Western philosophy
Western philosophy has a long history,
conventionally divided into four large eras - the Ancient, Medieval, Modern,
and Contemporary. The Ancient era runs through the fall of Rome and includes the Greek philosophers such
as
Plato and
Aristotle.
The Medieval period runs until roughly the late 15th century and the
Renaissance.
The "Modern" is a word with more varied use, which includes
everything from Post-Medieval through the specific period up to the 20th
century. Contemporary philosophy encompasses the philosophical developments of
the 20th century up to the present day.
Ancient philosophy
Western Philosophy is generally said to begin in
the Greek cities of western Asia Minor (Ionia)
with
Thales of
Miletus, who was
active around 585 B.C. and left us the opaque dictum, "all is water."
His most noted students were
Anaximenes of Miletus ("all is
air") and
Anaximander (all is
apeiron).
Other thinkers and schools appeared throughout Greece over the
next couple of centuries. Among the most important were
Heraclitus
("all is fire", all is chaotic and transitory),
Anaxagoras
(reality is so ordered that it must be in all respects governed by mind), the
Pluralists and
Atomists (the
world is composite of innumerable interacting parts), the
Eleatics
Parmenides
and
Zeno
(all is One and change is impossible, as illustrated by
his
famous paradoxes of motion), the
Sophists
(became known, perhaps unjustly, for claiming that truth was no more than
opinion and for teaching people to argue fallaciously to prove whatever
conclusions they wished). This whole movement gradually became more
concentrated in
Athens, which had become the dominant city-state
in
Greece.
There is considerable discussion about why
Athenian culture encouraged philosophy, but a popular theory
says
that it occurred because Athens had a direct
democracy. It
is known from Plato's writings that many sophists maintained schools of debate,
were respected members of society, and were well paid by their students.
Orators influenced Athenian history, possibly even causing its failure (See
Battle
of Lade). Another theory explains the birth of philosophical debate in Athens with the presence
of a slave labor workforce which performed the necessary functions that would
otherwise have consumed the time of the free male citizenry. Freed from working
in the fields or other manual economic activities, they were able to
participate in the assemblies of Athens
and spend long periods in discussions on popular philosophical questions.
Students of Sophists needed to acquire the skills of oration in order to
influence the Athenian Assembly and thereby increase respect and wealth. In
response, the subjects and methods of debate became highly developed by the
Sophists.
The key figure in transforming Greek philosophy
into a unified and continuous project - the one still being pursued today - is
Socrates, who
studied under several Sophists. It is said that following a visit to the
Oracle
of Delphi he spent much of his life questioning anyone in Athens who would engage him, in order to disprove
the oracular prophecy that there would be no man wiser than Socrates. Through
these live dialogues, he examined common but critical concepts that lacked
clear or concrete definitions, such as beauty and truth, and the virtues of
piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Socrates' awareness of his own
ignorance allowed him to discover his errors as well as the errors of those who
claimed knowledge based upon falsifiable or unclear precepts and beliefs. He
wrote nothing, but inspired many disciples, including many sons of prominent
Athenian citizens (including
Plato), which led to his
trial
and execution in 399 B.C. on the charge that his philosophy and sophistry
were undermining the youth,
piety, and moral fiber of the city. He was offered a chance to
flee from his fate but chose to remain in Athens,
abide by his principles, and drink the poison
hemlock.
Socrates' most important student was Plato, who
founded the
Academy
of Athens and wrote a number of
dialogues, which applied the
Socratic
method of inquiry to examine philosophical problems. Some central ideas of
Plato's dialogues are the
Theory of Forms, i.e., that the mind is imbued with an
innate capacity to understand and contemplate concepts from a higher order
preeminent world, concepts more real, permanent, and universal than or
representative of the
things of this world, which are only changing and
temporal; the idea of the immortal soul being superior to the body; the idea of
evil as simple ignorance of truth; that true knowledge leads to true virtue;
that art is subordinate to moral purpose; and that the society of the
city-state
should be governed by a merit class of propertyless philosopher kings, with no
permanent wives or paternity rights over their children, and be protected by an
athletically gifted, honorable, duty bound military class. In the later
dialogues Socrates figures less prominently, but Plato had previously woven his
own thoughts into some of Socrates' words. Interestingly, in his most famous
work,
The Republic, Plato critiques democracy,
condemns tyranny, and proposes a three tiered merit based structure of society,
with workers, guardians and philosophers, in an equal relationship, where no
innocents would ever be put to death again, citing the philosophers' relentless
love of truth and knowledge of the forms or ideals, concern for general welfare
and lack of propertied interest as causes for their being suited to govern.
