History of Western Philosophy

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The argument as it developed, from the Presocratics through Plato and Aristotle, the medievals, the rationalists and empiricists, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the analytic and continental split.

Why is Thales called the first philosopher?

Aristotle names him the founder of natural philosophy because he explained the world by a natural principle, water, rather than by the gods. He is also said to have predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BC.

Anaximander's apeiron

The boundless or indefinite: an unlimited, ageless stuff from which the opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) separate out and to which they return. He chose it because any definite element like water would be overcome by its opposite.

Pythagoras

Founder of a religious and philosophical community at Croton in southern Italy that held the soul is immortal and transmigrates, and that number is the principle of all things, a view drawn from discoveries about musical ratios.

Heraclitus

The Ephesian who held that everything is in flux and that the world is an ever-living fire governed by the logos, a hidden order in which opposites depend on each other. Plato summarized him as saying that everything flows.

Parmenides

The Eleatic who argued in a hexameter poem that what is cannot come to be, perish, move, or change, since that would require what is not, which cannot even be thought. Change and plurality belong to the way of opinion, not of truth.

Zeno's paradoxes

Arguments that motion and plurality lead to absurdity, defending Parmenides: Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, a runner must first cover half of any distance and so never starts, and a flying arrow is at rest at every instant.

Empedocles

The Sicilian who explained change without abandoning Parmenides' ban on coming-to-be: four eternal roots (earth, water, air, fire) are mixed and separated by two forces, Love and Strife, in a cosmic cycle.

Anaxagoras

Held that there is a portion of everything in everything, and that a separate, unmixed Mind (nous) set the original mixture rotating. He brought philosophy to Athens and was prosecuted for impiety for calling the sun a fiery stone.

Democritus and atomism

Everything consists of indivisible atoms moving in the void; they differ only in shape, size, and arrangement, and sensible qualities are conventions. By convention sweet, by convention bitter, in reality atoms and void.

Protagoras and the Sophists

Traveling teachers who taught rhetoric and politics for pay. Protagoras held that man is the measure of all things, so that what seems so to each person is so for them, and that on every question there are two opposing arguments.

Gorgias

A Sophist famous for rhetoric who argued, in a work on not-being, that nothing exists, that if anything existed it could not be known, and that if known it could not be communicated.

Socrates

The Athenian who wrote nothing, questioned everyone about virtue, and claimed to know only that he knew nothing. He was tried for impiety and corrupting the young and executed by hemlock in 399 BC.

Socratic method (elenchus)

Cross-examination: the questioner asks for a definition, draws out the respondent's other beliefs, and shows that they contradict the definition, leaving the respondent in aporia, a recognized state of not knowing.

Socratic intellectualism

The claim that virtue is knowledge and that no one does wrong willingly: whoever acts badly is mistaken about what is good, so wrongdoing is a kind of ignorance and weakness of will is impossible.

Plato

Socrates' student who founded the Academy in Athens around 387 BC and wrote philosophical dialogues, nearly all with Socrates as a character. His central doctrine is that the changing sensible world depends on unchanging intelligible Forms.

Theory of Forms

Beyond the changing particulars we perceive there exist eternal, unchanging, non-physical Forms (the Just itself, the Equal itself) that particulars imperfectly share in; the Forms are what knowledge is about and what definitions capture.

Allegory of the cave

Prisoners chained in a cave take shadows on the wall for reality; one is freed, painfully climbs to the sunlight, and returns to be mocked. It illustrates education as a turning of the soul from appearances toward the Form of the Good.

Plato's tripartite soul

The soul has three parts: reason, which seeks truth; spirit, which seeks honor and feels anger; and appetite, which seeks food, drink, and sex. Justice in the soul is each part doing its own work under reason's rule.

Meno's paradox and recollection

You cannot inquire into what you already know, and you cannot inquire into what you do not know because you would not recognize it. Plato's answer: the soul knew before birth, and learning is recollection, shown by an untaught slave working out a geometry result.

Euthyphro dilemma

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it? If the first, piety is independent of the gods; if the second, it is arbitrary. The dilemma is now posed about morality and God's commands.

Aristotle

Plato's student for twenty years, tutor to Alexander, and founder of the Lyceum in 335 BC. He created formal logic, systematic biology, and treatises on physics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetry.

Aristotle's four causes

Four kinds of explanation of a thing: the material cause (what it is made of), the formal cause (its shape or essence), the efficient cause (what brought it about), and the final cause (its purpose or end).

Hylomorphism

Every natural substance is a compound of matter and form: the bronze and the shape of the statue, the body and the soul of the animal. Form is not a separate Form but the organizing principle in the thing itself.

Aristotle's ethics of virtue

The human good is eudaimonia, flourishing, which consists in activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life. Virtues of character are means between excess and deficiency, found by practical wisdom (phronesis), and acquired by habit.

Aristotle's syllogistic

The first formal logic: a syllogism is an argument in which, certain things being stated, something else follows of necessity. He classified valid figures and moods of arguments built from statements like all A are B and some B are not C.

Unmoved mover

Since motion is eternal it needs an eternal cause that is itself unmoved, a pure actuality that moves the heavens as an object of love and desire moves a lover, and whose activity is thought thinking itself.

Epicurus

Founder of the Garden in Athens in 306 BC. He taught that atoms and void are all there is, that the gods do not intervene, that death is nothing to us since we do not survive it, and that the goal of life is pleasure understood as freedom from pain and disturbance.

The Epicurean swerve

Atoms falling through the void occasionally swerve by a minimal, uncaused amount. The swerve lets atoms collide to form worlds and, Epicureans held, breaks the chain of necessity that would leave no room for free choice.

Stoicism

The school founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BC in the Painted Stoa. The cosmos is a rational whole governed by logos; virtue, living in agreement with nature and reason, is the only good; externals like health and wealth are preferred but indifferent.

Dichotomy of control

Epictetus' first lesson: some things are up to us (our judgments, impulses, desires) and some are not (body, property, reputation). Confine your wanting to what is up to you and nothing can compel or hinder you.