Consider how Kubrick,the legendary movie director behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other classic films, might have summarized the history of philosophy. First scene: a stone monolith appears in ancient Ionia, and Thales begins to wonder whether there might be a single material substratum for all things. Thales throws a bone into the air, wondering if it will turn into water. The viewers of the movie seem to see the bone turn into a baguette, and ... A long time thereafter, another monolith is discovered in France, and Descartes imagines that he could and should move beyond solipsism. He launches a project, called modern philosophy, which will explore the furthest regions of space and find a God who can guarantee that no evil demon is fooling us. A computer named STRAUSS is then invented as an artificial lifeform that/who composes suitable music for inspiring moments like the appearance of monoliths. But STRAUSS is conflicted because ... thus spoke Nietzsch...
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“Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented." That is from Josiah Royce. We do tend to think of philosophers as "representing" -- as Socrates represents Periclean Athens and Leibniz represents the fragmented condition of the German speaking world as the Holy Roman Empire sank into irrelevance. Heck, the metaphysics of monadology might be linked to the inner-directedness of the various principalities of that world. Royce's statement was not plainly wrong though it may constitute an overstatement. The source of the quote is The Problem of Christianity (1913). For much of the book Royce follows the practice of philosophers as he defined it. That is, he takes himself to be a representative of a Christian civilization and he explores Christian theological concepts: sin, atonement, saving grace. B...
In a recent post, in order to make the case that the period 1880-1920 was a golden age for western philosophy, I offered you a list of works of that period, which I arbitrarily organized as two works per year. It makes, I think, an impressive list. But it will naturally raise questions.... 1. What number of these 82 works constitute "philosophy" in a fairly narrow sense of the term? All such borders are permeable, but my best answer is 36. Or, less than half. I am counting only non-fiction works among those 36. If I add to that number the heavily philosophical novels and plays on the list (Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Bellamy, Shaw and Joyce) I get that number up to 41, or just one-half of the whole. 2. What are the chief subjects of those that I think are philosophy but only in an acceptable broadened sense? This was a very active time for philosophically inclined thought within the adjacent fields of biology, psychology, economics, and history (where any of those ...
Antithenes: if one is going to claim any familiarity with the Platonic moment in philosophy, with the moment that produced but did not yet contain Cynicism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, one needs to know the name Antithenes. He was one of Socrates' followers, and so of very much the same philosophic milieu as Plato. But Antithenes went the other way on the issue of universals. He may even be said to be the founder of nominalism, saying thing like, "A horse I can see, but horsehood I cannot see." Too little in known about him. We do know, though, that the later Cynics claimed him as a spirit kindred to their own. They would tell a story of Diogenes of Sinope, as a young man, following Antithenes around to bask in his wisdom. This tale seems unlikely. It was invented to give the Cynics a sort of apostolic succession from Socrates, who by Diogenes' day was seen as the gold standard of philosophical greatness by a number of distinct factions. Socrates to Antithene...
Four books have especially shaped my thinking on the relations between the Eastern and the Western traditions in philosophy, broadly speaking. I’ll just give you author, title, date for three of them, and a short explanation of the fourth. William Johnson, THE STILL POINT (1970) Thomas Tweed, THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH BUDDHISM (1982) Rick Fields, HOW THE SWANS CAME TO THE LAKE (1992). Now the fourth. Get a hold of Kitaro Nishida, AN INQUIRY INTO THE GOOD (1990). As the title suggests, this is NOT a work of history but a substantive philosophical work. Further, the 1990 edition, from Yale University Press, is a translation of a book by the named Japanese scholar that he wrote, in his native language, in 1911. Nishida was very well aware of western philosophy, and an admirer of the American pragmatists in particular. His “inquiry into the good” is very self-aware about his blending of traditions east and west. Nishida died near the end of the second world war. During his li...
Herbert Spencer is often called a “Social Darwinist.” I have called him that myself, and will probably do so often in the future as well, because that has become the traditional term and it is sometimes necessary to abide by conventions in order to make oneself understood. But I have come to believe that the term is inapt. Two other labels suggest themselves as superior. If one is looking for a label Spencer would accept for his own social/ethical views, the term "rational utilitarianism" would work. If one doesn't care to ask his permission, social Lamarckianism will also apply. Spencer's works on relevant subjects include SOCIAL STATICS (1851), THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY (1873), and MAN VERSUS THE STATE (1884). Spencer called his own view “rational utilitarianism,” because -- as one might guess -- he believed utilitarians before him had been inadequately rational. He did identify the good with happiness, and that identification was associated for him wit...
A distinguished philosopher, and historian of philosophy, Brian McGuinness, passed away on December 23, 2019. Here is a list of some his publications. As you may notice, he was an authority on Wittgenstein and on related matters such as the Vienna Circle. Oddly, I haven't found a decent obituary. Please let me know if you see one, dear reader. Thanks. https://philpapers.org/s/Brian%20McGuinness
I love this. http://www.coppelia.io/2012/06/graphing-the-history-of-philosophy/ Scroll down a bit to see the whole graph, and an explanation of how it was done. This is as you will discover not a chronological presentation. The nearness of any two nodes is thematic: so you see Leo Strauss as a satellite of Plato and Eric Voegelin as a satellite of Aristotle. The size of the node indicates the number of connections, and so indirectly it indicates centrality within the whole net. Red indicates the Anglospheric analytical tradition, green the European continental tradition. Enjoy exploring.
