The ABCs of Philosophy

So-Called Western Philosophy

All of European Philosophy as a Footnote to Plato

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead¹

A magnificent quotation, a gross exaggeration, and a grain of truth.

What do we not already find in Plato: the theory of Forms (metaphysics), the question of what distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion (Theaitetos), the ideal state (Politeia), reflections on language (Kratylos) and on love (Symposion). Even art criticism is already there: Plato wants to banish the poets from his state because they deliver nothing but copies of copies. And the allegory of the cave remains to this day the archetype of all enlightenment: liberation from a world of shadows. The quotation is an exaggeration nonetheless: much of what came later (experimental natural science, Frege's logic, the theory of evolution) Plato would not have recognised even as a footnote.

Periods

The history of European philosophy is usually divided up roughly as follows:

• Antiquity (ca. 600 BCE to 529 CE): from the Presocratics through Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics, the Epicureans and Neoplatonism.
• The Middle Ages (ca. 500 to 1450): patristics and scholasticism, that is, philosophy in the service of and in dispute with theology.
• Renaissance and early modern period (ca. 1450 to 1700): humanism, rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and empiricism (Locke, Hume).
• Enlightenment and German Idealism (ca. 1700 to 1830): Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.
• 19th and 20th centuries: Marx, Nietzsche, existentialism, phenomenology and the split into analytic and continental philosophy.

The dividing lines often follow historical turning points more than philosophical ones: in 529 the emperor Justinian closed the Academy in Athens; in the 12th and 13th centuries Aristotle returned to Europe via Arabic translations; printing and the Reformation broke the Church's monopoly on interpretation. The scientific revolution, the French Revolution, industrialisation and the world wars each raised new questions. And the emigration of many philosophers fleeing the Nazis carried analytic philosophy into the English-speaking world, while France and Germany went their own ways.

Fields

The classical division follows the triad of the true, the good and the beautiful: logic and epistemology ask after truth, ethics after the good, aesthetics after the beautiful. Kant condensed this into three questions: “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?”² Later he added a fourth, in which the other three converge: “What is the human being?”³

Today's basic disciplines are:

• Logic: what is a valid inference?
• Epistemology: what can we know, and how?
• Metaphysics and ontology: what is there in the first place?
• Ethics: how ought we to act?
• Aesthetics: what is beautiful, what is art?
• Political philosophy: what is a just order?
• Philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science: how does language work, what is consciousness, what makes science science?

Science, Logic, Literature or Psychology?

What philosophy actually is, is something philosophers themselves do not agree on. Here are a few self-images, some of which contradict each other rather fiercely.

Philosophy as the Mother Devoured by Her Children

In the old days everything was philosophy. Already in Aristotle we find metaphysics, logic, physics, ethics, biology, rhetoric, politics and poetics under one roof. One by one the children moved out: Newton's main work is still called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687); with Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig (1879) psychology became independent; and logic migrated in part into mathematics. Unlike the case of Cronus, who devoured his children, here it is the other way around: every new science takes another piece of the mother's territory away. What remains are the questions nobody can yet answer with experiments.

Philosophy as the Foundational Science of Knowledge

There have always been philosophers who wanted absolutely certain knowledge. Descartes sought an unshakeable foundation,⁴ Spinoza wrote his Ethics “in geometrical order”, with definitions, axioms and proofs, and Kant wanted to clarify what reason can actually achieve before it asserts anything. Husserl still called for a “philosophy as a rigorous science”,⁵ and the logical positivists wanted to ground all knowledge in observation and logic. Religious philosophers were looking for ultimate certainties in any case. The dream has never fully worked out so far, but it has produced a great deal of clarity.

Philosophy as a Logic Machine

Many philosophers were also logicians. Leibniz dreamed of a universal language in which disputes could simply be calculated: “Calculemus!”, let us calculate.⁶ Frege and Russell created modern logic, and Wittgenstein closed his Tractatus with the sentence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”⁷ The Vienna Circle went further still: Rudolf Carnap declared metaphysical sentences such as Heidegger's “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” (“the nothing itself nothings”) to be simply meaningless.⁸ Whatever does not dance to the laws of logic gets thrown out.

