Philosophy: Basic Notions, Volume 1

By Nicolae Sfetcu

A basic introduction to the world of philosophy, with answers to the deepest questions we all ask ourselves, through the lens of the world's greatest philosophers, from Plato and Confucius to modern thinkers. A guide to the fundamental nature of existence, society and the way we think.
After an overview of philosophy, with the history of philosophy, branches of philosophy, philosophical concepts and philosophical schools and traditions, specific topics in philosophy are addressed, such as God (religion), good and evil (ethics), animal rights, politics (political philosophy), appearance and reality, science (philosophy of science), mind (philosophy of mind), and art (aesthetics).
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning such matters as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. Classical philosophical questions include both abstract questions (Is it possible to know something and prove it? What is most real?) and more practical and concrete questions (Is there an optimal way to live? Is it better to be just or unjust? Do people have free will?)
Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of approaching these problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and reliance on rational arguments.
Other investigations are closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits. For example, is beauty objective or subjective? Are there many scientific methods or just one? Is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy? The main sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics ("concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being"), epistemology (about the nature and foundations of knowledge andits limits and validity), ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic, philosophy of science and the history of Western philosophy.
Many philosophical debates that began in antiquity are still debated today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicolae Sfetcu
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9786060337522

Nicolae Sfetcu

Owner and manager with MultiMedia SRL and MultiMedia Publishing House. Project Coordinator for European Teleworking Development Romania (ETD) Member of Rotary Club Bucuresti Atheneum Cofounder and ex-president of the Mehedinti Branch of Romanian Association for Electronic Industry and Software Initiator, cofounder and president of Romanian Association for Telework and Teleactivities Member of Internet Society Initiator, cofounder and ex-president of Romanian Teleworking Society Cofounder and ex-president of the Mehedinti Branch of the General Association of Engineers in Romania Physicist engineer - Bachelor of Science (Physics, Major Nuclear Physics). Master of Philosophy.

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Philosophy

Basic Notions

Volume 1

Nicolae Sfetcu

Published by MultiMedia Publishing

Copyright 2022 Nicolae Sfetcu

Published by MultiMedia Publishing, https://www.telework.ro/en/publishing/

ISBN: 978-606-033-752-2

Source: Sections 1-13: Telework, CC BY-SA 3.0 text license, translation and adaptation from Wikipedia by Nicolae Sfetcu; Sections Introduction and Evolution or progress of philosophy: Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie - Tome premier: L’Antiquité et le Moyen âge, Librairie Félix Alcan, Paris, 1928. Tanslation and adaptation by Nicolae Sfetcu © 2022 Nicolae Sfetcu

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Introduction

It has sometimes seemed that the history of philosophy could only be an obstacle to living thought, a burden and a hindrance for whoever rushes towards the truth. Don't believe in the past! Emerson says to nature. You think, in moments of leisure, that there is enough history, literature, science behind you to exhaust thought and prescribe your future as well as any future. In lucid hours, you will see that there is not yet a line of writing. Words of a conquering pioneer, who fears like a deaf resentment of the past against the freedom of the future. And it is also, in another sense, the freedom of the mind, the autonomy of the development of reason, that Descartes defended against the forces of the past, by rebuilding on the ground the edifice of philosophy.

There are, it is true, only too many reasons to fear the past, when it claims to continue in the present and to be eternal, as if the mere duration created some right. But history is precisely the discipline which considers the past as such, and which, as it penetrates it further, sees, in each of its moments, an originality without precedent and which will never return. Far from being an obstacle, history is therefore, in philosophy as everywhere, a true liberator. It alone, by the variety of views it gives us of the human mind, can uproot prejudices and suspend over-hasty judgments.

But is an overview of the philosophical past possible? Does it not risk, because of the enormous complexity of the facts, to be either very difficult, if it does not choose and only wants to let itself go to the rhythm of indefinitely multiple thoughts, or else superficial, if it chooses? It is certain that one cannot imagine the past without classifying the facts in it in some way; this classification implies certain assumptions. The very idea of ​​undertaking a history of philosophy presupposes that we have posed and resolved, in a way that is at least provisional, the following three problems:

I. What are the origins and what are the boundaries of philosophy? Did philosophy begin in the 6th century in the Ionian cities, as a tradition that goes back to Aristotle admits, or did it have a more ancient origin either in the Greek countries or in the Eastern countries? Can and should the historian of philosophy limit himself to following the development of philosophy in Greece and in the countries of civilization of Greco-Roman origin, or should he extend his view to Eastern civilizations?

II. Secondly, how far and how much has philosophical thought developed sufficiently autonomously to be the subject of a history distinct from that of other intellectual disciplines? Is it not too intimately linked to the sciences, to art, to religion, to political life, for one to be able to make philosophical doctrines the object of separate research?

III. Finally, can we speak of a regular evolution or of a progress of philosophy? Or does human thought possess, from the outset, all the possible solutions to the problems it poses, and then only repeats itself indefinitely? Or do the systems replace each other in an arbitrary and contingent way?

Of these three problems, we think that there is no rigorous solution, and that all the solutions that have been claimed to give contain implicit postulates. It is however essential to take a position on these questions, if one wants to approach the history of philosophy; the only possible course is to bring out very explicitly the postulates contained in the solution that we accept.

Origins and boundaries of philosophy

The first question, that of origins, remains unresolved. Alongside those who, with Aristotle, made Thales the first philosopher in the sixth century, there were already historians in Greece who traced back beyond Hellenism, to the barbarians, the origins of the philosophy ; Diogenes Laertius, in the preface to his Lives of the Philosophers, speaks to us of the fabulous antiquity of philosophy among the Persians and the Egyptians. Thus, from antiquity, the two theses clashed: was philosophy an invention of the Greeks or a heritage they received from the Barbarians?

