The Reasons of Love
Chapter One
THE QUESTION: "HOW SHOULD WE LIVE?"
1 We have it on the authority both of Plato and of Aristotle that
philosophy began in wonder. People wondered about various natural
phenomena that they found surprising. They also puzzled over what struck
them as curiously recalcitrant logical, or linguistic, or conceptual
problems that turned up unexpectedly in the course of their thinking. As
an example of what led him to wonder, Socrates mentions the fact that it
is possible for one person to become shorter than another without
shrinking in height. We might wonder why Socrates should have been made at
all uncomfortable by such a shallow paradox. Evidently the problem struck
him not only as more interesting, but also as considerably more difficult
and disturbing, than it strikes us. Indeed, referring to this problem and
others like it, he says, "Sometimes I get quite dizzy with thinking of
them."
Aristotle gives a list of several rather more compelling examples of the
sorts of things by which the first philosophers were led to wonder. He
mentions self-moving marionettes (apparently the Greeks had them!); he
mentions certain ... read full excerpt from The Reasons of Love ebook
