Summary of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The place-names on the academic maps of philosophy tend to change. In the Middle Ages, for example, philosophy covered practically every branch of theoretical knowledge that did not come under theology.

#2 The history of philosophy is the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind. It is not a defined discipline, but rather a collection of different inquiries that have been adopted by other disciplines.

#3 The attempt to push rational inquiry to its limits is often bound to fail, and then the dream of reason which motivates philosophical thinking seems like a mirage. At other times, though, it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration.

#4 The first philosophers were showmen who performed poetry and prose readings in public. They attracted passing audiences, devoted followers, and sometimes ridicule. The Presocratics invented the archetypes of all later philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822500952

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Insights on Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The place-names on the academic maps of philosophy tend to change. In the Middle Ages, for example, philosophy covered practically every branch of theoretical knowledge that did not come under theology.

#2

The history of philosophy is the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind. It is not a defined discipline, but rather a collection of different inquiries that have been adopted by other disciplines.

#3

The attempt to push rational inquiry to its limits is often bound to fail, and then the dream of reason which motivates philosophical thinking seems like a mirage. At other times, though, it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration.

#4

The first philosophers were showmen who performed poetry and prose readings in public. They attracted passing audiences, devoted followers, and sometimes ridicule. The Presocratics invented the archetypes of all later philosophy.

#5

The Presocratics were a group of Greek philosophers who lived between the eighth and fourth centuries BC. They were famous for their wisdom, but their writings have been shattered by time and only survive in small fragments.

#6

Thales was a well-traveled man who had learned about the cycle of eclipses in the past. He made a lucky guess that the moon would block the sun, which led to the solar eclipse that he predicted would occur in 585 BC.

#7

Thales was the first person to propose that the earth rests on water. He said this because it floated like wood and other similar substances, which are so constituted as to rest upon water but not upon air. His reasoning did not impress Aristotle, who pointed out that if the earth needs something to rest on, then so does the water which allegedly supports it.

#8

The Greeks appreciated intellectual order, and they liked to establish it wherever it seemed to be lacking. They wrote their history in a stately procession of teachers and pupils, each one passing the torch of knowledge to an appointed successor.

#9

Anaximander’s work demonstrated the urge to simplify and reduce observable phenomena. He postulated something invisible as the arche, or basic stuff, of the world. He believed that the best accounts of nature could not always rely on what was directly observable.

#10

Anaximander believed that everything in the universe was born out of an indeterminate and undifferentiated mass. The fundamental opposites were born together out of the indeterminate, and none of the battling substances had an unfair head start on its opponent.

#11

Anaximander’s story is that the earth is at the center of things, and that life on earth is the result of the same process of separating out that created the cosmos. The idea that living things can be generated spontaneously out of warm, moist matter was almost universal until the seventeenth century, when microscopes began to reveal a different story.

#12

Anaximander’s explanation for the arrival of man was that the first men were carried inside fishes, or fish-like creatures, which acted as surrogate mothers. He did not mean that one species, man, developed from another species, fish. He thought that the first men were nursed by fish and could look after themselves once they emerged on land.

#13

Anaximenes was a Greek philosopher who believed that the world was made of air. He believed that everything was made of air, and he even tried to explain how. He believed that the fundamental stuff of the world itself had the power to grow and change.

#14

Anaximenes believed that the world was made of air, and that the different elements were formed from different amounts of air. He used his new tools of condensation and rarefaction to explain the weather, but he ended up saying the same thing as Anaximander.

#15

The Milesians were the first philosophers to use reason to try and explain the world around them. They believed in a world governed by comprehensible law, and they used this faith to come up with good explanations of things such as life, eclipses, and thunder.

#16

The Milesians were the first people to believe that everything can be explained. They did not believe in the divinely mysterious on the one hand and the naturally explicable on the other. They believed that everything can be explained.

#17

The first philosophers were not necessarily atheistic. They were practical men who had little time for myths. They were also free-thinking when it came to religion, and they did not have very enthusiastic beliefs about the Olympian gods.

#18

The first philosophers in Greece were able to crystallize their beliefs and myths, and thus make them available for examination and criticism. This was a novel opportunity