It seems that the orientalists, as they reveal to us the pre-Hellenic civilizations, such as the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations with which the cities of Ionia, the cradle of Greek philosophy, were in contact, give reason to the second of these theses. It is impossible not to feel the kinship of thought between the known thesis of the first Greek philosopher, Thales, that all things are made of water, and the beginning of the Poem of Creation, written many centuries earlier in Mesopotamia: When the sky above was unnamed, and the earth below had no name, of the primordial Apsu, their father, and of the tumultuous Tiamat, their mother to all, the waters merged into one. (Louis Delaporte, Mesopotamia) Such texts suffice at least to show us that Thales was not the inventor of an original cosmogony; the cosmogonic images, which he perhaps clarified, had existed for long centuries. We feel that the philosophy of the first physiologists of Ionia could be a new form of an extremely old theme.

The recent research on the history of mathematics has led to a similar conclusion. As early as 1910, G. Milhaud wrote: The material accumulated in mathematics by the Orientals and the Egyptians was decidedly more important and richer than was still generally suspected ten years ago..

Finally, the work of anthropologists on lower societies introduces new data which further complicates the problem of the origin of philosophy. We find, in fact, in Greek philosophy, intellectual traits which have their analogy only in a primitive mentality. The notions used by the first philosophers, those of destiny, justice, soul, god, are not notions that they created or elaborated themselves, they are popular ideas, collective representations that they have found. It is, it seems, these notions which serve them as schemas or categories for conceiving external nature. The idea that the Ionian physiologists have of the order of nature, as of a regular grouping of beings or forces on which sovereign destiny imposes their limit, is due to the transport of the social order into the external world; philosophy is perhaps, at its origin, only a kind of vast social metaphor. Facts as strange as the numerical symbolism of the Pythagoreans who admit that everything is number would be explained by this form of thought which a German philosopher called the morpho-logico-structural thought of the primitives and which he opposed to the functional thinking  based on the principle of causality; as the North American Zuni people correspond to the division of their race into seven parts, the division into seven of the village, of the regions of the world, of the elements, of time, so the Pythagoreans or even Plato in the Timaeus continually invent correspondences numbers of the same order. The resemblance affirmed in the Timaeus between the intervals of the planets and the musical scale seems to us completely arbitrary and the logic escapes us.

If this is so, the first philosophical systems of the Greeks would not be primitive at all; they would only be the elaborated form of a much older thought. It is undoubtedly in this mentality that we should seek the true origin of philosophical thought or at least of one of its aspects. A. Comte was not wrong in seeing in what he called fetishism the root of the philosophical representation of the universe; Now that, through folklore and studies on uncivilized peoples, we have a more precise and more positive knowledge of the state of mind of the primitives, we have a better idea of ​​all that remains of it in the evolved metaphysics of Greeks.

Thus the first philosophers of Greece did not really have to invent; they worked on representations of complexity and richness but also of the confusion of which we can hardly get an idea. They had less to invent than to disentangle and choose, or rather the invention was in this discernment itself. We would no doubt understand them better if we knew what they rejected than if we knew what they kept. Moreover, we sometimes see repressed representations reappearing; and the underlying primitive thought makes a continual effort, which sometimes succeeds, to break down the dikes in which it is contained.

If, despite these remarks, we have our story begin with Thales, it is therefore not that we are ignoring the long prehistory in which philosophical thought was elaborated; it is only for this practical reason that the epigraphic documents of the Mesopotamian civilizations are few and of difficult access, and it is then because the documents on the savage peoples cannot provide us with indications of what was primitive Greece.

*

The question of the boundaries of the history of philosophy, related to that of origins, cannot be resolved with precision either. It is undeniable that there has been, at certain times, in the countries of the Far East and especially in India, a real flowering of philosophical systems. But it is a question of knowing if the Greco-Roman world, then Christian on the one hand, the extreme Eastern world on the other, had an intellectual development completely independent of each other: in this case , it would be permissible to disregard the philosophy of the Far East in an exposition of Western philosophy. The situation is far from being so clear: for antiquity first of all, the easy commercial relations that there were from Alexander until the Arab invasions between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East made intellectual relationships possible. We have precise testimonies of it; the Greeks, travelers or philosophers, wrote a lot about India at that time; the remains of this literature, particularly from the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our era, testify at least to a keen curiosity for Indian thought. On the other hand, in the High Middle Ages, a philosophy developed in Muslim countries of which Greek, Aristotelian or Neoplatonic thought certainly formed the essential, but which, however, does not seem to have been without undergoing, on various occasions , the influence of the Indian neighborhood. Now, we will see what place this Arab philosophy had in Christianity, from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. It is therefore a very important question to know what are the degrees and the limits of this influence, direct or indirect. But it is also a very difficult question: the influence of Greece on the Far East, which is proven today in matters of art, was undoubtedly very strong in the intellectual field, and much stronger than the inverse influence of India on Hellenism. Given the uncertainty of the dates of Indian literature, the similarities between Greek and Indian thought cannot testify which of the two comes from the influence. It seems that it was only under Greek influence that the Hindus gave to the presentation of their ideas the systematic and orderly character that our intellectual habits, inherited from the Greeks, make us consider as linked to the very notion of philosophy.

