I did not know that.

As confessed in an earlier post, I am a "closet" fan of the movie trilogy "The Matrix". I have the "box set" which includes the usual "extras" such as making-of documentaries (one of my buddies from college is a stuntman who shows up in a couple of these...) and director's commentaries.

The Matrix box set is a little different because it also has an entire disc on the "philosophy" behind the story concept. It seems the Wachowski brothers, the creators of the concept and directors of the films, are "hard core" science fiction lovers. "Hard core" science fiction attempts to treat real scientific and philosophical questions in an entertaining way (not always easy to do and not easy for the uninitiated to understand). So, in keeping with their interests, they put out these "featurettes" on the philosophy that backs up the films. In sitting through these, I was again reminded that I know very little about philosophy and it stirred in me a desire to know more.

So, I decided to brush up on my philosophy from a Catholic perspective (first) so that I can begin to better understand where I may ultimately differ from the philosophy behind the film. In doing so I have come across a book entitled "An Introduction to Philosophy - the Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition". I'm only four chapters into the book and enjoying it a lot.

In the fourth chapter I came across a description of the "Golden Age of Greece" which says that the "Hellas" (i.e. Athens and Sparta) was "animated and invigorated" by the wars with Persia that occurred in the 5th century B.C. (This is cool to me because these wars are the theme of the movie "300" which in my opinion, and despite the pornographic sexuality, is also kind of cool. ). The author, Daniel Sullivan, says : "...these little communities were destined to reach a peak of blazing glory for which there is no parallel in history." He then provides a quote from another author, Edith Hamilton, who says: "We think and feel differently because of what a little Greek town [Athens] did during a century or two, twenty-four hundred years ago. What was then produced of art and of thought has never been surpassed and very rarely equalled, and the stamp of it is upon all the art and all the thought of the Western World."

The author then goes on to describe the problems that the Greeks encountered with their philosophy and how they came to realize that they couldn't ultimately get to the truth, to a reconciliation between their differing schools of philosophy (sensist and rationalist) and how this realization led them to skepticism and, finally, to despair and how they wound up falling as fast as they had risen.

I did not know that.