Viollet-le-Duc

Note: the following has been abstracted from the Grolier Encyclopedia.

Philosophy

Philosophy is the oldest form of systematic, scholarly inquiry. The name comes from the Greek philosophos, "lover of wisdom." The term, however, has acquired several related meanings: (1) the study of the truths or principles underlying all knowledge, being, and reality; (2) a particular system of philosophical doctrine; (3) the critical evaluation of such fundamental doctrines; (4) the study of the principles of a particular branch of knowledge; (5) a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs; and (6) a philosophical spirit or attitude.

All of these meanings of philosophy are recognizable in the intellectual traditions of ancient Greece. The pre-Socratics sought to find fundamental, natural principles that could explain what individuals know and experience about the world around them. The pre-Socratics and, later, Plato and Aristotle tried to develop a comprehensive set of principles that would account for their knowledge of both the natural and the human world. In developing philosophies, these early thinkers saw that their reflections could be used as a means of criticizing and often refuting popularly accepted mythological views as well as the thoughts of their predecessors and contemporaries. Socrates, at his trial, proclaimed a basic philosophical premise, that "the unexamined life was not worth living." By this he meant that if people do not examine and critically evaluate the principles by which they live, they cannot be sure that worthwhile principles exist. As the Greek thinkers codified their pictures of the world, they saw that for each science or study of some aspect of the world there could be a corresponding philosophy of this science or study, such as the philosophies of science, art, history, and so on. Each of these involves examining the fundamental principles of a discipline to see if they are logical, consistent, and--most important--true.

Because ancient philosophers questioned the various ways of life by which people live and sought the most satisfactory one, they developed their philosophical attitudes and theories as guides to practical living. From Socrates down to 20th-century thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre, a major element of the philosophical enterprise has been devoted to trying to designate what constitutes the good life for humans both as individuals and as social and political beings.

This kind of concern has contributed to the image of the philosopher as standing aside from and impervious to all the ups and downs of everyday existence. Michel de Montaigne declared that "to philosophize is to learn to die," indicating that the philosopher can be philosophical even in the face of death. The Stoic thinkers are usually seen as the epitome of this sense of philosophy. They maintained their philosophical attitude of calm reflection in the face of all sorts of temporary disasters.

Philosophical Questions
Philosophical Methods
Philosophy's Relation to Other Disciplines
Branches of Philosophy
History of Western Philosophy
Eastern Philosophy

Philosophical Questions

Because the term philosophy has various meanings, the nature of the field can be most easily grasped by examining the kinds of problems and questions the field deals with. In the beginnings of Western philosophy, the pre-Socratic thinkers dealt primarily with a metaphysical question: What is the nature of ultimate reality as contrasted to the apparent reality of ordinary experience? They tried to determine whether some ultimate constituents of the world would be the real and basic elements, whereas everything else would be ephemeral and merely a surface appearance. If such a reality existed, would it be permanent and unalterable, or would it be subject to change or alteration like everything else? The pre-Socratics generated some of the basic problems involved in defining reality, that is, in finding something so basic that it cannot be explained by anything else. They found their attempts to present logical explanations of their metaphysical theories ran into paradoxical results. Could a permanent, unchanging reality account for a changing world? Zeno of Elea became famous for working out his paradoxes, which claimed nothing could really change or move. Some of his paradoxes and some of those connected with the Greek Atomism still play a role in modern theoretical physics.

Over time, some aspects of the attempt to delineate reality became separated from the metaphysical quest and became the subject matter of the various natural sciences. This development has accelerated since the 17th century. The areas of study that have been peeled off from philosophy and assigned to the natural sciences include astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, and others. An example of this process may be seen in the consideration of a major metaphysical question, the relationship of mind and body. Originally, Platonic metaphysics claimed that the body and the mind were two separate and distinct entities. Plato, in fact, claimed the body was the prison house of the soul or mind. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes contended that mind and body were two separate and distinct substances that had nothing in common although they interact. Several Indian schools of philosophy hold a similar view. In the West this problem was gradually taken over by psychologists and neurophysiologists. The present tendency is to reduce mental phenomena to brain phenomena and thereby reduce the problem from a mind-body problem to a body problem.

Another constant philosophical question, from Greek times up to the present, has been to try to establish the difference between appearance and reality. Once people learned about sense illusions, the question arose of how to tell what seems to be from what really is. Skeptical thinkers have pressed the claim that no satisfactory standard can be found that will actually work for distinguishing the real from the apparent in all cases. On the other hand, various philosophers have proposed many such criteria, none of which has been universally accepted.

Another type of question raised by philosophers is: What is truth? Various statements about aspects of the world seem to be true, at least at certain times. Yet experience teaches that statements that have seemed to be true have later had to be qualified or denied. Skeptics have suggested that no evidence would be able to tell, beyond any show of doubt, that a given statement is in reality true. In the face of such a challenge, philosophers have sought to find a criterion of truth, especially a criterion of truth that would not be open to skeptical challenge.

Philosophers have also traditionally raised questions about values: What is good? How can good be distinguished from bad or evil? What is justice? What would a just society be like? What is beauty? How can the beautiful be distinguished from the ugly? These questions all deal with matters of evaluation rather than fact. Scientific investigation is of only slight help in determining if abortion is bad or if Vermeer's Milkmaid is a beautiful picture. The values that are at issue are not perceived in the same way as facts. If they were, much more agreement would exist about the specific answers to value questions. The philosopher seeks to find some means of answering these sorts of questions, which are often the most important ones that a person can ask and which will exhibit the basis of a theory of values.

Philosophical Methods

In view of the kinds of questions that philosophers deal with, what methods does the philosopher use to seek the answers? The philosopher's tools are basically logical and speculative reasoning. In the Western tradition the development of Logic is usually traced to Aristotle, who aimed at constructing valid arguments and also true arguments if true premises could be uncovered. Logic has played an important role in ancient and modern philosophy--that of providing a clarification of the reasoning process and standards by which valid reasoning can be recognized. It has also provided a means of analyzing basic concepts to determine if they are consistent or not.

Logic alone, however, is not enough to answer philosophers' questions. It can show when philosophers are being consistent and when their concepts are clear and unambiguous, but it cannot ascertain if the first principles or the premises are correct. Here philosophers sometimes rely on what they call intuition and sometimes on a speculative reasoning process. From their initial premises, philosophers then try to work out a consistent development of their answers to basic philosophical questions, following the rules of logic. Irrationalist philosophers, however, such as the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard, have contended that the less logical the solution to philosophical problems, the better. Philosophers such as these sometimes argue that the most important elements of existence and experience cannot be contained by logic, which is, after all, an element of experience itself. The part, they argue, cannot explain the whole.

Philosophy's Relation to Other Disciplines

Philosophy is both related to most disciplines and yet different from them. Almost from the beginning of both mathematics and philosophy in ancient Greece, relations were seen between them. On the one hand, the philosophers were strongly impressed by the degree of certainty and rigor that appeared to exist in mathematics as compared to any other subject. Some, like the philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras of Samos, felt that mathematics must be the key to understanding reality. Plato claimed that mathematics provided the forms out of which everything was made. Aristotle, on the other hand, held that mathematics was about ideal objects rather than real ones; he held that mathematics could be certain without telling us anything about reality.

In more modern times, Descartes and Baruch Spinoza used mathematics as their model and inspiration for formulating new methods to discover the truth about reality. The philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, the co-discoverer (with Isaac Newton) of calculus, theorized about constructing an ideal mathematical language in which to state, and mathematically solve, all philosophical problems. Similar views have been advanced in the 20th century as ways of resolving age-old philosophical difficulties. Attempts to accomplish this have found far from unanimous approval, however.