History of philosophy

Our second problem is that of the degree of independence of the history of philosophy with regard to the history of other intellectual disciplines. But we refuse to pose it dogmatically, as if it were a question of settling the question of the relationship of philosophy, taken as a thing in itself, with religion, science or politics. We want to pose it and resolve it historically; that is to say that it cannot admit of a simple and uniform solution. The history of philosophy cannot be, if it wants to be faithful, the abstract history of ideas and systems, separated from the intentions of their authors, and from the moral and social atmosphere in which they were born. It is impossible to deny that, at different times, philosophy has had, in what could be called the intellectual regime of the time, a very different place. In the course of history, we meet philosophers who are above all scholars; others are above all social reformers, like Auguste Comte, or teachers of morality, like the Stoic philosophers, and preachers, like the cynics; there are, among them, solitary meditators, professionals of speculative thought, like a Descartes or Kant, alongside men who aim at an immediate practical influence, like Voltaire. Personal meditation sometimes is simple self-reflection, and sometimes borders on ecstasy.

And it is not only because of their personal temperament that they are so different, it is because of what society, in each era, demands of a philosopher. The noble Roman, who seeks a director of conscience, the popes of the thirteenth century who see in the philosophical teaching a means of strengthening Christianity, the encyclopedists who want to put an end to the oppression of the forces of past ask very different things of philosophy; they alternately become missionaries, critics, teachers.

These are, it will be said, accidents; no matter what society wants to do with philosophy; what is important is that it remains, in the midst of the different intentions of those who use it; whatever their divergences, there is no philosophy except where there is rational thought, that is to say thought capable of criticizing itself and making an effort to justify itself with reasons. Isn't this aspiration to a rational value, one might think, a sufficiently characteristic and permanent feature to justify this abstract history of doctrines, this history of pure reason, as Kant says, who sketched out the idea? Sufficient to distinguish philosophy from religious belief, this trait would also distinguish it from the positive sciences; because the history of the positive sciences is completely inseparable from the history of the techniques from which they came and which they perfected. There is no scientific law which is not, under another aspect, a rule of action on things; philosophy, on the other hand, is pure speculation, pure effort to understand, without any other concern.

This solution would be very acceptable, if it did not have the immediate consequence of eliminating from the history of philosophy all the doctrines which make a part of belief, of intuition, intellectual or not, of sentiment, that is to say master doctrines; it therefore implies a firm opinion on philosophy, much more than an exact view of its history. To isolate a doctrine from the movement of ideas which brought it, from the feeling and the intention which guide it, to consider it as a theorem to be proved, is to replace by a dead thought a living and significant thought. We can understand a philosophical notion only by its relation to the whole of which it is an aspect. How many different nuances, for example, in the sense of the famous: Know yourself! in Socrates, self-knowledge means the dialectical examination and testing of one's own opinions; in Saint Augustine, it is a means of attaining the knowledge of God through the image of the Trinity that we find within ourselves; in Descartes, it is like an apprenticeship in certainty; in the Upanishads of India, it is the knowledge of the identity of the self and of the universal principle. How then can we grasp this notion and give it meaning, independently of the purposes for which we use it?

One of the greatest difficulties that can be opposed to the idea of ​​an abstract history of systems is the fact that one could call the displacement of the level of doctrines. To give a salient example, let us think of the ardent polemics, continued for centuries, on the limits of the domains of faith and reason. One could find many doctrines given at one time as of revealed faith and considered to others as a doctrine of reason. The dryness and poverty of philosophy properly so called in the High Middle Ages is compensated by the treasures of spiritual life which, from pagan philosophy, have passed into the theological writings of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine. The affirmation of the immateriality of the soul, which in Descartes is rationally proven, is for Locke a truth of faith. What could be more striking than the transposition that Spinoza subjected to the religious notion of eternal life, interpreting it through notions inspired by Cartesianism! From these facts, which could easily be multiplied, it follows that we do not sufficiently characterize a philosophy by indicating the doctrines it supports; it is much more important to see in what spirit it sustains them, to what mental regime it belongs.

This means that philosophy cannot be separated from the rest of the spiritual life, which is still expressed by the sciences, religion, art, moral or social life. The philosopher takes into account all the spiritual values ​​of his time to approve, criticize or transform them. There is no philosophy where there is no effort to order values ​​hierarchically.

It will therefore be a constant concern of the historian of philosophy to stay in touch with general political history and the history of all disciplines of the mind, far from wanting to isolate philosophy as a technique separated from the others.

However, these relationships with other spiritual disciplines are by no means uniform and invariable, but present themselves in very different ways according to periods and thinkers. Philosophical speculation can be ordered sometimes to religious life, sometimes to the positive sciences, sometimes to politics and morals, sometimes to art. There are times when the role of one of these disciplines predominates, while the others are almost obliterated; thus, during classical antiquity, we assist on the whole, to a gradual decrease in the role of the sciences, accompanied by the growth of the role of religion: while, at the time of Plato, the evolution of mathematics is of particular interest to the historian, this will be, at the time of Plotinus, the invasion of the oriental religions of salvation will have to call attention; it is at this point that we will have to pose the problem, still so difficult to resolve, of the specific influence of Christianity on philosophy. The current era sees, around philosophy, a struggle for influence so bitter that this meditation on the past is not entirely useless.

1 Philosophy

(The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin)

Philosophy, from ancient Greek φιλοσοφία (composed of φιλεῖν, philein love; and σοφία, sophia, wisdom) literally means love of wisdom. It is an activity and discipline existing since antiquity in the West and East, posing as a questioning, interpretation and reflection on the world and human existence. Different goals can be attributed to: the search for truth; meditation on the good, beautiful, justice; the quest for the meaning of life and happiness.

