Introduction This book has three basic purposes: 1 to provide an overview of the history of philosophy in the West; 2 to relate philosophical ideas and movements to their historical back
Trang 2Then and Now
A Look Back at 26 Centuries
of Ideas That Have Shaped
Trang 3© Copyright 2001, Zaine Ridling
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author
Trang 4Table of Contents
Preface iii
Introduction vi
PART I: HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY 2
The Writing of the History of Philosophy 3
Ways of Ordering the History 3
Factors in Writing the History of Philosophy 5
Shifts in the Focus and Concern of Philosophy 7
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy 9
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers 9
Cosmology and the Metaphysic of Matter 9
Monistic Cosmologies 9
Pluralistic Cosmologies 14
Epistemology of Appearance 16
Metaphysic of Number 17
Anthropology and Relativism 19
The Seminal Thinkers of Greek Philosophy 21
Socrates 21
Plato 23
Life 24
Philosophy 25
Aristotle 28
Philosophy 28
Disciples and Commentators 32
Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy 32
Stoics 33
Epicureans 35
Sceptics 36
Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists 37
Trang 5Medieval Philosophy 39
Early Medieval Philosophy 40
Augustine 41
Boethius 42
Greek Fathers of the Church and Erigena 43
Anselm 44
Bernard of Clairvaux and Abelard 45
Transition to Scholasticism 47
Arabic Thought 48
Jewish Thought 49
The Age of the Schoolmen 50
Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon 50
William of Auvergne 51
Bonaventure 52
Albertus Magnus 53
Thomas Aquinas 54
Averroists 56
Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages 57
Duns Scotus 58
William of Ockham 59
Meister Eckhart 60
Nicholas of Cusa 61
Modern Philosophy 62
The Renaissance and Early Modern Period 62
Dominant Strands of Renaissance Philosophy 64
Political Theory 65
Humanism 67
Philosophy of Nature 70
Rise of Empiricism and Rationalism 74
The Empiricism of Francis Bacon 74
The Materialism of Thomas Hobbes 75
Rationalism of Descartes 77
Rationalism of Spinoza and Leibniz 81
Literary Forms and Sociological Conditions 84
Trang 6The Enlightenment 86
Classical British Empiricism and Its Basic Tasks 87
Origin and Nature of Reason in Locke and Berkeley 88
Basic Science of Man in Hume 91
Nonepistemological Movements in the Enlightenment 92
Materialism and Scientific Discovery 92
Social and Political Philosophy 93
Professionalization of Philosophy 95
Critical Examination of Reason in Kant 98
Literary Forms 100
The 19th Century 101
German Idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel 102
Positivism and Social Theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx 106
Independent and Irrationalist Movements 110
The 20th Century 113
Individual Philosophies of Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead 114
Marxist Thought 116
Analytic Philosophy 117
Logical Positivism 117
Linguistic Analysis 120
Continental Philosophy 121
Phenomenology of Husserl and Others 122
Existentialism of Jaspers and Sartre 123
Conclusion 125
Bibliography 127
Trang 7PART II: WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS 134
Introduction 135
Ancient and Medieval Schools 136
Aristotelianism 136
The Hellenistic Age and Neoplatonism 136
Aristotelianism in Arabic Philosophy 138
Aristotelianism in Jewish Philosophy 141
The Christian East 141
The Christian West 142
Conclusion 147
Atomism 148
The Basic Nature of Atomism 148
Various Senses of Atomism 149
Two Basic Types of Atomism 149
Philosophical Atomism 150
Modern Atomic Theory 151
Extensions to Other Fields 151
Diverse Philosophical Characterizations of Atomism 153
The Intrinsic Nature of the Atoms 153
Atoms as Lumpish Corpuscles 154
Atoms as Sheer Extension 157
Atoms as Centres of Force: Dynamic Particles 158
Atoms as Psychophysical Monads 159
The Immutability of Atoms 160
Other Differences 161
Number of Atoms 161
Atoms in External Aggregation versus in Internal Relationship 163
History and Major Representatives of the Various Atomisms 165
Philosophical Atomism 165
Ancient Greek Atomism 165
The Elachista of the Early Aristotelian Commentators 166
The Minima Naturalia of the Averroists 167
Modern Scientific Atomism: Early Pioneering Work 167
The 17th century 168
Founding of Modern Atomism 169
Recent and Contemporary Scientific Atomism 170
Atomism in the Thought of India 171
Trang 8Foundational Issues Posed By Atomism 172
