Discover the Fascinating World of Western Philosophy

Philosophy of the Western World

• Western philosophy started with ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics.

• The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology and the first recognized philosopher was Thales of Miletus who identified water as the arche.

• Pythagoras claimed "all is number" and the Pythagoreans believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation.

• Parmenides argued that the world must be singular, unchanging and eternal, while anything suggesting the contrary was an illusion.

• Socrates developed a critical approach, now called the Socratic method, to examine people's views and focused on issues of human life: eudaimonia, justice, beauty, truth, and virtue.

• Plato founded the Platonic Academy and Platonic philosophy and identified virtue with knowledge, leading him to question what knowledge is and how it is acquired.

• Aristotle founded the Peripatetic school and wrote widely about topics of philosophical concern, including metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics, and logic.

• The Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods saw the continuation of Aristotelianism and Cynicism, and the emergence of new philosophies, including Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neopythagoreanism.

• Platonism also continued but came under new interpretations, particularly Academic skepticism in the Hellenistic period and Neoplatonism in the Imperial period.

• Medieval philosophy is defined partly by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and partly by the need to address theological problems.

• A prominent figure of this period was Augustine of Hippo who adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it.

• Scholasticism is not so much a philosophy or a theology as a methodology and places a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and to resolve contradictions.

• Anselm of Canterbury argued that the existence of God could be irrefutably proved with the logical conclusion apparent in the ontological argument.Overview of Western Philosophy from Middle Ages to Pragmatism

• Boethius argued that universals did not exist independently as claimed by Plato, but still believed in their existence in the substance of particular things.

• Peter Abelard extended Boethius's argument to nominalism, which states that universals were just names given to characteristics shared by particulars.

• Thomas Aquinas was an influential philosopher in medieval Christendom who aimed to reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with Christian theology. He defined a material substance as the combination of an essence and accidental features, with the essence being a combination of matter and form.

• Other important figures in medieval philosophy include John Scotus Eriugena, Gilbert de la Porrée, Hildegard of Bingen, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.

• The Renaissance period saw a shift towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism, with a focus on humanity and its virtues as the focus of philosophy.

• Early modern philosophy began in the 17th and 18th centuries, with central topics including the nature of the mind and its relation to the body, the implications of new natural sciences for traditional theological topics, and the emergence of a secular basis for moral and political philosophy.

• Descartes used Cartesian doubt as a method to ground his philosophy in problems of knowledge, rather than problems of metaphysics, and famously stated "I think, therefore I exist".

• German idealism emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with transcendental idealism being the view that there are limits on what can be understood since there is much that cannot be brought under the conditions of objective judgment.

• Late modern philosophy began in the 19th century, with German philosophy exerting broad influence in this century. Arthur Schopenhauer was inspired by Kant and Indian philosophy, and believed that the experience of will was how the noumenal reality was accessible.

• Jeremy Bentham established utilitarianism, which was a consequentialist ethic based on 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number'.

• Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870, asserting that the truth of beliefs consists in their usefulness and efficacy rather than their correspondence with reality. Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were its co-founders.A Summary of 20th Century Philosophy

• Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that emphasizes practical consequences and the effects of an object on people's lives.

• Neopragmatism is a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy.

• Analytic philosophy became the dominant school of thought in the English-speaking world for much of the 20th century.

• The Vienna Circle, a group of logical positivists, argued that metaphysics, ethics, and theology were meaningless.

• Philosophy of language emerged as its own program, focusing on the theory of meaning.

• Early identity theories of mind saw the mind as reducible to physical events; however, this was eventually challenged by the issue of subjective experience.

• Ethics in 20th century analytic philosophy began with Moore's Principia Ethica, which argued that ethical behavior is a result of intuition.

• Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe.

• The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, sought to study consciousness from a first-person perspective.

• Phenomenologically oriented metaphysics undergirded existentialism and post-structuralism.

• French post-structuralism was characterized by a rejection of the idea of a stable, objective reality.

• The Frankfurt School, a group of critical theorists, sought to analyze society and culture through a Marxist lens.Overview of Continental Philosophy

• Continental philosophy emphasizes the role of the individual in philosophical thinking, focusing specifically on the human subject and their lived experiences.

• Existentialism is a subset of continental philosophy that explores the individual's experience of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.

• Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation.

• Phenomenology was developed by Edmund Husserl, who sought to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. This led to the development of hermeneutics, which is a theoretical synthesis of modern hermeneutics and phenomenology.

• Structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible. It was later criticized by post-structuralism for its positivism and inability to transcend structures.

• Process philosophy identifies metaphysical reality with change and is sometimes classified as closer to continental philosophy than analytic philosophy.

• Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism, has influenced continental philosophy through the promotion of the suspension of judgment and the rejection of dogmatic assertions about ultimate metaphysical reality.