Reading Kants Geography (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
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Stuart Elden
Machine generated contents note: Kant and His Times 2. Kant's Lectures on "Physical Geography": Translating Kant's Physical Geography: They also believe in metempsychosis , the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. A key figure in Greek philosophy is Socrates. Socrates studied under several Sophists but transformed Greek philosophy into a branch of philosophy that is still pursued today. It is said that following a visit to the Oracle of Delphi he spent much of his life questioning anyone in Athens who would engage him, in order to disprove the oracular prophecy that there would be no man wiser than Socrates.
Socrates used a critical approach called the " elenchus " or Socratic method to examine people's views.
He aimed to study human things: Although Socrates wrote nothing himself, some of his many disciples wrote down his conversations. He was tried for corrupting the youth and impiety by the Greek democracy. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Selected Past Presentations
Although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, he chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles. His execution consisted of drinking the poison hemlock and he died in BC. Plato was a student of Socrates. Plato founded the Academy of Athens and wrote a number of dialogues , which applied the Socratic method of inquiry to examine philosophical problems. Some central ideas of Plato's dialogues are the immortality of the soul, the benefits of being just, that evil is ignorance, and the Theory of Forms. Forms are universal properties that constitute true reality and contrast with the changeable material things he called "becoming".
Aristotle was a pupil of Plato. Aristotle was perhaps the first truly systematic philosopher and scientist. He wrote about physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics and logic. Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. He in turn conquered much of the ancient world at a rapid pace. Hellenization and Aristotelian philosophy exercised considerable influence on almost all subsequent Western and Middle Eastern philosophers , including Hellenistic , Roman , Byzantine , Western medieval , Jewish , and Islamic thinkers.
Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology F. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. If he fails to do either as often occurs , he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. The most notable work of this German idealism was G. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology , ethics , political theory , and post-modern aesthetics.
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages , roughly extending from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. Early medieval philosophy was influenced by the likes of Stoicism , Neoplatonism , but, above all, the philosophy of Plato himself. Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason , the existence and unity of God , the object of theology and metaphysics , the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.
The prominent figure of this period was Augustine of Hippo one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity who adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it in the 4th century and whose influence dominated medieval philosophy perhaps up to end of the era but was checked with the arrival of Aristotle's texts. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers including Anselm of Canterbury , the father of scholasticism up until the 13th century.
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The modern university system has roots in the European medieval university , which was created in Italy and evolved from Catholic Cathedral schools for the clergy during the High Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas , an academic philosopher and the father of Thomism , was immensely influential in Catholic Europe; he placed a great emphasis on reason and argumentation, and was one of the first to use the new translation of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological writing.
The Renaissance "rebirth" was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought, [5] in which the recovery of classical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism. How much of Renaissance intellectual history is part of modern philosophy is disputed.
The term " modern philosophy " has multiple usages. For example, Thomas Hobbes is sometimes considered the first modern philosopher because he applied a systematic method to political philosophy. Modern philosophy and especially Enlightenment philosophy [17] is distinguished by its increasing independence from traditional authorities such as the Church, academia, and Aristotelianism; [18] [19] a new focus on the foundations of knowledge and metaphysical system-building; [20] [21] and the emergence of modern physics out of natural philosophy.
Some central topics of Western philosophy in its early modern also classical modern [23] [24] period include the nature of the mind and its relation to the body, the implications of the new natural sciences for traditional theological topics such as free will and God, and the emergence of a secular basis for moral and political philosophy.
The approximate end of the early modern period is most often identified with Immanuel Kant 's systematic attempt to limit metaphysics, justify scientific knowledge, and reconcile both of these with morality and freedom. Late modern philosophy is usually considered to begin around the pivotal year of , when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason appeared.
German philosophy exercised broad influence in this century, owing in part to the dominance of the German university system. The 19th century took the radical notions of self-organization and intrinsic order from Goethe and Kantian metaphysics, and proceeded to produce a long elaboration on the tension between systematization and organic development. Foremost was the work of Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic —16 produced a "dialectical" framework for ordering of knowledge. As with the 18th century, developments in science arose from philosophy and also challenged philosophy: After Hegel's death in , 19th-century philosophy largely turned against idealism in favor of varieties of philosophical naturalism , such as the positivism of Auguste Comte , the empiricism of John Stuart Mill , and the historical materialism of Karl Marx.
Logic began a period of its most significant advances since the inception of the discipline, as increasing mathematical precision opened entire fields of inference to formalization in the work of George Boole and Gottlob Frege. The three major contemporary approaches to academic philosophy are analytic philosophy , Continental philosophy and pragmatism. The 20th century deals with the upheavals produced by a series of conflicts within philosophical discourse over the basis of knowledge, with classical certainties overthrown, and new social, economic, scientific and logical problems.
The publication of Husserl's Logical Investigations —1 and Russell's The Principles of Mathematics is considered to mark the beginning of 20th-century philosophy. Since the Second World War , contemporary philosophy has been divided mostly into analytic and Continental traditions; the former carried in the English speaking world and the latter on the continent of Europe.
