Where it all began.

Bertrand Russel. Where do I even begin with this one?

When I eventually forced myself to sit down and prepare myself for Russel's enormous book, A history of Western Philopsophy, I immediately thought to myself, what on earth does any of this have to do with Journalism?

Unsurprisingly i knew little of what Russel was talking about speeding through various time eras that covered in depth the Greeks and the Romans, touching slightly on the Protestants and how they revelled in burning witches. Perplexed? I certianly was, i had no clue on how any of this linked into modern day Journalism and was eargerly awaiting Chris Horries lecture to turn my scattered notes into sense.

To begin with we delved straight into literary artefacts, recorded and preserved by the Greeks. The Greeks were known as the main literary and philosophical source in European Civilisation with the first piece of written literature produced by Homer, who is supposedly argued to be a series of poets rather than an individual. However this included The Iliad and The Odyssey which is said to have taken over 200 years to complete, dating roughly from 750BC-550BC. These pieces of literature explore the migration of humans and how our world and language has developed and transformed throughout time and history. We also briefly touched on the first piece of English literature, this being Beowulf, which describes the journey the Saxons undertook from Germany to England, again another written artefact describing humanities journey across the globe.

From looking at literature, we can see that Greek was the predominant language which has now influenced other languages ranging from Spanish, Italian, French and English where certain aspects of each have derived from the original source, this being Greek. The etymology, this being the study of words looks at the history of each word and how their meanings have changed over time.

It is known that the Greeks and Romans were very similar when looking at the advancement they achieved over other countries when investigating and exploring technology, science and philosophical ideas. They understood the theories behind air, atoms, space, time and how the earth circulated the sun, an unbelivable concept to the majority.

I have already mentioned that the Greeks were a strong literary and philosophical source however the Romans became the main source of power and politics. It is a well known fact that Rome collapsed due to their need for more and more power which led to their recline and began a period known as the middle ages or in other terms the Dark Ages. This led to a corrupt empire due to the slave trade as well as the loss of schools of philopsophy, meaning no further research was carried out into how the world works. They became obessed with the fatal idea of constructing the concept of a God-King, an immortal being who is all knowing, all seeing and all powerful which nowadays is known as a Budhist theory/Eqyptian ressurection. A fatal error? I thought so, however Christianity as a religion soon appeared, which the Romans then took on with the idea of having ONE god and that all people are equal. Christianity adapted into the Western world in 300AD which then continued for a further 1000 years. In my opinion a much better theory, even if it is coming from an athiests point of view.

I know it's alot to take in (try being in the lecture, scribbling notes down at 100 mph) but sitting here and typing up the lecture actually seems to help, i promise I am almost done, just a few facts from our main man of logic, the infamous Aristole and a summary reguarding the witch burning Protestants, so please bare with me...

Aristotle is said to have invented logic. Logic of course was a part of the greek science, preserved and presented by the Western World. Aristole abided by these three rules:

1. All men are mortal

2. Socrates is a man

3. Therefore Socrates is a man.

This theory of logic soon became greatly important and was therefore preserved by The Catholics and taught in schools, leading right through to todays education, aka university students, aka me. Arnt i lucky.

FINALLY The Protestants. A lovely bunch of witch burning, child scaring, hell tormenting reformists. They sound fantastic dont they? They believed in this idea of reformation, cleansing and simplicity, and ultimately named themselves "The New Jews". They wore dark clothes, banned any concepts of fun and decided that the best way of getting their children to believe in this religion was to hold them over gravestones, drilling into them the idea of "This is what will happen if you sin, you will die and go to hell" Pleasent enough.

They believed that everyone is going to hell unless they obeyed the written scripture in the Bible which soon led to the insane idea of burning women who appeared as witches. Any woman, deemed to be a witch was persecuted, caught and then drowned. If the woman floated, she was inevitably sentenced as a witch and sent to be burnt at the stake, if the woman drowned she was deemed innocent but still ended up losing her life. Get your head around the crazy logic begind that one.

Yes, i have produced a vast amount of information but hopefully you will find it as interesting as i did. Philosophy dosent seem so bad?