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HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY |
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and the writing of its history |
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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. |
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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 first 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. |
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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 British 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 behaviour 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. |
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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. |
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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 Republic) 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. |
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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
Skeptic, 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. |
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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
language 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 world subjectively
assembled. Plato and Descartes, Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German Idealist,
and John Dewey, a U.S. Pragmatist, have given to their systems many of the
quaint trappings of their own personalities. |
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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. |
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The writing of the history of philosophy
is itself controlled by a series of cultural habits or conventions. (see also historiography) |
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The ensuing article on the history of
Western philosophy 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. |
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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 types 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). |
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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 Skeptics, 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." |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 philosophy 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. (see also Thomism) |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Duns Scotus. The
end of the Middle Ages saw a new flowering of
the opposite tendencies in the Nominalist William of Ockham and the mystic
Meister Eckehart. |
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The Middle Ages gave way to the
Renaissance. Universalism was replaced by nationalism. Philosophy became
secularized. The great new theme was that of the mystery and immensity of the
natural world. The best philosophical minds of the 17th century turned to the
task of exploring the foundations of physical science, and the symbol of their
success--the great system of Newton's physics--turned the philosophers of the
Enlightenment to epistemology and to the examination of the human mind that had
produced so brilliant a scientific creation. The 19th century, a time of great
philosophical diversity, discovered the irrational and in so doing prepared the
way for the oppositions between Analysis and Phenomenology and between
Positivism and Existentialism that characterize 20th-century philosophy. |
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Although the foregoing capsule
presentation of the history of philosophy in the West follows a strict
chronology, it does not do justice to the constant occurrence and recurrence of
dominant strands in the history of thought. It would also be possible to write
the philosophical history of the Middle Ages simply by noting the complicated
occurrence of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines, of the Renaissance according
to the reappearance of Greek Materialism, Stoicism, and Skepticism, and of the
18th century in terms of the competing claims of Rationalist and Empiricist
principles. Thus, chronology and the interweaving of philosophical systems
cooperate in a history of philosophy. (A.W.L.) |
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