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Western philosophy
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Western philosophy encompasses the history of philosophy in the West 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.

Related Topics: humanism continental philosophy medieval philosophy medieval logic

Renaissance philosophy
The nature of Western philosophy
The Western tradition
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.

Many of these fundamental oppositions among philosophers will be treated in the

article that follows. But if any single opposition is taken as central throughout
the history of Western philosophy at every level and in every field, it is probably
that between the critical and the speculative impulses. These two divergent
motivations tend to express themselves in two divergent methods: analysis and
synthesis, respectively. Plato’s Republic is an example of the second; the
Principia Ethica (1903) of G.E. Moore (1873–1958), a founder of analytic
philosophy, is an example of the first. Beginning with a simple question about
justice, the Republic in its discursiveness slowly but progressively brings more
and more areas into the discussion: first ethics, then politics, then educational
theory, then epistemology, and finally metaphysics. Starting with one specific
question, Plato finally managed to make his discussion as broad as the world.
Principia Ethica does just the opposite. Beginning with a general question—What is
good?—it progressively breaks up this question into a whole series of subordinate
questions, analyzing meanings ever more minutely, growing narrower and narrower but
always with the utmost modesty and sincerity, striving for increasing simplicity
and exactitude.

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The analytic, or critical, impulse treats any subject matter or topic by
concentrating upon the part, by taking it apart in the service of clarity and
precision. It was essentially the method of Aristotle (384–322 bce) and of Peter
Abelard (1079–1142), a French Scholastic; of David Hume (1711–76), a Scottish
skeptic, and of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), a German American logical positivist;
and of Russell and Moore. The synthetic, or speculative, impulse operates by
seeking to comprehend the whole, by putting it all together in the service of unity
and completeness. It is essentially the method of Parmenides, a Sophist, and of
Plato; of Aquinas and of Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), a Dutch Jewish rationalist;
and of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a German idealist, and of
Whitehead. Throughout philosophy’s history, each of the two traditions has made its
insistent claim.

There is one philosophical tradition—that of logical positivism—that sees

philosophy as originating in the obscure mists of religion and coming finally to
rest in the pure sunshine of scientific clarity. This represents a necessary
progress because logical positivism considers it a scandal when philosophers speak
in statements that are not in principle “verifiable” (see verifiability principle);
it holds that bold and adventuresome philosophical speculation is at best mere
self-indulgence, a passing state occurring when philosophical problems are raised
prematurely—that is, at a time when philosophy does not possess the means to solve
them.

Although logical positivism represents a partisan view, it does express indirectly

a basic truth—that the philosophical enterprise has always hovered uncertainly
between the lure of religious devotion and that of scientific exactitude. In the
teachings of the earliest philosophers of Greece, it is impossible to separate
ideas of divinity and the human soul from ideas about the mystery of being and the
genesis of material change, and in the Middle Ages philosophy was acknowledged to
be the “handmaiden of theology.” But the increased secularization of modern culture
has largely reversed this trend, and the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon the
separation of nature from its divine creator has increasingly placed philosophical
resources at the disposal of those interested in creating a philosophy of science.

Yet philosophy’s continuing search for philosophical truth leads it to hope, but at
the same time to profoundly doubt, that its problems are objectively solvable. With
respect to a total description of Being or a definitive account of the nature of
values, only individual solutions now seem possible; and the optimistic hope for
objective answers that secure universal agreement must be given up.

In this respect, philosophy seems less like science than like art and philosophers
more like artists than like scientists, for their philosophical solutions bear the
stamp of their own personalities, and their choice of arguments reveals as much
about themselves as their chosen problem. As a work of art is a portion of the
world seen through a temperament, so a philosophical system is a vision of the
world subjectively assembled. Plato and Descartes, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a
German idealist, and John Dewey (1859–1952), an American pragmatist, have given to
their systems many of the quaint trappings of their own personalities.

But if philosophy is not true in the same sense as science, it is not false in the
same sense either; and this gives to the history of philosophy a living
significance that the history of science does not enjoy. In science, the present
confronts the past as truth confronts error; thus, for science, the past, even when
important at all, is important only out of historical interest. In philosophy it is
different. Philosophical systems are never definitively proved false; they are
simply discarded or put aside for future use. And this means that the history of
philosophy consists not simply of dead museum pieces but of ever-living classics—
comprising a permanent repository of ideas, doctrines, and arguments and a
continuing source of philosophical inspiration and suggestiveness to those who
philosophize in any succeeding age. It is for this reason that any attempt to
separate philosophizing from the history of philosophy is both a provincial act and
an unnecessary impoverishment of its rich natural resources.