Atomism as a Metaphysical System 172
Ancient Greek versus Contemporary Scientific Atomism 175
Evaluation of Atomism 176
Eleaticism 177
The Eleatic School Vis-À-Vis Rival Movements 178
The Rigorous Ontologism of Parmenides and Melissus 180
Logical and Linguistic Approach 180
Monistic Theory of Being 182
The Paradoxes of Zeno 184
The Decline of Eleaticism 186
Epicureanism 187
The Nature of Epicureanism 188
History of Epicureanism 189
Epicurus’ Own Life and Teachings 189
Doctrine of Epicurus 190
The Epicurean School 194
Epicureanism and Egoism in Modern Philosophy 196
Epicureanism in Contemporary Philosophy 197
Criticism and Evaluation 198
Platonism 201
Aristotle’s Account of Platonism 201
The Academy after Plato: The Rise of Neoplatonism 205
Influence of Platonism on Christian Thought 207
Pythagoreanism 210
General Features of Pythagoreanism 210
Major Concerns and Teachings 212
Religion and Ethics 212
Metaphysics and Number Theory 214
The Harmony of the Cosmos 215
The Doctrine of Opposites 216
Mathematics and Science 217
Arithmetic 217
Geometry 220
Music 221
Astronomy 222
History of Pythagoreanism 222
Trang 9Early Pythagoreanism 223
Background 224
Pythagorean Communities 224
Two Pythagorean Sects 225
4th-Century Pythagoreanism 226
The Hellenistic Age 226
Neo-Pythagoreanism 227
Medieval and Modern Trends 228
Evaluation 229
Realism 230
Nature and Scope of Realism 231
Realism and the Problem of Knowledge 231
Philosophical Senses of Realism 233
Basic Kinds of Realism 234
Distinctions Among the Realisms 235
History of Western Realism 237
Ancient Realism 237
Medieval Realism 238
Modern Realism 239
Major Issues and Evaluation of Realism 240
Scholasticism 242
Nature and Significance 243
History and Issues 246
Roots of Scholasticism 246
Early Scholastic Period 251
Maturity of Scholasticism 256
Late Scholastic Period 261
Enduring Features 262
Thomism 265
William of Ockham 268
Trang 10Scepticism 269
Various Senses and Applications 270
Ancient Scepticism 271
Medieval Scepticism 274
Modern Scepticism 275
In the Reformation 275
In the 17th Century 276
In the 18th Century 279
In Recent and Contemporary Philosophy 282
Criticism and Evaluation 284
Sophists 286
History of the Name 286
The 5th-Century Sophists 287
Nature of Sophistic Thought 290
Writings 294
Particular Doctrines 295
Theoretical Issues 296
Humanistic Issues 298
The Second Sophistic Movement 300
Stoicism 301
Nature and Scope of Stoicism 302
Ancient Stoicism 304
Early Greek Stoicism 304
Later Roman Stoicism 308
Stoic Elements in Pauline and Patristic Thought 310
Stoicism in Medieval and Modern Philosophy 312
Stoic Undercurrents in Medieval Thought 312
Renascence of Stoicism in Modern Times 314
Trang 11Modern Schools 318
Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy 318
General Viewpoint of Analytic Philosophy 321
Nature, Role, and Method of Analysis 321
Status of Philosophy in the Empiricist Tradition 321
Conceptual, Linguistic, and Scientific Analysis 323
Therapeutic Function of Analysis 325
Formal versus Ordinary Language 327
Development of Mathematical Logic 327
Divergence of Ordinary Language from Formal Logic 329
Interpretations of the Relation of Logic to Language 329
Early History of Analytic Philosophy 331
Reaction Against Idealism 331
Founding Fathers: Moore and Russell 333
G.E Moore 334
Bertrand Russell 336
Logical Atomism: Russell and the Early Wittgenstein 339
Logical Positivism: Carnap and Schlick 341
Later History of the Movement 344
Philosophical Investigations: the Later Wittgenstein 344
Language and Following Rules 345
Relation Between Mental and Physical Events 347
Recent Trends in England 349
Wittgensteinians 349
Oxford Philosophers 350
Recent Trends in the United States 353
Analytic Philosophy Today 355
Trang 12Empiricism 356
Various Meanings of Empiricism 358
Broader Senses 358
Stricter Senses 359
Fundamental Distinctions 360
Degrees of Empiricism 362
History of Empiricism 365
In Ancient Philosophy 365
In Medieval Philosophy 366
In Modern Philosophy 367
In Contemporary Philosophy 370
Criticism and Evaluation 371
Existentialism 375
Nature of Existentialist Thought and Manner 375
Historical Survey of Existentialism 379
Precursors of Existentialism 379
The Immediate Background and Founding Fathers 381
Emergence as a Movement 382
Methodological Issues in Existentialism 385
Substantive Issues in Existentialism 387
Fundamental Concepts and Contrasts 387
Ontic Structure of Human Existence 387
Manner and Style of Human Existence 390
