1. Chapter 2
Philosophy’s History

2. Early Greek Philosophy
Western philosophy appeared in Greece in the sixth century b.c.e.
First attempt to provide a thoroughly secular & rational explanation of the natural world
What is the basic reality underlying the world, changeless stuff of which:
All things are made?
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3. Early Greek Philosophy
Anaximander
The Eleatics, Parmenides
Zeno
The Atomists, Democritus
Leucippus
Idealism
Pythagoreans
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4. Early Greek Philosophy
Plato and Aristotle
pre-Socratic thought
Plato combined the Pythagorean and Eleatic conception of reality
With the Socratic concern with morality
Multiplicity of the ordinary physical world on the basis of eternal, unchanging, ideal entities
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5. Early Greek Philosophy
The discrepancy between our ideas and those things in the world to which those ideas refer
Tried to explain the ordinary world of sense particulars on the basis of the universal Forms
Eleaticism and materialism
Aristotle objected to some of Plato’s reasoning
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6. Philosophy in The Middle Ages
Wed philosophy to the requirements of the expanding Christian religion
Thomas Aquinas
Duns Scotus
The rise of the New Science toward the end of the Renaissance
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7. Modern Philosophy Rene Descartes Idealist trend
Knowledge must be erected on a solid foundation of certainty
Idealist trend
Continental Rationalists
British Empiricists
The possibility of a priori knowledge
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8. Modern Philosophy
Immanuel Kant came up with an ingenious resolution of rationalism and empiricism
Objects of our experience can be neither pure sensation (matter) nor pure thought (form)
Absolute idealists on one side and liberals on the other
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9. Twentieth-Century Philosophy
The twentieth century was characterized by a revolution against the past
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, John L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson
Maurice Merlearu-Ponty
Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, and Robert Brandom
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10. The Future of Philosophy
Philosophers are beginning to absorb currents of thought outside:
Their own Western tradition from Africa, the Middle East, and especially the Far East
Everyone has to be his or her own philosopher
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