“From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”
Current Hogwarts Faculty
DAVID BAGGETT is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, Pennsylvania. He’s published articles in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. Dave travels the train stations of the world looking for fractional platform numbers, and probably needs professional help for his addiction to Fizzing Whizzbees.
GREGORY BASSHAM is Director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life and Chair of the Philosophy Department at King’s College, Pennsylvania. He is the co-editor of The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All, author of Original Intent and the Constitution: A Philosophical Study, and co-author of Critical Thinking: A Student’s Introduction. Like Fred and George Weasley, Greg feels his future lies ou
tside the world of academic achievement.
CATHERINE JACK DEAVEL is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota). She specializes in ancient Greek philosophy. David Paul Deavel, by no means the lesser of two Deavels, is a doctoral candidate in historical theology at Fordham University and consulting editor for Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. The Deavels have two children currently transmogrifying their house, which has recently been featured in the “Runes and Ruins” column in the Daily Prophet. Recently they have experimented with the use of margarine in butter beer to very mixed results.
JASON T. EBERL is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He’s published in metaphysics, bioethics, and medieval philosophy, and is slated to co-edit (with Kevin Decker) Star Wars and Philosophy in this series. Jason spends his off-hours repeatedly watching the special edition DVD of “Quidditch’s Most Gruesome Injuries” frame by frame.
MIMI R. GLADSTEIN is Professor of English and Theatre Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso where she functions as an itinerant administrator, having chaired the departments of English, Philosophy, Theatre Arts and Film, Women’s Studies, and Western Cultural Heritage. She has published books and numerous articles on Ayn Rand, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. All of Mimi’s exams have been bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell.
BEN LIPSCOMB and CHRIS STEWART are both philosophy professors at Houghton College. Ben specializes in ethical theory, with further research and teaching interests in environmental and political philosophy, and in Kant. Chris is a specialist in the history and philosophy of science. His other research and teaching interests include the history of philosophy, business ethics, Kierkegaard and American pragmatism. Ben is particularly famous for his defeat of the cute, freckly, brownhaired girl in their class spelling bees in 1983 and 1985 (though not in 1984), for the discovery of the twelve uses of rolled oats, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Chris, who although he has abandoned natural magic for philosophy, retains an active interest in potions. They also both speak fluent Troll.
DIANA MERTZ HSIEH is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her interests range from metaphysics to politics, although virtues such as honesty have long held particular interest. Diana opted for a Muggle degree program only after discovering that no American university offers a doctorate in the History of Philosophy of Magic, and she wants everyone to know that there’s nothing, nothing at all wrong with being in Hufflepuff.
SHAWN E. KLEIN is the Undergraduate Advisor for the Arizona State University Philosophy Department, where he is also working on his doctorate in philosophy. He teaches philosophy both there and at Mesa Community College. His main interests are ethics and social philosophy, and he is still waiting for his favorite Quidditch team from Boston to win the World Cup in his lifetime.
GARETH B. MATTHEWS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He writes a regular column called “Thinking in Stories” for the journal Thinking. He is the author of Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy and The Philosophy of Childhood. While Gareth was on holiday in London recently, he could be seen repeatedly slamming his baggage cart into the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 of King’s Cross railway station. He was eventually asked to stop.
TOM MORRIS, unaccustomed to travel by Portkey, touched the bust of Knute Rockne at Notre Dame and suddenly found himself at the beach in North Carolina. Without a Hagrid to bring him back, he paced the sand in search of wisdom and became a public philosopher. Now he brings the best of philosophy to hundreds of thousands of Muggles in talks to Fortune 500 companies. After writing numerous academic books, and serving as national spokesman for Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, he’s authored such tomes as If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Philosophy for Dummies, and The Stoic Art of Living. You can visit him any time by simply using your computer and clicking on www.MorrisInstitute.com. It’s less dangerous than Portkeys.
STEVEN W. PATTERSON is Assistant Professor at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches ethics and political philosophy, and he was gracious enough to teach an overload for us this term at Hogwarts for Muggles. While a philosopher, Steve harbors ambitions to become the next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. (We keep trying to tell him there’s no such thing.)
MICHAEL SILBERSTEIN is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College and an adjunct at the University of Maryland, where he is also a faculty member in the Foundations of Physics Program and a Fellow on the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences. His primary research interests are philosophy of physics and philosophy of cognitive neuroscience. His most recent book is The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Science (co-edited with Peter Machamer). Michael once had a bad experience when his local fraternity pranksters replaced his Floo powder with Tang.
HARALD THORSRUD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New Mexico State University. When not eating chocolate frogs or working with dragons, he studies Greek and Roman philosophy. Harald’s been warned repeatedly against padding his vita by insisting he’s done some adjuncting at the real Hogwarts, and he’s not above using the Agitatio spell to keep students awake in the classroom.
JERRY L. WALLS is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky and Senior Speaking Fellow for the Morris Institute for Human Values. His fourth book was Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy, published by Oxford University Press, and his fifth and most recent book is Why I Am Not a Calvinist (with Joe Dongell). Jerry likes to reflect on philosophical issues while driving the back roads of Kentucky in his blue 1973 Triumph TR6. He still hopes to find the button that will make it fly.
JENNIFER HART WEED is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tyndale University College in Toronto. She specializes in medieval philosophy, contemporary metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Jennifer has been trying to transfigure herself into a cat since 1987, and has appeared twice on the cover of Witch Weekly’s “Most Bewitching Eyebrows” issue.
A Wizard’s Index
Abanes, Richard
alchemy
ambition, as a virtue
apparating
and personal identity
appearance-reality distinction
applied science
and ethics
and magic, analogy between
Aquinas, Thomas
Archelaus
Aristotle
on character traits
on courage
on emotion
on friendship
Metaphysics
Nicomachean Ethics
on virtue
on wisdom
Aslan
Augustine, St.
on evil
Avada Kedavra curse
Back to the Future (film)
Baum, Frank
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Being-becoming distinction
Bell, Katie
benevolent-universe premise
Binns, Professor
Black, Sirius
block universe/world
Bloom, Harold
Bobrick, Elizabeth
Boethius, Anicius
The Consolation of Philosophy
on evil, as self-destructive
on happiness
boggarts
Buckbeak
Bulstrode, Millicent