WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
- Philosophy is the acquisition of knowledge. – Plato
- Philosophy is the science by which the natural light of reason studies the first causes or highest principles of all things - is, in other words, the science of things in their first causes, in so far as these belong to the natural order. – Jacques Maritain
-Philosophy is the systematic study of the foundations of human knowledge with an emphasis on the conditions of its validity and finding answers to ultimate questions. –Wikipedia
- A study that attempts to discover the fundamental principles of the sciences, the arts, and the world that the sciences and arts deal with.
There was a time when many of the subjects now taught in school were all part of a very broad area called philosophy. Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, sociology, government, psychology, mathematics, logic, ethics, music, and more were all considered proper subjects for attention by philosophers. As recently as the early 19th century, natural philosopher was a term for a student of any of the sciences. Specialists in ethics were called moral philosophers. As late as the 1850s it was common to hear Bunsen burners and other laboratory tools called philosophical instruments.
The word philosophy itself is from Greek words meaning "love of wisdom." But it really means serious thought about the most basic questions that human beings can ponder--questions such as: What is the true nature of the universe? What is human nature really like, and what are a human being's moral responsibilities? Of what is matter composed? What are the qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty?
DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
It is true that many subjects that once belonged to philosophy--such as physics, chemistry, and psychology--have broken off to become independent disciplines. This has not, however, left philosophy with no material with which to work. There are certain basic issues that have belonged to philosophy from the beginning and that are still its major concerns. These include the nature of the universe, the possibility of knowledge, the correct use of reason, the standards of justice, and the qualities of beauty. These problems are the subject matter of the five branches of philosophy--metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics.
Metaphysics is a word coined almost accidentally. It is the title given to a book written by Aristotle after he had completed his 'Physics', and it was placed immediately afterward in the body of his writings. Whereas 'Physics' deals with the observable world and its laws, 'Metaphysics' is concerned with the principles, structures, and meanings that underlie all observable reality. It is the investigation, by means of pure speculation, of the nature of being--of the cause, substance, and purpose of everything. Metaphysics asks: What are space and time? What is a thing and how does it differ from an idea? Are humans free to decide their fate? Is there a first cause, or God, that has made everything and put it in motion?
Because the answers to such questions cannot be arrived at by observation, experience, or experiment, they must be products of the reasoning mind. Such matters are very close, in fact, to the province of religion and in Asia the answers to these questions are normally put in a strictly religious framework. In much 20th-century Western philosophy, metaphysics has been dismissed as pointless speculation that can never achieve positive results. Nevertheless, metaphysics has many defenders who still explore notions put forward by Plato and Aristotle.
Epistemology means "theory of knowledge." It is derived from the Greek episteme, meaning "knowledge," and logos, which has several meanings, including "theory." Whereas metaphysics is concerned with the underlying nature of reality, epistemology deals with the possibilities and limits of human knowledge. Basically it tries to arrive at a knowledge of knowledge itself. It is also a speculative branch of philosophy and tries to answer such questions as: Is the world as people perceive it the basic reality, or do people perceive only appearances (or phenomena) that conceal basic reality? What are the boundaries between reason and knowledge, on the one hand, and what some thinkers call the illusions deriving from metaphysics? What is the basis for knowledge? Is it observation, experience, intuition, or inspiration? Or is there some other basis?
Knowledge may be regarded as having two parts. There is, first of all, what one sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells. Next there is the way these perceptions are organized by the mind to form ideas or concepts. The problem of epistemology is based on how philosophers have understood the relationship of the mind to the rest of reality.
For the average person, common sense says that there is a real world of perceivable objects. These objects can be analyzed and understood with a high degree of accuracy. Philosophers have not been able to let the matter rest there.
Plato taught that the real world consisted of universal ideas. The world that people actually see is given form by these ideas and is thus less real because it is always changing, but the ideas are eternal and unchangeable.
Opponents of Plato have claimed that the ideas were nothing more than names people have attached to the objects they perceive. Names of individual objects and of classes of objects are merely ways of organizing perceptions into knowledge. Thus people see one animal they decide to call "cat." All similar animals are called "cats," and a whole category of animals is thereby named without any reference to eternal ideas or forms.
Some 18th-century British philosophers, the empiricists, made a sharp division between the mind and everything else. The most radical of these teachers, David Hume, carried this division to its logical conclusion and declared that it was impossible to prove the existence of a real world. Everything known, he said, depends on perception, but perception can never get any evidence outside itself to verify anything. Real knowledge, in his eyes, became completely impossible to achieve. Immanuel Kant met the challenge posed by Hume by saying there was a real world. Its underlying nature cannot be known--only the appearances of everything (which he called phenomena) can be perceived. Humans, however, impose a form of reality on the world by the way they organize their thoughts about it. They thus impose an order on their world through categories created by the mind.
From Plato to Kant and beyond, these are some of the ways that the complex issue of epistemology has been addressed. When the conclusions of nuclear physicists are taken into account--especially their studies on atomic particles--the problem of the reality of the material world and how much can be known about it is confronted with new challenges.
Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with human behavior, morality, and responsibilities of people to each other and to society. Because ethics plays such a large part in the way people live, it has always been a subject of great interest. Some thinkers have asserted that there are definite, knowable standards for human behavior. Others deny this and say that decisions should be based mostly on the situation in which one finds oneself. They are relativists--they say ethical decisions are related to specific circumstances.
This branch of philosophy is very close to religion. A large part of the Bible, for instance, is made up of wisdom literature, which is chiefly practical philosophy with a religious foundation. On the basis of ethics, Aristotle developed his 'Politics'. He moved from explaining how individuals could have a good life to how a good society should be built.
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty, the arts, and taste (or appreciation). The term is derived from the Greek word meaning "sense perception." The basic question for aesthetics is: How do humans judge what is beautiful? Is it a reasoned assessment, or is it merely an emotional preference?
Furthermore, do aesthetic judgments have any relationship to moral or scientific judgments? In conclusion then, aesthetics seeks to lay foundations for criticism in the arts, or it tries to show that such foundations are impossible.
Other approaches.
Approaches to philosophy other than dividing it into five areas may be taken. It is possible to divide philosophy into two types: speculative and practical. Speculative is from the Latin verb meaning "to look at." Basically it means to ponder a subject and arrive at conclusions.
Metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics are speculative approaches to philosophy. Their conclusions can never be verified. Logic is an attempt to guide thinking, and as such it is a tool of speculative philosophy. Ethics, however, is often called practical philosophy. It attempts to arrive at guidelines for behavior based on what is the best outcome for individuals or for society. It seeks to present a workable approach to conduct and mutual obligations. It also seeks to answer the questions, What is happiness? and What is a good life?
If ethics is practical philosophy, it is reasonable to assume that politics and economics fall into the same category. It is possible to form idealistic theories about both, but they are so closely identified with human behavior that their practical nature is always in the foreground. What really works becomes more significant than what someone says should work.
There is still another way to look at the work of philosophers. Some have been system builders. They have sought to analyze everything and fit all their ideas into one comprehensive way of understanding the world. They want answers to every question. Examples of such thinkers include Thomas Aquinas, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. They created essentially closed systems of thought. Other philosophers have taken the opposite approach, analyzing every separate piece of evidence and trying to explain it on its own terms. This was the direction taken by Aristotle, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell, among others.