The Oxford University Press has posted a timeline of women in philosophy. In order not to go back to Hypatia, which would make for an unwieldy graphic, the Oxfordians have arbitrarily begun the timeline in 1678, when a woman was for the first time granted a doctorate degree in philosophy. The university that broke that particular cave ceiling? The University of Padua in Italy. The woman involved? Elena Cornaro Piscopia. Senora Piscopia is new to me. Here are two other facts from the timeline that are also new to me, arbitrarily selected: Susanne Langer published a paper in the journal MIND (a leading British philosophy journal) in 1926. Langer is often regarded as the first woman "professional philosopher." Her 1926 paper was titled "Confusion of Symbols and Confusion of Logical Types." It expressed her interest in symbolic logic, which she would later put to work in the development of aesthetics. Finally, for our brief survey, the first college course ...
A recent book by Emily Thomas, a historian of philosophy, looks at four different theories about the reality and significance of time advanced by philosophers in Britain in the seventeenth century. Her breakdown is this: there was a "void theory," "idealism," "absolutism," and "relationalism." The terms are pretty close to self-explanatory, but I'll spell it out anyway. The void theory: there is no time. Idealism: time is real, and consists of mind-dependent relations. The remaining two may each come under the broader folder "realism," in that they both hold that time is real and it is not mind dependent. But they are importantly different from one another. Absolutism: time is independent of the actions of material bodies -- that is, time could be passing even if every object were staying still. Relationalism: time is real, independent of mind, but dependent on the actions of material bodies. The Absolutist view...
A new take on Plato's politics, GLAUCON'S FATE, will be available from Paul Dry Books in about a month. A new take on Plato's politics? A novel take on a subject that has been under debate for two and a half millennia? This speaks to a good deal of confidence on the part of the author, Jacob Howland, in the possibility that he really has something new to say. And the newness consists in looking to the frame story. The Republic begins thus (Socrates is speaking): I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the so...
I somewhat regret having been so perfunctory in my discussion of Kant in my book on the history of modern philosophy. I've been making up for that lately on Quora, posting repeatedly on matters Kantian. Here I am getting all pedantic full throttle when another Quora denizen asked the meaning and significance of the phrase "synthetic a priori." ---------------- There are two different dichotomies involved. First, for Kant, (following Hume here), some propositions are synthetic and others are analytic. Roughly speaking, synthetic propositions refer to the objective world, whereas analytic propositions describe the concepts/tools that I may use to grapple with the world. In other words, if we think of knowing-the-world as watching a football game, then synthetic means “about the game and its outcome,” whereas analytic means “about what counts as a ‘point’ and what counts as a ‘win’ etc.” Secondly, taking from thinkers like Leibniz, Kant sees so...
I'm working my way carefully through Fiona Cowie's book, WHAT'S WITHIN? NATIVISM RECONSIDERED (1999), a book I've only skimmed until now. I believe I've mentioned it here a time or two on the basis of the skimming and its reviews. The book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, is a look at Fodor and Chomsky in particular, and their revival of elements of classical rationalism, especially with regard to a priori ideas. Today I'll focus on an early point, within Cowie's historical discussion. She asks: what exactly was the classical debate, the one featuring Descartes and Leibniz on one side, figures such as Hobbes and Locke on the other, really about? It is not easy to pin in down. The empiricists sometimes wrote as if the rationalists were saying that a baby comes into the world already knowing, say, what a triangle is, or what constitutes a prime number. Babies clearly don't. And the old rationalists denied this is what they meant. D...
Both Plato and Aristotle believed in a tripartite human soul Was that just a coincidence, just a symptom of the attraction that the number three has for the human mind? or is the classification in the one case more similar to the other than might first appear? In Plato's view, the soul contains an appetite, a spirit, and an intellect. These correspond to the classes in an idealized city, where the appetite corresponds to the ordinary working stiffs, the spirit corresponds to the warriors (sometimes called "guardians"), and the intellect to the philosopher kings (sometimes also, confusingly, called "guardians"). In the world of fantasy, the three levels correspond to Dorothy's friends: where the appetite might be represented by the sentimental tin man, the guardian spirit by the lion, and the intellect by the scarecrow. What about Aristotle? He wrote of the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the (uniquely) human soul. The vegetative functions o...
And so the utmost a student of sociology can ever predict is that if a genius of a certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if someone could but succeed in starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that the modus operandi in each case would be subordination to a paramount state rather than federation, because no historian could have calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same moment such positions of authority to such peculiar individuals as Napoleon III, Bismarck, and Cavour. William James, "Great Men and their Environment," 1880. James was here rehabilitating something akin to the Carlylean theory of history as a set of the biographies of certain extraordinary individuals. Not exactly Carlylean -- there are important differences -- but this passage indicates the real similarity. Napoleon II...
As with western philosophy, there has been in the classical Indian tradition (and in the subgenre of that known as Vedic) a lot of attention to the relationship between emotion, or vedana, on the one hand and cognition, or vijnana, on the other. Popular western impressions of India and its literature may convey the idea that the latter teaches escape, liberation, from the feelings, which presumably tie one to this earthly realm, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and all of that. Isn't detachment the way to nirvana? Well, yes, to some. And of course that idea is not unique to India. The above paragraph might put one in mind of Plato, who located the passions at the bottom of his tripartite division of the soul, and specified that the top part, reason, must be firmly in command. In India, a close analog to Plato's thought is provided by the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika scholars. Individual emotions, whether likings or aversions, are regarded as defects ( dosas ). T...