A Brief History of Philosophy (if you have the time)

[smcder]

This thread is to discuss the history of Western philosophy as a reference.

I hope to post a little on each period in the history of philosophy and some resources I've found helpful in personally trying to put together a sense of the history of philosophy.

I've borrowed liberally from

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

And Wikipedia

And it's all probably slanted a bit toward forum discussions I've participated in on consciousness and other topics.

I'll also try to put a few book recommendations on the history of philosophy and specific topics along the way.

Discussion is welcome but my main goal is to make this as much of a reference thread as possible.

I am NOT an expert ... if you are, please help me out!! ;-)

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Western Philosophy is divided into four main eras:

Ancient - up to the fall of Rome
Medieval - up to the Renaissance
Modern - up to the 20th Century
Contemporary - the present; now

Presocratic Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Ancient history of philosophy is the road to Athens.

Thales got up one morning and rejected mythology. Afterward, he reportedly went for a beer, setting the tone ever since. He is also associated with Panpsychism

Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

He also defined general principles and set forth hypotheses, something that just wasn't done in polite company ... so people called him the "Father of Science" and stopped him in the street to ask about his hypotheses and then would laugh and laugh.

Democritus probably was a better father to science.

Heraclitus never set foot in the same river twice and made his living off bar bets that no one else could either. He called this

"Panta rhei"

which means "everything flows"

Anaxagoras - conceived of a cosmic mind that orders all things.

The Pluralists and Atomists - declared the world full of innumerable, interacting parts and bragged about how much trouble that was going to cause in a couple thousand years.

The Sophists developed Soph-is-ticated ways of arguing and ruined everything for all philosophers ever since.

"Students of Sophists needed to acquire the skills of oration in order to influence the Athenian Assembly and thereby increase respect and wealth. In response, the subjects and methods of debate became highly developed by the Sophists."

This is where the word

sophistry

Comes from.

And now we are at Athens and about to meet an unusual man and his personal assistant.

But before that we can ask why Athens?

Why Athens?

A few possibilities as to why Athens was the cradle of Western Philosophy:

1. Athens had a direct democracy.

2. the presence of a slave labor workforce freed male citizens from manual work "so they were able to participate in the assemblies of Athens and spend long periods in discussions on popular philosophical questions."

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For more on The Pre Socratics I recommend

History of Philosophy without any gaps

"It is as a mechanism, or mechanical construction, that the physicist looks upon the world; and Democritus, first of physicists and one of the greatest of Greeks, chose to refer all natural phenomena to mechanism and set the final cause aside."

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson


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...So far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned. There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of some supreme master of thought - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion....

AN Whitehead

Socrates
and his daimonion

Socrates - or "Socrates" as his school mates used to tease him ... is at once what's right and what's wrong with Western philosophy:

One can guess from all this just where the great question mark about the worth of existence was placed. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of collapse, destruction, of disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled instincts—as it was with the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among us, the “modern” peoples and Europeans?

Is there a pessimism of strength?

An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, evil, problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? Is there perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life? A tempting courage of the keenest sight which demands what is terrible as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against which it can test its power, from which it wants to learn what “to fear” means? What does the tragic myth mean precisely for the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest age? What about that tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian?4 And what about what was born out of the Dionysian—the tragedy? And by contrast, what are we to make of what killed tragedy—Socratic morality, dialectic, the satisfaction and serenity of the theoretical man?5 How about that? Could not this very Socratism [Sokratismus] be a sign of collapse, exhaustion, sickness, the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And could the “Greek serenity” of later Greek periods be only a red sunset? Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a suffering man?6 And even science itself, our science—indeed, what does all science in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism? A delicate self-defence against—the Truth? And speaking morally, something7 O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?—

Nietzsche The Berth of Treagedy section 1

Und das ungeheure Phänomen des Dionysischen? Was, aus ihm geboren, die Tragödie? - Und wiederum: das, woran die Tragödie starb, der Sokratismus der Moral, die Dialektik, Genügsamkeit und Heiterkeit des theoretischen Menschen- wie? könnte nicht gerade dieser Sokratismus ein Zeichen des Niedergangs, der Ermüdung, Erkrankung, der anarchisch sich lösenden Instinkte sein? Und die "griechische Heiterkeit" des späteren Griechenthums nur eine Abendröthe? Der epikurische Wille gegen den Pessimismus nur eine Vorsicht des Leidenden? Und die Wissenschaft selbst, unsere Wissenschaft - ja, was bedeutet überhaupt, als Symptom des Lebens angesehn, alle Wissenschaft? Wozu, schlimmer noch, woher -alle Wissenschaft? Wie? Ist Wissenschaftlichkeit vielleicht nur eine Furcht und Ausflucht vor dem Pessimismus? Eine feine Nothwehr gegen -die Wahrheit? Und, moralisch geredet, etwas wie Feig- und Falschheit? Unmoralisch geredet, eine Schlauheit? Oh Sokrates, Sokrates, war das vielleicht dein Geheimniss? Oh geheimnissvoller Ironiker, war dies vielleicht deine - Ironie? - -