I agree that they did not look to the Bible for their political philosophy, but they did not "dissolve the bonds" that tied them to altruism. They accepted it, which is why they relied on Paul of Tarshish for their view of human nature.

You need to be more specific about who "they" were, as several were ministers in their churches, just as others were merchants and farmers, and at least two were true scientists, perhaps three if you add fractions of lifetime interests.

Thanks, also, for the reminder about Cohen (NYT obit here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/us/... ). I used his edition of The Principia as part of the research for my award-winning biography of Newton's tenure as warden and master of the British Royal Mint. Allow me to recommend The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris. It has flaws, of course, but still offers good history and insight.

"The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris is excellent assembly of cogent essays is an extended argument for freedom and science. The scientific revolution and liberal democracy are inseparable. To limit one is to defeat the other. According to Ferris, the scientific method is the root of political freedom. In that, he continues the case made long ago by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Like Popper, Ferris misses the center of the target. It is not “liberal democracy” but capitalism that enabled and was empowered by the Enlightenment philosophy of rational-empiricism that we know today as Objectivism. To be fair, though, Ferris does devote an entire chapter to “The Science of Wealth” where he praises both free market capitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations."
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...

They also did not look to the Bible for their political philosophy, despite claims to the contrary by religious revisionist historians like Barton expanding on Lutz with further cascading distortions. Historical analysis of intellectual influences requires understanding the ideas and how they were used, not mechanically counting references regardless of where they were, who may have seen them, and how they were used to what extent. For example, Biblical references have been over-weighted by counting their dominant appearance in repetitive sermons that had nothing to do with Enlightenment influences on the founders. It would not have been intellectually possible for a theology of mysticism, other worldliness, and sacrifice to the supernatural following the dogma of sacred text to have created a society of individualism, reason and the right to the pursuit of one's own happiness for one's own goals here on earth.

Even the religious have denounced the use of Lutz's counting to argue for Biblical influence https://americanvision.org/9760/chris..., along with general debunking https://www.alternet.org/story/147497...

Plato was a mystic and a totalitarian, and even Aristotle had no idea of the purpose of government as protecting individual rights; his political writing was mostly descriptive of Greek city states. The influence of Aristotelian reason and individualism in politics had progressed much farther through other authors by the time of the Enlightenment, and Plato was in the wrong direction on all counts from the beginning. Not as well known is the influence of science and the Newtonian revolution on the founders: I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams & James Madison.

Anyone taking this lecture at face value is being badly misled. It is a distorted, misleading extolling of Plato for a conservative cause, more in the drama of a sermon than a college course describing Plato's philosophy and influence. It is from Hillsdale's History 101 "Western Heritage" indoctrination course, required for all students, which promotes a conservative religious interpretation of the evolution of western civilization. It is "philosophy" only in that it promotes their interpretation of the history of ideas, in this lecture emphasizing Plato; it is not a "best philosophy lecture" ever and is not "in depth analysis" of anything. It illustrates why Hillsdale does not define the standard of philosophy lectures, let alone the "best".

It reminds me of the kind of college humanities professors 'waxing eloquently' in their vague, flowery pontification that made me watch the clock waiting to get back to any serious engineering science course. But now I know better than to blame myself for not seeing value in it, and I know what is wrong with this sample from Hillsdale because it is so bad on so many basics.

It begins by announcing that the purpose of life is to "serve the Good", with the claim that studying philosophy will tell you what said "Good" is -- which the lecture never gets to. In the name of the purpose of philosophy we are expected to accept the false premise that the purpose of human life is to "serve", then accept what the "Good" is later by some kind of non-rational osmosis. No wonder he likes Plato.

The account of the Socratic method in Plato, misrepresented as critical thought, leaves out that the basic premise was that ideas do not come from examining reality, but rather by bringing out through leading questions an alleged innate knowledge from within you, prodded by your superior who will always know more than you through special insights. That is mystical from the outset.

Likewise, it leaves out of the account of the famous allegory of the cave -- in which people are trapped inside a cave able to observe only flickering shadows of reality -- that in Plato's philosophy this expresses that we are incapable of observing the true reality of the mystic World of Forms, of which our world is only an imperfect reflection. A guru with superior mystic insights is required to tell us what to believe.

That we are supposedly incapable of thinking for ourselves here in the material world was Plato's rationalization for a tyrannical dictatorship controlled by a "philosopher king" who knows the "true reality" of a mystic dimension inaccessible to others. Plato had no "stunningly prophetic observations about democracies gone bad that sound like seeing our day". He was arguing against Greek democracy as the only, at the time, alternative to his own ideal of tyranny: The Greeks had no concept of the rights of the individual and argued politics over who or what group should be in charge. The lecturer tried to sell Plato as "prophetic" by ignoring all that, recasting Plato on democracy in his own modern conservative rhetoric.

All subsequent philosophy has not been a "footnote to Plato" as the lecturer dramatically intones. He blanks out the other side of the fundamental philosophic debate. That began with Aristotle's emphasis on this world, reason, and happiness of the individual -- despite Aristotle having been a student of Plato, which left him with some Platonic influences. Aristotle, like other Greeks, did not have a political philosophy of individual freedom, and had no logical grounding for his individualist ethics of personal happiness, but he laid the groundwork for them and knew enough to reject Plato's tyranny.