Philosophy has both influenced and been influenced by practically all of the sciences. The physical sciences have provided the accepted body of information about the world at any given time. Philosophers have then tried to arrange this information into a meaningful pattern and interpret it, describing what reality might be like. Western philosophers over much of the last 2,500 years have provided basic metaphysical theories for the scientists to fit their data into and as the data changed, their metaphysical interpretations have had to be adjusted. Thus the scientific revolution of the 17th century, encompassing the scientific work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, was accompanied by a metaphysical revolution led by such thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the prevailing philosophers in England and France came to the conclusion that the sciences are, and ought to be, completely independent of traditional metaphysical interpretations. Instead, the sciences should just try to describe and codify observations and experiences. This approach has led in the last two centuries to a divorce of philosophy from the sciences. What has developed in response is a new branch of philosophy, the philosophy of science, which examines the methods of science, the types of scientific evidence, and the ways the sciences progress.

A third intellectual area that has been intimately involved with philosophy is religion. In ancient Greece some philosophers like Anaxagoras and Socrates scandalized their contemporaries by criticizing aspects of Greek religion. Others offered more theoretical approaches about the evidence for the existence and nature of God or the gods. Some denied the existence of a deity.

When Christianity entered the Greek world, attempts were made to develop a philosophical understanding of Christianity. Finally, toward the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th century, Saint Augustine achieved a synthesis of some of the elements of Platonic philosophy with the essentials of Christianity. Throughout the Middle Ages, philosopher theologians among the Jews, Muslims, and Christians sought to explain their religions in rational terms. They were opposed by antirational theologians who insisted that religion is a matter of faith and belief and not of reasons and arguments. After the Reformation, philosophers like Spinoza and David Hume began criticizing the traditional philosophical arguments used by theologians. Hume and Immanuel Kant sought to show that all of the arguments purporting to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were fallacious. Philosophers sought to explain why people were religious on nonrational grounds, such as psychological, economic, or cultural ones. The defenders of religion found themselves estranged from the philosophers, who kept using the latest results of science and historical research to criticize religion. Some, like Kierkegaard, made a virtue of this estrangement, insisting that religious belief is a matter of faith, and therefore not a matter of reason. More recently, since World War II, a group of theologians who are interested in recent philosophical developments and in the relationship between religion and contemporary culture have attempted to discover what religious statements can be intellectually meaningful. The history of the relation between philosophy and theology is thus a long and mixed affair, running the gamut from clarifying religion and providing a justification for it to tearing apart its intellectual underpinnings and trying to see what is left that a 20th-century scientifically oriented person can believe or take seriously.

Branches of Philosophy

The several different branches of philosophy correspond to the different problems being dealt with. One of the most basic is Epistemology, the theory of knowledge (episteme is Greek for knowledge). It deals with what can be known, how it can be known, and how certain the individual can be about it. It has special branches like the philosophy of science. The kinds of answers that emerge from a particular epistemology usually structure its Metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of nature of reality, the study of what features of experience are real and which are apparent. Aristotle called metaphysics the study of being as such; the term ontology is often used to describe this branch of philosophy today. How a person gets to know about pure being (an epistemological problem) colors what it is that is known. The reverse is also the case. What the individual thinks the world is really like colors what he or she thinks can be known about it. How the individual reasons about the world and how he or she can certify knowledge belongs to the branch of philosophy called logic. Logic provides the rational framework for all philosophical discussion, but is also itself open to metaphysical interpretations about what sort of world it is explaining.

Other branches of philosophy such as Ethics, Aesthetics, and political philosophy deal with evaluative aspects of the world such as what is good conduct, what is beautiful, and what is socially and politically just. The proposed answers to these questions are much involved with the philosopher's epistemological and metaphysical theories, and the values the philosopher espouses color his or her epistemology and metaphysics. Sometimes the pursuit of particular aspects of experience (such as sensations) or the use of particular tools (such as the analysis of language) will reorient philosophical inquiry or give birth to new branches of philosophy. Thus philosophy is never reasoned in a vacuum. It is concerned not only with abstract questions; it is also conditioned by history.

History of Western Philosophy

The Pre-Socratics

Western philosophy began in Greece, in the Greek settlement of Miletus in Anatolia. The first known philosophers were Thales of Miletus and his students, Anaximender and Anaximenes. Present-day knowledge of this Milesian School is based on fragments attributed to them by later writers. These first philosophers were metaphysicians, seeking for an element or force behind appearance that explained everything. Thales said that all was ultimately water, Anaximander that it was boundless or the infinite, and Anaximenes that it was air. Subsequent Greek philosophers, such as Heraclitus and Parmenides, argued about whether change or permanence was the basic feature of the world and about whether one or more than one element was the fundamental constituent of reality. Greek philosophy before Socrates was principally concerned with these metaphysical questions.

Socrates

Socrates, an Athenian, was primarily interested in value questions that affected what a person should do. At the time in Athens, the paid teachers, the Sophists, taught people how to live successfully; they did not raise the Socratic question of what was the right way of life, however. Socrates did not write anything, but he is vividly portrayed by his pupil Plato in the Dialogues as being the "gadfly" of Athens, forever asking people why they are doing what they are doing and making people realize that general principles were necessary to justify their conduct. Socrates was finally arrested and accused of heresy and corrupting the young of Athens. Socrates used his trial, described in Plato's Apology, as a final opportunity to make his general point. His accusers, he showed, did not know what the charges actually meant and had no evidence for them. He reported that the Delphic oracle had said that he, Socrates, was the wisest of all of the Athenians. Socrates said he was the wisest because he alone knew nothing and knew that he knew nothing, whereas everybody else thought they knew something. In spite of his eloquence and wisdom, Socrates was convicted and sentenced to death.

Plato

After Socrates' execution, his disciple Plato developed the first comprehensive philosophical system and founded the Academy, the first formal philosophical school. Plato contended that knowledge must be of universals (that is, of general types or kinds) and not of particulars. To know a particular cat, Miranda, the individual must first know what it is to be feline in general. Otherwise he or she will not be able to recognize the particular feline characteristics in Miranda. These universals, Plato claimed, were the basic elements from which the world was formed. They are called the Forms, or Platonic Ideas. Mathematics provides the most obvious cases of these Forms. They are known not by sense perception but by reasoning. They are known by the mind, not by the bodily organs. The world of Platonic Ideas is the unchanging Forms of things. The philosopher should turn away from this world of appearance and concentrate on the world of Forms. Plato, in his most famous work, The Republic, said that the world would be perfect when philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers. He believed that the philosopher-kings would know what justice really is, and, based on their knowledge of the Forms, they could then achieve justice in all societies.

For Plato the ultimate Idea, which illuminated the rest of the pure ideas, was the Idea of the Good. As Plato grew older he became more mystical about this idea. The school of Neoplatonism, which began a few centuries after his death, stressed these otherworldly and mystical elements, identifying the idea of the Good with God.

Aristotle

Plato's leading student, Aristotle, developed the most comprehensive philosophical system of ancient times. Aristotle broke with Plato, stressing the importance of explaining the changing world that humankind lives in as opposed to the Platonic Ideas. Aristotle spent years studying the natural sciences and collecting specimens, and about 90 percent of his writings are on scientific subjects, mostly on biological ones. Aristotle believed he could account for the changes and alterations in this world without either having to deny their reality or having to appeal to another world. For Aristotle all natural objects were composed of form and matter, and the changes that take place in matter are the substitution of one form for another. This substitution takes place because every natural object has a goal, or telos, which it is its nature to achieve. Thus stones, because they are essentially material, seek the lowest point, which is why they fall down. Each species is ultimately trying to achieve a state of perfection which for Aristotle was a state of perfect rest. The cosmos, as Aristotle saw it, is an ordered striving for this perfection. The pinnacle of the order is the Unmoved Mover, the ultimate cosmic agent, which fully and perfectly realizes its essence of eternal thought. The heavenly spheres imitate the Unmoved Mover and by so doing set the heavens in an eternal spherical motion; this process is repeated by individual souls, and so on. Aristotle's vision of the Cosmos remained central to Western thought until the time of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Hellenistic and Roman Periods

In the period from about 300 BC to AD 200 the central philosophical concerns shifted to how an individual should conduct his or her life. The Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans, although they dealt with the classical epistemological and metaphysical issues, emphasized the question of how humans should conduct themselves in a miserable world. All these theories stressed withdrawal, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual, from the turmoils of the day.

