CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE ANCIENT WORLD 700 BCE–250 CEEverything is made of water • Thales of Miletus
The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao • Laozi
Number is the ruler of forms and ideas • Pythagoras
Happy is he who has overcome his ego • Siddhartha Gautama
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles • Confucius
Everything is flux • Heraclitus
All is one • Parmenides
Man is the measure of all things • Protagoras
When one throws to me a peach, I return to him a plum • Mozi
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space • Democritus and Leucippus
The life which is unexamined is not worth living • Socrates
Earthly knowledge is but shadow • Plato
Truth resides in the world around us • Aristotle
Death is nothing to us • Epicurus
He has the most who is most content with the least • Diogenes of Sinope
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature • Zeno of Citium
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 250–1500God is not the parent of evils • St. Augustine of Hippo
God foresees our free thoughts and actions • Boethius
The soul is distinct from the body • Avicenna
Just by thinking about God we can know he exists • St. Anselm
Philosophy and religion are not incompatible • Averroes
God has no attributes • Moses Maimonides
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form • Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
The universe has not always existed • Thomas Aquinas
God is the not-other • Nikolaus von Kues
To know nothing is the happiest life • Desiderius Erasmus
RENAISSANCE AND THE AGE OF REASON 1500–1750The end justifies the means • Niccolò Machiavelli
Fame and tranquillity can never be bedfellows • Michel de Montaigne
Knowledge is power • Francis Bacon
Man is a machine • Thomas Hobbes
I think therefore I am • René Descartes
Imagination decides everything • Blaise Pascal
God is the cause of all things, which are in him • Benedictus Spinoza
No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience • John Locke
There are two kinds of truths: truths of reasoning and truths of fact • Gottfried Leibniz
To be is to be perceived • George Berkeley
THE AGE OF REVOLUTION 1750–1900Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd • Voltaire
Custom is the great guide of human life • David Hume
Man was born free yet everywhere he is in chains • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man is an animal that makes bargains • Adam Smith
There are two worlds: our bodies and the external world • Immanuel Kant
Society is indeed a contract • Edmund Burke
The greatest happiness for the greatest number • Jeremy Bentham
Mind has no gender • Mary Wollstonecraft
What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is • Johann Gottlieb Fichte
About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy • Friedrich Schlegel
Reality is a historical process • Georg Hegel
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world • Arthur Schopenhauer
Theology is anthropology • Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign • John Stuart Mill
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom • Søren Kierkegaard
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles • Karl Marx
Must the citizen ever resign his conscience to the legislator? • Henry David Thoreau
Consider what effects things have • Charles Sanders Peirce
Act as if what you do makes a difference • William James
THE MODERN WORLD 1900–1950Man is something to be surpassed • Friedrich Nietzsche
Men with self-confidence come and see and conquer • Ahad Ha’am
Every message is made of signs • Ferdinand de Saussure
Experience by itself is not science • Edmund Husserl
Intuition goes in the very direction of life • Henri Bergson
We only think when we are confronted with problems • John Dewey
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it • George Santayana
It is only suffering that makes us persons • Miguel de Unamuno
Believe in life • William du Bois
The road to happiness lies in an organized diminution of work • Bertrand Russell
Love is a bridge from poorer to richer knowledge • Max Scheler
Only as an individual can man become a philosopher • Karl Jaspers
Life is a series of collisions with the future • José Ortega y Gasset
To philosophize, first one must confess • Hajime Tanabe
The limits of my language are the limits of my world • Ludwig Wittgenstein
We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed • Martin Heidegger
The individual’s only true moral choice is through self-sacrifice for the community • Tetsuro Watsuji
Logic is the last scientific ingredient of philosophy • Rudolf Carnap
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope • Walter Benjamin
That which is cannot be true • Herbert Marcuse
History does not belong to us but we belong to it • Hans-Georg Gadamer
In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable • Karl Popper
Intelligence is a moral category • Theodor Adorno
Existence precedes essence • Jean-Paul Sartre
The banality of evil • Hannah Arendt
Reason lives in language • Emmanuel Levinas
In order to see the world we must break with our familiar acceptance of it • Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female • Simone de Beauvoir
Language is a social art • Willard Van Orman Quine
The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains • Isaiah Berlin
Think like a mountain • Arne Naess