Philosophy as Anti-Logic

For others, philosophy is more of a birthing pool for ideas, closer to poetry than to mathematics. Nietzsche philosophised in aphorisms, Kierkegaard in masks and pseudonyms, and Heidegger wrote that “reason, glorified for centuries,” is “the most stiff-necked adversary of thought”.⁹ Deleuze and Guattari defined philosophy as the art of inventing concepts.¹⁰ Oscar Wilde supplied the fitting motto: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”¹¹

Philosophy as Cultural History

There is a lot of Nietzsche here: instead of asking whether a morality is true, he asks where it comes from and whom it benefits.¹² Hegel had already called philosophy “its own time comprehended in thoughts”.¹³ Every philosophy is then also a mirror of its epoch, its language and its power relations. Foucault later applied this perspective to madness, the prison and sexuality (more on this in the history of critical thinking).

Philosophy as (Meta-)Psychology

When we talk about thinking, willing and feeling, the road to psychology does not seem long. Except that philosophy speaks of norms, that is, of how we ought to think, will and feel, whereas psychology describes how people actually think, feel and will. Around 1900 this was fiercely contested: Husserl and Frege fought against “psychologism”, which took the laws of logic to be mere habits of thought.¹⁴ Today philosophy and psychology work together more closely again, for instance when psychology shows how systematically we depart from the rules of logic.

Philosophy as Ethics

By now almost everything has floated away downstream from philosophy. But one child is still living at home: reflection on good action, ethics. For whether something is right cannot be measured like a temperature; the sciences tell us what is, but not what ought to be.¹⁵ That is why nearly all the “great” philosophers have contributed their share to ethics as well. Three major schools are still in dispute today: virtue ethics asks about good character, deontological ethics about the right principle, and utilitarianism about the best consequences.

• Aristotle: the goal of life is happiness (eudaimonía), and virtue lies in the right mean between two extremes, courage for instance between cowardice and recklessness (Nicomachean Ethics).
• Thomas Aquinas: he combines Aristotle with Christian theology and grounds a natural law that every human being can recognise by reason (Summa theologiae, 1265 to 1273).
• Spinoza: free is whoever understands their affects instead of blindly following them (Ethics, 1677).
• Kant: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785).
• Bentham and Mill: right is what brings about the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Mill, Utilitarianism, 1861).
• Nietzsche: he calls for a “revaluation of all values” and contrasts “slave morality” with “master morality” (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886).
• Hans Jonas: our responsibility extends to future generations (Das Prinzip Verantwortung, 1979).
• Peter Singer: the suffering of animals counts morally too (Animal Liberation, 1975).

Philosophy as Literature

From Montaigne through Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Sartre and Camus: some of the deepest philosophical thoughts are found in essays, plays and novels. Richard Rorty went so far as to claim that novels have done more for human solidarity than philosophical theories, because they bring the suffering of others before our eyes.¹⁶ Sometimes literature is more powerful than philosophy when it comes to life itself.

Personal Preferences

What people want from philosophy is as varied as people themselves:

• Some simply want to feel good: Epicurus sought peace of mind, and the Stoics practised not getting worked up about what cannot be changed.
• Some want to drive out their demons: Boethius wrote De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy, ca. 524) in prison, and Wittgenstein compared the methods of philosophy to therapies.¹⁷
• Some want to succeed: the Sophists sold the art of speaking as the key to a political career; Machiavelli wrote a manual for princes (Il Principe, 1532).
• Some want to be right: Schopenhauer ironically collected 38 stratagems for that purpose (Eristische Dialektik oder Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten, posthumously 1864).
• Some want to speak beautifully: since Gorgias and Cicero, rhetoric has been the elegant sister of philosophy, and sometimes its rival.
• Some want to understand the connections: for Hegel, “the true is the whole” (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807).
• Some want to get to the bottom of causes: from Aristotle's four causes to the principle of sufficient reason in Leibniz and Schopenhauer.
• Some want to change the world: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Marx, Thesen über Feuerbach, 1845)

