Big Ideas
Can be summed up in a simple question: why do things change?
What is the problem of change?
He believed that water was the fundamental substance of the universe
Who is Thales?
“God made it that way.”
What is Plato’s answer for why the world is mathematical?
The Pythagoreans believed that the motion of the heavenly bodies produced actual harmonic music which is called this.
What is “music of the spheres.”
The part of the soul or intellect the ancients believed could reason and find truth
What is logos?
The philosophy of nature or what we now call “science”
What is “natural philosoophy”?
”All is number”
What is the Pythagorean motto
The way to become more like the Forms, more like the eternal, perfect Ideas that inhabit Plato’s heaven.
Why is the study of mathematics important?
Plato wanted the Academy to create a mathematical system that acurately described and predicted the motion of the heavens.
What is the homework that Plato assigned the Academy?
This ancient thinker influenced the geocentric view for over 1,000 years
Who is Ptolemy?
The language of physics
What is mathematics?
Concerning the applicability of mathematics to the physical world, who said, ”The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”
The Trivium and the Quadrivium.
What are the liberal arts?
The belief that God structured creation mathematically supports this idea
What is God is a mathematician?
This ancient practice combined science, spirituality, and human meaning before they were separated in later centuries
What is astrology?
The branch of math that makes change measurable and predictable
What is calculus?
Plato inherited the views that the human souls are immortal and that the physical world is fundamentally mathematical from these ancient thinkers.
Who is Pythagoreans?
According to Plato, this is more important than our bodies.
What are our souls?
Ancient philosophers saw order in creation but failed to see this divine truth
What is God as the source of that order?
According to the author, many early philosophers saw signs of divine reason in nature but missed this essential truth
What is the existence of the Creator (God Himself)?
Nonphysical objects that literally exist outside the physical world, independent of an minds.
What are Forms?
The mysterious, nonphysical “realm” or ”world” where the Ideas or Forms exist.
What is “Plato’s Heaven”?
The educations that Plato sketches in THIS book is where the West gets the notion of the liberal arts.
What is the Republic?
The author claims that math is not just useful but woven into this
What is the fabric of creation (reality)?
According to the chapter, this field became the language of physics because it precisely describes how the world changes
What is mathematics?