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Figuring Out Life

 

            
             Almost as pressing as our basic need for food, our desires to resolve the questions surrounding our existence have yielded countless philosophies. Although factors such as geography, generation, culture and history have produced a wide variety of schools of thought, the aspects in which thinkers immersed themselves into have been relatively similar. The creation of the world, the presence of a higher being, perception, the possibility of an after-life and maybe most importantly our ultimate purpose in life, are just a few of the issues philosophers have dealt with. Undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of all time, Plato produces a radically contrasting approach to life from Lucretius, the first of the Epicureans. .
             One of the clearest reasons for Plato's domination of human thought is revealed early in the Timaeus. In discussing the origins of this world, he designates the Demiurge, or his equivalent of the contemporary God as the creator of the universe. Because his philosophy was much easier to "Christianize," it seems reasonable to think that Platonism was more warmly adopted compared to Lucretius" non-teleological view of the universe. By using the presence of Time as the basis of his argument concerning celestial bodies, Plato states that they were fashioned by the Demiurge:.
             "When the father who had engendered it saw it in motion and alive, he rejoiced and, being well pleased, he conceived the idea of making it still more like its model. Accordingly, as that model is the ever-existent Living Being, he set about making the universe also like it, But he planned to make as it were a moving likeness of eternity; and, at the same time that he set in order the Heaven, he made, of eternity that abides in unity, an ever-flowing likeness moving according to number - that to which we have given the name time.(31)".
             Furthermore, Plato continues to appoint this higher being as the creator of humans.


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