The Great Philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas

By Jeremy Stangroom and James Garvey

No matter how you view philosophy, regardless of what you think it is, this series from The Independent will give you a strong sense of the life and work of the very best thinkers in the philosophical neighbourhood, dealing carefully and rationally with the most human of questions, the hardest questions, the questions which matter most.

William James, in his last great work Some Problems of Philosophy, wrote that philosophy 'sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject . It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices'.

This series shows how philosophical argument can be profoundly disconcerting in this way; how it leads people to question everything they thought they knew about existence, knowledge and ethics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784280628

Jeremy Stangroom

Dr Jeremy Stangroom is a founding editor of The Philosophers' Magazine, one of the world's most popular philosophy publications. He has written and/or edited numerous books, including: "New British Philosophy", "What Philosophers Think" and "Great Thinkers A-Z" (all with Julian Baggini); "The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense" and "Why Truth Matters" (with Ophelia Benson); and "What Scientists Think". He is a frequent contributor to "New Humanist" magazine, and he is also the editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy web site.

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This edition published in 2015 by Arcturus Publishing Limited

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Content for this series is extracted from the following titles all published by Arcturus Publishing Ltd.

Great Philosophers

978-0-572-03174-3

Philosophy: The Great Thinkers

978-0-572-03379-8

Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers

978-0-572-03206-7

Copyright © 2005 Arcturus Publishing Limited

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person or persons who do any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

ISBN: 978-1-784-28062-8

THE GREAT

PHILOSOPHERS

SOCRATES

PLATO

ARISTOTLE

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

JEREMY STANGROOM

JAMES GARVEY

Contents

Introduction

Ancient & Medieval

Socrates

Plato

Aristotle

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Glossary

Introduction

Welcome to the first in our series 'The Great Philosophers', which will examine the lives and work of some of history's greatest philosophers. The ideas of thinkers as diverse as Niccoló Machiavelli and Bertrand Russell, and ranging from Socrates to Michel Foucault, will be looked at in their social and historical context in order to give a sense of the issues that have engaged philosophers through the ages, and that have inspired and motivated philosophical endeavour.

The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars once said of philosophy that its aim is to 'understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term'. This is apt as a description of philosophy since it captures an ambiguity in how the discipline is commonly conceptualised.

Some maintain that philosophy is best defined by its particular subject matter. As traditionally conceived, it deals with the Big Three Questions. What exists? How do we know? What are we going to do about it? The answers involve us in metaphysics - the study of the nature of reality; epistemology - the study of the conditions required to know something; and ethics - the attempt to say what it is to live a morally good life. These are distinctly human questions in the sense that it is hard to be human without wondering about them at some time or other. Great minds sometimes settle on them, think about them, and the result is philosophy.

Others take it that philosophy consists in a kind of attitude or way of life. Distinctive of this way of living is a critical view of things, a refusal to accept what others accept without further reflection. It has got more than one great philosopher into serious trouble. Our exemplar here is Socrates, whose life and work we look at today, who thought that the unexamined life was not worth living. He not only thought this, he died for it. Many join him in thinking that the word 'philosophy', literally 'love of wisdom', marks out an approach to life as against a method or set of questions.

Finally, there are those who think that it is possible to philosophise about anything - that philosophy is best defined by a particular method. It requires the ability to follow logical argument; to play with different ideas to see where they lead; to anticipate objections and counter-arguments; to be willing to put aside preconceptions in the interests of a detached objectivity. In this sense, philosophy is not so much the love of wisdom, as the Ancient