Problems of Existentialist Philosophy 392
Man and Human Relationships 392
The Human Situation in the World 394
Significance of Being and Transcendence 397
Problems of Existentialist Theology 398
Social and Historical Projections of Existentialism 400
Trang 13Idealism 403
Approaches to Understanding Idealism 404
Basic Doctrines and Principles 404
Basic Questions and Answers 407
Ultimate Reality 408
The Given 408
Change 409
Basic Arguments 410
The Reciprocity Argument 411
The Mystical Argument 411
The Ontological Argument 413
Types of Philosophical Idealism 413
Types Classed by Culture 413
Western Types 414
Eastern Types 418
Types Classed by Branches of Philosophy 421
Criticism and Appraisal 422
Materialism 424
Types of Materialist Theory 425
Types Distinguished by Departures from the Paradigm 425
Types Distinguished by Its View of History 427
Types Distinguished by Their Account of Mind 428
History of Materialism 430
Greek and Roman Materialism 430
Modern Materialism 431
Contemporary Materialism 433
Translation Central-State Theories 434
Disappearance Central-State Theories 436
Eastern Materialism 438
Substantive Issues in Materialism 438
Reductionism, Consciousness, and Brain 438
Logic, Intentionality, and Psychical Research 440
Trang 14Phenomenology 442
Characteristics of Phenomenology 442
Essential Features and Variations 443
Contrasts with Related Movements 444
Origin and Development of Husserl’s Phenomenology 446
Basic Principles 446
Basic Method 449
Basic Concepts 452
Later Developments 455
Phenomenology of Essences 455
Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology 456
Other Developments 459
Dissemination of Phenomenology 459
Phenomenology in Various Countries 459
In France 459
In Germany 463
In Other European Countries 463
In the United States 464
Phenomenology in Other Disciplines 465
Conclusion 466
Positivism and Logical Empiricism 466
The Social Positivism of Comte and Mill 468
The Critical Positivism of Mach and Avenarius 471
Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism 476
The Earlier Positivism of Viennese Heritage 477
Language and the Clarification of Meaning 478
The Verifiability Criterion of Meaning and Its Offshoots 480
Other Issues 483
The Later Positivism of Logical Empiricism 486
The Status of the Formal and A Priori 487
Developments in Linguistic Analysis and Their Offshoots 489
Current Criticisms and Controversies 492
Trang 15Pragmatism 494
Major Theses of Philosophic Pragmatism 495
History of Pragmatism 498
Antecedents in Modern Philosophy 498
The Metaphysical Club 500
The Classical Pragmatists 500
Other American Pragmatists 507
Pragmatism in Europe 508
Later Tendencies 510
Evaluation of Pragmatism 512
Rationalism 513
Types and Expressions of Rationalism 514
History of Rationalism 518
Epistemological Rationalism in Ancient Philosophies 518
Epistemological Rationalism in Modern Philosophies 521
Ethical Rationalism 523
Religious Rationalism 525
Expansion of Religious Rationalism 525
Four Waves of Religious Rationalism 526
Status of Rationalism 529
Religious 529
Ethical 529
Metaphysical 530
Challenges to Epistemological Rationalism 532
Utilitarianism 534
The Nature of Utilitarianism 535
Basic Concepts 535
Methodologies 536
Criticisms 537
Historical Survey 539
Antecedents of Utilitarianism Among the Ancients 539
Growth of Classical English Utilitarianism 539
Late 19th- and 20th-century Utilitarianism 541
Effects of Utilitarianism in Other Fields 542
Summary and Evaluation 544
Bibliography 546
Trang 16PART III: PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 588
Introduction 589
The Concept of Human Nature 590
Ancient Greece 596
Medieval Period 599
Renaissance 601
The 16th and 17th Centuries: The Rise of Scientific Thought 602
Rationalism versus Scepticism 602
Work of Descartes 604
Work of Locke 607
Development of Anthropological Studies 609
Work of Tyson 609
Emergence of Cultural Anthropology 611
The 18th-Century Enlightenment 612
The Natural History of Man 612
Man the Rational Subject 615
The 19th Century 620
The 20th Century: Emergence of Philosophical Anthropology 625
Frege and Empiricist Anthropology 626
Husserl and Philosophical Anthropology 629
Work of Heidegger 631
Work of Sartre and Other Existentialists 632
Philosophical Anthropology and Theology 636
Saussure, Freud, and Antihumanism 637
Humanism 641
Introduction 641
Origin and Meaning of the Term Humanism 642
The Ideal of Humanitas 642
Other Uses 644