The philosophy is not knowledge, nor body of knowledge, but a process of reflection on available knowledge. From its origins rooted in dialogue and debate of ideas, it can be seen as an activity analysis, definition, creation or meditation on concepts.

Unlike the natural sciences, the formal sciences and humanities, to which it is closely linked with its history, philosophy does not give itself a subject of particular and unique study. However, it can be found in the philosophy distinct areas of study, such as logic, ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy and theory of knowledge. During the history, other disciplines have joined the basic branches of philosophy, such as aesthetics, philosophy of law, philosophy of science (also known as epistemology), philosophy of mind, the philosophical anthropology and philosophy of language.

Etymology

Etymologically, the word philosophy derives from the ancient Greek φιλοσοφία, composed of φιλεῖν, loving and σοφία, wisdom, knowledge, that is to say literally: love of wisdom or love of knowledge. It should be noted that the word φιλοσοφία is effectively part of the lexicon of the ancient Greek, we find uses attested from antiquity. It is therefore not a modern construction based on Greek, a common form of neologism, as for the term utopia for example.

The terms φιλόσοφος (philosophos) and φιλοσοφεῖν (philosophein) appear in some instances in the pre-Socratic thinkers Heraclitus, Antiphon, Gorgias and Pythagoras, but also in other contemporary thinkers of Socrates, such as Thucydides or Herodotus. According to an echo of Heraclides Ponticus, Pythagoras would be the first Greek thinker to call himself a philosopher. However, it is Socrates' practice, in Plato's dialogues, which will determine the type of research and questioning that philosophy still embodies today.

Philosophy is repeatedly defined by Plato as opposed to human desires: philo-hedonos (love of pleasure), philo-somatos (love of the body), or philo-nikos (love of victory). For him, it is exercised rather in the more than human part of human beings, that is to say in a purely intellectual practice, and it is synonymous with φιλομαθια (philomathia): love of knowledge. On the other hand, it is a tension towards a knowledge or a wisdom that one does not possess, and in this sense it is a permanent desire: thus, Socrates, during his trial reported in Socrates' Apology, affirms to be a friend of wisdom, not a wise. It is this that leads him to find in his death sentence an ultimate chance of separation from his body, which he considers truly human, and of his soul, which he considers truly intellectual, this soul being able this way to contemplate knowledge after death.

Desire to know and love of knowledge, or philosophy, is it the same thing?

- Plato, The Republic, II, 376b

Philosophy is nothing but the love of wisdom.

- Cicero

What is philosophy?

Philosophy is one of the main forms of manifestation of the human spirit. The question of how one can define philosophy is itself a philosophical one. For the concept, we can say that philosophy is the study of meaning and justifications or beliefs about the general or universal aspects of things, a study that is not conducted by experiments and careful observation, but by formulating problems and offering solutions, argumentation of solutions and dialectical discussion on all these. Philosophy studies the general concepts such as existence, goodness, knowledge and beauty, asking questions like What is goodness in general? or Is knowledge possible?. In general terms, the philosophy is the critical, analytical or speculative study of external and internal, in addition to reflective study on the method for the study of such subjects. Currently philosophy is dominated by topics, not systems. The current philosophy is one oriented towards social action, seeking applications in all areas of business and environmental issues.

The proposed perspective of philosophy is one:

totalizing (reflecting all human knowledge, objective and subjective reality, meaning of things, issues and phenomena)

self-reflective (personal and autonomous reflection aimed at building the self)

anthropocentric (knowledge is a relationship between subjective and objective reality)

axiological (sets stages and priorities in the development of the meanings).

Philosophy as a way of life

(Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenes, 1860. Romantic portrait which represents also the dog (in Greek κύων) which gave its name to cynicism.)

The philosophy was understood very early as a way of life and not just as a theoretical reflection. In other words: be a philosopher, is also live and act in a way not just to confront abstract questions. The etymology of the term philosophy makes clear that the philosopher is one who tends toward wisdom, which seeks to live properly and specifically seeking happiness. Philosophy understood as lifestyle focuses on the implementation in his own life the results of philosophical reflection. The idea that philosophy is a way of life also have led some philosophers to imagine that, for this reason, they had to guide others and help them live their lives properly. Philosophy, personal ethics, could be a political collective project. These collective ambitions of philosophy take different forms. A true community of life could be around a philosopher. This partly explains the birth in antiquity of the philosophical schools (around Epicurus, Plato or Aristotle, for example). Since the pre-Socratic and especially from Socrates, a tradition has defended this conception of philosophy as a way of life. These include the Stoics, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Sartre and Russell. But these are far from excluding the idea that the philosopher is concerned with theoretical problems. 'Wisdom', or more accurately sophia, that wants to possess the philosopher is also a knowledge and understanding. The philosopher, in line with the tradition founded by Socrates, knows how it is to live; it can justify its choice and lifestyle. Socrates, for example, in the pre-Socratic dialogues of Plato, requires its partners they are able to give the logos of their value judgments and their choice is to say to justify them rationally. This requirement of rationality may even lead to give genuinely scientific foundation for philosophy. Of course the definition of philosophy as a modus vivendi (way of life) can claim to be sufficient to define philosophy as a whole. Many philosophers have understood philosophy as an intellectual activity and not as a way of life: so it is clearly in academia and research today. It is quite different, especially in India. The Western perspective can be applied to philosophical concepts in force in this part of the world, although there were attempts to assimilate the Roman era, especially with Plotinus. We know that during the conquests of Alexander the Great (to -325), the Greeks were beaten by Hindu asceticism and deprivation that resulted. Hence their name, false, of gymnosophists (of gumno, naked). These ascetics practiced the teachings of the Upanishads. In this confrontation of philosophical ideas it is involved ethnophilosophy.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his inaugural lecture at the College de France, entitled "Praise to the philosophy", suggests a conception of philosophy as a way of life.