General considerations
Ways of ordering the history
The writing of the history of philosophy is controlled by a variety of cultural
habits and conventions.

The ensuing article on the history of Western philosophy is divided into five
sections—ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary. A threefold
distinction between ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy was prevalent until
recent times and is only as old as the end of the 17th century. This distinction
slowly spread to historical writing in all fields and was given definitive
influence in philosophical writing through the series of lectures on the history of
philosophy that Hegel delivered first at Jena, then at Heidelberg, and finally at
Berlin between 1805 and 1830. In the century after Hegel, it was taken for granted
as standard practice, though a host of cultural assumptions is implied by its use.

Treatment of the total field of the history of philosophy has been traditionally
subject to two types of ordering, according to whether it was conceived primarily
as (1) a history of ideas or (2) a history of the intellectual products of human
beings. In the first ordering, certain ideas, or concepts, are viewed as archetypal
(such as matter or mind or doubt), and the condensations occurring within the flow
of thought tend to consist of basic types, or schools. This ordering has
characterized works such as The History of Materialism (1866) by Friedrich Lange
(1828–75), The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to Blanshard (1957) by A.C. Ewing
(1899–1973), and The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) by
Richard H. Popkin (1923–2005). In the second type of ordering, the historian,
impressed by the producers of ideas as much as by the ideas themselves—that is,
with philosophers as agents—reviews the succession of great philosophical
personalities in their rational achievements. This ordering has produced the more
customary histories, such as A History of Western Philosophy (1945) by Bertrand
Russell and The Great Philosophers (1957) by Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).

Plutarch, c. 100 ce.

These two different types of ordering depend for their validity upon an appeal to
two different principles about the nature of ideas, but their incidental use may
also be influenced by social or cultural factors. Thus, the biographers and
compilers of late antiquity (among them Plutarch [46–c. 119], Sextus Empiricus
[flourished 3rd century ce], Philostratus [170–c. 245], and Clement of Alexandria
[150–c. 211]), impressed by the religious pluralism of the age in which they lived,
thought of philosophers, too, as falling into different sects and wrote histories
of the Sophists, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, and other such schools; whereas,
almost 2,000 years later, Hegel—living in a period of Romantic historiography
dominated by the concept of the great man in history—deliberately described the
history of philosophy as “a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of
thought.”

Moving between these two ordering principles, the article below will be eclectic
(as has come to be the custom), devoting chief attention to outstanding major
figures while joining more-minor figures, wherever possible, into the schools or
tendencies that they exemplify.

Factors in writing the history

The type of ordering suggested above also has some relationship to the more general
problems of method in the writing of the history of philosophy. Here there are at
least three factors that must be taken into account: (1) that any philosopher’s
doctrines depend (at least in part) upon those of his predecessors, (2) that a
philosopher’s thought occurs at a certain point in history and thus expresses the
effects of certain social and cultural circumstances, and (3) that a philosopher’s
thought stems (at least in part) from his own personality and situation in life.
This is only to say that the history of philosophy, to be at all comprehensive and
adequate, must deal with the mutual interplay of ideas, of cultural contexts, and
of agents.
The first factor may be called logical because a given philosophy is, in part, the
intellectual response to the doctrines of its forerunners, taking as central the
problems given by the current climate of controversy. Thus, many of the details of
Aristotle’s ethical, political, and metaphysical systems arise in arguments
directed against statements and principles of Plato; much of An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690) by the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), an
initiator of the Enlightenment, is directed against contemporary Cartesian
presuppositions; and the New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1704) by
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a broadly learned German rationalist, is, in
turn, specifically directed against Locke.