Basic Principles and Attitudes 645
Classicism 646
Realism 647
Critical Scrutiny and Concern with Detail 649
The Emergence of the Individual and the Idea of the Dignity of Man 649
Active Virtue 650
Early History 652
The 15th Century 659
Trang 17Leon Battista Alberti 660
The Medici and Federico da Montefeltro 662
Later Italian Humanism 664
Things and Words 666
Idealism and the Platonic Academy of Florence 667
Machiavelli’s Realism 669
The Achievement of Castiglione 670
Tasso’s Aristotelianism 671
Northern Humanism 672
Desiderius Erasmus 672
The French Humanists 673
François Rabelais 674
Michel de Montaigne 675
The English Humanists 676
Sidney and Spenser 678
Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare 680
Humanism and the Visual Arts 683
Realism 683
Classicism 684
Anthropocentricity and Individualism 685
Art as Philosophy 686
Humanism, Art, and Science 687
Humanism and Christianity 690
Later Fortunes of Humanism 691
Conclusion 694
Marxism 694
The Thought of Karl Marx 695
Historical Materialism 696
Analysis of Society 698
Analysis of the Economy 702
Class Struggle 704
The Contributions of Engels 706
German Marxism After Engels 709
The Work of Kautsky and Bernstein 709
The Radicals 711
The Austrians 712
Russian and Soviet Marxism 713
Trang 18Lenin 713
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat 716
Stalin 717
Trotskyism 720
Variants of Marxism 721
Maoism 721
Marxism in Cuba 724
Marxism in the Third World 725
Marxism in the West 726
Bibliography 729
PART IV: BRANCHES OF PHILOSOPHY 742
Aesthetics 743
Introduction 743
The Nature and Scope of Aesthetics 743
Three Approaches to Aesthetics 745
The Aesthetic Recipient 748
The Aesthetic Object 750
The Aesthetic Experience 755
Relationship Between Form and Content 760
The Role of Imagination 762
Emotion, Response, and Enjoyment 766
The Work of Art 771
Understanding Art 772
Representation and Expression in Art 772
Symbolism in Art 775
Form 779
The Ontology of Art 781
The Value of Art 784
Taste, Criticism, and Judgment 786
Concepts Used in Aesthetic Evaluation 788
Trang 19The Development of Western Aesthetics 794
The Contributions of the Ancient Greeks 794
Medieval Aesthetics 795
The Origins of Modern Aesthetics 796
The Significance of Baumgarten’s Work 798
Major Concerns of 18th-Century Aesthetics 799
Kant, Schiller, and Hegel 802
Post-Hegelian Aesthetics 804
Expressionism 805
Marxist Aesthetics 807
Eastern Aesthetics 809
India 809
China 810
Japan 811
Epistemology 812
Introduction 812
Issues of Epistemology 812
Epistemology as a Discipline 812
Two Epistemological Problems 814
Our Knowledge of the External World 814
The ‘Other-Minds’ Problems 816
Implications 818
Relation of Epistemology to Other Branches of Philosophy 820
The Nature of Knowledge 822
Six Distinctions of Knowledge 825
Occurrent versus Dispositional Conceptions of Knowledge 827
A Priori versus A Posteriori Knowledge 828
Necessary versus Contingent Propositions 829
Analytic versus Synthetic Propositions 830
Tautological versus Significant Propositions 830
Logical versus Factual Propositions 831
Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description 833
Description versus Justification 836
Knowledge and Certainty 838
Trang 20Origins of Knowledge 841
Innate versus Learned 842
Rationalism versus Empiricism 843
Scepticism 846
The History of Epistemology 849
Ancient Philosophy 849
Pre-Socratics 849
Plato 850
Aristotle 854
Ancient Scepticism 857
St Augustine 860
Medieval Philosophy 862
St Anselm of Canterbury 862
St Thomas Aquinas 863
John Duns Scotus 867
William of Ockham 870
From Scientific Theology to Secular Science 871
Modern Philosophy 873
Faith and Reason 873
Impact of Modern Science on Epistemology 876
René Descartes 877
John Locke 878
George Berkeley 882
David Hume 886
Kinds of Perceptions 886
Cause and Effect 889
Substance 890
Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact 891
Scepticism 892
Immanuel Kant 895
G.F.W Hegel 898
Contemporary Philosophy 899
Continental Philosophy 900
Analytic Philosophy 904
Commonsense Philosophy, Logical Positivism, and Naturalized Epistemology 905
Perception and Knowledge 907
Phenomenalism 912
Trang 21Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology 916
Philosophy of Mind 917
Introduction 917
Philosophy of Mind as a Discipline 918
The Search for a Criterion of the Mental 919
Purposeful Behavior 919
Intentionality 922
The Scope of Application of Intentionality 926
Subjective Experience 929
