... getting back on track for a moment ... I've read a lot since initially asking this question - and it is quite obvious that theism remains a major component of contemporary philosophy (through Kierkegaard, Whitehead, etc.) ... but are contemporary philosophical positions on theism so far removed from the Judeo-Christian tradition that hardly any of it can be classified as heresies thereof? ...

Haven't we all heard usually on that first chapter on critical thinking or on that first day of ancient philosophy about the "sophists", the Jewish vagabonds, who taught fallacious reasoning as a tool of persuasion for Athen's politicians. Socrates tried to show ways to see through rhetoric.

I think the theistic claims become heresy when they move so far away from mainline Christianity.



Yes, but the sophists Socrates opposed were quite different from the mystics who use paradox and contradictory language. The sophists just wanted to develop the rhetorical skills to win an argument, right or wrong. The mystic isn't trying to win an argument, the mystic is trying to express the ineffable to students.

... language - can't philosophize with it; can't philosophize without it! ... (is that paradoxical enough? ) ...

A sophist is simply a wise man. The sophists Socrates battled against were those who taught their rhetorical skills for money without giving proper moral leadership to their pupils - Socrates had a problem with those who taught irresponsibly.

Socrates was a sophist. He was just one, so the stories go, who taught responsibly, like many of his peers.

I think Didymos is right but can't find an authoratitive reference at the moment. At any rate, I wouldn't object to being called a sophist.

I have nothing to say about Socrates. I was just saying that there is nothing wrong with Sophism practiced as it should be.

I'd say that the idea that 'the only true knowledge is what all people know together' is demonstrably the precise opposite of the truth. Consider the unfalsifiability of solipsism.

Plato was an opponent of sophism, and so cannot be bracketed with Socrates as you do. He is held responsible by many philosophers for the poor opinion and mistaken impression we have of their methods.

Solipsism is a false theory...

... or maybe just half a theory ... it may be that the assertion that only the intersubjective is knowledge wrongly dismisses subjective knowledge ... and the fact that it's so easy to slip into solipsism may be evidence that there are indeed elements of knowledge that are "solipsistic" ...

The people of Athens disagreed with you, as do I...

That's fine. But your analysis of Socrates misses a vital point. Socrates was killed because Athens had recently been defeated, it's liberal ruler had just died and an intense plaque was ravaging the city. The Athenians wanted stability and Socrates was a mischief maker. His execution really is that simple.

You may not agree with Socrates' philosophic points of view, but you should respect the man. To call his philosophy "crap" is ludicrous. It's like calling Newtonian physics crap in light of modern physics.

Knowledge is like life itself, if it not shared it is not had... So soon as it can be conceived it can be shared, but how much can we touch and not grasp can never be known...

... hmmmm - methinks the right way to say that is "A life not shared is not had" and not "Life not shared is not had" ... (it's a statement about the quality of a life, not a statement about life itself) ... if I were to take your statement literally, the result would be rather strange, wouldn't it? - requiring both a liver/knower as well as an observer to share that life/knowledge with before life/knowledge actually exists? ... but then, maybe you were just making a statement about the quality of something known, not a statement about knowledge itself, eh?

We actually do share the same life, ...

... European philosophy has consistently occupied itself with the question of human specialness. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have been concerned to demonstrate, in the most convincing manner possible, that human beings are significantly different from all other forms of life. ... Such demonstrations were, we may suspect, needed to justify the increasing manipulation and exploitation of nonhuman nature by, and for, (civilized) humankind. The necessity for such philosophical justification became especially urgent in the wake of the scientific revolution, when our capacity to manipulate other organisms increased a hundredfold ...

But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man introduced a profound tension into the anthropocentric trajectory of European philosophy and science. ... if indeed fish are our distant anscestors and mice are our cousins, then our own traits and capacities must be, to some degree, continuous with those found in the rest of the earthly environment.

Most scientists, however, while accepting Darwin's theories, were reluctant to relinquish the assumption of human specialness - the assumption that alone justifies so many of the cultural and research practices to which we have now become accustomed. In earlier centuries we could ascribe our superiority to the dispensation of God, who had "created" us as his representatives on earth, or who had bequeathed to humans alone the divine capacity for awareness and intelligence. After Darwin, however, we no longer had such easy recourse to extraworldly dispensation ...

In our own time it is language, conceived as an exclusively human property, that is most often used to demonstrate the excellence of humankind relative to all other species ...

(But) only by overlooking the sensuous, evocative dimension of human discourse, and attending solely to the denotative and conventional aspect of verbal communication, can we hold ourselves apart from, and outside of, the rest of animate nature ...

If, for instance, one comes upon two human friends unexpectedly meeting each other for the first time in many months, and one chances to hear their initial words of surprise, greeting, and pleasure, one may readily notice, if one pays close enough attention, a tonal, melodic layer of communication beneath the explicit denotative meaning of the words - a rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet, rather like two birds singing to each other. ... - the two singing bodies thus tuning and attuning to one another, rediscovering a common register, remembering each other. It requires only a slight shift in focus to realize that this melodic singing is carrying the bulk of communication in this encounter, and that the explicit meanings of the actual words ride on the surface of this depth like waves on the surface of the sea.

It is by a complementary shift of attention that one may suddenly come to hear the familiar song of a blackbird or a thrush in a surprisingly new manner - not just as a pleasant melody repeated mechanically, as on a tape player in the background, but as active meaningful speech. Suddenly, subtle variations in the tone and rhythm of that whistling phrase seem laden with expressive intention, and the two birds singing to each other across the field appear for the first time as attentive, conscious beings, earnestly engaged in the same world that we ourselves engage, yet from an astonishingly different angle and perspective ...

Thus, at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks.