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Western philosophy refers to the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics.
- A History
A History of Western Philosophy is a 1946 book by British...
- Philosophy
Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece in the 6th...
- Values (Western philosophy)
Introduction. Primary values. Aesthetic values. Ethical...
- A History
- Overview
- The Western tradition
Western philosophy, history of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient Greeks of Classical antiquity to the present.
This article has three basic purposes: (1) to provide an overview of the history of philosophy in the West, (2) to relate philosophical ideas and movements to their historical background and to the cultural history of their time, and (3) to trace the changing conception of the definition, the function, and the task of philosophy.
It would be difficult if not impossible to find two philosophers who would define philosophy in exactly the same way. Throughout its long and varied history in the West, philosophy has meant many different things. Some of these have been a search for wisdom (the meaning closest to the Latin philosophia, itself derived from the Greek philosoph, “lover of wisdom”); an attempt to understand the universe as a whole; an examination of humankind’s moral responsibilities and social obligations; an effort to fathom the divine intentions and the place of human beings with reference to them; an effort to ground the enterprise of natural science; a rigorous examination of the origin, extent, and validity of human ideas; an exploration of the place of will or consciousness in the universe; an examination of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty; and an effort to codify the rules of human thought in order to promote rationality and the extension of clear thinking. Even these do not exhaust the meanings that have been attached to the philosophical enterprise, but they give some idea of its extreme complexity and many-sidedness.
It is difficult to determine whether any common element can be found within this diversity and whether any core meaning can serve as a universal and all-inclusive definition. But a first attempt in this direction might be to define philosophy either as “a reflection upon the varieties of human experience” or as “the rational, methodical, and systematic consideration of those topics that are of greatest concern to humankind.” Vague and indefinite as such definitions are, they do suggest two important facts about philosophizing: (1) that it is a reflective, or meditative, activity and (2) that it has no explicitly designated subject matter of its own but is a method or type of mental operation (like science or history) that can take any area or subject matter or type of experience as its object. Thus, although there are a few single-term divisions of philosophy of long standing—such as logic, ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics—its divisions are probably best expressed by phrases that contain the preposition of—such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of law, and philosophy of art (aesthetics).
Part of what makes it difficult to find a consensus among philosophers about the definition of their discipline is precisely that they have frequently come to it from different fields, with different interests and concerns, and that they therefore have different areas of experience upon which they find it especially necessary or meaningful to reflect. St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–75), a Dominican friar, George Berkeley (1685–1753), a bishop of the Irish Church, and Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), a Danish divinity student, all saw philosophy as a means to assert the truths of religion and to dispel the materialistic or rationalistic errors that, in their opinion, had led to its decline. Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 bce) in southern Italy, René Descartes (1596–1650) in France, and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in England were primarily mathematicians whose views of the universe and of human knowledge were vastly influenced by the concept of number and by the method of deductive thinking. Some philosophers, such as Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bce), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73), were obsessed by problems of political arrangement and social living, so that whatever they have done in philosophy has been stimulated by a desire to understand and, ultimately, to change the social and political behaviour of human beings. And still others—such as the Milesians (the first philosophers of Greece, from the ancient Anatolian city of Miletus), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an Elizabethan philosopher, and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), an English metaphysician—began with an interest in the physical composition of the natural world, so that their philosophies resemble more closely the generalizations of physical science than those of religion or sociology.
The history of Western philosophy reveals in detail the concentrated activity of a multitude of serious and able thinkers reflecting upon, reasoning about, and considering deeply the nature of their experience. But throughout this diversity certain characteristic oppositions continually recur, such as those between monism, dualism, and pluralism in metaphysics (see pluralism and monism); between materialism and idealism in cosmological theory; between nominalism and realism in the theory of signification; between rationalism and empiricism in epistemology; between utilitarianism and deontological ethics in moral theory; and between partisans of logic and partisans of emotion in the search for a responsible guide to the wisdom of life.
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Históricamente, el término se refiere al pensamiento filosófico de la cultura occidental, empezando por la filosofía griega antigua de los presocráticos. La propia palabra filosofía tiene su origen en el griego antiguo philosophía (φιλοσοφία), literalmente, "el amor a la sabiduría" en griego antiguo: φιλεῖν phileîn ...
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work. Co-Principal Editors:Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman.