Philosophy can be divided into five branches which address the following questions:
| Study of Existence | What's out there? | |
| Study of Knowledge | How do I know about it? | |
| Study of Action | What should I do? | |
| Study of Force | What actions are permissible? | |
| Study of Art | What can life be like? |
There is a hierarchical relationship between these branches as can be seen in the Concept Chart. At the root is Metaphysics, the study of existence and the nature of existence. Closely related is Epistemology, the study of knowledge and how we know about reality and existence. Dependent on Epistemology is Ethics, the study of how man should act. Ethics is dependent on Epistemology because it is impossible to make choices without knowledge. A subset of Ethics is Politics: the study of how men should interact in a proper society and what constitutes proper. Esthetics, the study of art and sense of life is slightly separate, but depends on Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics.
Pre-Socratic philosophy is Greek philosophy before Socrates (but includes schools contemporary with Socrates which were not influenced by him). In Classical antiquity, the Presocratic philosophers were called physiologoi (in English, physical or natural philosophers). Diogenes Laërtius divides the physiologoi into two groups, Ionian and Italiote, led by Anaximander and Pythagoras, respectively.
The Presocratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations of the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. These philosophers asked questions about "the essence of things":
From where does everything come?
From what is everything created?
How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
How might we describe nature mathematically?
Others concentrated on defining problems and paradoxes that became the basis for later mathematical, scientific and philosophic study.
Later philosophers rejected many of the answers the early Greek philosophers provided, but continued to place importance on their questions. Furthermore, the cosmologies proposed by them have been updated by later developments in science.
History
Western philosophy began in ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE. The Presocratics were mostly from the eastern or western fringes of the Greek world. Their efforts were directed to the investigation of the ultimate basis and essential nature of the external world. They sought the material principle (archê) of things, and the method of their origin and disappearance. As the first philosophers, they emphasized the rational unity of things, and rejected mythological explanations of the world. Only fragments of the original writings of the presocratics survive. The knowledge we have of them derives from accounts of later philosophical writers (especially Aristotle, Plutarch, Diogenes Laërtius, Stobaeus and Simplicius), and some early theologians, (especially Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus).
The first Presocratic philosophers were from Miletus on the western coast of Anatolia. Thales (624-546 BCE) is reputed the father of Greek philosophy; he declared water to be the basis of all things. Next came Anaximander (610-546 BCE), the first writer on philosophy. He assumed as the first principle an undefined, unlimited substance without qualities, out of which the primary opposites, hot and cold, moist and dry, became differentiated. His younger contemporary, Anaximenes (585-525 BCE), took for his principle air, conceiving it as modified, by thickening and thinning, into fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth.
The practical side of philosophy was introduced by Pythagoras of Samos (582-496 BCE). Regarding the world as perfect harmony, dependent on number, he aimed at inducing humankind likewise to lead a harmonious life. His doctrine was adopted and extended by a large following of Pythagoreans who gathered at his school in south Italy in the town of Croton. His followers included Philolaus (470-380 BCE), Alcmaeon of Croton, and Archytas (428-347 BCE).
Heraclitus of Ephesus on the western coast of Anatolia in modern Turkey (535-475 BCE) posited that all things in nature are in a state of perpetual flux held together by a dynamic, eternal structure or pattern, which he termed the Logos. Metaphorically, Heraclitus had used the image of fire to represent this eternal pattern. From fire all things originate, and return to it again in a process of development.
The Eleatic School, called after the town of Elea (modern name Velia in south Italy), emphasized the doctrine of the One. Xenophanes of Colophon (570-470 BCE), declared God to be the eternal unity, permeating the universe, and governing it by his thought. Parmenides of Elea (510-440 BCE), affirmed the one unchanging existence to be alone true and capable of being conceived, and multitude and change to be an appearance without reality. This doctrine was defended by his younger countryman Zeno of Elea (490-430 BCE) in a polemic against the common opinion which sees in things multitude, becoming, and change. Zeno propounded a number of celebrated paradoxes, much debated by later philosophers, which try to show that supposing that there is any change or multiplicity leads to contradictions. Melissus of Samos (born c. 470 BCE) was another eminent member of this school.
Empedocles of Agrigentum (490-430 BCE) was from the ancient Greek city of Akragas (Ἀκράγας), Agrigentum in Latin, modern Agrigento, in Sicily. He appears to have been partly in agreement with the Eleatic School, partly in opposition to it. On the one hand, he maintained the unchangeable nature of substance; on the other, he supposes a plurality of such substances - i.e. four classical elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Of these the world is built up, by the agency of two ideal motive forces - love as the cause of union, strife as the cause of separation. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500-428 BCE) in Asia Minor, also maintained the existence of an ordering principle as well as a material substance, and while regarding the latter as an infinite multitude of imperishable primary elements; he conceived divine reason or Mind (nous) as ordering them. He referred all generation and disappearance to mixture and resolution respectively. To him belongs the credit of first establishing philosophy at Athens.
The first explicitly materialistic system was formed by Leucippus (5th century BCE) and his pupil Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BCE) from Thrace. This was the doctrine of atoms - small primary bodies infinite in number, indivisible and imperishable, qualitatively similar, but distinguished by their shapes. Moving eternally through the infinite void, they collide and unite, thus generating objects which differ in accordance with the varieties, in number, size, shape, and arrangement, of the atoms which compose them.
Others
The last of the Presocratic natural philosophers was Diogenes of Apollonia from Thrace (born c. 460 BCE). He was an eclectic philosopher who adopted many principles of the Milesian school, especially the single material principle, which he identified as air. He explained natural processes in reference to the rarefactions and condensations of this primary substance. He also adopted Anaxagoras' cosmic thought.
The Sophists held that all thought rests solely on the apprehensions of the senses and on subjective impression, and that therefore we have no other standards of action than convention for the individual. Specializing in rhetoric, the Sophists were more professional educators than philosophers. They flourished as a result of a special need at that time for Greek education. Prominent Sophists include Protagoras (490-420 BCE) from Abdera in Thrace, Gorgias (487-376 BCE) from Leontini in Sicily, Hippias (485-415 BCE) from Elis in the Peloponnesos, and Prodicus (465-390 BCE)from the island of Ceos.
Other early Greek thinkers
This list includes several men, particularly the Seven Sages, who appear to have been practical politicians and sources of epigrammatic wisdom, rather than speculative thinkers or philosophers in the modern sense.
Solon (c. 594 BCE); Chilon of Sparta (c. 560 BCE); Thales (c. 585 BCE); Bias of Priene (c. 570 BCE); Cleobulus of Rhodes (c. 600 BCE); Pittacus of Mitylene (c. 600 BCE); Periander (625-585 BCE); Aristeas of Proconnesus (7th century BCE); Pherecydes of Syros (c. 540 BCE); Anacharsis (c. 590 BCE).
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
The story begins with Thales of Miletus, a shrewd and intelligent mathematician who lived in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. He attempted to give an explanation of the world that does not depend on gods or mythology--but only on natural causes. He decided that everything originated in water, on the basis of finding sea fossils inland far from the Mediterranean Sea. Water, therefore, is the fundamental building block of matter.