For Pierre Hadot in "Philosophy as a way of life: The true philosopher is not the speaker, but the doer [daily] (p 176). There would be up again in our contemporary world, for philo-sophers (sic), in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say researchers of wisdom, which would not renew philosophical discourse, but seek [ ...] a more conscious life, [more coherent], more rational, more open to others and the immensity of the world. [...] speech and life [philosophical daily] are inseparable (p 179). [...] The concentration on the present moment, wonder at the presence of the world, looking from above [concept that is familiar to him, and it also comes in view of Sirius] focused on things, awareness of the mystery of existence (p 180). [...] Strive for objectivity, the impartiality of the historian and scholar, and also break away from his ego to open up to a universal perspective (p 262). [...] To open our heart to all living creatures and the whole of nature in its splendor" (p 263).

Western philosophy

Contemporary Western philosophy comes from a multiple tradition in various forms: hermeneutics and post-Kantian tradition in Germany, analytic philosophy in English-speaking countries and in much of Europe, phenomenological tradition in continental Europe. Some raise serious questions about the philosophical tradition and its assumptions as feminist philosophy, Derrida or Heidegger deconstruction. These currents include so many different practices and different views on the nature of philosophy, which prohibit providing a single acceptable definition to all. If there are today several philosophical traditions, none can claim summarize philosophical activity alone or describe the philosophical activity of consensus.

The difficulties in defining philosophy are also epistemological in nature, because it is difficult to rigorously define methods, themes and objects of philosophy. Historically, it indeed inspired other disciplines (mathematics, or positive sciences). Yet, it never succeeded in developing a method or set of methods that have succeeded in establishing itself among philosophers (like the experimental method has emerged in physics and chemistry, for example). Additionally amalgam between philosophy and other disciplines are more favored by a tradition of philosophers with very different interests. Aristotle also has been same time a logician, philosopher and naturalist. Determine the social function of a philosopher is not easy. Most of the activities formerly belonging to the discipline have now become autonomous (psychology, natural sciences, etc.), and the own domain of philosophy is reduced.

But it is also difficult to determine the essence of Western philosophy, due to its status in society is itself difficult to define, or because it was reduced to other seemingly related disciplines. Since ancient times, for example, Socrates was confused in The Clouds by Aristophanes with the Sophists, which Plato presents us yet as his opponents in his dialogues.

Immanuel Kant brought the field of philosophy to four questions: "What do I know? What should I do? What is it I hope for? What Is Man? ".

The methods of Western Philosophy

(Paul Gauguin, Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? (1897-1898).)

It is possible, in a first approach, ex negativo delineate a number of methods and heuristic principles that characterize at least in part philosophy

Negative delimitations of the method

On the one hand philosophy does not resort to the experimental method. Philosophy, indeed, unlike physics, chemistry or biology, never really integrated the process of experimentation in its heuristic tools. This is evident in ancient and medieval philosophy who did not know the experiment. Even the great philosophers who have distinguished themselves as scientists (Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, to name a few) have always distinguished work in science and in the philosophical field. Some philosophers like Kant and Wittgenstein have even seen in the absence of experimental philosophy an essential feature of this epistemological discipline and refused any confusion with the experimental sciences.

On the other hand, the philosophy is not, in essence, a science based on empirical observation unlike sociology or political science, for example. This naturally does not believe that philosophy can ignore the most obvious empirical data. But traditionally philosophy is not limited to a mere catalog of facts and undertaking a real job for this theorizing or speculation. For example, although Aristotle collected the constitutions of the Greek cities of the time, he wanted in Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics to analyze the structures of the city from a theoretical point of view.

Finally, philosophy, unlike mathematics or formal logic, never decided to work only through formal symbols, although Leibniz could dream of solving philosophical problems by means of a universal logical calculus. And if contemporary analytic philosophy is unthinkable without mathematical logic, it still uses massively natural language.

Characteristics of the method of the philosophy

Despite the difficulties involved in this domain, it is possible to distinguish some major positive features of the philosophical method. The philosophy is understood as a critical work. This is one of its most common definitions. This review is however never outright negative. It aims to create new certainties and correct false evidence, illusions and errors of common sense or philosophy itself. Socrates, for example, questioned his contemporaries and the Sophists to show them their contradictions and their inability to justify what seemed obvious. Descartes is in the modern era the best representative of this concept of philosophy, because, he said, only a radical and general doubt could be the basis for a rigorous and unmistakable thought.

The philosophy is often characterized as work on concepts and notions, a working creative concepts for understanding reality, to distinguish the objects from each other and to analyze them, but also one analytical work of the concepts and its ambiguities. She has early recognized the problems of the ambiguities of language. Nowadays analytic philosophy gives, also, much room for this.

Moreover, unlike science, delineation methods and fields of philosophy is part of the philosophy itself. Every thinker must specify what problems he wishes enlighten, and what is the best method to solve these problems. It is indeed necessary to see that there is a profound unity of philosophical problems and philosophical method. So we do not have to see the instability of the methods and philosophical themes as a weakness of the discipline, but rather as a feature of its nature. Thus, philosophy is a kind of critical knowledge back on itself, or more precisely a rational critique of all knowledge (opinions, beliefs, art, scientific thinking, etc.), including philosophical - as reflecting on the role of philosophy is starting a philosophical reflection.

