History of Western philosophy

Ancient philosophy is the period of history of Western philosophy that corresponds to the Old Age. It understands Greek philosophy (presocratic and helenistic) and Roman philosophy. It lasted more than 1100 years, from around the year 600 to. C. (with Tales de Mileto) until the sixth century AD, when the last neoplatonics were active. Its main locations were ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.

The philosophy of antiquity was geographically limited in the Mediterranean. Antiquity philosophers can be divided into great features in different groups. First, the philosophers before Socrates, called "presocratic" (about 600 - 400 B.C.) and known to give "the passage of myth to logos». Then the Greek classic period, which begins with Socrates (about 500 - 300 BC). Plato, a pupil of Socrates, and Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, became two of the most important and influential philosophers, known as the "major democracy". Other contemporaries were the sophists and the "minor democratic" (megarics, cynics and cirenaics). Finally, the philosophy of the Hellenistic period followed the classical period, followed by the philosophy of late antiquity, which includes the epicures, the Stoics, the Skeptics and Neoplatonics.

Other important philosophical traditions of antiquity were Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, influential were the cultures of Judaism, ancient Egypt, the Persian Empire and Mesopotamia. In the regions of the fertile Crescent, Iran and Arabia emerged the philosophical literature of the sapiential books and which today dominates Islamic culture. The early Sapiential Literature of the Fertile Crescent was a genre that sought to educate people about ethical action, practical life and virtue through stories and proverbs. In Ancient Egypt, these texts were known as sebayt (“teaching”) and are fundamental to our understanding of the philosophy of Ancient Egypt. Babylonian astronomy also included many philosophical speculations about the cosmology that could have influenced the ancient Greeks.

Jewish philosophy and Christian philosophy are religio-philosophical traditions that developed both in the Middle East and in Europe, which share certain primitive Jewish texts (mainly Tanach) and monotheistic beliefs. Jewish thinkers such as the Geonim of the Talmudic Academies in Babylon and the philosopher Maimonides studied Greek and Islamic philosophy. Later, Jewish philosophy was under strong Western intellectual influences and includes the works of Moses Mendelssohn, who marked the beginning of Haskalah (also known as Jewish illustration), Jewish existentialism and reformist Judaism.

The pre-Islamic Persian philosophy begins with the work of Zoroastro, one of the first promoters of monotheism and dualism between good and evil. This dualistic cosmogony influenced subsequent Iranian developments, such as manifoldism, dungeonism and zurvanism.

Medieval philosophy is all the streams of thought and philosophical treaties that developed from the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD) to the Renaissance (sixteenth and sixteenth centuries). The main quest for medieval philosophy was the cohesion of the beliefs inherited from classical philosophy with the dogmas of Christianity, although there were also very important contributions of Jewish and Islamic beliefs.

The Renaissance philosophy, or Renaissance philosophy, is the philosophy that developed mainly between the 15th and 16th centuries, beginning in Italy and advancing towards the rest of Europe.

In the Renaissance, philosophy was still a very broad field that covered studies that are now allocated to several different sciences, as well as theology. With that in mind, the three fields of philosophy that received the most attention and development were political philosophy, humanism and natural philosophy.

In political philosophy, the rivalries between the national states, their internal crises and the beginning of the European colonization of America renewed interest in problems about the nature and morality of political power, national unity, internal security, the power of the State and international justice. In this field they highlighted the works of Nicolás Maquiavelo, Jean Bodin and Francisco de Vitoria.

Humanism was a movement that emphasized the value and importance of human beings in the universe, in contrast to medieval philosophy, which always placed God and Christianity in the center. This movement was, first of all, a moral and literary movement, starring figures such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, St. Thomas Moro, Bartolomé de las Casas and Michel de Montaigne.

The philosophy of the nature of the Renaissance broke with the medieval conception of nature in terms of divine purpose and order, and began to think in terms of forces, physical causes and mechanisms. There was also a partial return to Plato's authority over Aristotle, both in his moral philosophy, in his literary style and in the relevance given to mathematics for the study of nature. Nicolas Copernico, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei were precursors and protagonists in this scientific revolution, and Francis Bacon provided a theoretical basis to justify the empirical method that would characterize the revolution. On the other hand, in medicine, the work of Andreas Vesalius in human anatomy revitalized the discipline and provided more support to the empirical method. The philosophy of Renaissance nature may be best explained by two propositions written by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks:

• All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
• There is no certainty that neither of the mathematical sciences nor any of the sciences derived from the mathematical sciences can be used.

Similarly, Galileo based his scientific method on experiments, but also developed mathematical methods for its application to physics problems, an early example of mathematical physics. These two ways of conceiving human knowledge formed the basis for the beginning of empirism and rationalism, respectively.

Other influential Renaissance philosophers were Pico della Mirandola, Nicolas de Cusa, Michel de Montaigne, Francisco Suárez, Erasmus de Róterdam, Pietro Pomponazzi, Bernardino Telesio, Johannes Reuchlin, Tommaso Campanella, Gerolamo Cardano and Luis Vives.

Modern philosophy is that philosophy developed during modern age and associated with modernity. It is not a specific doctrine or school (so it should not be confused with specific movements such as Modernism), although many authors of this era share certain common assumptions, which helps to distinguish it from previous and later philosophy.

The centuryXVII mark the beginning of modern philosophy, while the beginning of the centuryXX. marks its end. How much of the Renaissance should be included as part of modern philosophy is a controversial issue: the Early Renaissance is often considered less modern and more medieval than the late High Renaissance. It is also debated whether modernity is over or not in the century.XX. and if it has been replaced by postmodernity. How one decides these questions determines the scope of use of the concept of "modern philosophy". Another of these uses is to date modern philosophy from the " Era of Reason", where systematic philosophy became common, which excludes Erasmus of Rotterdam and Nicolas Machiavelli as "modern philosophers". Another way is to date it, just as most of the modern period is dated, from the Renaissance. For some, modern philosophy ended in 1800 with the emergence of hegelianism and idealism. A general vision would then have Erasmus of Rotterdam, Francis Bacon, Nicolás Maquiavelo and Galileo Galilei as representatives of the boom of empirism and humanism.

For centuries XVII and XVIII, important figures in mind philosophy, epistemology and metaphysics could be divided into approximately two main groups. Rationalism, dominant in France and Germany, which argued that all knowledge has to start from innate ideas in the mind. Important Rationalists were René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Nicolás Malebranche. Empirism, on the other hand, defended that knowledge always begins with the sensory experience we receive through the senses. Important figures of this line of thought were David Hume, John Locke and George Berkeley. Ethics and political philosophy are generally not subsumed within these categories, although all these philosophers worked on ethics in their own distinctive styles. Other important figures in political philosophy are Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

By the end of the centuryXVIIIImmanuel Kant established an innovative philosophical system that sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism. Whether or not, the philosophical dispute continued. Kant strongly influenced German philosophical works at the beginning of the centuryXIXthus beginning the tradition of German idealism. The characteristic theme of idealism was that the world and mind should be understood according to the same categories. German idealism culminated in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who, among many other things, said that “the real is rational; the rational is real”.

The centuryXIX was characterized by being largely a reaction to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the last third to the publication of The Origin of Species. It began with the development of German idealism (mainly Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), but it continued with a number of other movements, most of which were created by philosophers working from outside the academic world. In Germany, the metaphysical excesses of idealism led to a neo-kantist movement. Arthur Schopenhauer brought idealism to the conclusion that the world was only a useless game of images and desires, and defended atheism and pessimism. Nietzsche, on the other hand, considered that this did not lead to pessimism, but to the possibility of a new kind of freedom, proclaimed the death of God and along with Kierkegaard laid the foundations for existential philosophy. Auguste Comte coined the term "positivism" and popularized the school of the same name. In ethics, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed utilitarianism, according to which the correct action is that which produces the greatest amount of general happiness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels invested hegelian philosophy to lay the foundations of dialectical materialism. In the United States, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey gave rise to pragmatist school. By the end of the century, Edmund Husserl began the school of transcendental phenomenology. In the last third of the century, Gottlob Frege began with his work in mathematical logic, which would provide the tools for analytical philosophy, but would remain unknown until the century.XX.. The British Philosophy of the CenturyXIX little by little was dominated by neo-hegelian thought and as a reaction against this, figures such as Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore created the movement of analytical philosophy, which is essentially an update of traditional empiricism accommodated the invention of modern logic by German mathematician Gottlob Frege.

Contemporary philosophy is the current period of philosophy history. By extension, it is also called by this name the philosophy produced by philosophers who are still alive. It is the period that follows modern philosophy, and its beginning is usually set at the end of the centuryXIX or early centuryXX..

The most significant and comprehensive philosophical traditions of the centuryXX. were analytical philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world, and continental philosophy in continental Europe. The centuryXX. He also saw the emergence of new philosophical currents, such as logical positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, poststructuralism, philosophical materialism, currentism and neotomism.

In this period most important philosophers worked from universities, especially in the second half of the century. Some of the most discussed topics were the relationship between language and philosophy (this fact is sometimes called "the linguistic twist"). The main exponents of this "giro" were Martin Heidegger in the continental tradition and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the analytical tradition.