Much Ado About Nothing

After the inhuman crimes of the Nazis, a question haunted many philosophers: what good is enlightenment anyway? The self-proclaimed nation of poets and thinkers had become, overnight, a nation of judges and hangmen, and even a philosopher of Heidegger's stature had joined the Nazi party in 1933.¹⁸ If classical education and philosophy do not prevent such monsters, then why philosophise at all? Adorno answered not with less enlightenment, but with a different one: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.”¹⁹ Education, then, does not protect us by itself; it only helps when it sharpens one's own judgement instead of merely decorating it.

Chinese Philosophies

The great Chinese schools arose in a time of chaos, the Warring States period (ca. 475 to 221 BCE). No wonder their guiding question was stability: how does one create order in the state, in the family and in one's own life? Confucianism relied on humaneness, education and rites; Daoism (Laozi, Zhuangzi) on non-intervention in harmony with the course of things; Legalism on strict laws and punishments. Mohism developed a culture of argumentation of its own (see history of critical thinking). After the unification of the empire, Confucianism became the state philosophy for two millennia.

Indian Philosophies

The Sanskrit word for philosophy, darśana, means “view” or “way of seeing”, and often more than knowledge is at stake: liberation (mokṣa) from the cycle of suffering and rebirth. A distinction is drawn between schools that accept the authority of the Vedas (such as Nyāya, Sāṃkhya, Yoga and Vedānta) and those that reject it: Buddhism, Jainism and the materialist Cārvāka. The Nyāya school developed a sophisticated logic and theory of debate, with precise rules for when an inference is valid. The Jains taught the “many-sidedness” of reality (anekāntavāda), familiar from the parable of the blind men who touch an elephant and each describe something different.

African Philosophies

For a long time it was denied that African philosophy existed at all; Hegel, for instance, denied Africa any history whatsoever.²⁰ In fact much thinking was passed on orally, in proverbs, stories and conversations with sages, which “sage philosophy” later investigated systematically. It is disputed whether a collective “ethnophilosophy” may be derived from such traditions, or whether philosophy always requires critical individual voices.²¹ A well-known example of African thought is Ubuntu: “A person is a person through other persons.” And with Zera Yacob there is already, in the 17th century, an Ethiopian voice that tests religions against the standard of reason.

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Footnotes

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929, Part II, chap. 1, sect. 1. ↩

2. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), 1781/1787, A 805/B 833. ↩

3. Immanuel Kant, Logik (ed. by Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche), 1800, Introduction III. ↩

4. René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641, First and Second Meditation. ↩

5. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”, in: Logos 1, 1910/11. ↩

6. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. by C. I. Gerhardt, vol. 7, p. 200. ↩

7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 1921/22, proposition 7. ↩

8. Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”, in: Erkenntnis 2, 1931/32. The Heidegger quotation comes from Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?, 1929. ↩

9. Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsches Wort ‚Gott ist tot‘”, in: Holzwege, 1950. ↩

10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991. ↩

11. Oscar Wilde, “The Relation of Dress to Art”, in: Pall Mall Gazette, 28 February 1885. ↩

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887. ↩

13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1820, Preface. ↩

14. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, 1900. ↩

15. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739/40, Book III, Part 1, Section 1. ↩

16. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989, Introduction. ↩

17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), 1953, § 133. ↩

18. Martin Heidegger. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩

19. Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (radio lecture 1966), in: Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, 1971. ↩

20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 1837 (posthumous), Introduction. ↩

21. The debate began with Placide Tempels, La philosophie bantoue, 1945; the most important criticism of it is Paulin Hountondji, Sur la « philosophie africaine », 1976. ↩