Medieval Period

Greek philosophy was the major formative influence on the later philosophical traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. In all three, the theories of the Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle, were employed to clarify and develop the basic beliefs of the religious traditions.

Philo of Alexandria introduced Platonic ideas and methods into Jewish thought, particularly into the interpretation of Scripture about the beginning of the Christian era. He exerted little influence on later Jewish thought, however, and the Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages seems to have developed as a movement parallel to those in Islam. Important figures in early medieval Jewish thought include Isaac Israeli, Saadia ben Joseph Gaon, and the Neoplatonist Solomon Ibn Gabirol. The most important Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, however, was Maimonides. Maimonides developed a comprehensive interpretation of religion and understanding based on Aristotelian principles that was influential in the Christian West as well as among Jewish thinkers.

In Judaism, as in Islam and Christianity, religious speculation and philosophy developed in close connection. This development is particularly evident in the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah. The esoteric teachings of these schools have influenced much later Jewish thought, including that of Spinoza, the most important Jewish philosopher of the early modern period. Drawing both on his religious background and on the geometric method of Descartes, Spinoza developed a philosophical Pantheism of great depth.

In the Islamic tradition as well the starting point was the work of Plato and Aristotle. The 9th-century Neoplatonist al-Kindi was followed by al-Farabi, who drew on both Plato and Aristotle to create a universal Islamic philosophy. The most important of the medieval Muslim philosophers, however, was Avicenna (ibn Sina). Starting from the distinction between essence and existence, Avicenna developed a metaphysics in which God, the necessary being, is the source of created nature through emanation. Both his metaphysics and his intuitionist theory of knowledge were influential in the later Middle Ages as well as in the later history of Islamic thought.

The philosophical tradition did not go unchallenged, however. The 11th-century theologian and mystic al-Ghazali mounted a critique of philosophy, specifically Avicenna's, that is rich in argument and insight. Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers provoked a response by Averroes ibn Rushd entitled the Incoherence of the Incoherence, in which al-Ghazali's arguments are countered point for point. Averroes was best known, however, as an interpreter of Aristotle and excited great influence on all subsequent thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition. In the later Middle Ages the historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun produced a trenchant critique of culture, and the elaboration of metaphysics and epistemology was carried on in the theosophical schools of Islamic mysticism.

The first systematic Christian philosophy was that of Origen, but for the European Middle Ages no authority could rival Saint Augustine. Augustine elaborated a Neoplatonist vision combining the metaphysics of Plotinus with an elaboration of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. To this he added an epistemology in which knowledge is achieved through illumination by grace. No substantial movement arose beyond Augustine until the 12th century, when new interest arose in logic and theory of knowledge. In this connection the most important figures are Saint Anselm and Peter Abelard.

In the late 12th and early 13th centuries the writings of Aristotle were reintroduced into the West, first in translations from the Arabic and later in direct translation. After some initial resistance Aristotle became the dominant philosophical authority and remained so until the Renaissance. First Saint Albertus Magnus and then Saint Thomas Aquinas combined Aristotle's philosophy with the tradition of Augustinian theology to produce a synthesis holding that Aristotle was right about those things that are within the grasp of reason, while what was beyond reason could only be known by faith. Thus reason could prove that God exists, but his nature could be known only by faith. More extreme Aristotelian schools developed and came into conflict with the church, which, in 1277, issued condemnations of many positions held by Aristotle and Aquinas, among others. In the 14th century two figures dominated the scene: Duns Scotus and William of Occam. Scotus developed an extremely complex philosophy based on a number of earlier positions, and Occam's critiques of metaphysics and epistemology remain paradigms of philosophical argument.