Life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning • Albert Camus
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 1950–PRESENTLanguage is a skin • Roland Barthes
How would we manage without a culture? • Mary Midgley
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory • Thomas Kuhn
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance • John Rawls
Art is a form of life • Richard Wollheim
Anything goes • Paul Feyerabend
Knowledge is produced to be sold • Jean-François Lyotard
For the black man, there is only one destiny and it is white • Frantz Fanon
Man is an invention of recent date • Michel Foucault
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion • Noam Chomsky
Society is dependent upon a criticism of its own traditions • Jürgen Habermas
There is nothing outside of the text • Jacques Derrida
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves • Richard Rorty
Every desire has a relation to madness • Luce Irigaray
Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires • Edward Said
Thought has always worked by opposition • Hélène Cixous
Who plays God in present-day feminism? • Julia Kristeva
Philosophy is not only a written enterprise • Henry Odera Oruka
All the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure • Slavoj Žižek
DIRECTORY
GLOSSARY
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
Philosophy is not just the preserve of brilliant but eccentric thinkers that it is popularly supposed to be. It is what everyone does when they’re not busy dealing with their everyday business and get a chance simply to wonder what life and the universe are all about. We human beings are naturally inquisitive creatures, and can’t help wondering about the world around us and our place in it. We’re also equipped with a powerful intellectual capability, which allows us to reason as well as just wonder. Although we may not realize it, whenever we reason, we’re thinking philosophically.
Philosophy is not so much about coming up with the answers to fundamental questions as it is about the process of trying to find these answers, using reasoning rather than accepting without question conventional views or traditional authority. The very first philosophers, in ancient Greece and China, were thinkers who were not satisfied with the established explanations provided by religion and custom, and sought answers which had rational justifications. And, just as we might share our views with friends and colleagues, they discussed their ideas with one another, and even set up “schools” to teach not just the conclusions they had come to, but the way they had come to them. They encouraged their students to disagree and criticize ideas as a means of refining them and coming up with new and different ones. A popular misconception is that of the solitary philosopher arriving at his conclusions in isolation, but this is actually seldom the case. New ideas emerge through discussion and the examination, analysis, and criticism of other people’s ideas.
"Wonder is very much the affection of a philosopher; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this."
Plato
Debate and dialogue
The archetypical philosopher in this respect was Socrates. He didn’t leave any writings, or even any big ideas as the conclusions of his thinking. Indeed, he prided himself on being the wisest of men because he knew he didn’t know anything. His legacy lay in the tradition he established of debate and discussion, of questioning the assumptions of other people to gain deeper understanding and elicit fundamental truths. The writings of Socrates’ pupil, Plato, are almost invariably in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as a major character. Many later philosophers also adopted the device of dialogues to present their ideas, giving arguments and counterarguments rather than a simple statement of their reasoning and conclusions.
The philosopher who presents his ideas to the world is liable to be met with comments beginning “Yes, but …” or “What if …” rather than wholehearted acceptance. In fact, philosophers have fiercely disagreed with one another about almost every aspect of philosophy. Plato and his pupil Aristotle, for example, held diametrically opposed views on fundamental philosophical questions, and their different approaches have divided opinions among philosophers ever since. This has, in turn, provoked more discussion and prompted yet more fresh ideas.
But how can it be that these philosophical questions are still being discussed and debated? Why haven’t thinkers come up with definitive answers? What are these “fundamental questions” that philosophers through the ages have wrestled with?
Existence and knowledge
When the first true philosophers appeared in ancient Greece some 2,500 years ago, it was the world around them that inspired their sense of wonder. They saw the Earth and all the different forms of life inhabiting it; the sun, moon, planets, and stars; and natural phenomena such as the weather, earthquakes, and eclipses. They sought explanations for all these things—not the traditional myths and legends about the gods, but something that would satisfy their curiosity and their intellect. The first question that occupied these early philosophers was “What is the universe made of?”, which was soon expanded to become the wider question of “What is the nature of whatever it is that exists?”
