This book gives a competent overview of western philosophy from the Classical Greece to just before the present day in a few hundred pages. The value is in the feel the general reader gets for the issues, even though it is impossible to cover content in anything but the most superficial detail.
The book has 4 sections, corresponding to huge chunks of history. It starts with the Greeks, who tried to understand reality virtually without reference to an omnipotent God or Gods. Though occasionally there is some mention of a God or metaphysical organizing force, their explanations were predominantly based on reason.
The most important philosopher was Plato, who argued that we need to understand a deeper abstract reality – an ultimate truth – that lies behind everyday appearances. This “idealism” is akin to finding a mathematical description or some kind of underlying law that would explain a phenomenon, even if it’s expressed as his “world of forms” (a metaphor I’ve always found hard to grasp). Of course, the windup to Plato is long: he synthesized a vast array of ideas from the pre-Socratics, who pondered such questions as the difference between being and becoming (acorn to oak), whether everything was made of the same substance or from irreducible “elements”.
The range of Greek philosophies – from skepticism, cynics, rhetoricians, and proto-scientific inventors – is simply dazzling and it largely set the terms and parameters of philosophical debate for the next 2,500 years. Aristotle, the other towering intellect who was mentored by Plato, came up with a number of original notions as well, including elementary logic, but also biology, implying evolution and historical development. Finally, Plato gave us a character, Socrates, who questioned everything and was regarded as the quintessential philosopher from that day forward.
After the Greeks established a relatively secular and rational way of attempting to investigate reality, Christianity and later Islam re-imposed an omnipotent (and unquestionable) God: they took the concepts of the Greeks and folded them into their theology, creating their own philosophical conundrums. In that way, for example, Plato’s forms became ideas in the mind of God.
So far as the controversies underlying Christology – the logical possibilities of Christ’s relation to God – the Greeks offered fertile methods and notions to attempt to resolve these issues. Early Christians pondered how Christ could be the son of God as well as God, whether he was made of the same “substance”, to what extent he was human, etc. These differences of opinion never got resolved, indeed they often led to violence, and continue to resurface as denominations, sects, and churches proliferate even today; indeed, these philosophical issues explain many of the differences between Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Coptics, Calvinists, and all varieties of Evangelicals.
Though ultimately unable to explain much, medieval philosophers did develop holistic logic frameworks and hierarchies of ideas, in such enterprises as Scholasticism, which sought to logically reconcile every Biblical reference. While derided as nonsensical today ("how many angels on the head of a pin?"), in fact Scholasticism is one of the little-recognized building blocks of modern science – just on a different subject, shall we say.
Then, the Renaissance and Enlightenment respectively rediscovered the ancient sources of philosophy and tried to understand them on their own terms rather than through a Christian prism. They also refined the methodology of the search for knowledge. The Enlightenment philosophes thought that every question, if properly posed, had an answer which can be based purely on reason rather than any metaphysical or scriptural authority and that all such answers would be compatible with each other.
This body of knowledge, they believed, would form a seamless web of infallible and immutable truth, not just on scientific subjects, such as the motion of the planets (Newton), but also human behavior, politics, indeed everything. It was as if all of existence could be seen as parts in a single mechanism. In their scheme, the enlightened despot might indeed embody the philosopher-king that Socrates described in Plato’s Republic, able to see the ultimate reality and know what was best to do.
Of course, it didn’t take long for other philosophers to challenge these self-satisfied certainties. Kant and then the Romantics (Rousseau, Fichte, Goethe, Hegel) argued for more pluralistic visions, opening the way to relativism. Not only were certain ideas incompatible, even irreconcilable (particularly regarding political systems with their assumptions about “human nature”), but many things might be unknowable or require a more holistic and historical perspective. Objections by the Romantics notwithstanding, these innovations represented iterations on idealism, refining them into what would become modern scientific methodology (seeking deeper patterns and structures beneath observable and/or provable reality, e.g. elemental atoms and their behavior in chemistry).
Unfortunately, when the authors get to the final section - contemporary philosophy - they lost me. If there is a unifying idea, it is that idealism – that unchanging, underlying reality – is questionable at best and can be assumed refuted a priori as a concept (except in narrow circumstances). Man is not rational, but driven instead by dark and unfathomable urges (Nietzsche, Freud). Moreover, if logic and language may be faulty or inadequate tools, they are the only ones we have at our disposal (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein). The book ends with the existentialists, who argued that there is no meaning in any objective sense and so one’s actions and inner struggle are what count (Heidegger, Sartre, Camus). This was the section and period I most wanted to understand and that I still understand the least.
For the most part, this is a fun read and hugely ambitious synthesis. By the end, because the modern section peters out, I didn’t feel very satisfied with the reading experience. In addition, the type is too small and was a constant strain.
A friend of mine used to say that philosophy can be summed up by the story of the three umpires sitting in a bar. The first umpire says, "I calls 'em as I sees "em". The second umpire says, "I calls 'em as they are". The third umpire says, "They ain't nothin' until I calls 'em".
One of the things that makes Philosophy hard for me to read is that we already know "how the story comes out" in the sense that ideas that might have been radical in an earlier age have now made their way into the common currency of modern life-even if those using them couldn't put a name to them. In my own case, my old dad made it a point to read to his children each night. I showed up somewhat unexpectedly, almost a decade after my next oldest sibling, and by then, my dad was well into the worst stages of his active alcoholism (he got, and stayed sober, when I was about eleven). I should add, that though he was apparently sometimes embarrassing, he was not a violent or abusive drunk.
He had graduated the from the University of Washington in 1928, with a degree in Journalism, and always managed to find work, first as a newspaperman, and then in Advertising and Public Relations, and had a lifelong "love of words", and in the 1950s he became interested in the works of S.I. Hayakawa on the topic of "General Semantics", and occasionally, a few pages from one of these would be my bedtime story. One of my earliest memories is that of my father sitting on my bed reading the words, "So even though we often say we live in a "dog-eat-dog" world, that doesn't mean that the world is actually full of dogs eating dogs".
Many years later, I was told that this was "like something Wittgenstein might say"-yet here it was, a basic "building block" in my developing mind-and I landed there, in the 20th Century, without building up to it through all those other philosophers-and it makes some of the hand-wringing along the way seem kind of silly-and reading it more of an exercise in "reverse engineering" or "archeology" than the exciting process of discovery it probably was for those who first came up with it.
Thank you, as always, for wading into this stuff so that the rest of us can get at the best bits.