The History of Philosophy Read online

  A. C. Grayling

  * * *

  THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART I

  Ancient Philosophy

  Philosophy before Plato

  The Presocratic Philosophers

  Thales

  Anaximander

  Anaximenes

  Pythagoras

  Xenophanes

  Heraclitus

  Parmenides

  Zeno of Elea

  Empedocles

  Anaxagoras

  Leucippus and Democritus

  The Sophists

  Socrates

  Plato

  Aristotle

  Greek and Roman Philosophy after Aristotle

  Cynicism

  Epicureanism

  Stoicism

  Scepticism

  Neoplatonism

  PART II

  Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

  Philosophy in Medieval Times

  Augustine

  Boethius

  Anselm

  Abelard

  Aquinas

  Roger Bacon

  Duns Scotus

  William of Ockham

  Philosophy in the Renaissance

  Renaissance Platonism

  Renaissance Humanism

  Renaissance Political Thought

  PART III

  Modern Philosophy

  The Rise of Modern Thought

  Francis Bacon

  Descartes

  Hobbes

  Spinoza

  Locke

  Berkeley

  Leibniz

  Hume

  Rousseau

  Kant

  The Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment

  Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

  Bentham

  Hegel

  Schopenhauer

  Positivism

  Mill

  Marx

  Nietzsche

  Idealism

  Pragmatism

  PART IV

  Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

  Analytic Philosophy

  Russell

  Frege

  Moore

  Wittgenstein: The Early Philosophy

  Logical Positivism

  Carnap

  Quine

  Popper

  Wittgenstein: The Later Philosophy

  Ordinary Language Philosophy

  Ryle

  Austin

  Strawson

  Philosophy of Language

  Davidson

  Dummett

  Kripke

  Philosophy of Mind

  Ethics

  Stevenson

  Hare

  Mackie

  Virtue Ethics

  Political Philosophy

  Rawls

  Nozick

  Feminist Philosophy

  Continental Philosophy

  Husserl

  Heidegger

  Merleau-Ponty

  Sartre

  Gadamer

  Ricoeur

  Deleuze

  Derrida

  Continental Thought: Un Salon des Refusés

  PART V

  Indian, Chinese, Arabic–Persian and African Philosophy

  Indian Philosophy

  Vedas and Upanishads

  Samkhya

  Nyaya–Vaisheshika

  Buddhism

  Jainism

  Carvaka–Lokayata

  Chinese Philosophy

  Confucianism

  Confucius

  Mencius

  Xunzi

  Mohism

  Daoism

  Daodejing

  Zhuangzi

  Legalism

  Han Feizi

  Yijing

  Arabic–Persian Philosophy

  Falsafa and Kalam

  Al-Kindi

  Al-Farabi

  Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

  Al-Ghazali

  Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

  African Philosophy

  Concluding Remarks

  Appendix: A Sketch of Logic Fallacies of Informal Logic

  Timeline of Philosophers

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Professor A. C. Grayling is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy and other subjects, and has written on non-Western philosophy. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

  Preface

  This survey of philosophy’s history is intended for the general interested reader and for those embarking on the study of philosophy. There are fine scholarly treatments of particular periods in the history of philosophy for those who wish to take their enquiries further, and I hope that some readers will be motivated by the following pages to turn to them, and above all to the primary literature of philosophy itself. Not all the classics of philosophy have an impenetrable veil of technicality and jargon draped over them, as is the case with too much contemporary philosophical writing, the result of the relatively recent professionalization of the subject. It was once taken for granted that educated people would be interested in philosophical ideas; the likes of Descartes, David Hume and John Stuart Mill accordingly wrote for everyone and not just for trained votaries of a profession.

  To tell the story of philosophy is to offer an invitation and an entrance, much as Bertrand Russell did in his History of Western Philosophy, a book that achieved near-classic status for the sparkling clarity of its prose and its wit – though not always for its accuracy, adequacy or impartiality. Nevertheless that was a book I relished as a schoolboy, along with its nineteenth-century predecessor, G. H. Lewes’ A Biographical History of Philosophy. It is a testament to both that, after the long intervals that have elapsed since they were written, one can enjoy them still, despite knowing that the explosion in more recent scholarship has added much to our understanding of philosophy’s history, and that philosophy’s history itself has grown longer and richer since their time. The ambition in what follows is to iterate their achievement for our own day, and to supplement the endeavour by looking not only (though mainly) at the Western tradition but beyond it to the other great traditions of thought – the Indian, Chinese and Arabic–Persian – even if only in outline, to indicate comparisons.

  An historical overview obviously does not pretend to offer a complete treatment of the thinkers and themes it discusses; for this one must go to primary sources and scholarly examinations of them. But not all readers intend to carry the study of philosophy further, and for their purposes it is important that they should be given a reliable account of the thinkers and debates constituting philosophy’s great story. That aim is fully in view here.