Thales was succeeded in the 6th century BC by Anaximander and Anaximenes, both of Miletus. Anaximander explained the world as originating in conflicts between contraries, such as hot and cold and wet and dry. The cold partly dried up, leaving the Earth and its water. The hot turned some water into mist and air, while the remainder ascended to form fiery rings in the heavens. Holes in the rings are the sun, moon, and stars.
Anaximenes declared that air is the source of all matter. His major contribution, however, was stating that nothing can be created from nothing. Matter, force, and energy are indestructible. These ideas later reappeared in physics in the laws of the conservation of matter and energy.
Pythagoras, also of the 6th century BC, thought that number is the basis of reality because the forms and relations of things can all be explained numerically. Heracletus (late 6th century BC) argued that the basic characteristic of the universe is change. Permanence is only an appearance. Parmenides (5th century) said permanence is real and change only an illusion.
All of the above-named early philosophers sought to explain everything in terms of one basic quality. They were called monists, from the Greek word for "one." Later philosophers sought explanations in plurality. Empedocles (mid-5th century BC) believed that there are four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Anaxagoras (also 5th century BC) taught that everything is made of infinitely small particles. Democritus and Leucippus carried this idea further by teaching that all matter is made up of atoms--not the atoms of today's physicists but similar tiny, indivisible units. The ideas of Democritus and Leucippus were of critical significance for the later development of physics, though they were generally discarded at the time. The Roman philosopher Lucretius based his work on them in 'On the Nature of Things'.
Late in the 5th century BC a group of teachers called Sophists appeared. They were teachers of practical wisdom who took money for their lessons. The first was Protagoras (died 410 BC). His statement, "Man is the measure of all things," indicates the Sophist view that the real world is the one people live in and see. The earlier "real worlds" of metaphysicians are, he said, pointless speculation. The Sophists were the first skeptics. They cast doubt on the merits of speculation and said learning to live and succeed in the real world is the point of philosophy.
The classical period of Greek philosophy lasted from about 430 to 320 BC. The first great philosopher was Socrates. He challenged the Sophists by saying it is possible to learn absolute virtue and attain truth. He sought universal principles by pursuing the clear, common meaning of terms, and he raised some of the basic questions of knowledge and ethics. He did this by question-and-answer conversations, now called the Socratic method. The teaching of Socrates rested on two basic assumptions: a person is never to do wrong, either directly or indirectly, and no one who knows what is right will act contrary to it.
Plato was Socrates' foremost pupil and recorder of many of his conversations. His 'Dialogues', even in translation, are some of the most interesting reading in Western literature. He developed a many-sided philosophy that includes a theory of knowledge, a theory of human conduct, a theory of the state, and a theory of the universe. He said there is a world of sense experience that is always changing. There is also a world of unchanging ideas, which is the only true reality. His world of ideas resembles a blueprint after which the objects of the physical world are fashioned. So profound has the influence of Plato been on human thought that the 20th-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that all philosophy is "but a footnote to Plato."
Aristotle was Plato's most famous pupil, though he departed from his master's teaching on many points. His writings on nature make him the world's first real scientist, though his conclusions have long been superceded. His contributions are so great that he stands alongside Plato as one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world. He said, in contrast to Plato, that the material world is real and not a creation of eternal forms. He taught that individual things combine form and matter in ways that determine how they grow and change. Aristotle was also the founder of formal logic.
Philosophy after Aristotle to about AD 100 was concerned mainly with ethics. Epicurus regarded reality as a random arrangement of atoms and decreed that pleasure is the chief goal of life. The Stoics, led by Zeno, believed that the universe is ordered and rational. The principle of Zeno's thought is to live in accordance with nature. He based his ideas on the teachings of Socrates. Humans, he said, must discipline themselves to accept their place in the world. There is a great deal of fatalism in the Stoic position. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a leading Stoic, who explained the philosophy clearly in his 'Meditations'. Another well-known Stoic was Epictetus. He left no writings, but his teachings were recorded and passed down in 'Discourses' by his pupil Arrian.
Another notable school of thought that appeared in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC is skepticism. Founded by Pyrrho of Elis, it asserts that humans cannot know anything for certain. No one can ever be sure that what is perceived by the senses is real or only an illusion. The skeptical view did not make much headway at the time, but it endured to reach new heights in the work of David Hume in the 18th century. It is one of the most radical positions taken in epistemology.
The Roman statesman Cicero introduced Greek philosophy to Rome, but his works show little that was new except in his political books. The so-called pagan philosophy based in Athens came to an end when the schools of Athens were closed by the emperor Justinian in AD 529. Its teachers survived for a while elsewhere, but with diminished influence.
During the early Christian era there were a number of philosophers called Neoplatonists because their basic ideas were derived from Plato. Their point of view also includes ideas derived from Aristotle and the Stoics. The most prominent Neoplatonist was Plotinus, who used his teachings to combat Christianity. He published nothing, but his notes were published as 'Enneads' by his disciple Porphyry. He taught that the highest reality is the good (or God) and the lowest level of reality is the material world. By his time the influence of Aristotle had almost disappeared, not to be revived for centuries. Plato's thought became dominant, even among Christian writers.
Medieval
Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire early in the 4th century. For the next 1,000 years it dominated philosophy and tolerated little opposition. The chief philosophers were churchmen, especially teachers of theology. Platonism and some elements of Neoplatonism were absorbed and used by Christian teachers and blended with Biblical doctrine. Early Christian philosophy begins with Augustine of Hippo and includes Boethius, the church fathers, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Peter Abelard. With the rediscovery of Aristotle, largely through the writings of Muslim philosophers in the 12th century, his influence became dominant for a time in Western Europe and reached its pinnacle in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.
Augustine identified the eternal ideas of Plato with truths that come from God. This divine world of truth is encountered by turning the mind toward God's revelation. Augustine taught that the immortality of the human soul can be proved by its possession of eternal truths.
Boethius was a major channel of Platonist philosophy to the Middle Ages. In 'The Consolation of Philosophy' he teaches that the eternal ideas are inborn ideas that people remember from the previous existence of the soul.
Between Augustine and Aquinas the pivotal character in philosophy was Anselm. He used both faith and reason to arrive at truth. He is most remembered for his proofs of the existence of God, derived from Neoplatonist philosophy. Bernard of Clairvaux was suspicious of building faith on philosophical concepts. He developed a doctrine of mystical love as the path to truth. Abelard constructed a question-and-answer method for teaching theology, published in his book 'Sic et Non' (Yes and No). His main interest was in logic. He taught that the material world is real. Universal ideas, in contrast to Plato, are only names or mental concepts. This position, called nominalism, had great influence in sidetracking Platonism from its dominant position in philosophy.
During the 12th century a revolution took place that completely changed the course of Western philosophy. The writings of Aristotle were translated into Latin and were studied by churchmen for the first time. They gave teachers access to his scientific works and to his logical method of argument. Many of these Latin translations are based on earlier Arabic translations and commentaries by such Muslim writers as Avicenna and Averroes. The 'Metaphysics' of Aristotle was especially influential in turning philosophers away from Plato. The scientific writings prompted research into the natural world by such men as Roger Bacon.
