Chapter I Socrates and Plato
	Chapter II Corpus Aristotelicum
	Chapter III Weeping and Laughing Philosophers
	Chapter IV Stoicism and Skepticism
	Chapter V Scholastic Epistemology
	Chapter VI Roger and Francis Bacons
	Chapter VII Cosmology and Epistemology
	Chapter VIII Classic Protagonists of Epistemology
	Chapter IX The Sociologists
	Chapter X Galactic Stage of Cosmological Argument
	Chapter XI Logical Positivism and Beyond ...
	Chapter XII Visual Statistics in Search of Meaning

Weeping and Laughing

Philosophers

Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE)

Heraclitus concern with brevity of human existence earned him the epithet the

weeping philosopher.

Only about a hundred of Heraclitus aphorisms survive. His most memorable is that

You cannot step into the same river twice,

a favorite of Mikhail Gorbachev. He also influenced Friedrich Nietzsche by the notion that every event has its own time-span. This marks the beginning of one of the issues of epistemology, i.e., the nature of time. The Greek philosophers favored the idea that the universe has an infinite past with no beginning, while medieval philosophers and theologians subscribed to the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning, which is in congruence with the book of Genesis.
 

Democritus (c. 400 BCE), the father of the first atomic hypothesis (Gr., atomos, a-not + temmein to cut), was one of the first philosophers to warn about the subjective qualities of our cognitions, scorned numerous superstitions of his times, and asserted that

Belief in an afterlife is a laughable fiction.

For this medieval commentators sometimes described him as

                      'laughing philosopher'.  

Doctoral dissertation of Karl Marx (1841) was on the philosophy of Democritus. Democritus strived for deterministic explanations of events  ("What caused this event?") In contrast, Plato favored the teleological explanations ("What purpose did this event serve?") The teleological explanations imply the notions of prime mover and final cause. Plato disliked Democritus and wished that all of his books were burnt.

Botticelli's Primavera was inspired by Lucretius De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

Among Democritus followers the most congenial to a skeptical contemporary reader is Lucretius. In his De Rerum Natura (c. 50 BCE), Lucretius describes the universe in rational terms and shows the implausibility of religions and superstitions. His arguments about the irrationality of beliefs in God are told with eloquence and clarity.

Lucretius extols the life of detached tranquility, maintaining modest and easily attainable standard of living, while avoiding lofty ambitions, controversies, and disputes. This lifestyle makes life genuinely worth living.

Pain should be accepted with equanimity. When experiencing pain, one should concentrate the mind on past pleasures, and, when the pain is interminable and severe, on its eventual cessation by the painless state of death.

To fear death, Lucretius argues, is to make the conceptual error of assuming yourself being able to lament your own non-existence. Being dead will be no better or worse than it was when you've not yet have been born. This Lucretian symmetry argument is gaining prominence in the recent philosophical literature on death.

Lucretius talks about death as the natural conclusion of life, a counterpart of birth, liberating us from pain, anguish, anxiety, and fear. Albert Einstein asserted the same, saying that the fear of death is irrational, since when you die, no one can ever harm you again.