Wednesday Wisdom

If you can get to place where no city lights obscure the sky, look up. What you will see is the Perseid Meteor Shower. This event happens every August as the Earth passes through the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle. The Comet Swift–Tuttle is the large, icy comet that is responsible for the Perseid meteor shower first named in 1862.The Perseid meteor shower is a cosmological event that happens when the earth passes through the debris and dust of the comet. Movements of the stars and the sky were well known in antiquity, as ancient Greeks pondered the universe.

Perseus was one of the great heroes of Greek mythology and the son of Zeus and Danaë. He is best known for killing Medusa, rescuing Andromeda, and becoming the legendary founder of the city of Mycenae. King Polydectes, wanting to court his mother challenged Perseus to bring him the head of Medusa, the only mortal of the three Gorgon sisters. Medusa was terrifying because anyone who looked directly at her turned to stone. The gods helped Perseus, Athena gave him a polished shield. Hermes gave him a curved sword and Hesperides provided magical equipment, including a bag to carry Medusa's head. Perseus also obtained winged sandals and a helmet that made its wearer invisible. Instead of looking directly at Medusa, Perseus used the reflection in Athena's shield to guide his sword. He beheaded Medusa while she slept. In Greek mythology, the stars tell the story of Perseus holding Medusa’s severed head. Within the constellation Perseus is the star Algol, meaning “demon” or “ghoul,” which represents Medusa’s eye and appears to blink in the night sky.

Mythology meets logic

As entertaining as Greek mythology is, more importantly, the development of philosophy and science also grew out of Hellenic* culture through the study of epistemology. Moving beyond centuries-old stories of gods and their whims, Greek philosophers began to explore how and why the world works the way it does. Anaxagoras (500 BC) proposed a radical physical theory that the universe was made of heavy, rocky material. He argued that the sun and stars were burning stones, and that shooting stars were glowing pieces of rock thrown off by the rapid rotation of the heavens. His theory gained huge credibility when a massive meteorite fell at Aegospotami in Thrace, Greece around 467 BCE. In his treatise Meteorologica (340 BC), Aristotle offered a naturalistic theory that dominated Western thought for nearly two millennia. Aristotle divided the cosmos into the “sublunary realm” which was below the moon was subject to change and decay and the “superlunary realm” above the moon which was perfect and eternal. Because the heavens were unchangeable, Aristotle argued that shooting stars, meteors, and comets could not be astronomical objects. Instead, he classified them as atmospheric occurrences, from the Greek word “meteora” which means raised aloft and is why we still call the study of weather meteorology. He believed dry, flammable vapors rose from the Earth into the upper atmosphere and where they were ignited by the friction of the rotating night sky. Although these theories were flawed, clearly ancient Greeks were looking past myths and towards logic and science to explain the universe.

And every August, the two stories appear to meet in the night sky. One that still provides fantastic stories that captivate the imagination of Greek mythology, another of the wonders of the universe.

We all love a good story, but even 2300 years ago logic and science evolved over myth. Look up and remember people have been speculating and watching this phenomenon for millennia, so get out and enjoy the wonders of the Perseid Meteor Shower.

*Hellenic culture is the ancient, classic or current Greek culture while Hellenistic is a time period during and after were Alexander the Great spread the ideas, language and culture of Greece.

And now you know...

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.