Philosophy

Aristotle

Philosophy (literally 'love of wisdom', from the Ancient Greek word φιλοσοφία (philosophía), which comes from φίλος (phílos) and σοφία (sophía), meaning friend/lover and wisdom respectively) is an academic discipline concerned with the most fundamental and general concepts and principles involved in thought, action, and reality. Philosophy progresses according to various methods of rational inquiry.

Philosophy is accurately described as both the first science and the "Queen of the Sciences". Until the late 19th century, what is now called "science" was subsumed under Natural Philosophy.

Philosophy in the West has its origins in Ancient Greece, ca. 600 B.C. After the fall of the Roman Empire, much of Greek philosophy was lost to the West, preserved only in the Arab world until the time of the Crusades and the Moorish conquest of Spain. Contact with Arab philosophers (especially al-Ghazali, who developed a version of the Cosmological argument, ibn Rushd, and ibn Sina) kick-started the largely dormant philosophical tradition in Europe, beginning the "Academic period", which ended with Descartes and the beginning of the Enlightenment. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a major split between Analytic philosophy (or Anglophone philosophy) and Continental philosophy. This divide can be traced back to the late 19th century and a split in focus between Gottlob Frege and the intellectual descendants of Friedrich Hegel.

The main branches of philosophy are Metaphysics, which is (broadly speaking) the study of what-is; Ethics, the study of correct action; Logic, the rules (both formal and informal) of reason; Epistemology, the study of knowledge, and Aesthetics, the study of the nature of beauty and the artistic criteria of judgment. Notable sub-branches include Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of Religion, Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of mind.

Branches of Analytic Philosophy

Broadly speaking, there are a number of topics one would expect to fall under the title Philosophy:

• Logic: The analysis of terms, propositions and the principles of reasoning
• Metaphysics: The analysis of concepts which transcend physical science, including the Philosophy of mind.
• Epistemology: The analysis of the nature of knowledge, how we know, and what we can and cannot know.
• Ethics: The analysis of the nature of morality and morals, how and why we determine right from wrong.
• Political Philosophy: The analysis of the nature of the human public sphere, which one may consider the ethics of the way society is arranged.
• Philosophy of Science: The analysis of scientific concepts and methodology, which concerns itself mostly with the foundations of science, and interdisciplinary areas.
• Aesthetics: The analysis of the nature and experience of art and beauty.

History of Philosophy

Conventionally the History of Western Philosophy is divided into four eras: Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary.

The Ancient era starts with the Presocratic philosophers and goes until the fall of the Roman empire; The Medieval goes until the end of the Middle Ages; The Modern up to the 20th century, and The Contemporary up to present.

Frederick Copleston, S.J. (April 10, 1907 - February 3, 1994) was a Jesuit scholar who wrote the highly respected 9 volume History of Philosophy.

Greek Philosophy

Philosophy in the West begins with Thales of Miletus, who was the first astronomer in recorded history to accurately predict a solar eclipse. The Milesian School founded by Thales included Anaxagoras, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. It was Pythagoras (ca. 582 - 504 BC) who first brought Philosophy into connection with practical life; he also gave Philosophy its name "the love of wisdom". Closely related is the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Around the time of Heraclitus, Parmenides of Elea, with his pupil Zeno, raised some serious objections to the project of Milesian philosophy. These objections laid the groundwork for Socrates and his pupil Plato, and Aristotle, as well as the Atomists, Democritus and Leucippus. After the Greek philosophical golden age other systems appeared, like Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism. At the closing period of Greek philosophy Neoplatonism was founded by Plotinus of Lycopolis.

Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.), carrying some traces of Plato, has been of momentous importance in the development of Christian thought.

Medieval era

In the West, until the twelfth century, little was known of Plato and Aristotle, except a few dialogues and some treatises on logic. St. Anselm (1O33-1109) made a first attempt at systematizing Scholastic philosophy. Some decades later, the Arabic and Byzantine thinkers entered into relation with Western culture, and affecting a philosophical revival; translations of the ancient authors were made and the works of Avicenna and Averroes became better known. In the thirteenth century important names appear: Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, and in the following century: William of Occam, Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, and later Thomas More and Grotius.

Modern era

John Stuart Mill

Rene Descartes , Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Twentieth Century

This century has offered a wide diversity of orientations. The best known are the French school of Existentialism, the German study of Phenomenology, the Positivists of the Vienna Circle, and the post-Positivist Analytic movement.

Existentialists

Henri Bergsson (1859 – 1941), 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), philosopher, playwright, and novelist, that was the leading exponent of existentialism, are probably the best-known examples of this School.

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) founder of phenomenology, Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) are the core writers here.

Positivists

The Vienna Circle philosophers, most notably Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Godel, and Otto Neurath were the first positivists, but this tradition, unlike Existentialism and Phenomenology is no longer an active research program.