Finally, philosophy is a deductive and rational discipline. It is not simple intuition or subjective impression but remains inseparable from the desire to show by arguments and deductions what it beforehand: it is will of rationality. It is even the rupture of presocratic with religious thought (mythology) of their time, and their relationship to the Greek gods is traditionally considered the point marking the birth of philosophy. This desire to demonstrate and deliver an argument is found in the history of philosophy. Think of the discussions eristic in antiquity, in the interest of philosophers from Aristotle to logic, but also in the Middle Ages, in order to give the philosophy the demonstrative rigor of mathematics (as in Descartes or Spinoza), or the importance that analytical philosophy gives today to rigor and argumentative clarity. Despite this profound trend, contemporary philosophy saw developing a radical critique of reason, whether Nietzsche, Heidegger or Adorno: the same rationality is found by setting debate by philosophy.

The method is a set of requirements for the optimal course of an activity. The latter can be either a rather complex collective practice, as the management of the political community (democratic method), or the resolution of a specific theoretical problem (for ex., Cantor diagonal method, semantic table method). The concept of method is historically linked to the problem of the acquisition of certainty in the cognitive field. For Socrates, the activity aiming knowledge is, like any other art, obliged to comply with certain rules. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates seems fully aware of the relationship between the validity of knowledge and the modality of acquisition: it is also the essence of any position that recognizes the predominant importance method. The Socratic method of Socrates and the dialectical method in the various presentations starting from the Platonic dialogues are procedures to avoid the error in the analysis of concepts, especially the form of error that resides in the tacit or unconscious acceptance of prejudices and presuppositions.

The branches of Western philosophy

Philosophy is far from being a well-defined field of knowledge in the sense that the problems it confronts are of extreme variety. It studies many objects, that is why its subdivision into different branches is problematic and arbitrary. Moreover, if entire sections of philosophy appeared in the twentieth century, certain domains emerged very clearly from philosophy in modern times. Physics, for example, was considered to belong to philosophy until the eighteenth century. But detachment is not always so clear; thus political science, considered as an old branch of the philosophy that has become autonomous, maintains a permanent dialogue with political philosophy (which is therefore not dead). Similarly, biology, which has long been hampered by its belonging to philosophy with the finalist, mechanistic, and vitalist theses, returns through a backdoor. Indeed, at the dawn of the twenty-first century the development of biotechnology has as corollary the emergence of a new field of philosophical study: bioethics.

In spite of these difficulties, the following branches are distinguished today because each has a well-defined own object which it subjects to specific questions (and in particular those indicated here):

Metaphysics and its various branches (Are there immaterial realities?, Is there God?, Is the soul immortal? Incorporeal?);

Ontology, attached or not to metaphysics according to interpreters (What is the being?, Why is there being rather than nothing?);

Philosophy of religion, partly connected with metaphysics, since it tries to define the divine and raises the question of the existence of God, which it doubles as an interrogation on the nature of the sacred in general;

Morality or ethics: practical and normative discipline to define the best conduct for each situation: (What is the end of human actions?, Is good and evil universal values allowing ​​to define this end?);

Political philosophy (Where can the legitimacy of power come from?, What is the best political regime? Can and has ethics to guide political action?);

Philosophy of law (What are the relations between law and justice?, How do legal norms arise?, According to what criteria are they to be judged?);

Gnoseology (Where does knowledge come from?);

Theory of knowledge (What is truth?);

Aesthetics (What is beautiful?, What is art?)

Philosophy of the mind (What are the relations between body and mind?, How does cognition work?);

Philosophy of logic;

Philosophy of action (Is liberty Illusory?);

Philosophy of history (Is history governed by laws, a necessity, or is it the absurd fruit of contingency?);

Philosophy of language (What is the origin of language?, How is language distinguished from other communication systems?, What relationships exist between language and thought);

Philosophy of freedom consists, according to Rudolph Steiner, of combining rationalism and empiricism to found an ethical individualism.

Epistemology which is literally a discourse on knowledge (or even science in a rather restricted sense) and in this sense joins in the gnoséologie or theory of knowledge, while also referring to the methodology and philosophies of language and action.

The challenge of philosophy is considerable because it deals with central questions, such as, for example, the meaning of life, the possible history of the soul after death, the possible and desirable political organization, the place of people in society and more broadly in humanity and history. The fact that these issues are also addressed and treated by religions and others by political parties explains the passionate nature of the status of philosophy in all activities is not well defined and remains a subject of controversy. Accepting a serene examination of this controversy would allow us to better evaluate the real contribution of philosophy to knowledge. It is difficult to evaluate this controversy without referring to the Greek philosophy. The importance of Plato's discussion of the verification of an idea is notorious, but the main difficulty is that the Platonic writings are historically favored by those of his opponents. In fact, the writings of the Sophists have not been so well preserved in time. Yet it is by replacing Platonism in the historical context of its opposition to the Sophists that one could well evaluate its significance. The contribution of Karl Popper (The open society and his enemies, 1979 Seuil) despite questionable passages shows that one can not reduce the opposition Plato/the sophists to the camps of good and evil (Popper ending even by opposing an aristocratic Plato to Democratic sophists belonging to an anti-slavery current alongside Pericles and Herodotus (Popper's book already ) One of the reproaches made by the sophists to philosophers is that of Isocrates, according to which it is better to bring on useful subjects a reasonable opinion [...] than on the futility of exact knowledge (Eloge d'Hélène). Without going so far, there is the theme of a rather sharp reproach made to philosophy by others, which consists in saying that philosophy is a dialogue which produces its own criteria of truth, unrelated to real life. What the Sophists ultimately reproach the philosophers is the quasi impossibility for them to act in public affairs because these sciences do not bring relief in action and remain completely removed from practical necessities "(Isocrates, On the exchange 262)

This does not detract from the irreplaceable character of Plato's works. The introduction of The Republic depicts Socrates' old friend, Cephale scrupulously analyzing the injustices he was able to commit and asserting that the one who has lived will have a companion, which will become the theme of salvation in certain later monotheistic religions. Is it this proximity to religion with philosophy that explains the equivocal status some philosophers allow themselves to speak of such particular way?