Adequacy as a Criterion of the Mental 931
Core Characteristics of Subjectivity 934
Privileged Status of Subjectivity 936
The Existence and Status of the Mind 941
The Mind as Material 942
Eliminative Materialism 943
Behaviorism 944
Central-State Theory 945
The Mind as Immaterial 946
Dualism 947
Immaterialism 949
Neutral Theories 950
The Analysis of Mental Phenomena 952
The Cognitive 953
The Affective 954
The Volitional 955
Some Metaphysical and Epistemological Issues 956
Personal Identity Through Time 956
Personal Immortality 958
Knowledge of Other Minds 959
Artificial Intelligence 961
Trang 22Ethics 962 Introduction 962
The Origins of Ethics 963 Mythical Accounts 963 Introduction of Moral Codes 963 Problems of Divine Origin 965 Prehuman Ethics 966 Nonhuman Behavior 966 Kinship and Reciprocity 967 Anthropology and Ethics 970 Ancient Ethics 974 The Middle East 974 India 977 China 982 Ancient Greece 984 Western Ethics from Socrates to the 20th Century 987 The Classical Period of Greek Ethics 987 Socrates 987 Plato 989 Aristotle 992 Later Greek and Roman Ethics 997 The Stoics 997 The Epicureans 999 Christian Ethics from the New Testament to the Scholastics 1001 Ethics in the New Testament 1001 Augustine 1004 Aquinas and the Moral Philosophy of the Scholastics 1005 Renaissance and Reformation 1010 Machiavelli 1010 The First Protestants 1011 The British Tradition: from Hobbes to the Utilitarians 1013 Hobbes 1013 Early Intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and Clarke 1016 Shaftesbury and the Moral Sense School 1018 Butler on Self-Interest and Conscience 1019 The Climax of Moral Sense Theory: Hutcheson and Hume 1020 The Intuitionist Response: Price and Reid 1024
Trang 23Utilitarianism 1025 Paley 1025 Bentham 1026 Mill 1027 Sidgwick 1028
The Continental Tradition: from Spinoza to Nietzsche 1030 Spinoza 1030 Leibniz 1031 Rousseau 1032 Kant 1033 Hegel 1039 Marx 1042 Nietzsche 1044 20th-Century Western Ethics .1046 Metaethics 1046 Moore and the Naturalistic Fallacy .1047 Modern Intuitionism .1049 Emotivism 1050 Existentialism 1052 Universal Prescriptivism 1053 Modern Naturalism .1056 Recent Developments in Metaethics .1059 Normative Ethics 1066 The Debate Over Consequentialism 1066 Varieties of Consequentialism 1067
An Ethic of Prima Facie Duties .1072 Rawls’s Theory of Justice 1073 Rights Theories .1075 Natural Law Ethics 1077 Ethical Egoism .1079 Applied Ethics .1082 Applications of Equality .1084 Environmental Ethics 1086 War and Peace 1087 Abortion, Euthanasia, and the Value of Human Life 1088 Bioethics 1089 Bibliography 1093
Trang 24Acknowledgments
I wish to express sincere appreciation to Francis Christie, John Farthing, and Jay McDaniel for their assistance and lasting influence In addition, special thanks to my wife who has supported both me and my work for so many years
Trang 25Preface
The concepts that lie at the heart of philosophy antedate historical record
by thousands of years In one form or another, the concept of immortality probably extends back at least to the Neanderthals some tens of thousands of years ago They seem to have developed some notion of an afterlife, as is evident in their burial sites and symbolism In prehistory, magic also displays unmistakable philosophical underpinnings: it appeals to causes unseen and not yet understood Abstraction and idealized forms can be traced back to the Cro-Magnon, who lived more than ten thousand years ago The ghastly practice of human sacrifice, which already indicates some complex set of beliefs about the world, can be traced back at least this far
When did people first envision gods and goddesses who must be appeased? When did they first believe in forces behind the scenes and mysteries in the very stuff of life? When did they begin to speculate about the creation of the world, and in what terms? When did they move beyond the
"facts" of nature to speculation, to spirituality, to wonder? When did these beliefs and speculations begin to consolidate into that cantankerous discipline that the Greeks called philosophy? How did the numerous gods and goddesses
of the early ancient world become one? In 1370 B.C.E., the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV) proclaimed belief in one God, centuries before the birth of Moses Abraham, we are told, had such a belief in a single God five hundred years earlier How much of philosophy is an effort to come to terms with that demand for unity and concern for that which is “beyond” us?