Plato's most outstanding student was
Aristotle,
perhaps the first truly systematic philosopher.
Aristotelian logic was the first type of
logic to attempt to
categorize every valid
syllogism. A syllogism is a form of argument that is
guaranteed to be accepted, because it is known (by all educated persons) to be
valid. A
crucial assumption in
Aristotelian logic is that it has to be about
real objects. Two of Aristotle's syllogisms are invalid to modern eyes. For
example, "All A are B. All A are C. Therefore, some B are C." This
syllogism fails if set A is empty, but there are real members of set B. In
Aristotle's syllogistic logic you could say this, because his logic should only
be used for things that really exist ("no empty classes")
The application of
Aristotelian logic is preceded by having the
student memorize a rather large set of syllogisms. The memorization proceeded
from diagrams, or learning a key sentence, with the first letter of each word
reminding the student of the names of the syllogisms.
Each syllogism had a name, for example:
"Modus Ponens" had the form of "If A is true, then B is true. A
is true, therefore B is true."
Most university students of logic memorized
Aristotle's 19 syllogisms of two subjects, permitting them to validly connect a
subject and object. A few logicians developed systems with three subjects, or
described a way of elaborating the rules of three subjects.
Medieval philosophy
The history of western medieval philosophy is
generally divided into two periods, early medieval philosophy, which started
with
St.
Augustine in the mid 4th century and lasted until the recovery in the 13th
century West of a great bulk of
Aristotle's works and their subsequent translation into
Latin from the Arabic and Greek, and high medieval philosophy, which came about
as a result of the recovery of Aristotle. This period, which lasted a mere
century and a half compared to the nine centuries of the early period, came to
a close around the time of
William
of Ockham in the middle of the 14th century. Western medieval philosophy
was primarily concerned with implementing the Christian faith with
philosophical reason, that is, "baptizing" reason.
Early medieval philosophy was influenced by the
likes of
Stoicism,
neo-Platonism,
but, above all, the philosophy of
Plato himself. The prominent figure of this period was St. Augustine who adopted
Plato's thought and Christianized it in the 4th century and whose influence
dominated medieval philosophy perhaps up to end of the era but was checked with
the arrival of Aristotle's texts. Augustinianism was the preferred starting
point for most philosophers (including the great
St. Anselm of Canterbury) up until the
13th century.
During the later years of the early medieval
period and throughout the years of the high medieval period, there was a great
emphasis on the nature of God and the application of
Aristotle's
logic and
thought to every area of life. Attempts were made to reconcile these three
things by means of
scholasticism. One continuing interest in this time was
to prove the existence of God, through logic alone, if possible. The point of
this exercise was not so much to justify belief in God, since in the view of
medieval Christianity this was self-evident, but to make classical philosophy,
with its extra-biblical pagan origins, respectable in a Christian context.
One monumental effort to overcome mere logical
argument at the beginning of the high medieval period was to follow
Aristotelian demonstration by starting from effects and reasoning up to their
causes. This took the form of the
cosmological argument, conventionally
attributed to
St. Thomas Aquinas. The argument roughly is that
everything that exists has a cause. But since there could not be an infinite
chain of causes back into the past, there must have been an uncaused
"first cause." This is God. Aquinas also adapted this argument to
prove the goodness of God. Everything has some goodness, and the cause of each
thing is better than the thing caused. Therefore, the first cause is the best
possible thing. Similar arguments were used to prove God's power and
uniqueness.
Another important argument for proof of the
existence of God was the
ontological argument, advanced by
St. Anselm.
Basically, it says that God is that than which nothing greater can be thought.
There is nothing that simply exists in the mind that can be said to be greater
than something that enjoys existence in reality. Hence the greatest thing that
the mind can conceive of must exist in reality. Therefore, God exists. This
argument has been used in different forms by philosophers from Descartes
forward.
Renaissance philosophy
Contemporary philosophical historiography
emphasizes a great "gap" between Middle Ages and Modern thought. And
often this "gap" is used as a mean to characterize the meaning of the
word "modern" used in "modern philosophy".