Western philosophy was born with the Pythagoreans whose theses and manners were as much akin to superstition as to religion (according to Brunet (Early Greck Philosophy) who borrowed it from Diels, there were taboos imposed on the first Pythagorean pupils, not to pick up an object on the ground, not to touch a white cock, quoted by Popper in the book already cited, The open society and its enemies. This origin affects it as a sort of youthfulness, as if philosophy, which chiefly discusses sacred things and what deserves to be experienced, constantly felt the need to express oneself in a coded way to try to demonstrate the liturgical character of his inheritance and finally his status. This origin and this pretension sometimes give an elitist style to philosophical lessons. The predominant use of Latin, whose sound evokes the authority of an empire, whose productions are still present in legal science, is part of this implicit coding.

This is detrimental to readers who ask nothing better than to learn, but sometimes give up reading texts which, in order to preserve this elitist character, are expressed in an imaginary language and can cause a sensible person to doubt his normal faculty of understanding. The major reproach that can be made to this way of philosophizing is that philosophy is sometimes lost in a hesitation between poetry and science. And by carefully avoiding a definition of her status, she authorizes herself to create licenses which are usually accepted only in poetic art. This results in cultivating the illusion of a discourse that may seem all the more profound because it is obscure and ultimately produces a disinterest in culture.

Paul Valery had clearly explained that poetry and philosophy can not be mixed not more than one can play draughts with the rules of the game of chess. It seems that since German romanticism this tradition has been accentuated in continental Europe to cultivate a language which modifies, in the name of some authority, the syntactic and lexical rules and it seems that renowned philosophers did not deprive themselves to bypass the common rules of language or to import words of foreign languages ​​to speak of the problematic points of their doctrine that it would have been very useful on the contrary to make clearer.

Kant, even before the romantic period, yielded to this facility by very often using the Latin phrase a priori, without defining it clearly and without being able to see if it designates a chronological antecedence to think that there can be a time before the experiment, or a logical anteriority, of which he only accounts with the moral part or simply with a moral precedence. This leads one to wonder about the meaning of a moral precedence: how the supposition of a moral transcendence could ground a theoretical transcendence. He ends up resting his doctrine on a thesis of saying that things are like that because they have to be like that and hide under the luxurious carpet of Latin phrases the embarrassing dust of contradictions.

The notion of imperative which can be retained in a salutary way as a rule of action can not, even for a single moment, assert as the principle of knowledge. The fact that this postulate of transcendence is debatable does not detract from the interest of the relativity of knowledge. Nor to the fact that it seems that Kant was as much as one might judge a psychologist as wise as those of the XIXth and the XXth century. And yet philosophy seems to be the source of an important part of human freedom insofar as it allows men to continually adapt to life by the rigor of the method which it can cultivate. It is also an encouragement to the acquisition of a common cultural heritage. Thus in the words of Georges Steiner everyone is indebted to all.

The philosophy also allows people to collectively improve their own education and to examine, in theory, the veracity of all talk outside of any authoritarian consideration. By this philosophy can claim to create a part of human history, but a simple examination of the history of philosophy with its basic rule, to admit as coherent only the words which are grammatically admissible, would make it possible to verify on what points this claim is based on. This work naturally involves an important stake when it comes to evaluating the contribution of the philosophical method to psychotherapy. In particular, the phenomenological method, when it does not go astray in baroque ratiocinations, seems to furnish valuable descriptions of the course of psychic phenomena, in the same way as the Vijnanavadin Buddhist philosophy.

Western philosophy and society

(Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)

Over time the relationship between society and philosophers have varied greatly but generally can be determined three types of reports. On the one hand the relationship between society and philosophers are sometimes characterized by a violent attitude of rejection because it is common that the philosophy stands out. Suspicious vis-à-vis traditions, critical of all forms of prejudice, philosophy did not fail to experience clashes more or less hard with the society. Some symbolic dates to remember:

in 432 BC: Anaxagoras was expelled from Athens within the scope of a charge of atheism;

in 399 BC: Socrates was condemned to death under the charges of moral corruption of youth and impiety;

in 529 AD: the Christian Emperor Justinian prohibits the teaching of (pagan)philosophy in Athens. It is on this date that the Greek philosophers took refuge in Syria and Lebanon, where some philosophical works will be translated into Arabic by translators working for the first Abbassides caliphs.

the years 1188-1189: Sultan Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur banned the philosophy, studies and books in Morocco and Spain. Averroes and his works are targeted;

February 17, 1600: Giordano Bruno was tortured at the stake for his rejection of transubstantiation, the trinity, his blasphemy against Christ, his denial of the virginity of Mary;

February 7, 1752: In France, the Encyclopedia of Diderot is censored because it involved the ideological foundations of the society of the time;

May 16, 1849: Karl Marx was expelled from Cologne after the 1848 German Revolution for seditious items.

But then, paradoxically, philosophy has also managed to become institutionalized. The existence of universities where it is learned, philosophical scholarly societies (like Kant-Gesellschaft), or prestigious competitions such as aggregation in France clearly show. Leaders can then take advice from philosophers and be inspired by philosophical principles such as enlightened despots of the eighteenth century.