In the pages that follow, I have tried to write a history of philosophy that
is simple and straightforward but captures the complexity and diversity of the subject The reader may rightly wonder why this volume is so large, but when
Trang 26I tried to cut, it was not my authorial egos that were bruised but the history itself What is sufficiently inessential to omit? Of course, I have made such decisions, thousands of them, but, nevertheless, the richness of the subject was persuasive At the risk of massive oversimplification, we have tried for inclusiveness And we took heart as we read our German philosophical counterpart, Hans Joachim Störig, whose “short history” weighs in at 750 pages
I have tried to keep my own biases out of the text – not always successfully I have also tried to glean some sense of a global perspective on philosophy, but have not made a false attempt to avoid taking a distinctively
“Western” perspective in doing so There is no point in apologizing for this Philosophy in all its forms and cultures is wondrous
Zaine Ridling, Ph.D
Kansas City, Missouri, USA
June 2001
Trang 27Introduction
This book has three basic purposes: (1) to provide an overview of the history of philosophy in the West; (2) to relate philosophical ideas and movements to their historical background and to the cultural history of their time; and (3) to trace the changing conception of the definition, the function, and the task of philosophy
It is a paradox faced by all of those who attempt to write the history of philosophy that the “philosophy” whose history they write probably would not have been defined exactly alike by any two of the major figures whom they judge it fitting to include in their accounts For throughout its long and varied history in the West, “philosophy” has meant many different things Some of these have been a search for the wisdom of life (the meaning closest to the Greek words from which the term is derived); an attempt to understand the universe as a whole; an examination of man’s moral responsibilities and social obligations; an effort to fathom the divine intentions and man’s place with reference to them; an effort to ground the enterprise of natural science; a rigorous examination of the origin, extent, and validity of men’s ideas; an exploration of the place of will or consciousness in the universe; an examination of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty; an effort to codify the rules of human thought in order to promote rationality and the extension of clear thinking Even these do not exhaust the meanings that have been attached to the philosophical enterprise, but they give some idea of its extreme complexity and many-sidedness
It is difficult to determine whether any common element can be found within this diversity and whether any core meaning can be discovered for philosophy that could serve as a universal and all-inclusive definition But a
Trang 28first attempt in this direction might be to define philosophy either as “a reflection upon the varieties of human experience” or as “the rational, methodical, and systematic consideration of those topics that are of greatest concern to man.” Vague and indefinite as such definitions are, they do suggest two important facts about philosophizing: (1) that it is a reflective, or meditative, activity and (2) that it has no explicitly designated subject matter
of its own but is a method or type of mental operation (like science or like history) that can take any area or subject matter or type of experience as its object Thus, although there are a few single-term divisions of philosophy of long standing – such as logic, ethics, epistemology (the theory of knowledge),
or metaphysics (theory of the nature of Being) – its divisions are probably best expressed by phrases that contain the preposition “of” – such as philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of law, or philosophy of art
Part of what makes it difficult to find a consensus among philosophers about the definition of their discipline is precisely that they have frequently come to it from different fields, with different interests and concerns, and that they therefore have different areas of experience upon which they find it especially necessary or meaningful to reflect St Thomas Aquinas (a Dominican friar of the 13th century), George Berkeley (a bishop of the Irish Church in the 18th century), and Søren Kierkegaard (a Danish divinity student
in the 19th century) all saw philosophy as a means to assert the truths of religion and to dispel the Materialistic or Rationalistic errors that, in their opinion, had led to its decline Pythagoras in ancient south Italy, René Descartes in the late Renaissance, and Bertrand Russell in the 20th century have been primarily mathematicians whose views of the universe and of human knowledge have been vastly influenced by the concept of number and
by the method of deductive thinking Some philosophers, such as Plato or the
Trang 29British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, have been obsessed by problems of political arrangement and social living, so that whatever else they have done in philosophy has been stimulated by a desire to understand and, ultimately, to change the social and political behavior of men And still others – such as the Milesians (the first philosophers of Greece); Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan philosopher; and, in the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead, a process metaphysician – have begun with an interest in the physical composition of the natural world, so that their philosophies resemble more closely the generalizations of physical science than those of religion or sociology
The history of Western philosophy reveals in detail the concentrated activity of a multitude of serious and able men reflecting upon, reasoning about, and considering deeply the nature of their experience But throughout this diversity certain characteristic oppositions habitually recur, such as the division between monists, dualists, and pluralists in metaphysics; between Materialists and Idealists in cosmological theory; between Nominalists and Realists in the theory of signification; between Rationalists and Empiricists in the theory of knowledge; between Utilitarians, self-realizationists, and proponents of duty in moral theory; and between partisans of logic and partisans of emotion in the search for a responsible guide to the wisdom of life
Many of these fundamental oppositions among philosophers will be treated in the article that follows But if any single opposition is taken as central throughout the history of Western philosophy at every level and in every field, it is probably that between the critical and the speculative impulses These two divergent motivations tend to express themselves in two
divergent methods: that of analysis and that of synthesis Plato’s Politeia (The
Trang 30Republic) is an example of the second The Principia Ethica (1903) of G.E
Moore, a founder of linguistic philosophy, is an example of the first Beginning with a simple question about justice, Politeia in its discursiveness slowly but progressively brings more and more areas into the discussion: first ethics, then politics, then educational theory, then theory of knowledge, and finally metaphysics Starting with one specific question, Plato finally managed
to make his discussion as broad as the world Principia Ethica does just the
opposite Beginning with a general question – What is good? – it progressively breaks up this question into a whole series of subordinate questions, analyzing meanings ever more minutely, growing narrower and narrower but always with the utmost modesty and sincerity, striving for increasing simplicity and exactitude