However, a historical perspective (and
philosophical ones less interested into a single solid "gap")
emphasizes the existence of a long period of transition between the
teleologically driven centuries (running up the XIII or XIV Centuries) and the rationalists-empiricistsdebates.
As well as for the figurative arts, music, vernacular languages and
literatures, and the Christian religion, philosophy was greatly renewed in The
Renaissance.
The Renaissance, spread into Europe from Italy
and in particular from Northern Italy and Tuscany, also by the means of architecture,
arts and literature, inaugurated new philosophical problems, and permitted a
new era of thought, independent from the Roman Church.
If most (if not all) of medieval philosophers
were priests and monks, early and late Renaissance philosophers were a more
heterogeneous population, including rhetors, magicians and astrologues, early
empirical scientist, poets, philologists. The new era put together all these
souls in the search for the human specificity. The study of humanae litterae
overcame that of divinae litterae, and opened the way for modern
skepticism and science.
Modern philosophy
As with many periodizations, there are multiple
current usages for the term "Modern Philosophy" that exist in
practice. One usage is to date modern philosophy from the "
Age of
Reason", where systematic philosophy became common, excluding
Erasmus and
Machiavelli as "modern philosophers".
Another is to date it, the way the entire larger modern period is dated, from
the
Renaissance.
In some usages, "Modern Philosophy" ended in 1800, with the rise of
Hegelianism and Idealism. There is also the
lumpers/splitters
problem, namely that some works split philosophy into more periods than others:
one author might feel a strong need to differentiate between "The Age of
Reason" or "Early Modern Philosophers" and "The
Enlightenment"; another author might write from the perspective that
1600-1800 is essentially one continuous evolution, and therefore a single
period. Wikipedia's philosophy section therefore hews more closely to centuries
as a means of avoiding long discussions over periods, but it is important to
note the variety of practice that occurs.
A broad overview would then have
Erasmus,
Francis
Bacon,
Niccolò Machiavelli, and
Galileo
Galilei represent the rise of empiricism and humanism in place of
scholastic tradition.
17th-century philosophy is dominated by the
need to organize philosophy on rational, skeptical, logical and axiomatic
grounds, such as the work of
René
Descartes,
Blaise Pascal, and
Thomas
Hobbes. This type of philosophy attempts to integrate religious belief into
philosophical frameworks, and, often to combat atheism or other skeptical
beliefs, by adopting the idea of material reality, and the
dualism between
spirit and material. The extension, and reaction, against this would be the
monism of
George Berkeley (
idealism)
and
Benedict de Spinoza (
dual aspect theory). It was during this time
period that the empiricism was developed as an alternative to skepticism by
John Locke,
George
Berkeley and others. It should be mentioned that
John Locke
and
Thomas
Hobbes developed their well known political philosophies during this time,
as well.
The
18th-century philosophy article deals with
the period often called the early part of "The Enlightenment" in the
shorter form of the word, and centers on the rise of systematic empiricism,
following after
Sir Isaac Newton's natural philosophy. Thus
Diderot,
Voltaire,
Rousseau,
Montesquieu,
Kant and the
political philosophies embodied by and influencing the
American Revolution and
American Enlightenment are part of
The
Enlightenment. Other prominent philosophers of this time period were
David Hume
and
Adam
Smith, who, along with
Francis Hutcheson, were also the
primary philosophers of the
Scottish Enlightenment and
Thomas
Paine and
Thomas Jefferson who were philosophers of the
American Enlightenment.
Edmund
Burke was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, namely Hume's skeptism
and reliance on tradition and the passions, and while supporting the American
Revolution based on the established rights of Englishmen, rejected the
"natual rights" claims of the Enlightenment and vehemently rejected
the Rationalism of the French Revolution (see
Reflections on the Revolution
in France).
The
19th century took the radical notions of
self-organization and intrinsic order from Goethe and Kantian metaphysics, and
proceeded to produce a long elaboration on the tension between systematization
and organic development. Foremost was the work of
Hegel, whose
Logic
and
Phenomenology of Spirit produced a "dialectical" framework
for ordering of knowledge. The 19th century would also include
Schopenhauer's negation of the will. As with
the 18th century, it would be developments in science that would arise from,
and then challenge, philosophy: most importantly the work of Charles Darwin,
which was based on the idea of organic self-regulation found in philosophers
such as
Adam
Smith, but fundamentally challenged established conceptions.