Finally, philosophy can consider that it should develop theoretically a political project that the philosophers (like Plato) or the head of a State (as Machiavelli) or the masses themselves (Marx) should put in place. The classic example of political ambitions of philosophy naturally remains Plato and his famous Republic, in which it outlines a genuine political utopia breaking radically with traditional modes of thought and action. In another context, Russell and Sartre held the philosophy inseparable from political involvement.

History of Western philosophy

(Representation of Wisdom (1635): Sapiens Dominabitur Astris. Free text translation: Who acquires wisdom will master the stars.)

If philosophy has a long history, it is necessary to distinguish the practice of philosophy from the simple study of past doctrines. Sometimes attenuated or even erased, this distinction is crucial. Many thinkers appeal to the earlier philosophies to support, inspire, or criticize them: there is an appeal to history and a common cultural background, but it does not make from philosophy a historical discipline. Philosophical practice is not merely a gloss on the philosophy of preceding epochs, so it must be distinguished from the history of philosophy.

The history of philosophy consists in attempting to reconstruct, to understand, to interpret, even to criticize, the positions and theses of thinkers such as Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, etc. It is less a matter of evaluating the philosophical relevance or the current interest of these philosophers than of knowing what they really said, and of restoring their thoughts in their contexts of appearance. This work of study also deals with philosophical currents (ancient skepticism, neo-nantism), or questions debated in history (the dualism of the soul and the body, the quarrel of the universals) belonging also to the history of philosophy.

Philosophy, taken as an activity, aims to study and answer questions related to a problem, an area or branch of philosophy. It goes without saying that this practice constantly leads to referring to the earlier philosophers, but the relation to history here is different from that which the historian of philosophy would have. In such a case, the philosopher does not aim at knowing what he has thought; he seeks to reinstate this thought in his personal argumentation; he is instrumentalizing the preceding philosophies in order to justify his thought and to reveal his own point of view. The essence of this practice is to answer problems, to ask questions, if necessary using the history of philosophy.

Asian philosophies

Chinese philosophy

Chinese philosophy differs radically from Greek philosophy, so much so that one can question the association of the terms of the expression Chinese philosophy. From the beginning the paths diverged, joining only in the twentieth century: the linguistic forms are very different (the Chinese linguistics is not based on the logos, unlike the ancient Greek); Chinese thought relies more readily on analysis than on synthesis; on solving problems only on the definition of concepts; on the example rather than the demonstration; on the fluidity of the mind than on the solidity of the arguments.

Chinese thought is therefore interesting in the sense that it allows us to discover original entries, unknown to Western philosophy.

Confucianism

(Confucius)

Confucianism is the main path of Chinese philosophy and has only rarely been shelved. All education was based in the first place on the books forming the Confucian Canon: including Shi Jing or Book of Poems, Yi Jing or Book of Changes, Annals of Lu, Confucius Interviews and the book of Mencius. Almost all scholarly production in China can be interpreted as a commentary on these revered works as the essence of the Chinese spirit. Almost all Confucianist movements of thought presented themselves as having reconnected with the true thought of the Sage. Between the realists like Xun Zi and the followers of his idealist Mencius, later on between Wang Yangming and Zhu Xi, trends emerged and debated Master's thought, enriching philosophy with new concepts and interpretations. It is the lineage of Mencius that Zhu Xi will privilege and his comments will be those considered as orthodox, that is to say as references, by the imperial examiners of the Ming and Qing dynasties (the last one).

Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism refers to a late and distant development of Confucianism but has roots other than Confucianism. It began its development under the Song Dynasty and achieved its greatest expansion under the Ming. There are traces of it since the Tang dynasty.

This school of thought had a great influence in the East, particularly in China, Japan and Korea. Zhu Xi is considered the greatest neo-Confucian master of the Song, while Wang Yangming is the most famous masters under the Ming. But there are conflicts between the schools of these two thinkers.

Taoism

(道 dào the Way, calligraphy 草書 caoshū wild grass, a very free style influenced by Taoism. Credit: Frédéric Glorieux, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Taoism, a religion, a philosophy?

The term "Taoism" covers texts, authors, beliefs and practices, and even historical phenomena that have been able to claim each other, spread over 2,500 years of history.

The category Taoism was born during the Han Dynasty (200 BC to 200 AD), long after the writing of the first texts, the need to classify the funds of the princely and imperial libraries. Dao jiā (道家) or dao jiào (道教), a Taoist school, distinguished at the time one of the philosophical schools of the Warring States period (500 BC to 220 BC). ). School is here to hear in its Greek sense, even Pythagorean, of a community of thought also devoting itself to a philosophical life; to see an intellectual current there is a modern anachronism. But this school was probably only virtual, because its authors, to the extent that they really existed, did not necessarily know each other, and some texts are attributed to different schools according to the catalogs.

During the period of the Three Kingdoms (220-265), the terms dao jai (道家) and dao jiao (道教) diverge, the first designating philosophy and the second religion. For the category quickly encompassed religious beliefs and practices of various origins: ... Taoism has never been a unified religion and has constantly been a combination of teachings based on various original revelations [...] it can not be seized only in its concrete manifestations .

Is Taoism a philosophy or a religion? Both, can we say. The ancient conceptions of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) and Dao De Jing (Tao Te King) are evoked, as these texts continue to inspire Chinese thought, as well as the West, with themes such as the Dao, the critique of dualistic thought, technique, morality; in a praise of nature and freedom. There will also be a presentation on Taoist practices, focusing on the Chinese Middle Ages (the six dynasties, 200-400). The period reveals mystical techniques, medical ideas, alchemy, collective rites. Their development began well before and continued thereafter, but this moment makes it possible to offer a