The analytic, or critical, impulse treats any subject matter or topic by concentrating upon the part, by taking it apart in the service of clarity and precision It was essentially the method of Aristotle and of Peter Abelard, a medieval Scholastic; of David Hume, a Scottish sceptic, and of Rudolf Carnap, a 20th-century semantic Positivist; and of Russell and Moore The synthetic, or speculative, impulse operates by seeking to comprehend the whole, by putting it all together in the service of unity and completeness It is essentially the method of Parmenides, a Pre-Socratic monist, and of Plato; of
St Thomas and of Benedict de Spinoza, a modern Jewish Rationalist; of G.W.F Hegel, a German Idealist, and of Whitehead Throughout philosophy’s history, each of the two traditions has made its insistent claim
There is one philosophical tradition – that of Positivism – that sees philosophy as originating in the obscure mists of religion and coming finally
to rest in the pure sunshine of scientific clarity This represents a necessary progress, because Positivism considers it a scandal when philosophers speak a
Trang 31language that is not accessible to “verification”; it holds that bold and adventuresome philosophical speculation is at best mere self-indulgence, a passing state occurring when philosophical problems are raised prematurely – that is, at a time when philosophy does not possess the means to solve them Though Positivism represents a partisan view that it is not necessary to hold, it does express indirectly a basic truth – that the philosophical enterprise has always hovered uncertainly between the lure of religious seriousness and that of scientific exactitude In the earliest philosophers of Greece it is impossible to separate ideas of divinity and the human soul from ideas about the mystery of being and the genesis of material change, and in the Middle Ages philosophy was acknowledged to be “the handmaiden of theology.” But the increased secularization of modern culture has largely reversed this trend, and the Enlightenment emphasis upon the separation of nature from its divine creator has increasingly placed philosophical resources at the disposal of those interested in creating a philosophy of science
Yet philosophy’s continuing search for philosophical truth leads it to hope, but at the same time to profoundly doubt, that its problems are objectively solvable With respect to a total description of Being or a definitive account of the nature of values, only individual solutions now seem possible; and the optimistic hope for objective answers that secure universal agreement must be given up
In this respect, philosophy seems less like science than like art and the philosopher more like an artist than a scientist, for his philosophical solutions bear the stamp of his own personality, and his choice of arguments reveals as much about himself as his chosen problem As a work of art is a portion of the world seen through a temperament, so a philosophical system is a vision of the
Trang 32world subjectively assembled Plato and Descartes, Immanuel Kant, an century German Idealist, and John Dewey, a U.S Pragmatist, have given to their systems many of the quaint trappings of their own personalities
18th-But if philosophy is not true in the same sense as science, it is not false
in the same sense either; and this gives to the history of philosophy a living significance, which the history of science does not enjoy In science, the present confronts the past as truth confronts error; thus, for science, the past, even when important at all, is important only out of historical interest In philosophy it is different Philosophical systems are never definitively proved false; they are simply discarded or put aside for future use And this means that the history of philosophy consists not simply of dead museum pieces but
of ever-living classics – comprising a permanent repository of ideas, doctrines, and arguments and a continuing source of philosophical inspiration and suggestiveness to those who philosophize in any succeeding age It is for this reason that any attempt to separate philosophizing from the history of philosophy is both a provincial act and an unnecessary impoverishment of its rich natural resources
Trang 33Then and Now
© 2001 All Rights Reserved
Zaine Ridling, Ph.D
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Trang 35Part I History of Western Philosophy
Trang 36The Writing of the History of Philosophy
The writing of the history of philosophy is itself controlled by a series of cultural habits or conventions
Ways of Ordering the History
This chapter is divided into three sections – ancient, medieval, and modern – and this division is so pervasive today that it is difficult to remember that the threefold distinction is only as old as the end of the 17th century This distinction – first employed in the writing of European history
proper by Georg Horn of Leiden in his Arca Noae: Sive Historia Imperiorum
et Regnorum a Condito Orbe ad Nostra Tempora (1666; “Noah’s Ark; or, The
History of Empires and Kingdoms from the Beginning of the World to Our Times”) and a generation later by Christophorus Cellarius, a German historian, in 1696 – slowly spread to historical writing in all fields and was given definitive influence in philosophical writing through the series of lectures on Philosophiegeschichte (“History of Philosophy”) that Hegel delivered first at Jena, then at Heidelberg, and finally at Berlin between 1805 and 1830 Since Hegel, it has been taken for granted as standard practice, although a host of cultural assumptions is implied by its use
Treatment of the total field of the history of philosophy has been traditionally subject to two types of ordering, according to whether it was conceived (1) as primarily a history of ideas or (2) as a history of the intellectual products of men In the first ordering, certain ideas, or concepts, are viewed as archetypal (such as matter or mind or doubt); and the condensations occurring within the flow of thought tend to consist of basic
Trang 37types or schools This ordering has characterized such works as Friedrich
Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (1866; The History of Materialism), A.C Ewing’s compilation The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to Blanshard (1957), or Richard H Popkin’s History of Scepticism from Erasmus to
Descartes (1960) In the second type of ordering, the historian, impressed by
the producers of ideas as much as by the ideas themselves – that is, with philosophers as agents – reviews the succession of great philosophical personalities in their rational achievement This ordering has produced the
more customary histories such as Émile Bréhier’s Histoire de la philosophie (1926-32), Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945), and Karl Jaspers’ Die grossen Philosophen (1957; The Great Philosophers)
These two different types of ordering depend for their validity upon an appeal to two different principles about the nature of ideas, but their incidental use may also be influenced by social or cultural factors Thus the biographers and compilers of late antiquity (among them, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Philostratus, and Clement of Alexandria), impressed by the religious pluralism
of the age in which they lived, thought of philosophers, too, as falling into different sects and wrote histories of the Sophists, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, and other such schools; whereas almost 2,000 years later, Hegel – living in a period of Romantic historiography dominated by the concept of the great man in history – deliberately described the history of philosophy as “a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought.”