Also in the 19th century, the Danish philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard took philosophy in a new
direction by focusing less on abstract concepts and more on what it means to be
an
existing individual. His work provided impetus for many 20th century
philosophical movements, including
existentialism.
Contemporary philosophy
The
20th century deals with the upheavals
produced by a series of conflicts within philosophical discourse over the basis
of knowledge, with classical certainties overthrown, and new social, economic,
scientific and logical problems. 20th century philosophy was set for a series
of attempts to reform and preserve, and to alter or abolish, older knowledge
systems. Seminal figures include
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Martin
Heidegger,
Bertrand Russell,
Jean-Paul
Sartre, and
Edmund Husserl.
Epistemology,
the theory of knowledge, and its basis was a central concern, as seen from the
work of Heidegger, Russell,
Karl Popper, and
Claude Lévi-Strauss. Phenomenologically
oriented metaphysics undergirded
existentialism
(Sartre,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Albert
Camus) and finally
poststructuralism (
Gilles
Deleuze,
Jean-François Lyotard,
Michel
Foucault,
Jacques Derrida).
Pragmatist Richard
Rorty has argued that these and other schools of 20th century philosophy, including
his own, share an opposition to classical
dualism that is both
anti-essentialist
and antimetaphysical. The
psychoanalytic work of
Sigmund
Freud,
Jacques Lacan,
Julia
Kristeva, and others has also been influential in contemporary
continental philosophy.
A notable phenomenon of the latter half of the
century was the rise of popular writers on philosophy, such as
Ayn Rand,
whose espoused systems proved influential among a general Anglophone readership
despite their isolation from academic philosophy. Conversely, some philosophers
have attempted to define and rehabilitate older traditions of philosophy. Most
notably,
Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Alasdair MacIntyre have both, albeit in
different ways, revived the tradition of
Aristotelianism.
The philosophy of the present century is
difficult to clarify due to its immaturity. A number of surviving 20th century
philosophers have established themselves as early voices of influence in the
21st. These include
Noam Chomsky,
Saul Kripke,
and
Jürgen Habermas. The perceived conflict between
continental and
analytic schools of philosophy remains
prominent, despite increasing skepticism regarding the distinction's
usefulness. A variety of new topics have risen to the stage in analytic
philosophy, orienting much of contemporary discourse in the field of
ethics. New
inquiries consider, for example, the ethical implications of new media and
information exchange. Such developments have rekindled interest in the
philosophy of technology and
science. There has been increased enthusiasm
for highly specialized areas in philosophy of science, such as in the
Bayesian school of
epistemology.
Eastern philosophy
Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy as
Henry
Corbin describes is a philosophy whose development, and whose modalities,
are essentially linked to the religious and spiritual fact of
Islam.
[3]
In the other word, it represents the style of philosophy produced within the
framework of Islamic culture. This description does not suggest that it is
necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor even that it is exclusively
produced by Muslims.
Religious roots
Theoretical questions were raised right from the
beginning of Islam, questions which could to a certain extent be answered by
reference to Islamic texts such as the
Quran, the practices
of the community and the traditional sayings of
Muhammad, the
Prophet
of Islam, and his
Companions. In fact, rational argumentation about Islamic
doctrines starts with Quran itself, and has been followed up in the utterances
of the Muhammad and especially in the sermons of
Ali. This despite the
fact that their style and approach are different from those of the Muslim
theologians
Though nothing definite can be said about the
beginnings of
theology
among Muslims, what is certain is that discussion of some of the problems, such
as the issue of
predestination,
free will
and
Divine Justice,
became current among Muslims during the first half of the 2nd century of Islam
coincides with 8th century. Perhaps the first formal centre of such discussions
was the circle of
Hasan al-Basri(d.728-29). Later several theological
schools have emerged from 8th to 10th century.
Mu'tazili
theology originated in the 8th century in
Basra (Iraq) by
Wasil ibn
Ata (d.748 A.D.).
Transferring of Greek philosophy
The early
conquests
of the Muslims brought them into close contact with centers of civilization
heavily influenced by
Christianity and also by
Greek
culture. Many rulers wished to understand and use the Greek forms of knowledge,
some practical and some theoretical, and a
large
translation project started which saw official support for the assimilation
of Greek culture. This had a powerful impact upon all areas of Islamic
philosophy.
Neoplatonism definitely became the prevalent school of
thought, following closely the curriculum of Greek philosophy which was
initially transmitted to the Islamic world.
