Western philosophy

• 1. Introduction

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  Western philosophy begins with a man who looked at the world and said, "all is water." His name was Thales of Miletus, born around 625 BC in Ionia, and he is recognized as the first philosopher. What set him apart was not the answer but the method. He used observation and reason to reach his conclusion, rather than handing down an unargued fable. The word itself comes from the Ancient Greek philosophia, literally the love of wisdom, joining philein, to love, with sophia, wisdom. From that single shift, dogma giving way to reason, a tradition unspooled across more than two thousand years. How does a question about the first principle of the universe become a question about whether you can step into the same river twice? Why did one teacher drink poison rather than flee Athens? And how did Greek ideas carried east by a conquering army return as a way to quiet the mind? Those threads run through everything that follows.

• 2. The First Principle

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  The pre-Socratic philosophers wanted to know the arche, the cause or first principle of the world. Thales named water. His student Anaximander answered differently, claiming the arche was the apeiron, the infinite. Anaximenes of Miletus, who came after both, nominated air as the most suitable candidate. Each rejected unargued fables and reached instead for argued theory.

  Pythagoras, born around 570 BC on the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia, later settled in Croton in southern Italy, the region called Magna Graecia. The Pythagoreans held that "all is number," offering formal accounts where the Ionians had offered material ones. Their discovery of consonant intervals in music let the idea of harmony enter philosophy, suggesting that opposites together could give rise to new things. They also believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.

  Parmenides broke from those who thought the arche transformed into many things. He argued the world must be singular, unchanging, and eternal, and that anything suggesting otherwise was an illusion. Zeno of Elea built his famous paradoxes to defend this, showing motion and plurality to be impossible. Heraclitus answered with the opposite claim, that everything is in flux all the time, and that one cannot step into the same river twice.

  Empedocles, possibly an associate of both Parmenides and the Pythagoreans, said the arche was composed of multiple sources, giving the four classical elements. Love and Strife acted upon them to form the world's mixtures. His older contemporary Anaxagoras pointed instead to nous, the mind, as the external force. Leucippus and Democritus proposed atomism, which Jonathan Barnes called "the culmination of early Greek thought."

• 3. The Examined Life

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  Socrates changed course after his friend Chaerephon visited the Oracle of Delphi, where the Pythia declared that no one in Athens was wiser than Socrates. To test that claim, Socrates spent much of his life questioning anyone in Athens who would engage him. The critical approach he developed is now called the Socratic method. He fixed his attention on human life: eudaimonia, justice, beauty, truth, and virtue. He wrote nothing himself, but two disciples, Plato and Xenophon, recorded his conversations, and Plato also used him as a fictional character in his dialogues.

  Socrates's questioning earned him enemies, who accused him of impiety and corrupting the youth. The Athenian democracy tried him, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death. His friends offered to help him escape from prison, but he chose to stay and abide by his principles. His execution consisted of drinking poison hemlock. He died in 399 BC.

  Plato founded the Platonic Academy and, like his teacher, identified virtue with knowledge. That move pushed him toward epistemology, the question of what knowledge is and how it is acquired. Other students of Socrates founded their own schools. Antisthenes founded Cynicism, whose followers pursued virtue in agreement with nature, rejecting wealth, power, and fame for a simple life free of possessions. Aristippus founded Cyrenaicism, nearly the opposite, holding that pleasure was the supreme good and that people could only know their own experiences.

• 4. Aristotle's System

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  Aristotle founded the Peripatetic school, the final school established in the Classical period, and wrote across an astonishing range: physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics, and logic. His logic was the first to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. His epistemology was an early form of empiricism.

  Aristotle criticized Plato's metaphysics as poetic metaphor, faulting it above all for failing to explain change. In its place he offered the four causes, material, efficient, formal, and final, all grounded on what he termed the unmoved mover. His ethics named eudaimonia as the ultimate good, achievable by living according to human nature, which means living with reason and virtue. He defined virtue as the golden mean between extremes.

  Aristotle regarded politics as the highest art, since every other pursuit serves its goal of improving society. The state, he held, should maximize the chances to pursue reason and virtue through leisure, learning, and contemplation. He tutored Alexander the Great, who conquered much of the ancient Western world. Hellenization and Aristotelian philosophy went on to shape almost every later Western and Middle Eastern philosopher.

• 5. Schools Of The Good Life

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  Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism, taking up the Cynic ideals of steadfastness and self-discipline. He applied the concept of apatheia, indifference, to personal circumstances rather than to social norms, and traded the Cynics' shameless flouting of duty for a resolute fulfillment of it. The Stoic aim was to live in accordance with nature, finding eudaimonia in freedom from fears and desires, and in choosing how to respond to external circumstances.

  Epicurus and his followers named "the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain" as the goal of life. They were careful to add, "We do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or of sensuality... we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the mind." That qualification turned hedonism back toward ataraxia, the untroubled state.

  Pyrrho of Elis, a Democritean philosopher, traveled to India with Alexander the Great's army and was influenced by Buddhist teachings, especially the three marks of existence. Returning to Greece, he founded Pyrrhonism, which taught that opinions about non-evident matters, that is, dogma, are what block ataraxia. To quiet the mind, Pyrrhonism uses epoche, the suspension of judgment, about all non-evident propositions.