Medieval theologians who sought to reconcile the doctrines of Christianity with the rational explanations of the world given by Aristotle were called Schoolmen, or Scholastics, because they were university teachers. Their philosophy is called Scholasticism. This merging of Aristotle with doctrine culminated in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, one of the great system builders in the history of philosophy. His major work is 'Summa Theologica' (Summary of Doctrine), a question-and-answer approach to teaching that has never been equaled. He posed questions, stated objections, then presented replies to every objection. Aquinas attempted to settle the conflict between faith and reason by showing that reason should deal with the facts of nature, but that supernatural truths of revelation must be accepted by faith. He said that some truths, such as the existence of God, are both revealed and provable by reason. Opposition to his teachings came from John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and others.
Opposition to Aquinas was condemned by the Roman Catholic church, but it persisted. By the 14th century there was a revival of Platonism and Neoplatonism in writers such as Meister Eckehart and Nicholas of Cusa. Aristotelianism lost its vitality, but its impact had been made. While theology persisted with Platonic ideas, the natural sciences and other research continued the path Aristotle had pioneered. Soon even it was overtaken by a period of invention and discovery that pushed medieval philosophy and other studies aside.
Modern Philosophy
From 1500 philosophy took so many twists and turns that it cannot be defined by any one approach. The ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and others still had to be dealt with but mostly for their relation to practical thinking. Metaphysics still had its advocates, as it does today, but many schools of thought denied its validity. After 1500 philosophy found itself in a world characterized by the growth of cities, the appearance of new inventions, the refusal to accept God or the supernatural as explanations for reality, the invention of printing to spread ideas, the emergence of a new economic system called capitalism, the voyages of discovery to the New World, the Reformation that split Western Christendom, and a great fascination with the natural world and human abilities to exploit and understand it.
During the Renaissance a preoccupation with mathematics and natural science began that endured for two centuries. In the Enlightenment era of the 17th and 18th centuries, attention turned to the nature of the human mind and its abilities to master the natural world. The two main philosophical points of view were rationalism and empiricism. Then, at the end of the Enlightenment, appeared the work of Immanuel Kant, who tried to bridge the gap between rationalism and empiricism. With him the Enlightenment ended and the 19th century began.
The decades of the 19th century were dominated by many differing currents of thought. The discovery of the irrational as an antidote to pure reason manifested itself in the discipline of Romanticism. New ideas appeared in political thought all over the world: liberalism demanded democratization of the political process, while socialism demanded economic justice.
Early in the modern period Francis Bacon was an ardent advocate of the new learning. He held that knowledge cannot be based on accepted authorities but must begin with experience and proceed by induction to general principles. He helped lay the foundation for British empiricism, one of the main schools of modern philosophy.
Modern rationalism originated in the work of the Frenchman Rene Descartes. From the statement, "I think, therefore I am," Descartes proceeded deductively to build a system in which God and mind belong to one order of reality and nature to another. He saw nature as a mechanism that can be explained mathematically, while God is pure spirit. The reconciliation of these two orders of reality in a new metaphysics occupied many other philosophers, including Nicolas de Malebranche, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
While rationalism was taking hold on the Continent, empiricism underwent new developments in the British Isles. The leading empiricists were Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume--all of whom made distinctive contributions to epistemology. They were mainly concerned with how the mind can know.
Locke, for example, stated that the senses are the ultimate source of ideas. Thus, all mental operations result from combining perceptions into concepts. Hume carried empiricism to its ultimate conclusion in his radical skepticism, contending that there is no justification for assuming the reality of either a material or spiritual world. No reality beyond perception can ever be proved.
It was Hume's uncompromising skepticism that awoke Immanuel Kant in Germany from his "philosophical slumbers" and led him to launch a brilliant, but in the long run unsuccessful, attack on it in his 'Critique of Pure Reason'. In it he deals with reason and its potential and limits. In 'Critique of Practical Reason' he examines ethics, and in 'Critique of Judgment' he explores the mind's role in aesthetics. Kant is another of the giants of Western thought, and his influence endured in the work of the German idealists--Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Hegel was the giant of 19th-century thought and the first great system builder since Thomas Aquinas. His ideas, and the powerful reactions to them, still carry great weight in philosophical circles. He formulated a logic that he believed accounts for evolution in nature, history, and human thought. Prominent German philosophers after Hegel were Johann Friedrich Hebart, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
An attack on Hegel soon appeared from the north that was to influence all philosophy. In Denmark Soren Kierkegaard held that reality cannot be fully comprehended by reason because human existence is always involved in choices that are absurd from a rational viewpoint. He conceived of each person as a unique human being and that all people are responsible for their own development and free to direct their own lives.
This implies that one's existence creates one's essence, not vice versa--thereby turning upside down the whole history of metaphysics. People become what they will be; they are not determined from birth by a nature that determines it for them. The name of the movement that Kierkegaard inspired is called existentialism. His concepts were developed in the 20th century by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel.
In France meanwhile, Auguste Comte founded the philosophy called positivism. Positivism rejects pure speculation as a form of self-indulgence. It says that assertions must be subject to verification. Comte attempted to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the discovery of social laws. The English philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer were influenced by positivism, though Spencer relied a good deal on Charles Darwin's insights on evolution. He believed that the notion of "survival of the fittest" applies to society as well as to the biological world.
In the late 19th century some English philosophers absorbed German idealism (the name given to the work of Kant and his followers) and became critics of empiricism. Hegel's influence was especially strong in the writings of Thomas Hill Green and Francis Herbert Bradley. In the United States Josiah Royce advanced similar views. Earlier American thinkers tended to follow the lead of their British contemporaries. Thus Jonathan Edwards was strongly influenced by the empiricist views of Locke, while Ralph Waldo Emerson was an ardent admirer of Thomas Carlyle. The empiricist tradition in England was carried on by John Stuart Mill.
The principal contribution to American philosophy in the 19th century was pragmatism, first formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce. William James extended pragmatism to include a theory of truth: a proposition is true if it fulfills its purpose. John Dewey was the leading 20th-century exponent of pragmatism.
German philosophy after Hegel went in different directions. One direction continued the work of Hegel, creating a school of neo-Hegelians whose influence was felt even in the United States. Other Germans espoused irrationalism. Its two chief exponents were Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. They displaced reason with the human will and its dark side, its propensity to seek power by any means. These writers, along with Kierkegaard, provided a nonrational explanation of human nature that came to the forefront in the politics of the 20th century.
Philosophy in the 20th century became captive to the universities. Few professors write for a popular readership. Two of the chief exceptions were Jean-Paul Sartre in France and Spain's George Santayana. This professionalism sharpened the differences between schools of philosophy, and it made the task of defining philosophy more difficult. There is, in fact, a total lack of consensus on the nature and purpose of philosophy. The main 20th-century schools are logical empiricism, linguistic analysis, existentialism, and phenomenology. In the socialist world Marxism still dominates.
Before defining these schools it is necessary to mention three philosophers who defy easy classification: Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey. All were basically metaphysicians but each in his own way. Bergson, in his great treatise 'Creative Evolution', says that the mind is capable of two different types of knowing. The first is the method of analysis, which is the means used in the sciences. The other is intuition, by which people are able to know their deepest selves and the profound truths of reality.
Whitehead was a mathematician as well as philosopher. Metaphysics was his main interest. He said it is the task of philosophy "to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted."
