A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories)

by Nigel Warburton

That was more or less all he did. But the questions he asked were razor-sharp.

In fact he claimed he didn't know anything, so how could he teach at all?

The word ‘philosopher’ comes from the Greek words meaning ‘love of wisdom’.

Life, he declared, is only worth living if you think about what you are doing. An unexamined existence is all right for cattle, but not for human beings.

So these three great thinkers form a chain: Socrates–Plato–Aristotle.

384 BC,

working as a tutor to Alexander the Great,

In a famous Renaissance painting by Raphael, The School of Athens, Plato points upwards to the world of the Forms;

You need to feel the right kind of emotions at the right time and these will lead you to behave well.

There was one unfortunate side effect of Aristotle's brilliance, though. He was so intelligent, and his research was so thorough, that many who read his work believed he was right about everything.

This view is completely at odds with Plato's Theory of Forms and the possibility that philosophers could gain knowledge of them through abstract thought

So, he thought, to be happy you should free yourself from desires and not care about how things turn out. That is the right way to live.

All the great philosophers have been sceptics in this sense. It is the opposite of dogmatism. Someone who is dogmatic is very confident that they know the truth.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC) argued that fear of death was a waste of time and based on bad logic.

Epicurus believed that philosophy should be practical. It should change how you live.

That's how the modern meaning of ‘epicurean’ got going.

At the heart of Stoicism was the idea that we are responsible for what we feel and think. We can choose our response to good and bad luck.

The most fruitful way to exist, he declared – perceptively – was studying philosophy. This was a way of being truly alive.

Ontological

Summa Theologica, another Italian saint, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74),

This first cause, he declared, must have been God. God is the uncaused cause of everything that is.

In 1938 the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed Adolf Hitler when he gave his word that he would not try and expand German territory further.

Critics of Hobbes think he went too far in allowing the sovereign, whether it was a king or queen or parliament, to have such power over the individual in society. The state he describes is what we would now call an authoritarian one: one in which the sovereign has almost unlimited power over citizens.

The worst way to exist was to be in what he called bondage: at the complete mercy of your emotions. When something bad happens, someone is rude to you, for example, and you lose your temper and are filled with hatred, this is a very passive way to exist.

Even though these choices can never be fully free, it is better to be active than passive.

One character, Martin, suggests that the only way to make life bearable is to stop philosophizing and get down to work.

Roughly speaking, empiricists (such as Locke) thought we didn't; rationalists (such as Descartes) thought we did.

But Kant was certain. If you do something just because of how you feel that is not a good action at all.

Kant thought that morality was a system of categorical imperatives. Your moral duty is your moral duty whatever the consequences and whatever the circumstances

This reverence for the dignity and worth of individual human beings is at the core of modern human rights theory. It is Kant's great contribution to moral philosophy.

This way of thinking about right and wrong based on cool reasoning rather than emotion is very different from Aristotle's (see Chapter 2). For Aristotle, a truly virtuous person always has the appropriate feelings and does the right thing as a result of that.

The idea has never really caught on, though Lenin's body was embalmed and put on display in a special mausoleum.

The pleasure of an aristocrat counted no more than the pleasure of a poor worker. That was not how society was ordered then.

Perhaps even more radical for the time was his belief that animals' happiness was relevant.

Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and she was usually associated with the wise owl.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in what is now Germany, in 1770 and grew up in the era of the French Revolution when the monarchy there was overthrown and a new republic established.

Hegel believed that we can move closer to truth by following his dialectical method.

Yet there are some experiences that can make life bearable. These come mostly from art. Art provides a still point so that, for a short time, we can escape the endless cycle of striving and desire. Music is the best art form for this.

So the basic morality that Schopenhauer taught was one of compassion. Properly understood, other people aren't external to me.

Mill had been brought up as a utilitarian, and Bentham's influence was immense.

Lower pleasures, such as those an animal can experience, would never challenge the higher, intellectual pleasures, like the pleasure of reading a book or listening to a concert.

Mill went further, and said that it would be better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool.

In 1859 he published a short but inspiring book defending his view that giving each person space to develop as they saw fit was the best way to organize society. That book is called On Liberty and it is still widely read today.

Darwin went on a five-year voyage on HMS Beagle,

They were contagious, inspiring real revolutions in Russia in 1917 and elsewhere.

Others point out that human nature makes us more competitive and greedy for ourselves than he allowed: there is no possibility in their view of human beings co-operating fully in a communist state – we're just not like that.

The point of this example is to show that pragmatism is concerned with practical consequences – the ‘cash value’ of thought.

Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficial impact on our lives.

Truth for him is what we would end up with if we could run all the experiments and investigations we would ideally like to. This is very close to A.J. Ayer's logical positivism which is the subject of Chapter 32.

According to James' pragmatic theory of truth, what makes the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’ true is that believing it produces useful practical results for us.