Structuralism

Structuralism is a theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves, with members such as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913), Swiss linguist, Roman Jakobson (1896 – 1982), Russian-American linguist and literary critic, Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – ), French anthropologist, Roland Barthes (1915 – 1880), French critic, and Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984), French philosopher and historian. Foucault is renowned for historical studies that reveal the sometimes morally disturbing power relations inherent in social practices.

Others

The Frankfurt School , a group of researchers associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research), founded in 1923 as an autonomous division of the University of Frankfurt; Structuralism, theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves, with members such as Theodor Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund , Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), a German essayist and critic (He is known for his synthesis of eccentric Marxist theory and Jewish messianism) and Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979), U.S.; Also, criticism of Positivism by German Jürgen Habermas (1929– ), a professor at the University of Frankfurt with the Critical Theory.

Some other important names are: George Edward Moore (1873 – 1958), English philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970, British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), Austrian philosopher.

American Philosophy

Some scholars have said that American philosophers’ focus on the interconnections of theory and practice, on experience and community, but different concerns and themes have waxed or waned at different times. Through the middle of the 20th century, at least, American philosophers were actively engaged in shaping and reflecting the development of American culture.

Pragmatism

Main figures are: Charles Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952), and Richard Rorty (1931-2007).

Philosophy of Religion

The best-known American philosopher of religion is without a doubt Alvin Plantinga (1932- ) at the University of Notre Dame; also well-known are John Hick (1922- ), who, though born in England, did much of his work at Claremont University in southern California, and professor William Alston (1921- ) working at Syracuse University.

Analytic Philosophers

Harvard philosopher John Rawls.

America has produced a great many philosophers in the Analytic tradition. A brief list of notables:

• W.V.O. Quine
• Saul Kripke
• Kit Fine
• Ted Sider
• Robert Stalnaker
• Daniel Dennett
• John Searle
• Richard Montague
• Paul Grice

Especially well-known to non-philosophers is John Rawls (1921 - 2002) (political and moral philosophy) author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999), and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001).

The Genesis of "Philosophizing"

Paradoxically, the impetus and driving force for philosophizing is not so much love of wisdom, at least, at first, but rather the eradication of frustration, pain, "thwartedness", and incompleteness or unfulfillment - all of which come to our lives in the process of our growth forcing themselves upon our awareness. The reason "why" comes about, first of all, to provide an alleviation or a solution. The "problem of pain" arises because there is actual pain, political philosophy because of the discomfiture of people in their aggregates and groupings and the outworkings one with another, philosophy of history because of the need to understand so as not to undergo what has been undergone already, or conversly, to learn, inorder to repeat what was deemed good, etc.

As the experiences or facets subsummed under each branch of Philosophy are multitudenous, the "why", that is, the solution or explanation, becomes that which unifies, simplifies in the sense that it points to what is behind it all, and more comprehensive. The "location" of the "why" for much of philosophy has been found either outside the processees and material of discussion, that is the explanatory principal is "transcendent", or found within, that is, the principal is "immanent". An example of the latter sees in the many (transitory) changes before our eyes the one true reality - the one blazing fire and not the tongues of flame, the one river and not the continually different passing waters, the one deity within all the gods, the one Godhead expressed by and within the whole created matter (pantheism), the eastern Atman is Brahman, where the individual soul is the world soul. A discussion of "causality becomes very much a discussion of manifestation of what is, of "epiphany".

On the other hand, when the explanatory principal is transcendant, that is, outside, "causality" comes to the fore as well as "purpose", " plan", and "intent", and, of course , the Being who is Himself "on the outside" of the creation, God. Even to call God a "He" and not an "it" points to our own value of what we know as personality and positing the greater fulfillment of this "Outside". Sometimes, there is a fluidity from one to another as in the Philosophy of History, One can see the transition from:

1. the transcendent Biblical God who intervenes in History and the prophets who produces a linear understanding of history by proclaiming a future kingdom that could be different than the past, according to how we live, in distinction to the previous cyclical histories of the ancient Near East.

2. to the linear but immanent principal of F. Hegel which sees that developing Idea within the matter of History itself, developing according to a thesis, producing its opposite, an antithesis, leading to, in the combination of both, a new reality, a synthesis. This, in turn, leads to the "idea of Progress" but non directed and unguided by any transcendent principle.

3. to the denuded of all Idea and spirit but retaining the linear history as vestige, now Marxism's "mechanistic" principal of utopian Dialectical Materialism - thesis, antithesis, antithesis of Class struggle. This leads to the "idea of the Inevitable".

"Revelation to" man, such as is provided by the God declared in the Old and New Testaments, rather than "manifestation within" man (and all else) is the natural complement for the quest that man sets before himself for the solutions, fulfillments, alleviations, etc, required by his very living, and to which Philosophy addresses itself.

See also

• Greek Philosophy
• Greek philosophers
• Idealism

External links

• History of Philosophy
• History of Philosophy - Resources
• A History of American Philosophy Book by Herbert W. Schneider.