A condensed history of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. The author has examined primary sources regarding the writings, lives and times of those from the 2500 years leading up to the renaissance who are regarded as the great philosophers of the West, in order to encapsulate what these men and their followers were saying and how they fit into their times, and to deduce from their words just what philosophy is. In the author’s opinion, the history of Philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than of a sharply defined discipline, “a peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly” in the words of William James.
This volume covers a diverse cast of characters from the fifth and sixth centuries BC (the Milesians, the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, the Sophists) through the Giants of Philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) and their near contemporaries in the 5th century BC to the early middle ages of the pre-Renaissance (Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics). With the exception of Plato and Aristotle, who found teaching jobs and started Academies that lasted centuries, most of the early philosophers come across as cantankerous elderly vagrants of an argumentative disposition who congregated in public places. Almost all we know of Socrates’ thought is what Plato has him say in various dialogues—he apparently was a master at leading his opponents into contradicting themselves. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, were prolific writers and doers who wrote widely on everything (Logic, Ethics, etc. and Science in the case of Aristotle), started the academies that made Athens famous and dominated philosophy until Galileo, Newton and the enlightenment 2000 years later. The importance of these early thinkers was not so much their systems of thought as their struggle to understand their world by reasoning. According to Aristotle the aim of human life is Eudaimonia, which translates as successful, admirable living and all round good fortune leading to a contented state of mind. The age of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates was followed by various competing sects—Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics being the better known, and finally by the stifling rise of the Christian Church.
There was a two-way exchange between philosophy, on the one hand, and the development of science, economics, psychology, mathematics, sociology, etc., on the other hand, over the 2000 years following the Age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; an age which saw the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Christian church and the general collapse of thought as the dark ages swept over Europe. Fortunately, the learning of ancient Europe was preserved and extended in the Arab world until it was rediscovered during the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries
In 1543 Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) published his account of the earth rotating about the sun, refuting both Aristotle and the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Shortly afterwards, Giordano Bruno, a Catholic friar, was burned at the stake for holding this view. Galileo (1564-1642) agreed with Copernicus about the earth rotating about the sun, disagreed with Aristotle and the Church about heavenly and earthly bodies being subject to different forces and built telescopes to view the heavenly bodies and confirm his theories. Galileo also agreed with Democritus and the Epicureans about the atomistic theory of matter, which was recognized to be in conflict with the Church doctrine which held that when bread and wine were consecrated by a priest that they became transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ, for which beliefs he was condemned by the Church. God was brought into the atomic theory to placate the Church and allow the development of a mechanical science of nature by Gallileo, Kepler, Descartes and Hobbes to go forward. The best thinkers of the 17th century were struggling with questions of how is mental activity to be described in terms of Democritus’ particles of matter, what is the place of man in a mechanistic universe and what is the place of God, laying the groundwork for Newton.
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Top reviews from other countries
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and to strip away as best he can the academic persona these thinkers have been ...
Reviewed in Canada on February 27, 2017marsha l. reid
Excellent review of the history of philosophy
Reviewed in Canada on October 31, 2016artic irish
Livraison très rapide et le produit telle qu'affiché.
Reviewed in Canada on September 1, 2021