HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

I. Nature, involvements, and writing of the history of philosophy
  PHILOSOPHY IN THE WESTERN TRADITION
  GENERAL CONSIDERATION OF THE HlSTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
The writing of the history of philosophy
Shifts in the focus and concern of philosophy through history

II. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy
The Pre-Socratic philosophers
Cosmology and the metaphysic of matter
Epistemology of appearance'
Metaphysic of number^
Anthropology and relativism
The seminal thinkers of Greek philosophy
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle

Hellenistic and Roman philosophy
Stoics
Epicureans
Skeptics
Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists

III. Medieval philosophy
Early medieval philosophy
Transition to Scholasticism
The age of the Schoolmen
Philosophy in the late Middle Ages

IV. Modern philosophy
The Renaissance and early-modern period
   Dominant strands of Renaissance philosophy
   Rise of Empiricism and Rationalism
   Literary forms and sociological conditions

The Enlightenment
   Classical British Empiricism and its basic tasks
   Nonepistemological movements in the Enlightenment
  Critical examination of reason in Kant
  Literary forms

The 19'" century
  German idealism of Fichte, Schefting, and Hegel
  Positivism and social theory in comte. Miff, and Marx
  Independent and irrationalist movements

The 20"' century
   Individual philosophies of Bergson, Dewey, and whitehead
   Marxist thought
   Analytic philosophy
   Continental philosophy
   Concluding comments

"Phylosophy" has meant many different things. Some of these have been a search for the wisdom of life (the meaning closest to the Greek words form which the term is derived) an attempt to understand the universe as a whole; an examination of man's moral  responsibilities and his social obligations: an effort to fathom the divine intentions and man's place with reference to them; an effort to ground the enterprise of natural science; a rigorous examination of the origin, extent, and validity of men's ideas; an exploration of the place of will or consciousness in the universe; an examination of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty; an effort to codify the rules of human thought in order to promote rationality and the extension of clear thinking. Even these do not exhaust the meaning that, have been attached  to the philosophic enterprise, but they give some idea of its extreme complexity and many sidedness.

Thus, although there are a few single-term divisions of philosophy of long standing-such as logic, ethics, epistemology (the theory of knowledge), or metaphysics (theory of the nature of Being)- its division are probably best expressed by-phrases that contain the preposition "of- such as philosophy of nature or philosophy of art.

1. Thomas Aquinas (a Dominican friar of the 13th century), George Berkley (a bishop of the Irish Church in the 18th century), and Soren Kierkegaard (a Danish divinity student in the 19th century) all the saw philosophy as a means to assert the truths of religion and to disel the materialistic or Rationalistic errors that in their opinion, had led to its decline.

2.Pythagoras in ancient south Italy, Rene Descartes in the late Renaissance, and Bertrand Russeli in the 20th century have been primarily mathematicians whose views of the universe and of human knowledge have been vastly influenced by the concept of number and by the method of deductive thinking.

3. Some philosophers, such as Plato or the British philosophers Thomas Honnes and John Stuart Mill, have been obsessed by problems of political arrangement and social living, so that whatever else they have done in philosophy has been stimulated by a desire to understand and, ultimately, to change the social and political behavior of men.

4. Milesians (the first philosophers and of Greece); Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan philosophers and in the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead, a process metaphysician - have began with an interest in the physical composition of the natural world, so that their philosophies resemble more closely the
generalizations of physical science than those of religion or sociology.

The history of western philosophy reveals in detail the concentrated activity of a multitude of serious and able men reflecting upon, reasoning about, and considering deeply the nature of their experience. But throughout this manifold diversity certain characterize oppositions habitually recur, such as the division between Materialists and Idealists in cosmological theory; between Nominalists and Realists in the theory of signification; between Rationalists and Empiricists in the theory of knowledge; between Utilitarian, self-realizationists, and proponents of duty in moral theory; and between partisans of logic and partisans of emotion in the search for a responsible guide to the wisdom of life.
 
These two divergent motivations tend to express themselves in two divergent methods: that of analysis and that of synthesis. Plato's Republic is an example of the second. The Principle Ethics (1903) of G.€.Moore, a founder of linguistic philosophy, is an example of the first.

The analytic, or critical, impulse treats any subject matter or topic by concentrating upon the part, by taking it apart in the service of clarity and precision. The synthetic or speculative impulse operate by seeking to comprehend the whole, by putting it all together in the service unity and completeness. There is one philosophical tradition-that of Positivism - which sees philosophy as originating in the pure sunshine of scientific clarity.

Though Positivism represents a partisan view that it is not necessary to hold, it does express indirectly a basic truth-that the philosophic enterprise has always hovered uncertainly between the lure of religious seriousness and that of scientific exactitude. In the earliest philosophers of Greece, it is impossible to separate ideas of divinity and the human soul form ideas about the mystery of being and the genesis of material change, and in the Middle Ages philosophy was acknowledged to be" the handmaiden of theology". But the increased secularization of modern culture has largely reversed this trend, and the Enlightenment emphasis upon the separation of nature form its divine creator has increasingly placed philosophic resources at the disposal of those interested in creating a philosophy of science.

Yet philosophy's continuing search for philosophic truth leads it is to hope, but at the same time to profoundly doubt, that its problems are objective. With respect to a total description of being or a definitive account of the nature of values, only individual solutions now seem possible; and the optimistic hope for objective answers that secure universal agreement must be given up.