The second factor may be called sociological because it considers philosophy, at

least in part, as a direct form of social expression, arising at a certain moment
in history, dated and marked by the peculiar problems and crises of the society in
which it flourishes. From this perspective, the philosophy of Plato may be viewed
as the response of an aristocratic elitism to the immediate threat of democracy and
the leveling of values in 5th-century Athens—its social theory and even its
metaphysics serving the movement toward an aristocratic restoration in the Greek
world. Thus, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas may be viewed as an effort toward
doctrinal clarification in support of the institution of the medieval Roman
Catholic Church, as the saint spent his life obediently fulfilling the
philosophical tasks set for him by his superiors in the church and the Dominican
order. Thus, the philosophy of Kant, with all of its technical vocabulary and rigid
systematization, may be viewed as an expression of the new professionalism in
philosophy, a clear product of the rebirth of the German universities during the
18th-century Enlightenment.

The third factor may be called biographical, or individual, because, with Hegel, it
recognizes that philosophies are generally produced by people of unusual or
independent personality, whose systems usually bear the mark of their creators. And
what is meant here by the individuality of the philosopher lies less in the facts
of his biography (such as his wealth or poverty) than in the essential form and
style of his philosophizing. The cool intensity of Spinoza’s geometric search for
wisdom, the unswerving (if opaque) discursiveness of Hegel’s quest for completeness
or totality, the relentless and minute analytic search for distinctions and shades
of meaning that marks Moore’s master passion (“to be accurate—to get everything
exactly right”)—these qualities mark the philosophical writings of Spinoza, Hegel,
and Moore with an unmistakably individual and original character.

Shifts in the focus and concern of Western philosophy

Any adequate treatment of individual figures in the history of philosophy tries to
utilize this threefold division of logical, sociological, and individual factors;
but in a synoptic view of the history of philosophy in the West, one is
particularly aware of the various shifts of focus and concern that philosophy has
sustained and, indeed, of the often profound differences in the way that it defines
itself or visualizes its task from age to age or from generation to generation.

Philosophy among the Greeks slowly emerged out of religious awe into wonder about
the principles and elements of the natural world. But as the Greek populations more
and more left the land to become concentrated in their cities, interest shifted
from nature to social living; questions of law and convention and civic values
became paramount. Cosmological speculation partly gave way to moral and political
theorizing, and the preliminary and somewhat fragmentary questionings of Socrates
and the Sophists turned into the great positive constructions of Plato and
Aristotle. With the political and social fragmentation of the succeeding centuries,
however, philosophizing once again shifted from the norm of civic involvement to
problems of salvation and survival in a chaotic world.

The dawn of Christianity brought to philosophy new tasks. St. Augustine (354–430)—
the philosophical bishop of Hippo—and the Church Fathers used such resources of the
Greek tradition as remained (chiefly Platonism) to deal with problems of creation,
of faith and reason, and of truth. New translations in the 12th century made much
of Aristotle’s philosophy available and prepared the way for the great theological
constructions of the 13th century, chiefly those of the Scholastic philosophers St.
Bonaventure (c. 1217–74), St. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–80), St. Thomas Aquinas,
Roger Bacon (c. 1220–92), and John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308). The end of the
Middle Ages saw a new flowering of the opposite tendencies in the nominalism of
William of Ockham (c. 1285–c. 1347) and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–
c. 1327).

The Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance. Universalism was replaced by
nationalism. Philosophy became secularized. The great new theme was that of the
mystery and immensity of the natural world. The best philosophical minds of the
17th century turned to the task of exploring the foundations of physical science,
and the symbol of their success—the great system of physics constructed by Sir
Isaac Newton (1642–1727)—turned the philosophers of the Enlightenment to
epistemology and to the examination of the human mind that had produced so
brilliant a scientific creation. The 19th century, a time of great philosophical
diversity, discovered the irrational, and in so doing prepared the way for the
20th-century oppositions between logical atomism and phenomenology and between
logical positivism and existentialism.

Although the foregoing capsule presentation of the history of philosophy in the

West follows a strict chronology, it does not do justice to the constant occurrence
and recurrence of dominant strands in the history of thought. It would also be
possible to write the philosophical history of the Middle Ages simply by noting the
complicated occurrence of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines, of the Renaissance
according to the reappearance of ancient materialism, Stoicism, and skepticism, and
of the 18th century in terms of the competing claims of rationalist and empiricist
principles. Thus, chronology and the interweaving of philosophical systems
cooperate in a history of philosophy.

Albert William Levi