A Little History of Philosophy

Socrates/Plato (400 BC) - Uses clever counter-examples to show that his interlocutor's comments don't apply in every situation and demonstrate that they didn't really know what they thought they knew.
- The man who breaks free is like a philosopher. He sees beyond appearances. Ordinary people have little idea about reality because they are content with looking at what's in front of them rather than thinking deeply about it. But the appearances are deceptive. What they see are shadows, not reality.
- Socrates was a great talker, Plato was a superb writer, and Aristotle was interested in everything.
Aristotle (384 BC) - Believed that the way to understand any general category was to examine particular examples of it. He thought that every virtue lies in between two extremes. Bravery is halfway between foolhardiness and cowardice - doctrine of the Golden Mean
Pyrrho (365-270 BC) - Scepticism. The foundations of your thought aren't anything like as firm as you'd like to believe and are unlikely to make you happy. The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get close to the truth, or at least to reveal how little we know or can know.
Epicurus (341-270 BC) - The Garden. We all seek pleasure and avoid pain whenever we can. The best way to live is to have a very simple lifestyle, be kind to those around you, and surround yourself with friends. "I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind."
Zeno of Citium (334-262 BC) - Stoicism. We are responsible for what we feel and think. We can choose our response to good and bad luck. Emotions don't simply happen to us. Psychological techniques that will make our lives calmer. Other Stoics:
- Cicero (106-43 BC)
- Seneca (1 BC-65 AD)
- Epictetus (55-135 AD)
Augustine (354-430) - Within a person the Manicheans believed, goodness came from the soul. Evil came from the body, with all its weaknesses and desires and its tendency to lead us astray.
Boethius (475-525) - "The Consolation of Philosophy"
Anselm (1033-1109)
Aquinas (1225-74) - God is the uncaused cause of everything that is.
Machiavelli (1469-1527) - "The Prince" It's better as a leader to be feared than to be loved.
Hobbes (1588-1679) - Leviathan (1651) At heart we are all selfish and it is only the rule of law and the threat of punishment that keep us in check. Life outside of society would be nasty, brutish, and short. Individuals in the state of nature would have to enter into a "social contract", an agreement to give up some of their dangerous freedoms for the sake of safety. Without what he called a "sovereign", life would be a kind of hell. Safety was far more important than freedom. Fear of death would drive people towards forming a society.
Descartes (1596-1650)
Pascal (1623-62) - Everyone is torn between anxiety and despair.
Spinoza (1632-77) - Thought that God was the world. Wrote philosophy as if it were geometry. The proofs in his book Ethics look like geometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions. Everything fits together in one huge system and the best way to understand is by the power of thought. Rationalism - emphasizing reason rather than experiment. Was a determinist. The best we can achieve is for our emotions to emerge from our own choices rather than external events. Even though these choices can never be fully free, it is better to be active than passive.
Locke (1632-1704) - His view that we have a God-given right to life, freedom, happiness, and property influenced the founding fathers who wrote the US constitution. Bodily continuity doesn't decide the issue of personal identity. What matters is psychological continuity.
Berkeley (1685-1753) - Immaterialism. There is no reality at all beyond the ideas that we have. An object is just a collection of ideas that you and other people have of it. God was constantly perceiving things in the world, so they continued to exist.
Leibniz (1646-1716) - Principle of Sufficient Reason
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Hume (1711-76)
Rousseau (1712-78) - When people get together and form a society, they become a ind of person. Each individual is then part of a greater whole. They way they can stay truly free in society is to obey laws that are in line with the General Will. If someone can't identify the right thing to do, they become "freer" by being forced to conform.
Kant (1724-1804) - Interested in the limits of thought, the limits of what we can know and understand. We can know about the phenomenal world, the world around us, which we experience with our senses.
- Can we know anything a priori? Empiricists, like Locke, thought no, while rationalists, like Descartes, thought yes. Kant thought that knowledge that reveals truth about the world, yet is arrived at independently of experience, is possible - synthetic a priori knowledge. We can, by the power of reason, discover features of our own minds that tint all our experience.
Bentham (1748-1832) - The Panopticon. Utilitarianism or the Greatest Happiness Principle.
Hegel (1770-1831) - Everything is in a state of change which takes the form of a gradual increase in self-awareness and reality is constantly moving towards its goal of understanding itself. The main thrust of history turns out to be Spirit understanding its own freedom.
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - Life is painful and it would be better not to have been born. Reality exists both as Will and as Representation. Will is the blind driving force that is found in absolutely everything that exists. The World of Representation is your way of making sense of everything and it requires your consciousness. Your mind organizes your experience to make sense of it all. No other philosopher has given such a central place to the arts.
Mill (1806-73) - The Harm Principle. Every adult should be free to live as he or she pleases as long as no one else is harmed in the process.
Darwin (1809-82) -
Kierkegaard (1813-55) - Fear and Trembling (1842). Decision-making is built into the title of his most famous work Either/Or. This book gives the reader a choice between either a life of pleasure and chasing after beauty or one based on conventional moral rules, a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical.
Marx (1818-83)
James (1842-1910) - Pragmatism. Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficial impact on our lives. Words are tools that we do things with, rather than symbols that somehow mirror the way the world is. Words allow us to cope with the world, not copy it.
- Peirce (1839-1914)
Nietzsche (1844-1900) - If God is dead, what comes next?
Freud (1856-1939)
Russell (1872-1970) - Set theory seemed to promise a way of explaining the structure of all our reasoning. Started the linguistic turn in philosophy, where philosophers began to think very hard about language and its underlying logical form.
Ayer (1910-89) - Logical Positivism, celebrating science as the greatest human achievement. Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)
Sartre (1905-80) - Existentialism. Through the choices I make in my life I paint a picture of what I think a human being ought to be like. If I do this sincerely, it is a great responsibility.
- De Beauvoir (1908-86)
Wittgenstein (1889-1951) - Instead of assuming all games have a single thing in common, he thinks we should see words like "game" as "family resemblance terms". The idea of a private language of sensations doesn't make sense at all. Many philosophers before him thought that each individual's mind was completely private.
Arendt (1906-75) -
Popper (1902-94) - Science progresses when we realize that a particular way of thinking about reality is false.
Kuhn - There aren't facts out there waiting to be discovered: instead, the framework or paradigm to some extent fixes what you can think about. And then it shifts.
Singer (1946-) - Consistency is treating similar cases in a similar way.