Dewey's writings encompass ethics, metaphysics, education, and scientific method. As a pragmatist he said philosophy should be geared to human needs. He desired to find the same positive underpinnings for ethics and politics that were being stated in the sciences.
Logical empiricism was inspired by David Hume and originated after 1900 by Bertrand Russell (assisted by Whitehead), Rudolf Carnap in Germany, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Austria. They all insisted that philosophy must be scientific. This purpose was stated by Wittgenstein in his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' (1921): "The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. . . . The result of philosophy is to make propositions clear." All metaphysics becomes meaningless. All statements have meaning only if they can be verified. As for what cannot be verified (religion, for instance), Wittgenstein concludes in his book: "Whereon we cannot speak, thereon must we be silent."
Later in life Wittgenstein became skeptical of the logical foundations of mathematics and science. In his 'Philosophical Investigations' he turned toward a critical examination of ordinary language.
The school that emerged from his work is called linguistic analysis. This school believes that language itself is the object of philosophical investigation. Traditional problems in philosophy can be solved if language is rid of its obscurities and confusion. Other philosophers in this school were Gilbert Ryle, John Langshaw Austin, Susanne K. Langer, and Willard Van Orman Quine.
On the European Continent Edmund Husserl originated the branch of philosophy called phenomenology. His premise is that it is possible to examine the world without any preconceived notions about causes or underlying structures. By carefully exploring all the data available to conscious experience, it is possible to arrive at an explanation of essential structures of all phenomena. (Phenomena are the realities perceived by the senses. The word itself means "appearances" and suggests that there is an unperceived reality behind them.) Phenomenology, in other words, is a new approach to constructing metaphysics.
So diverse have the schools of philosophy become in the late 20th century that there seems little likelihood of any unity of purpose. There are still individuals who have high regard for earlier thinkers, because they addressed the world in which people live while seeking to explain it and its meaning. One such teacher in the United States was Mortimer J. Adler, who published 'The Conditions of Philosophy' in 1965 as a defense of traditional philosophical functions.
The rest of modern thought has become extremely technical and complex, dealing mainly with the nature of language, communication, and symbolism. Those who are determined that philosophy be scientific and those who are devoted to metaphysical speculation go their separate ways. The problem of epistemology, how it is possible to know, remains unsolved, but it has increasingly been taken up by scientists. Brain function is being analyzed by physiologists. Experts in the computer field pose the possibility of creating artificial intelligence. Following the pioneering work of Alan Turing in England, they seek to create devices that will match the higher intellectual capacities of humans--such as the ability to reason, discover meanings, and generalize from past experience. If achieved, artificial intelligence would pose a serious challenge to all previous views of epistemology and to the nature of philosophy itself.
Some Philosophic Terms
ATOMISM. The universe consists of tiny, indivisible units called atoms.
DETERMINISM. All events are the inevitable result of existing conditions. Free will is an illusion.
DUALISM. The universe is basically composed of two elements, matter and mind.
EMPIRICISM. All knowledge is derived from experience by way of sense perceptions.
EPICUREANISM. This school of philosophy taught that the supreme good in human life is happiness or pleasure.
EXISTENTIALISM. Based on the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, this family of philosophies teaches that humans create their own existence by choices and actions.
HEDONISM. The pursuit and enjoyment of pleasure is life's main goal.
IDEALISM. Reality is essentially mental or spiritual. The material world is a lesser order of reality.
INTUITIONISM. Knowledge of reality is gained through the immediate apprehension of self-evident truths.
MATERIALISM. Reality consists essentially of physical substances.
MECHANISM. The processes of nature--animate and inanimate--are machinelike; the functioning and behavior of biological organisms are mechanical.
MONISM. The universe is composed of only one substance, whether matter or mind.
NATURALISM. Because objects in nature are regular and not haphazard, they are all subject to a scientific explanation.
ONTOLOGY. Nearly synonymous with metaphysics, the term refers to a deductive way of understanding.
PHENOMENOLOGY. The world's phenomena can be investigated and understood without having to form prior explanations of reality. By exploring examples, one can arrive at conclusions about underlying structures.
PLURALISM. The universe cannot be explained on the basis of one substance. It consists of two or more, such as matter and mind.
POSITIVISM. The principles and methods of science should be used to guide individual behavior and to solve social problems.
PRAGMATISM. The meaning and truth of an idea are tested by practical consequences.
RATIONALISM. Truth and knowledge are gained by reason rather than by experience or perception.
REALISM (the name for two separate doctrines). 1. General ideas are not merely terms but refer to real things. 2. Material objects exist independently of any knowledge or perception of them.
SCHOLASTICISM. Late medieval philosophy taught by university professors, or Schoolmen, was given this name.
SKEPTICISM. All philosophical assumptions can be challenged on the ground that it is impossible to prove that there can be any real knowledge of the world.
SOPHIST. The term means "sage," but it was applied specifically to teachers of wisdom who charged for their lessons.
STOICISM. Through reason it is possible to view the world as rational. In regulating one's life, the individual learns to accept what happens with a tranquil mind. In everything, duty to society is performed.
TRANSCENDENTALISM. Humans are intuitively aware of a reality beyond sensory phenomena.
UTILITARIANISM. Social actions are valid if they promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Consequences are therefore more significant than motive.
THE THREE GIANTS OF PHILOSOPHY
SOCRATES (470-399 B.C.)
He is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death. He was born in Athens, and that he spent most of his life in the city squares and marketplaces talking with the people he met there. “The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing,” he said. He could also stand lost in thought for hours on end.
Even during his lifetime he was considered somewhat enigmatic, and fairly soon after his death he was held to be the founder of any number of different philosophical schools of thought. The very fact that he was so enigmatic and ambiguous made it possible for widely differing schools of thought to claim him as their own.
He was extremely ugly, potbellied, and had bulging eyes and a snub nose. But inside he was said to be “perfectly delightful.” It was also said of him that “You can seek him in the present, you can seek him in the past, but you will never find his equal.”
The life of Socrates is mainly known to us through the writings of Plato, who was one of his pupils. Plato wrote a number of Dialogues, or dramatized discussions on philosophy, in which he uses Socrates as his principal character and mouthpiece.
Since Plato is putting his own philosophy in Socrates’ mouth, we cannot be sure that the words he speaks in the dialogues were ever actually uttered by him. So it is no easy matter to distinguish between the teachings of Socrates and the philosophy of Plato. Exactly the same problem applies to many other historical persons who left no written accounts. The classic example, of course, is Jesus. We cannot be certain that the “historical” Jesus actually spoke the words that Matthew or Luke ascribed to him. Similarly, what the “historical” Socrates actually said will always be shrouded in mystery.
But who Socrates “really” was is relatively unimportant. It is Plato’s portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2,500 years.
The Art of Discourse
The essential nature of Socrates’ art lay in the fact that he did not appear to want to instruct people. On the contrary he gave the impression of one desiring to learn from those he spoke with. So instead of lecturing like a traditional schoolmaster, he discussed.
Obviously he would not have become a famous philosopher had he confined himself purely to listening to others. Nor would he have been sentenced to death. But he just asked questions, especially to begin a conversation, as if he knew nothing. In the course of the discussion he would generally get his opponents to recognize the weakness of their arguments, and, forced into a corner, they would finally be obliged to realize what was right and what was wrong.
Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to “give birth” to the correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. It cannot be imparted by someone else. And only the understanding that comes from within can lead to true insight.
The ability to give birth is a natural characteristic. In the same way, everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason. Using your innate reason means reaching down inside you and using what is there.
By playing ignorant, Socrates forced the people he met to use their common sense. Socrates could feign ignorance—or pretend to be dumber than he was. We call this Socratic irony. This enabled him to continually expose the weaknesses in people’s thinking. He was not averse to doing this in the middle of the city square. If you met Socrates, you thus might end up being made a fool of publicly.
So it is not surprising that, as time went by, people found him increasingly exasperating, especially people who had status in the community. “Athens is like a sluggish horse,” he is reputed to have said, “and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.”
A Divine Voice
It was not in order to torment his fellow beings that Socrates kept on stinging them. Something within him left him no choice. He always said that he had a “divine voice” inside him. Socrates protested, for example, against having any part in condemning people to death. He moreover refused to inform on his political enemies. This was eventually to cost him his life.
In the year 399 B.C. he was accused of “introducing new gods and corrupting the youth,” as well as not believing in the accepted gods. With a slender majority, a jury of five hundred found him guilty.
He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience—and the truth— higher than life. He assured the jury that he had only acted in the best interests of the state. He was nevertheless condemned to drink hemlock. Shortly thereafter, he drank the poison in the presence of his friends, and died.
Why did Socrates have to die? People have been asking this question for 2,400 years. However, he was not the only person in history to have seen things through to the bitter end and suffered death for the sake of their convictions. Jesus in fact has several striking parallels between them. Both Jesus and Socrates were enigmatic personalities, also to their contemporaries. Neither of them wrote down their teachings, so we are forced to rely on the picture we have of them from their disciples. But we do know that they were both masters of the art of discourse. They both spoke with a characteristic self-assuredness that could fascinate as well as exasperate. And not least, they both believed that they spoke on behalf of something greater than themselves. They challenged the power of the community by criticizing all forms of injustice and corruption. And finally—their activities cost them their lives.
The trials of Jesus and Socrates also exhibit clear parallels. They could certainly both have saved themselves by appealing for mercy, but they both felt they had a mission that would have been betrayed unless they kept faith to the bitter end. And by meeting their death so bravely they commanded an enormous following, also after they had died. I do not mean to suggest that Jesus and Socrates were alike. I am merely drawing attention to the fact that they both had a message that was inseparably linked to their personal courage.
A Joker in Athens
Socrates lived at the same time as the Sophists. Like them, he was more concerned with man and his place in society than with the forces of nature. As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates “called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.”
But Socrates differed from the Sophists in one significant way. He did not consider himself to be a “sophist”—that is, a learned or wise person. Unlike the Sophists, he did not teach for money. Socrates called himself a philosopher in the true sense of the word. A “philosopher” really means “one who loves wisdom.”
The Sophists took money for their more or less hairsplitting expoundings, and sophists of this kind have come and gone from time immemorial. I am referring to all the schoolmasters and self-opinionated know-it-alls who are satisfied with what little they know, or who boast of knowing a whole lot about subjects they haven’t the faintest notion of. You have probably come across a few of these sophists in your young life. A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world.
And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little. A philosopher is therefore someone who recognizes that there is a lot he does not understand, and is troubled by it. In that sense, he is still wiser than all those who brag about their knowledge of things they know nothing about.
“Wisest is she who knows she does not know,”. Socrates himself said, “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say it in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.
Like Socrates, who dared tell people how little we humans know. We can either fool ourselves and the rest of the world by pretending that we know all there is to know, or we can shut our eyes to the central issues once and for all and abandon all progress. In this sense, humanity is divided. People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
It is like dividing a deck of cards into two piles. You lay the black cards in one pile and the red in the other. But from time to time a joker turns up that is neither heart nor club, neither diamond nor spade. Socrates was this joker in Athens. He was neither certain nor indifferent. All he knew was that he knew nothing—and it troubled him. So he became a philosopher— someone who does not give up but tirelessly pursues his quest for truth.
An Athenian is said to have asked the oracle at Delphi who the wisest man in Athens was. The oracle answered that Socrates of all mortals was the wisest. When Socrates heard this he was astounded, to put it mildly. He went straight to the person in the city whom he, and everyone else, thought was excessively wise. But when it turned out that this person was unable to give Socrates satisfactory answers to his questions, Socrates realized that the oracle had been right. Socrates felt that it was necessary to establish a solid foundation for our knowledge. He believed that this foundation lay in man’s reason. With his unshakable faith in human reason he was decidedly a rationalist.
The Right Insight Leads to the Right Action
Socrates claimed that he was guided by a divine inner voice, and that this “conscience” told him what was right. “He who knows what good is will do good.”
By this he meant that the right insight leads to the right action. And only he who does right can be a “virtuous man.” When we do wrong it is because we don’t know any better. That is why it is so important to go on learning.
Socrates was concerned with finding clear and universally valid definitions of right and wrong. Unlike the Sophists, he believed that the ability to distinguish between right and wrong lies in people’s reason and not in society.
Socrates thought that no one could possibly be happy if they acted against their better judgment. And he who knows how to achieve happiness will do so. Therefore, he who knows what is right will do right. Because why would anybody choose to be unhappy? Can you live a happy life if you continually do things you know deep down are wrong? There are lots of people who lie and cheat and speak ill of others. Are they aware that these things are not right—or fair, if you prefer? Do you think these people are happy? Socrates didn’t.
PLATO (429–347 BC)
He was born into an aristocratic Athenian family. He is, along with Aristotle, perhaps the most important figure in the history of Western philosophy. Although he thought of entering politics, he became finally disillusioned with it following the execution of Socrates.
Around 380 BC Plato founded the Academy for the propagation of knowledge and education for the future rulers of Greek city-states.The curriculum of the Academy included philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and some natural science. Plato perhaps felt the need to try to put his political philosophy into action. He returned to Athens, and sheltered from the political storms around him.
He died at the age of eighty years old. It is against the Pre-Socratic background that the views of Socrates and Plato emerge; starting with a concern for ethical matters; but the same overall approach is applied to knowledge generally.
What is good or what the good is?
Socrates is seeking is a true or real definition; that is, not merely an account of how we, in fact, use a word, nor a stipulated use, but a definition that tells us of the true nature of the object or quality to which the word applies; that is, its essence.
To have knowledge of something, X, involves understanding what we truly mean by the term "X "; and understanding the true meaning of "X" involves saying what X is-what the essential fixed nature of X is-what it is for X to be the kind of thing it is.
Plato holds a realist theory of meaning and knowledge. The meaning of terms and that which we come to know is a process of discovering an existing objective reality "out there", not a process of creation which is relative to the apparatus-for example, language, or the senses - we use for the inquiry.
This notion of objectivity and invariance of standards-of being able to say what X is-applies to ethics and aesthetics, as well as science and mathematics; without fixed reference points for the meanings of classificatory terms, all significant talk about the world would be impossible.
To make our meanings match the world as it really is, is to seek true or real definitions, and requires objects, which the definitions are definitions of. The meaning of the word "justice" is not, in Plato's view, a mere conception in the mind, but is fixed mind-independently.