This is the branch of philosophy we now call metaphysics. Although much of the original question has since been explained by modern science, related questions of metaphysics such as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” are not so simply answered.
Because we, too, exist as a part of the universe, metaphysics also considers the nature of human existence and what it means to be a conscious being. How do we perceive the world around us, and do things exist independently of our perception? What is the relationship between our mind and body, and is there such a thing as an immortal soul? The area of metaphysics concerned with questions of existence, ontology, is a huge one and forms the basis for much of Western philosophy.
Once philosophers had started to put received wisdom to the test of rational examination, another fundamental question became obvious: “How can we know?” The study of the nature and limits of knowledge forms a second main branch of philosophy, epistemology.
At its heart is the question of how we acquire knowledge, how we come to know what we know; is some (or even all) knowledge innate, or do we learn everything from experience? Can we know something from reasoning alone? These questions are vital to philosophical thinking, as we need to be able to rely on our knowledge in order to reason correctly. We also need to determine the scope and limits of our knowledge. Otherwise we cannot be sure that we actually do know what we think we know, and haven’t somehow been “tricked” into believing it by our senses.
"Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them."
Voltaire
Logic and language
Reasoning relies on establishing the truth of statements, which can then be used to build up a train of thought leading to a conclusion. This might seem obvious to us now, but the idea of constructing a rational argument distinguished philosophy from the superstitious and religious explanations that had existed before the first philosophers. These thinkers had to devise a way of ensuring their ideas had validity. What emerged from their thinking was logic, a technique of reasoning that was gradually refined over time. At first simply a useful tool for analyzing whether an argument held water, logic developed rules and conventions, and soon became a field of study in its own right, another branch of the expanding subject of philosophy.
Like so much of philosophy, logic has intimate connections with science, and mathematics in particular. The basic structure of a logical argument, starting from a premise and working through a series of steps to a conclusion, is the same as that of a mathematical proof. It’s not surprising then that philosophers have often turned to mathematics for examples of self-evident, incontrovertible truths, nor that many of the greatest thinkers, from Pythagoras to René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, were also accomplished mathematicians.
Although logic might seem to be the most exact and “scientific” branch of philosophy, a field where things are either right or wrong, a closer look at the subject shows that it is not so simple. Advances in mathematics in the 19th century called into question the rules of logic that had been laid down by Aristotle, but even in ancient times Zeno of Elea’s famous paradoxes reached absurd conclusions from apparently faultless arguments.
A large part of the problem is that philosophical logic, unlike mathematics, is expressed in words rather than numbers or symbols, and is subject to all the ambiguities and subtleties inherent in language. Constructing a reasoned argument involves using language carefully and accura
tely, examining our statements and arguments to make sure they mean what we think they mean; and when we study other people’s arguments, we have to analyze not only the logical steps they take, but also the language they use, to see if their conclusions hold water. Out of this process came yet another field of philosophy that flourished in the 20th century, the philosophy of language, which examined terms and their meanings.
Morality, art, and politics
Because our language is imprecise, philosophers have attempted to clarify meanings in their search for answers to philosophical questions. The sort of questions that Socrates asked the citizens of Athens tried to get to the bottom of what they actually believed certain concepts to be. He would ask seemingly simple questions such as “What is justice?” or “What is beauty?” not only to elicit meanings, but also to explore the concepts themselves. In discussions of this sort, Socrates challenged assumptions about the way we live our lives and the things we consider to be important.
The examination of what it means to lead a “good” life, what concepts such as justice and happiness actually mean and how we can achieve them, and how we should behave, forms the basis for the branch of philosophy known as ethics (or moral philosophy); and the related branch stemming from the question of what constitutes beauty and art is known as aesthetics.
From considering ethical questions about our individual lives, it is a natural step to start thinking about the sort of society we would like to live in—how it should be governed, the rights and responsibilities of its citizens, and so on. Political philosophy, the last of the major branches of philosophy, deals with these ideas, and philosophers have come up with models of how they believe society should be organized, ranging from Plato’s Republic to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
"O philosophy, life’s guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee?"