  My method, accordingly, is to give as clear and concise an account as I can of philosophy’s main figures and ideas. Notes are kept to a minimum, and almost all are asides or amplifications, not textual references; there are bibliographies citing the main texts referred to, and works which will take readers further.

  It is an almost irresistible temptation to discuss and debate, criticize and defend, when writing of philosophical ideas, for that is the very essence of philosophy. But in this kind of book that temptation has to be restrained to a considerable degree, not just because yielding to it would quadruple the book’s length, but because doing so is not the main point. At times, though, it is necessary to show why what followed from a given philosopher’s ideas was influential or prompted disagreement, so an evaluative element
is not wholly absent.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go to my colleagues at the New College of the Humanities, especially to Dr Naomi Goulder and Dr David Mitchell, and friends and colleagues in philosophy there who have made the experience so rewarding: Simon Blackburn, Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer, Christopher Peacocke, Ken Gemes, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein and the late Ronald Dworkin. My thanks go also to Daniel Crewe of Viking Penguin, to Bill Swainson who first commissioned this book, to Catherine Clarke, to Mollie Charge and to the many students over the years who have taught me much about the thinkers and ideas surveyed in the following pages, proving the deep truth of the tag docendo disco.

  Introduction

  Philosophy’s history, as today’s students and teachers of philosophy see it, is a retrospective construct. It is chosen from the wider stream of the history of ideas in order to provide today’s philosophical concerns with their antecedents. This fact has to be noted if only to avoid confusion about the words ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosopher’ themselves. For almost all of its history ‘philosophy’ had the general meaning of ‘rational enquiry’, though from the beginning of modern times in the Renaissance until the nineteenth century it more particularly meant what we now call ‘science’, though a ‘philosopher’ was still someone who investigated anything and everything. Thus it is that King Lear says to Edgar, ‘First let me talk with this philosopher: What is the cause of thunder?’ On William Hazlitt’s tombstone, engraved in 1830, the famous essayist is described as ‘the first (unanswered) Metaphysician of the age’, because at that time what we now call ‘philosophy’ was called ‘metaphysics’ to distinguish it from what we now call ‘science’. This distinction was often marked by the labels ‘moral philosophy’ to mean what we now call ‘philosophy’, and ‘natural philosophy’ to mean what we now call ‘science’.

  The word ‘scientist’ was coined as recently as 1833, giving the related word ‘science’ the sense it now familiarly has. After that date the words ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’ took on their current meanings, as the sciences diverged more and more from general enquiry by their increasing specialism and technicality.

  In contemporary philosophy the principal areas of enquiry are epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, political philosophy, the history of debates in these areas of enquiry, and philosophical examination of the assumptions, methods and claims of other fields of enquiry in science and social science. Most of this is, and certainly the first three are, the staple of a study of philosophy at universities in the Anglophone world and in Europe today.

  And correlatively, these are the fields of enquiry that determine which strands in the general history of ideas are selected as today’s ‘history of philosophy’, thus leaving aside the history of technology, astronomy, biology and medicine from antiquity onwards, the history of physics and chemistry since the seventeenth century, and the rise of the social sciences as defined disciplines since the eighteenth century.

  To see what determines which strands in the history of ideas to fillet out as ‘the history of philosophy’ we therefore need to look backwards through the lens of the various branches of contemporary philosophy as listed above, and this requires a preliminary understanding of what these branches are.

  Epistemology or ‘theory of knowledge’ is enquiry into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. It investigates the distinctions between knowledge, belief and opinion, seeks to ascertain the conditions under which a claim to know something is justified, and examines and offers responses to sceptical challenges to knowledge.

  Metaphysics is enquiry into the nature of reality and existence. What exists, and what is its nature? What is existence? What are the most fundamental kinds of being? Are there different kinds of existence or existing thing? Do abstract entities outside space and time, such as numbers and universals, exist in addition to concrete things in space and time such as trees and stones? Do supernatural entities such as gods exist in addition to the natural realm? Is reality one thing or many things? If humans are wholly part of the natural causal order of the universe, can there be such a thing as free will?

  Metaphysics and epistemology are central to philosophy as a whole; they are, as it were, the physics and chemistry of philosophy; understanding the problems and questions in these two enquiries is basic to discussion in all other areas of philosophy.

  Logic – the science of valid and sound reasoning – is the general instrument of philosophy, as mathematics is in science. In the Appendix I give a sketch of the basic ideas of logic and explain its key terms.