Moving between these two ordering principles, the article below will be eclectic (as has come to be the custom), devoting chief attention to outstanding major figures, while joining more minor figures, wherever possible, into the schools or tendencies that they exemplify
Trang 38Factors in Writing the History of Philosophy
The type of ordering suggested above also has some relationship to the more general problems of method in the writing of the history of philosophy Here there are at least three factors that must be taken into account: (1) the historian must understand how (at least in part) any philosopher’s doctrines depend upon those of his predecessors; (2) he must understand that a man’s philosophy occurs at a certain point in history and, thus, how it expresses the effects of certain social and cultural circumstances; and (3) he must understand how in part it stems from the philosopher’s own personality and situation in life This is only to say that the history of philosophy, to be at all comprehensive and adequate, must deal with the mutual interplay of ideas, of cultural contexts, and of agents
The first factor may be called logical because a given philosophy is, in part, the intellectual response to the doctrines of its forerunners, taking as central the problems given by the current climate of controversy Thus, many
of the details of Aristotle’s ethical, political, and metaphysical systems arise in
arguments directed against statements and principles of Plato; much of An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by John Locke, an initiator
of the Enlightenment, is directed against current Cartesian presuppositions;
and the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1704; New Essays
Concerning Human Understanding) by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a broadly
learned Rationalist, is, in turn, specifically directed against Locke
The second factor may be called sociological because it considers philosophy, at least in part, as a direct form of social expression, arising at a certain moment in history, dated and marked by the peculiar problems and crises of the society in which it flourishes From this perspective, the
Trang 39philosophy of Plato may be viewed as the response of an aristocratic elitism to the immediate threat of democracy and the leveling of values in 5th-century Athens – its social theory and even its metaphysics servicing the thrust toward
an aristocratic restoration in the Greek world Thus, the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas may be viewed as an effort toward doctrinal clarification in support of the institution of the medieval Roman Church, as the saint spent his life obediently fulfilling the philosophical tasks set for him by his superiors in the church and the Dominican order Thus, the philosophy of Kant, with all of its technical vocabulary and rigid systematization, may be viewed as an expression of the new professionalism in philosophy, a clear product of the rebirth of the German universities during the 18th-century Enlightenment The third factor may be called biographical, or individual, because, with Hegel, it recognizes that philosophies are generally produced by men of unusual or independent personality, whose systems usually bear the mark of their creators And what is meant here by the individuality of the philosopher lies less in the facts of his biography (such as the wealth or poverty, the married state or bachelorhood that he shares with other men) than in the essential form and style of his philosophizing The cool intensity of Spinoza’s geometric search for wisdom, the unswerving (if opaque) discursiveness of Hegel’s quest for completeness or totality, the relentless and minute analytic search for distinctions and shades of meaning that marks Moore’s master passion (“to be accurate – to get everything exactly right”), these qualities mark the philosophical writings of Spinoza, Hegel, and Moore with an unmistakably individual and original character
Trang 40Shifts in the Focus and Concern of Philosophy
Any adequate treatment of individual figures in the history of philosophy tries to utilize this threefold division of logical, sociological, and individual factors; but in a synoptic view of the history of philosophy in the West, one is particularly aware of the various shifts of focus and concern that philosophy has sustained and, indeed, of the often profound differences in the way that it defines itself or visualizes its task from age to age or from generation to generation
Philosophy among the Greeks slowly emerged out of religious awe into wonder about the principles and elements of the natural world But as the Greek populations more and more left the land to become concentrated in their cities, interest shifted from nature to social living; questions of law and convention and civic values became paramount Cosmological speculation partly gave way to moral and political theorizing, and the preliminary and somewhat fragmentary questionings of Socrates and the Sophists turned into the great positive constructions of Plato and Aristotle With the political and social fragmentation of the succeeding centuries, however, philosophizing once again shifted from the norm of civic involvement to problems of salvation and survival in a chaotic world
The dawn of Christianity brought to philosophy new tasks Augustine, the philosophical bishop of Hippo, and the Church Fathers used such resources of the Greek tradition as remained (chiefly Platonism) to deal with problems of the creation, of faith and reason, and of truth New translations in the 12th century made much of Aristotle’s philosophy available and prepared the way for the great theological constructions of the 13th century, chiefly those of the Scholastic philosophers Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, Thomas