Sadly, Plato won the first round of the debate when his neo-Platonic followers from Plotinus to Augustine set the intellectual course of Christianity and subsequently Dark-Age-wrecked the western world for over a thousand years. In that they were a lengthy footnote to Plato, but Aristotelianism returned, beginning with Acquinas' better side, culminating in Ayn Rand's this-world philosophy of reason today.

Extolling Platonism -- which is other-worldly mysticism, self-abnegation, collectivism and submission to a tyranny that the lecturer dared not admit, is not the call for a philosophy of reason and individualism that Ayn Rand urged as necessary to change the course of the culture and therefore its politics. It is the opposite. Followers of Plato are conventional intellectuals that are the cause of the problem.

Leonard Peikoff describes how the course of philosophy has been a "Duel between Plato and Aristotle", not a mere footnote to Plato, in the epilogue of his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and provides details in his Ominous Parallels and history of philosophy lectures that begin with the pre-Socratic Greeks. That is where you will find examples of the "best philosophy lectures", not in Hillsdale conservative traditionalists following Plato.

Contrary to the claim of Dr. Terrence Moore, the founders of our republic did not look to Plato for inspiration.

"All gentlemen were supposed to be able to cite Plato and Aristotle, but when they did so, it was usually by way of oratorical flourish rather than out of genuine appreciation, approval, or even knowledge. Rush and Rittenhouse thought Aristotle a "tyrant" and his works utterly useless—an opinion shared by Jefferson and Adams. As to Plato, Jefferson raged against the "whimsies, the puerilities and unintelligible jargon" of The Republic as being the "sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities of a foggy mind." Adams said he learned only two things from reading Plato: one was where Franklin had plagiarized some of his ideas, and the other was "how to cure the hiccups." By contrast, a goodly number of Americans read Machiavelli, though few found it expedient to cite him." -- http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/foun...

Donald S. Lutz also compiled an inventory of the works most often cited by the Founders. His “Top 40” (actually 37) can be found here at the Online Library of Liberty ...
Prof. Lutz’s Top 10 are:
St. Paul
Montesquieu
Sir William Blackstone
John Locke
David Hume
Plutarch
Cesare Beccaria
John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon
Delolme
Samuel Pufendorf
(http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...)

I was going to vote that down as spam, but it is worth discussing because the deep and broad errors were addressed by Ayn Rand in her non-fiction. In the history of philosophy, Objectivism is a quantum improvement, a paradigm shift that disproves Alfred North Whitehead's claim that "all philosophy is footnote to Plato." Moreover, the many errors in that lecture define the fundamental problems with Hillsdale College in particular and modern conservatism in general.

In his lifetime, what we call "the Socratic Method" was known as "the Milesian way." It was brought to Athens by refugees from Miletos after the collapse of the Ionian Revolt. Apsasia of Miletos was "the woman who brought philosophy to Athens." She was the paramour of Pericles. He defended her in court when the citizens sought to banish her for impiety. Aspasia hosted symposia in her home. That was where Socrates learned to ask questions. (http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )

As for those questions, the Socratic Method offered by Plato is based on Plato's wrongful epistemology. Plato said that we are born with ideas in our heads. EIDOS = form. The goal of Socratic inquiry is to draw out from you what you already know. Plato demonstrates this when he has Socrates talk a slave through the doubling of a square in the Dialog of Meno.

The Parable of the Cave elaborates on that, being Plato's view that we have no hope of true perception, but, apparently, some special people do, thus, the need for philosopher-kings to rule us.

As for the dangers of democracy, yes, we all know that. However, in particular, Prof. Terrence Moore conflates the actual history of Athens, confusing the time of the Thirty Tyrants and the subsequent return to democracy with the rule of the 500 who did bring state power to their personal vengeances, expropriating the property of certain wealthy citizens. That was parodied in Aristophanes's play, The Council of Women. Aristophanes also lampooned Socrates in The Clouds. Moore does not mention that Pericles also brought Anaxagoras to Athens, and that Anaxagoras was exiled for claiming that the sun is a hot rock, not a god.

Dangerous as democracy is, no form of government can be imposed to the benefit of society. Moreover, to the Greeks the word "tyrant" had special meaning and not the one we assume today. In fact, tyranny was the first form of popular rule, overthrowing hereditary kings in the late-600s to mid-500s BCE. It was when philosophy replaced religion, coined money replaced cows as money, merchants replaced farmers as the engines of wealth, geometry was invented, and citizens at assemblies took control of their governments. That was when the Greeks of Ionia invented the hoplite form of fighting, with dressed lines. And those warriors were (1) in the field because they voted to go to war; and (2) they were paid to be there, not just attached by the bonds of the tribe.

If you read the Platonic dialog "Protagoras" you get a better view of sophistry and democracy, as Socrates and Protagoras engage on the question of whether justice can be taught.