In agreeing with Heraclitus that the sensible world is in flux, Plato realizes that the objects of such definitions are not going to be found among imperfect and mutable sensible objects, but exist in a supersensible realm of immutable objects "seen" by the intellect beyond sense-experience.
What we mean by "horse" in general, if it is meaningful at all, is something other than any particular horse, each of which differs; each horse is a horse because of its sharing in a nature common to all horses.
It is from the search for definitions of universal, immutable, ethical standards that Plato's theory of Forms emerges as the basis for all knowledge (episieme) in its full sense.
For Plato, two main conditions have to be met for the highest sort of knowledge.
(a) Universality or objectivity : Knowledge of something is not relative to a point of view; knowledge should be something that would be true from any point of view.
(b) Unchangingness, eternality or immutability: This requires that knowledge is unchanging over time; that if something is knowledge, then it is knowledge once and for all; it cannot cease to be knowledge. Knowledge in its highest sense is infallible: it is absolutely certain.
There are two factors that make the world of sensible objects unsuitable for knowledge.
(a') That things and properties in the sensible world are not fully real, since they are not unconditionally what they appear, as how they appear depends on a point of view.
(b') That things in the sensible world are constantly changing. In this way sensible things can take on contrary properties over time; the sensible world is one of becoming.
Plato gives strict conditions for Knowledge:
· certainty,
· universality
· immutability.
We can further understand the Platonic ideal of knowledge, and the requirement that it be objective, through analogy with scientific laws of nature: Newton's first law of motion, "Every body continues in its state of rest , or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it" , is not a law applicable only to particular bodies, or bodies considered from a certain point of view; it at least applies to all bodies at all times and in all places.
The Forms have the following important characteristics.
(a") Universality or objectivity-The Forms are also what is universally or objectively true from any point of view.
(b") Unchangingness, eternality or immutability-Since the Form of F is immutable and indeed eternally what it is, there is no time at which the Form of F can become not-F, it is eternally F.
Taking (a") and (b") together gives the conditions for the mode of being of fully real existence, and this matches (a) and (b), the conditions for knowledge proper.
Plato's answer to both Heraclitus and Parmenides is the Forms. Plato agrees with Heraclitus that the world of sensible objects is ultimately in flux , and he agrees with Parmenides that the intellect alone knows the true nature of reality
Forms subsist beyond the flux of experience and space and time in a transcendent, supersensible realm that is ultimately perceived purely by the intellect. The Forms are pure objective essences, and as the objects of knowledge they match the characteristics required of knowledge itself.
Being (Forms) - knowledge
Becoming (sensible world) - true belief
Non-being (nothing) – ignorance
The way to approach true knowledge is by the method of dialectic: giving, improving, and eventually destroying, hypotheses assumptions used for justification in the sense of reasoned grounds for what we claim to know.
For it to be said that I know X, it has to be the case not only that I have beliefs, even if they are true, concerning X, but also that I can give an account of why it is true that X, or what X is; a proper account or justification marks the beginning of the distinction between belief and knowledge.
Reality should determine language to give objective concepts which are not our creation, but rather fixed, and imposed upon us.
The essential nature of a thing includes only those features which are necessary and jointly sufficient for it to be the kind of thing it is.
It is important to see that for Plato the concern is not with the necessary connection of propositions, or merely with the meaning of words, but with the nature of the objects the words stand for: real immutable eternal objects-the Forms with the required characteristic of being-understood by the sense-independent intellect through their descriptive concepts revealed in definitions or formulae.
ARISTOTLE (384-322 BC)
He was born the son of a prominent physician, in Macedon in north east Greece. At the age of seventeen he became a student of Plato's Academy, and later a teacher there.
In the early days he was generally in agreement with Platonic philosophy, later, in important respects, did he reject Plato's philosophy. He continued to share Plato's opposition to skepticism, and agreed that knowledge is possible; it is on how the skeptical problem is to be solved that they differed.
Aristotle was predisposed to take a greater interest than Plato in the natural world, of which Aristotle thought knowledge is possible. Following the death of Plato, Aristotle left the Athenian Academy, and was eventually tutor to the heir to the Macedonian throne, Alexander the Great.
Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BC, and taught at the Lyceum. A charge of impiety was brought against Aristotle; rather than be the central character in a replay of the fate of Socrates, he left Athens in 323 BC. Unable to return home to Stagira, the city of his birth, which had been destroyed, he went to the remote city of Chalcis, where he died in lonely exile in 322 BC at the age of sixty -two. He married twice, having been once widowed; by his second marriage he had a son, Nicomachus.
The philosophy of Aristotle owes a great deal to Plato.
First, although Aristotle rejected Plato's theory of real separately existing Forms, he held on to the notion of forms as the unchanging reality providing the basis for knowledge proper of what things are.
Aristotle's intelligible forms are immanent (in-dwelling) in sensible particulars, and cannot, unlike Platonic Forms, exist apart from particulars.
Second, Aristotle supports anti-mechanical, teleological methods of explanation.
Teleology is not so much an empirical hypothesis as a decision to adopt a certain method of explanation. It aims to explain why things are as they are by referring to the ends to which they aim; the end is being perfect, or fully developed, specimens of the kind of things they are.
Aristotle agrees with Plato that knowledge proper or scientific knowledge (episteme) must be certain and necessary; knowledge is of invariant or unchanging universal necessary truths. Knowledge must be knowledge of something.
Aristotle rejects Plato's solution of positing as the true objects of knowledge a realm of separately existing essences, the Forms:
first, because he thinks it only duplicates our problems concerning knowledge of the world, and second, because Plato gives no clear account of how individual objects in the world are supposed to participate in, or resemble, the Forms.
If the world is in constant flux, as Heraclitus suggests, then it cannot contain eternal unchanging objects suitable for knowledge.
If we adopt, on the other hand, a Parmenidean view, all change and plurality in the world are illusions, for they involve logical contradictions: F becoming not-F; hotness becoming coldness.
Atomism may seem to point to a way out, for atoms remain the same (have being) through change; indeed change is simply a rearrangement of the same atoms. Aristotle rejects atomism (or materialism).
For these reasons Aristotle posits substance as that which has identity or stability through change.
Substances are, in a sense, pivots around which change occurs.
This is supported by the logical analysis of the carrier of all true or false assertions about the world: the proposition.
In Aristotle's view propositions always contain two elements: the subject and the predicate. Predicates are what is said to be true or false of subjects.
Subjects can remain the same while having different, or indeed contrary, predicates applied to them, and predicates logic ally depend on there being subjects.
Predicates, whereby we say things about subjects, can be grouped in different sorts or categories that are the highest genera or classes of being and together may cover all modes of being.
Aristotle gives the ten genus categories as: substance, quality, quantity, relation (which are the chief categories), place, time, less temporary condition/ state, more temporary condition/ state, activity, passivity.
To say what kind of thing X is, is to give its essence; The essence or "whatness" of a thing is given in a real definition or formula which provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be what it is;
The essence of X therefore defines what we mean by an "X".
Contrary to Plato's theory of Forms, there cannot, metaphysically speaking, be universal attributes such as horseness without horses or paleness without some object or other that is pale.
The logical point about subjects and predicates, and the corresponding metaphysical dependence of some ways-of-being on others, led Aristotle to formulate two senses of substance.