  When Arcesilaus became head of the Academy, he adopted skepticism as a central tenet of Platonism, making it nearly identical to Pyrrhonism. Later the two diverged. The Academic skeptics did not doubt that truth exists; they doubted that humans had the capacity to obtain it, basing this on Plato's Phaedo, sections 64 to 67. Neoplatonism arrived with Plotinus, who argued that mind exists before matter and that a single mind must cause the universe. So conceived, Neoplatonism became essentially a religion, and shaped later Christian thought.

• 6. Faith Meets Reason

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  Augustine of Hippo, one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity, adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it. His influence dominated medieval philosophy nearly until the rediscovery of Aristotle's texts, and Augustinianism remained the preferred starting point for most philosophers up to the 13th century. On the problem of evil he argued that evil was a necessary product of human free will. When that raised the conflict between free will and divine foreknowledge, both Augustine and Boethius answered that God stands outside of time entirely and does not see the future.

  Scholasticism was less a philosophy than a methodology, prizing dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and resolve contradictions. In the classroom it took the form of explicit disputation: a question is broached, oppositional responses are given, a counterproposal is argued, and the opposing arguments are rebutted.

  Anselm of Canterbury, called the father of scholasticism, advanced the ontological argument, reasoning that God is by definition the greatest thing conceivable, and that since an existing thing is greater than a non-existing one, God must exist. Gaunilo of Marmoutiers replied by applying the same logic to a perfect imagined island, reaching an absurd result. Anselm answered that a greater island can always be conceived, whereas the greatest thing conceivable always exists as an idea in the mind.

  Thomas Aquinas, the father of Thomism, drew on the newly recovered Aristotle and aimed to reconcile his philosophy with Christian theology. Seeking to understand the soul, he defined a material substance as a combination of essence and accidental features, the essence itself combining matter and form. For humans, the soul is the essence, and following Plato he saw it as unchangeable and independent of the body. The medieval tradition also drew on the Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides, and the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes.

• 7. The Turn To The Knower

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  Rene Descartes is often considered the first modern philosopher because he grounded his work in problems of knowledge rather than metaphysics. His method, Cartesian doubt, accepted only the most certain belief as a foundation, leading to his maxim cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I exist." The need to find a route from the private world of consciousness to external reality was widely accepted until the 20th century, but the mind-body problem remained.

  Baruch Spinoza answered that mind and body are one substance, since God and the universe are one and the same. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz took the opposite path, holding that the world is composed of many individual substances called monads. Together with Descartes, they count as the influential early rationalists. Thomas Hobbes, a materialist and empiricist, held that all knowledge comes from sensation and that thought is a kind of computation. John Locke and David Hume joined him at the core of British empiricism, while George Berkeley argued for immaterialism, that the world exists as a result of being perceived.

  Hobbes built his political philosophy from the state of nature, which he judged violent and anarchic, calling life there "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Locke saw that same state as one of freedom, where only some liberty is surrendered to form a society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that people in nature lived peacefully, and that society itself bred inequality.

  Immanuel Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by arguing that the mind uses a priori understanding to interpret a posteriori experience. He had been inspired by Hume's account of how the mind produces the perception of cause and effect. His Critique of Pure Reason, of 1781, sought a new groundwork for metaphysics. Continuing from him, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling dropped belief in an independent world and built a thoroughgoing idealism. G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, of 1807, advanced the Hegelian dialectic, which resolves contradictions such as "being" and "not being" with "becoming."

• 8. The Modern Schism

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  Around 1781, the year Lessing died and Kant's Critique appeared, the 19th century began opening a divide that would harden into two traditions. Continental philosophy leaned toward general frameworks of metaphysics and was more common in the German-speaking world. Analytic philosophy focused on epistemology, ethics, law, and politics, and was more common in the English-speaking world. Arthur Schopenhauer, inspired by Kant and Indian philosophy, held that reality could be reached through the experience of will. Friedrich Nietzsche countered that the will to power was empowering, forming the basis of ethics. Jeremy Bentham established utilitarianism on "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," an idea taken from Cesare Beccaria, and John Stuart Mill later divided pleasures into higher and lower kinds.

  Gottlob Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic, of 1884, was the first analytic work according to Michael Dummett. Frege took the linguistic turn, invented a formal notation for logic, and argued that logical truths are independent of the minds discovering them. Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore are also counted as founders. Russell wrote Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, while Moore wrote Principia Ethica. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Russell's disciple, argued in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that the problems of philosophy were products of language, resting on the picture theory of meaning. He later changed course, holding that language has many uses he called language games.

  The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle judged metaphysics, ethics, and theology meaningless because they were not verifiable. Karl Popper, a former participant, called verificationism incoherent and promoted falsificationism instead. Thomas Kuhn argued that science is composed of paradigms that shift when evidence accumulates against them. Continental philosophy, by contrast, gathered phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology to study consciousness from a first-person perspective, naming intentionality as the directedness of conscious acts. Martin Heidegger, formerly Husserl's research assistant, drew on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl for an existential approach to ontology.

  Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are widely regarded as the fathers of existentialism, which begins not with the thinking subject alone but with the acting, feeling, living individual facing an apparently absurd world. Structuralism, inaugurated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, held that language speaks man rather than the reverse. Post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued that every attempt to grasp the signified yields more signifiers, so meaning is always deferred. Pragmatism, begun in the United States around 1870 by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, offered a third path, holding that the truth of beliefs lies in their usefulness rather than their correspondence with reality.