Rationalism

The synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelianism was a major form of Scholasticism, which dominated European philosophy into the 17th century. During the Renaissance other forms of ancient philosophy began to be revived and used as ammunition against the scholastics. This involved the Renaissance Platonists and the Skeptics, as well as others interested in esoteric doctrines like that of the Kabbalah. In terms of the future development of philosophy, the revival of ancient skepticism played the greatest role. This view, popularized by Montaigne in the late 16th century, raised the fundamental epistemological problem of what can be known. The methods of the new scientific schools conflicted with, and thus brought into question, the principles inherited from the Middle Ages. Rene Descartes proposed a method for guaranteeing knowledge. He argued that in order to provide a secure foundation for knowledge it was necessary to discover "clear and distinct ideas" that could not be doubted and could serve as a basis for deriving further truths. He found such an idea in the proposition "I think, therefore I am." Using this as a paradigm, Descartes drew a distinction between thinking substance and extended substance, or mind and matter. He went on to draw conclusions about God, nature, and mind that continue to be influential. For this reason Descartes is often considered the founder of modern philosophy.

A few years after Descartes's death, Baruch de Spinoza offered his theory to improve on that of Descartes. Spinoza insisted that only one substance, God, exists, and that two of his attributes are thought and extension. Everything that is and that can be known about is an aspect of God. Spinoza's God, however, was the antithesis of the God of traditional religion. God, or Nature (as Spinoza put it), was the laws from which everything followed. In Spinoza's pantheistic world everything had to be what it was, and everything was to be understood rationally. The mind and body were two aspects of the same thing, which was to be understood either logically or in terms of natural science.

A third great 17th-century rationalist was Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. The basic unit of his metaphysics, equivalent to a substance, was the monad, a center of force or energy. Each monad was internally determined by its definition. Monads could not interact, but, due to a "preestablished harmony," the action in one monad coincided with that in another. God chose the monads in the world so that it would be the best of all possible worlds. (A world with more or less or different monads would not be as good, or God would have chosen it.) Leibniz believed that the truths about monads could be discovered by rational analysis.

Empiricism

Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were all rationalists in their epistemologies; they stressed a world of metaphysical truths that could be discovered by reason. In contrast to this kind of philosophizing, a quite different approach developed in Great Britain, stressing the importance of sense experience as the basis of knowledge. Starting with Sir Francis Bacon, the empirical theory of knowledge was propounded both as a way of eliminating various metaphysical and theological difficulties and as a way of genuinely advancing knowledge. The most important statement of this theory was made by John Locke. He claimed that all knowledge comes from sense experience. Individuals are, however, forced to believe that underlying experience is some indefinable kind of substance. No one can be completely certain of direct intuitive inspections of his or her ideas, less certain of demonstrations from them, and still less certain of what Locke called "sensitive knowledge," knowledge of the reality of experience. In spite of the limitations on knowledge, humans can know enough to function in this world.

Bishop George Berkeley saw Locke's theory as having dangerous skeptical and irreligious tendencies because of its reliance on a material substance for ideas to belong to. Berkeley insisted that the only things truly known are ideas and that ideas can only exist in the minds that perceive them. Matter is simply complexes of sensations. Nothing really exists except perceiving and being perceived (esse est percipere). What holds the world together is that God perceives everything all of the time. Berkeley's Idealism gained few adherents. If it is granted that all of our knowledge consists only of sense experiences, no evidence exists that the world is any more than ideas and the minds they are in. In philosophy this position is called Solipsism, the view that the only reality is the self.

Berkeley was followed by David Hume, who showed that a thoroughly consistent empirical theory of knowledge leads to a complete skepticism. Hume's major contribution was to show that an individual cannot gain any causal information about experience, or about what is beyond immediate experience, from empirical knowledge. He or she can neither deduce nor induce the cause or the effect of experience). Individuals thus have no basis for accepting that the future must resemble the past. It is only habit or custom that leads them to expect and believe that the items found constantly conjoined in experience will remain so in the future. Hume also argued that from empirical data humans could have no real knowledge of substance, mind, or even God. They are reduced to complete skepticism except that habits or customs make them unjustified believers.

Kant and Hegel