(a) It must be that which is always a subject of predication, and never predicated of any subject.
(b) It must be that which has an independent or separate way-of-being or mode of existence.
The subject Socrates can change from young to old, pale to flushed, and yet he remains the same individual: an instance of a man.
Paleness as a way-of-being depends for its existence both on some in stances of paleness and on objects of some kind or other being pale;
The Greek word Aristotle uses for substance, ousia, is derived from "to be". So we have two meanings of substance:
(1) Primary substances: individual instances of the class of universals, designated by a certain category of predicates, which can exist separately being what they are-"this so-and-so", this X, this man, this horse.
(2) Secondary substances: the universals, designated by a certain category of predicates, which are the properties defining real or natural kinds or what something is, of which primary substances are instances: "so-and-so", Xness, man, horse.
In addition there are non-substances:
(3) Non-substances: the classes of universals and particulars, designated by certain categories of predicates, which are not capable of independent existence as identifiable instances of kinds or ways-of-being-X, a heap of bricks; Xness, paleness.
Primary substances are compounded of two elements,
(a') matter (hyle)
(b') form (eidos, morphe).
By "matter" here is meant something more general than the physical stuff out of which it is made; what is meant by "matter" is whatever it is that takes on a certain determinate form, which thereby turns a "this" into a "this so-and-so".
The form of a thing is immaterial and structural, and it is what gives matter a determinate character as a certain kind of thing.
The meaning of "matter" here is not restricted to physical stuff: "matter" might be a man's general character that takes on the form "bad" so he has a "bad character".
Matter and form are the logical parts of substance (apart from God who is pure actualized form); they always occur together and can be separated only in thought; we never find "prime matter" devoid of all specific determinations.
For example, a lump of bronze is matter with the determinate form of bronze, and a bronze statue is matter with the determinate form of bronze taking on the form of a statue. The same bronze statue may be melted down and take on a new form, turning it into a bronze bowl. With the progressive addition of form to matter we can move "upward" from clay, to bricks, to walls, to house.
That matter and form are logically distinct is shown by the fact that we can have the same form giving an instance of a kind of thing (a hammer) but different matter (some metal, some wood), and have the same matter (some metal) but a different form giving an instance of a kind of thing (a hammer, a chisel).
Aristotle distinguishes two sorts of change:
(a") substantial change
(b") non-substantial change, or accidental change.
As a man moves from being young to being old we have a case of non-substantial change; the subject of change remains, through the change, the same individual or instance of what kind of thing it is: a man. But when a man dies, we have a case of substantial change-the individual becomes a different kind of thing. What it is is something else: a mere pile of flesh and bones.
What remains the same through substantial change (a") is the matter (a') which has lost one form (b') and taken on another form. What remains constant through non-substantial change (b") is the form (b') or essence, formulated in a definition, that gives those properties that make a thing the kind of thing it is.
Another way of looking at this analysis of change is to make the distinction between the essential properties of things and the accidental properties of things; so these correspond to the secondary substances and the non-substances respectively. "actuality" and "potentiality"
To complete Aristotle's analysis of the nature of change, we have to make the distinction between "actuality" and "potentiality". When matter takes on a certain form, there is contained within the nature of the form not only what the actual form is at any given time, but also the potential further actualizations. For example, an acorn has a certain determinate actuality (actual state) at any given time; but it is also potentially an oak tree.
The point to be noted is that the form limits the way that a particular kind of thing goes on; acorns do not develop into horses, but have a certain natural course of development. An eye that is blind suffers from "privation", because it is not actualizing its potential; whereas to say that a tree cannot see is not to say it suffers from privation, since to actualize seeing is not a potential part of the form of a tree.
Substantial and Accidental change
Natural kinds are divisions of nature herself, not divisions imposed arbitrarily by us in language; the divisions are discovered, not created.
The explanation of change is, however, sometimes very unclear. This is partly due to difficulties as to what natural kinds there actually are.
This produces the problem of distinguishing.
If, for example, we have a change of property from f to g, it may not be clear if it is correct to say, "Xf has become Xg" (an accidental change), or if it is correct to say, "Xf has become Yg" (a substantial change).
If sweet wine turns sour, it is unclear whether it is correct to say that the sweet wine has become sour wine (an accidental change), or that the wine has become vinegar (a substantial change).
The form of a thing is an intelligible form; it is ultimately perceived not by the senses, but by the intellect or reasonably intellectual intuition (nous). It is this reference to the kinds or sorts of things there are in the world that is the basis for scientific knowledge and explanations of the world.
Knowledge is knowledge of "causes ", and Aristotle gives four senses to the notion of "cause". It is important to see that "cause" here has a wider connotation than our mechanical notion, and none of Aristotle's four senses really matches our use of the concept.
Four Causes
Aristotle distinguishes four "causes" answering "Why is X as it is?":
(a) Material
(b) Formal
(c) Efficient
(d) Final or Teleological
(a) here refers to the matter or stuff (not necessarily physical stuff) out of which X is made.
(b) refers to what kind of thing X is; it is a "so-and- so".
(c) refers to the agent (not what the agent does) that brings X about.
(d) refers to what X is for, or what its goal or end state will be; what its purpose is.
If we take the case of a house, we can see that (a) is the bricks out of which it is made; (b) is the kind of house it is (Victorian sty le terrace); (c) is the men who built it; (d) points to its purpose of providing shelter.
Knowledge proper requires that its objects must be both really existing, and eternal and unchanging.
If nothing in the sensible world is eternal and unchanging, then it follows that knowledge of the sensible world is not possible.
If it is also the case that the sensible world is the only really existing world, then knowledge is not possible at all.
If knowledge is possible, but it is accepted that the sensible world is not eternal and unchanging, then knowledge must be of a really existing transcendent supersensible world of eternal and unchanging objects: the Forms or essences of Plato.
If knowledge is possible, but it is accepted that the sensible world is the only real world, then knowledge must be of really existing eternal and unchanging features of the sensible world: the forms or real kinds of Aristotle.
That is, if knowledge proper is possible, it must be the case either that there is a world of eternal and unchanging real objects beyond the sensible world (the position of Plato), or that there are eternal and unchanging real features of the sensible world (the position of Aristotle).
Aristotle holds that there is something about the sensible world that is eternal and unchanging and graspable ultimately by the intellect and is a suitable object for scientific knowledge: the natural kinds of things there are and the relations between them. These natural kinds are objective really existing features of the world, not mere arbitrary conventional classifications imposed by us.
It is natural or real kinds that are the proper objects of knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is knowledge of causes: giving the reason why X is as it is, and must be as it is.
The most general and firmest of these principles is the law of non-contradiction, which in the Metaphysics Aristotle states thus: "For the same thing to hold good and not to hold good simultaneously of the same thing and in the same respect is impossible."
The positing of such fixed intelligible forms is what makes a scientific knowledge of nature possible, in the sense of knowing universal necessary truths about universal necessary features of the world.
The point at issue here is whether there is such a thing as natural necessity: whether there are necessary features and connections in the natural world expressible in necessary truths, or whether such necessity is restricted to logical truths which say nothing about the natural world, although they may say something about a world of real objects apprehended by pure intellectual thought beyond the natural world.
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