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).

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.