極簡哲學史 A Quick History of Philosophy - 1

For younger readers and those with short attention spans, here is my own abbreviated and simplified history of Western Philosophy, all on one (long) page. The explanations are necessarily simplistic and lacking in detail, though, and the links should be followed for more information.

Pre-Socratic Philosophy

Western Philosophy - by which we usually mean everything apart from the Eastern Philosophy of China, India, Japan, Persia, etc - really began in Ancient Greece in about the 6th Century B.C. Thales of Miletus is usually considered the first proper philosopher, although he was just as concerned with natural philosophy (what we now call science) as with philosophy as we know it.

Thales and most of the other Pre-Socratic philosophers (i.e. those who lived before Socrates) limited themselves in the main to Metaphysics (inquiry into the nature of existence, being and the world). They were Materialists (they believed that all things are composed of material and nothing else) and were mainly concerned with trying to establish the single underlying substance the world is made up of (a kind of Monism), without resorting to supernatural or mythological explanations. For instance, Thales thought the whole universe was composed of different forms of water; Anaximenes concluded it was made of air; Heraclitus thought it was fire; and Anaximander some unexplainable substance usually translated as "the infinite" or "the boundless".

Another issue the Pre-Socratics wrestled with was the so-called problem of change, how things appear to change from one form to another. At the extremes, Heraclitusbelieved in an on-going process of perpetual change, a constant interplay of opposites; Parmenides, on the other hand, using a complicated deductive argument, denied that there was any such thing as change at all, and argued that everything that exists is permanent, indestructible and unchanging. This might sound like an unlikely proposition, but Parmenides's challenge was well-argued and was important in encouraging other philosophers to come up with convincing counter-arguments. Zeno of Elea was a student of Parmenides, and is best known for his famous paradoxes of motion (the best known of which is that of the Achilles and the Hare), which helped to lay the foundations for the study of Logic. However, Zeno's underlying intention was really to show, like Parmenides before him, that all belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion.

Although these ideas might seem to us rather simplistic and unconvincing today, we should bear in mind that, at this time, there was really no scientific knowledgewhatsoever, and even the commonest of phenomena (e.g. lightning, water freezing to ice, etc) would have appeared miraculous. Their attempts were therefore important first steps in the development of philosophical thought. They also set the stage for two other important Pre-Socratic philosophers: Empedocles, who combined their ideas into the theory of the four classical elements (earth, air, fire and water), which became the standard dogma for much of the next two thousand years; and Democritus, who developed the extremely influential idea of Atomism (that all of reality is actually composed of tiny, indivisible and indestructible building blocks known as atoms, which form different combinations and shapes within the surrounding void).

Another early and very influential Greek philosopher was Pythagoras, who led a rather bizarre religious sect and essentially believed that all of reality was governed by numbers, and that its essence could be encountered through the study of mathematics.

Classical Philosophy

Philosophy really took off, though, with Socrates and Plato in the 5th - 4th Century B.C. (often referred to as the Classical or Socratic period of philosophy). Unlike most of the Pre-Socratic philosophers before him, Socrates was more concerned with how people should behave, and so was perhaps the first major philosopher of Ethics. He developed a system of critical reasoning in order to work out how to live properlyand to tell the difference between right and wrong. His system, sometimes referred to as the Socratic Method, was to break problems down into a series of questions, the answers to which would gradually distill a solution. Although he was careful to claim not to have all the answers himself, his constant questioning made him many enemies among the authorities of Athens who eventually had him put to death.

Socrates himself never wrote anything down, and what we know of his views comes from the "Dialogues" of his student Plato, perhaps the best known, most widely studied and most influential philosopher of all time. In his writings, Plato blended Ethics, Metaphysics, Political Philosophy and Epistemology (the theory of knowledgeand how we can acquire it) into an interconnected and systematic philosophy. He provided the first real opposition to the Materialism of the Pre-Socratics, and he developed doctrines such as Platonic Realism, Essentialism and Idealism, including his important and famous theory of Forms and universals (he believed that the world we perceive around us is composed of mere representations or instances of the pure ideal Forms, which had their own existence elsewhere, an idea known as Platonic Realism). Plato believed that virtue was a kind of knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) that we need in order to reach the ultimate good, which is the aim of all human desires and actions (a theory known as Eudaimonism). Plato's Political Philosophy was developed mainly in his famous "Republic", where he describes an ideal (though rather grim and anti-democratic) society composed of Workers and Warriors, ruled over by wise Philosopher Kings.

The third in the main trio of classical philosophers was Plato's student Aristotle. He created an even more comprehensive system of philosophy than Plato, encompassing Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, Metaphysics, Logic and science, and his work influenced almost all later philosophical thinking, particularly those of the Medieval period. Aristotle's system of deductive Logic, with its emphasis on the syllogism (where a conclusion, or synthesis, is inferred from two other premises, the thesis and antithesis), remained the dominant form of Logic until the 19th Century. Unlike Plato, Aristotle held that Form and Matter were inseparable, and cannot exist apart from each other. Although he too believed in a kind of Eudaimonism, Aristotle realized that Ethics is a complex concept and that we cannot always control our own moral environment. He thought that happiness could best be achieved by living a balanced life and avoiding excess by pursuing a golden mean in everything (similar to his formula for political stability through steering a middle course between tyranny and democracy).

Other Ancient Philosophical Schools

In the philosophical cauldron of Ancient Greece, though (as well as the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations which followed it over the next few centuries), several other schools or movements also held sway, in addition to Platonism and Aristotelianism:

• Sophism (the best known proponents being Protagoras and Gorgias), which held generally relativistic views on knowledge (i.e. that there is no absolute truthand two points of view can be acceptable at the same time) and generally skeptical views on truth and morality (although, over time, Sophism came to denote a class of itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in rhetoric and "excellence" or "virtue" for money).
• Cynicism, which rejected all conventional desires for health, wealth, power and fame, and advocated a life free from all possessions and property as the way to achieving Virtue (a life best exemplified by its most famous proponent, Diogenes).
• Skepticism (also known as Pyrrhonism after the movement's founder, Pyrrho), which held that, because we can never know the true innner substance of things, only how they appear to us (and therefore we can never know which opinions are right or wrong), we should suspend judgment on everything as the only way of achieving inner peace.
• Epicureanism (named for its founder Epicurus), whose main goal was to attain happiness and tranquility through leading a simple, moderate life, the cultivation of friendships and the limiting of desires (quite contrary to the common perception of the word "epicurean").
• Hedonism, which held that pleasure is the most important pursuit of mankind, and that we should always act so as to maximize our own pleasure.
• Stoicism (developed by Zeno of Citium, and later espoused by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius), which taught self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions in order to develop clear judgment and inner calm and the ultimate goal of freedom from suffering.
• Neo-Platonism (developed out of Plato's work, largely by Plotinus), which was a largely religious philosophy which became a strong influence on early Christianity (especially on St. Augustine), and taught the existence of an ineffable and transcendent One, from which the rest of the universe "emanates" as a sequence of lesser beings.