  Ethics, as a subject in the philosophy curriculum, is enquiry into the concepts and theories of what is good, of right and wrong, of moral choice and action. The phrase ‘as a subject in the philosophy curriculum’ is employed here because the word ‘ethics’ has multiple applications. Even when used as the label of an area of philosophy it serves to denote two separable matters: examination of ethical concepts and reasoning – this is more precisely described as ‘metaethics’ – and examination of ‘normative’ moralities which seek to tell us how to live and act. Normative morality is distinguished from the more theoretical metaethical enquiry by describing normative morality as a ‘first order’ endeavour and metaethics as a ‘second order’ endeavour. By its nature philosophy is a second-order enquiry, so ‘ethics’ in the context of philosophical study standardly means metaethics.

  But the word ‘ethics’ also, though relatedly, denotes the outlook and attitudes of individuals or organizations regarding their values, how they act and how they see themselves. This is a familiar and good use of the term; and – interestingly – reflection on this use shows that the words ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ do not mean the same. This is easier to grasp when we note the etymologies of the terms: ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek ethos meaning ‘character’, whereas ‘morals’ derives from a coining by Cicero from the Latin mos, moris (plural mores) which means ‘custom’ and even ‘etiquette’. Morality, accordingly, is about our actions, duties and obligations, whereas ethics is about ‘what sort of person one is’, and although the two are obviously connected, they are equally obviously distinct.

  This distinction naturally appears in the arenas of metaethical and normative discussion too. In their identification of the locus of value, some metaethical theories focus on the character of the agent, others on the consequences of actions, others again on whether an action conforms to a duty. When it is the character of an agent that matters, we are discussing ethics in the sense of ethos just described; when it is the consequence of actions or conformity with duty that matters, it is the narrower focus of morality which is in view.

  Aesthetics is enquiry into art and beauty. What is art? Is beauty an objective property of things natural or man-made, or is it subjective, existing in the eye of the beholder only? Can something be aesthetically valuable whether or not it is beautiful and whether or not it is a work of art? Are the aesthetic values of natural things (a landscape, a sunset, a face) different from those we attribute to artefacts (a painting, a poem, a piece of music)?

  Philosophy of mind is the enquiry into the nature of mental phenomena and consciousness. It was once an integral part of metaphysics because the latter, in enquiring into the nature of reality, has to consider whether reality is only material, or in addition has non-material aspects such as mind, or perhaps is only mental as the ‘idealist’ philosophers argue. But as consensus has grown around the view that reality is fundamentally and exclusively material, and that mental phenomena are the products of the material activity of the brain, understanding those phenomena and in particular the nature of consciousness has become a topic of intense interest.

  Philosophy of language is enquiry into how we attach meaning to sounds and marks in a way that enables communication and embodies thought, indeed perhaps makes thought above a certain rudimentary level possible in the first place. What is the unit of
semantic meaning – a word, a sentence, a discourse? What is ‘meaning’ itself? What do we know – or know how to do – when we ‘know the meaning’ of expressions in a language? Is there such a thing as a language such as English, or are there as many idiolects of English as there are speakers of those idiolects, thus making a language in fact a collection of not completely overlapping idiolects? How do we interpret and understand the language-use of others? What are the epistemological and metaphysical implications of our understanding of language, meaning and language-use?

  For good reasons the philosophies of mind and language have become conjoined into a single overall enquiry in more recent academic philosophy, as the titles of books and university courses ubiquitously attest.

  Political philosophy is enquiry into the principles of social and political organization and their justification. It asks, What is the best way to organize and run a society? What legitimates forms of government? On what grounds do claims to authority in the state or a society rest? What are the advantages and disadvantages of democracy, communism, monarchy and other forms of political arrangement?

  The history of philosophy as it is viewed backwards through the lens of the above enquiries is an essential part of philosophy itself, because all these enquiries have evolved over time as – so to speak – a great conversation among thinkers living in different centuries in different circumstances but nevertheless absorbed in the same fundamental questions; and therefore knowing the ‘case law’ of these debates is crucial to understanding them. This prevents us from unnecessarily reinventing the wheel over and over again, helps us to avoid mistakes and to recognize pitfalls, allows us to profit from our predecessors’ endeavours and insights, and gives us materials to use in trying to understand the subject matter at issue, and to frame the right questions to ask about them.fn1

  Philosophical examination of the assumptions, methods and claims of other fields of enquiry is what is meant by such labels as ‘philosophy of science’, ‘philosophy of history’, ‘philosophy of psychology’ and the like. Every enquiry rests on assumptions and employs methodologies, and self-awareness about these is necessary. Philosophical questions about science, for example, are asked by scientists themselves and not only by philosophers; philosophical questions about the study of history likewise are raised by historians in discussing their methods and aims. Consider each in turn more particularly, as follows.