In this respect, philosophy seems less like science than like art and the philosopher more like an artist than a scientist, for his philosophic solutions bear the stamp of his own personality, and his choice of arguments reveals as much about himself as his chosen problem. As a work of art is a portion of the world seen through a world subjectively assembled. Plato and Descartes, Immanuel Kant, the pivotal figure of modern philosophy, and John Dewey, a U.S. Pragmatist, have given to their systems many of the quaint trappings of their own personalities,

But if philosophy is not true in the same sense as science, it is not false in the same sense either; and this gives to the history of philosophy living significance, which the history of science does not enjoy. In science, the present confronts the past as truth confronts error; thus, for science, the past, even when important at all, is important only out of historical interest. In philosophy it is different. Philosophical system are never definitively proved false; they are simply discarded or part aside for future use. And this means that the history of Philosophy consists not simply of dead museum pieces but of ever - living classics - comprising a permanent repository of ideas, doctrines, and arguments and a continuing source of philosophical inspiration and suggestiveness to those who philosophize in any succeeding age. It is for this reason that any attempt to separate philosophizing form the history of philosophy is both a provincial act and an unnecessary impoverishment of its rich natural resources.

History of philosophy has been traditionally subject to types of ordering, according to whether it was conceived.

1. As primarily a history of ideas.
2. As a history of the intellectual products of men.

Froedrich Lnage's Geschichte des Materialisms (1866), Eng.tras The History of Materialism (3rd ed.. 1925), A.C.Ewing's compilation The Idealist Tradition, from Berkely to Blanshard (1957). or Richard H.Popkin's History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960). In the second type of ordering, the historian, impressed by the producers of ideas as much as by the ideas themselves - that is, with philosophers as agents - reviews the succession of great philosophic personalities in their rational achievement.

These two different types of ordering depend for their validity upon an appeal to how different principles about the nature of ideas, but their incidental use may also be influenced by social or cultural factors. Thus. the biographers and compilers of late antiquity (among them, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus. Philostratus. and Clement of Alexandria), impressed by the religious pluralism of the age in which they lived, thought of philosophers, too, as falling into different sects and wrote histories of the Sophists, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, and other such schools; whereas almost 2,000 years later. Hegel-living in a period of romantic historiography dominated by the concept of the great man in history- deliberately described the history of philosophy as 'a succession of noble mind, a gallery of heroes of thought".

FACTORS IN WRITING HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The type of ordering suggested above also has some relationship to the more general  problems of method in the writing of the history of philosophy. Here there are at least three factors that must be taken into account;

1.The historian must understand how (at least in part) any philosopher's doctrines depend upon those of his predecessors;        

2. He must understand that a man's philosophy occurs at a certain point of time in history and, thus, how it expresses the effects of certain social and cultural circumstances;

3. He must understand how in part it stems from the philosopher's own personality and situation in life,

The first factor may be called logical because it is the intellectual response that a given philosophy make to the doctrines of it forerunners in which the very problems taken as central have often been given by the current climate of controversy. Thus, many of the details of Aristotle's ethical, political, and metaphysical systems arise in arguments directed against statements and principles of Plato.

The second factor may be called sociological because it considers philosophy, at least in part as a direct form of social expression arising at a certain moment in history, dated and marked by the peculiar problems and crises of the society in which it flourishes. Thus, the philosophy of Kant, with all of its technical vocabulary and rigid systematization, may be viewed as an expression of the new professionalism in philosophy a clear product of the rebirth of the German Universities during the 18th century English tenement.

The third factor may be called biographical or individual because with Hegel, it recognize that it philosophers are generally produced by men of unusual or independent personality whose systems usually bear the mark of their creators. The cool intensity of Spinoza's geometric searches for wisdom, the unsewrving (if opaque) discursiveness of Hegel's quest for completeness or totality. These qualities mark the philosophical writings of Spinoza. Hegel, and Moore with an unmistakably individual and original character. But in a synoptic view of the history of philosophy, one is particularly aware of the various shifts of focus and concern that philosophy has sustained and, indeed, of the often profound difference in the way that it defines itself or visualizes its task from age to age or form generation to generation.

I. Philosophy among the Greek slowly emerged out of religious awe into wonder about the principles and elements of the natural world. But as the Greek
populations more and more left the land to become concentrated in their cities, interest shifted form nature to social living; question of law and convention and civic values became paramount. Cosmological speculation partly gave way to moral and political theorizing and the preliminary and somewhat fragmentary questionings of Socrates and the Sophists turned into the great positive constructions of Plato and Aristotle. With the political and social fragmentation of the succeeding centuries, however philosoizing once again shifted from the form of civic involvement to problems of salvation and survival in a chaotic world.

11.. The drawn of Christianity brought to philosophy new tasks. Augustine, the philosophic bishop of Hippo, and the Church Fathers used such resources of the Greek tradition as remained (chiefly Platonism) to deal with problems of the creation, of faith and reason and of truth.

111. The waning of the Middle Ages became the Renaissance. Universalism was replaced by nationalism. Philosophy became secularized. The great new fact was that of the mystery and immensity of the natural world. The best philosophic minds of the 17th century turned to the task of exploring the foundations of physical science, and to symbol of their success - the great system of physical science, and to symbol of their success - the great system of Newton's physics - turned the philosophers of the Enlightenment to epistemology and to the examination of the human mind that the hand produced so brilliant a scientific creation.

IV. The 19th century, a time of great philosophical diversity, discovered the irrational and in so doing prepared the way for the oppositions between analysis and Phenomenology and between Positivism and Existentialism that characterize the present situation in philosophy.

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