The perceived conflict between Continental and analytic schools of philosophy remains prominent, despite increasing skepticism regarding the distinction's usefulness. In the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school for much of the 20th century. The term "analytic philosophy" roughly designates a group of philosophical methods that stress detailed argumentation, attention to semantics, use of classical logic and non-classical logics and clarity of meaning above all other criteria. Though the movement has broadened, it was a cohesive school in the first half of the century.
Analytic philosophers were shaped strongly by logical positivism , united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language. Bertrand Russell and G. Moore are also often counted as founders of analytic philosophy, beginning with their rejection of British idealism, their defense of realism and the emphasis they laid on the legitimacy of analysis.
Russell's classic works The Principles of Mathematics , [41] " On Denoting " and Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead , aside from greatly promoting the use of mathematical logic in philosophy, set the ground for much of the research program in the early stages of the analytic tradition, emphasizing such problems as: These works also explored issues of ontological commitment and metaphysical problems regarding time, the nature of matter, mind, persistence and change, which Russell often tackled with the aid of mathematical logic.
Frege took "the linguistic turn ," analyzing philosophical problems through language. Some analytic philosophers held that philosophical problems arise through misuse of language or because of misunderstandings of the logic of human language. In , Ludwig Wittgenstein , who studied under Russell at Cambridge, published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , which gave a rigidly "logical" account of linguistic and philosophical issues. Years later, he reversed a number of the positions he set out in the Tractatus , in for example his second major work, Philosophical Investigations Investigations was influential in the development of "ordinary language philosophy," which was promoted by Gilbert Ryle , J.
Austin , and a few others. In that paper Quine criticizes the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, arguing that a clear conception of analyticity is unattainable.
The later work of Russell and the philosophy of Willard Van Orman Quine are influential exemplars of the naturalist approach dominant in the second half of the 20th century. But the diversity of analytic philosophy from the s onward defies easy generalization: Recently, the experimental philosophy movement has sought to reappraise philosophical problems through social science research techniques. Some influential figures in contemporary analytic philosophy are: Analytic philosophy has sometimes been accused of not contributing to the political debate or to traditional questions in aesthetics.
Analytic philosophers have also shown depth in their investigations of aesthetics, with Roger Scruton , Nelson Goodman , Arthur Danto and others developing the subject to its current shape. Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. While identifying any non-trivial common factor in all these schools of thought is bound to be controversial, Michael E. Rosen has hypothesized a few common Continental themes: The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl , sought to study consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective, while Martin Heidegger drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to propose an unconventional existential approach to ontology.
Conversely, some philosophers have attempted to define and rehabilitate older traditions of philosophy. Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, [42] [43] shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.
Their influence, however, has extended beyond existentialist thought. Transcendental idealism, advocated by Immanuel Kant , is the view that there are limits on what can be understood, since there is much that cannot be brought under the conditions of objective judgment.
Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason — in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting approaches of rationalism and empiricism, and to establish a new groundwork for studying metaphysics. Although Kant held that objective knowledge of the world required the mind to impose a conceptual or categorical framework on the stream of pure sensory data—a framework including space and time themselves—he maintained that things-in-themselves existed independently of human perceptions and judgments; he was therefore not an idealist in any simple sense.
Kant's account of things-in-themselves is both controversial and highly complex. Continuing his work, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling dispensed with belief in the independent existence of the world, and created a thoroughgoing idealist philosophy. The most notable work of this German idealism was G. Hegel 's Phenomenology of Spirit , of Hegel admitted his ideas were not new, but that all the previous philosophies had been incomplete. His goal was to correctly finish their job. Hegel asserts that the twin aims of philosophy are to account for the contradictions apparent in human experience which arise, for instance, out of the supposed contradictions between "being" and "not being" , and also simultaneously to resolve and preserve these contradictions by showing their compatibility at a higher level of examination "being" and "not being" are resolved with "becoming".
This program of acceptance and reconciliation of contradictions is known as the "Hegelian dialectic ". Philosophers influenced by Hegel include Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach , who coined the term projection as pertaining to humans' inability to recognize anything in the external world without projecting qualities of ourselves upon those things; Karl Marx ; Friedrich Engels ; and the British idealists , notably T. Few 20th-century philosophers have embraced idealism. However, quite a few have embraced Hegelian dialectic. Immanuel Kant's "Copernican Turn" also remains an important philosophical concept today.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis, originating from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
It analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. Marxist analyses and methodologies influenced political ideologies and social movements. Marxist understandings of history and society were adopted by academics in archaeology, anthropology, media studies, political science, theater, history, sociology, art history and theory, cultural studies, education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology and philosophy.
Edmund Husserl 's phenomenology was an ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. Phenomenology later achieved international fame through the work of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger formerly Husserl's research assistant , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Through the work of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl's focus on subjective experience influenced aspects of existentialism. Inaugurated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible. Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system, and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought.
This led Continental thought away from humanism, and toward what was termed the decentering of man: Structuralism sought the province of a hard science, but its positivism soon came under fire by post-structuralism, a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists, but later came to criticize it. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing, for example, but the poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines.
While the distinction between the signifier and signified was treated as crystalline by structuralists, poststructuralists asserted that every attempt to grasp the signified results in more signifiers, so meaning is always in a state of being deferred, making an ultimate interpretation impossible. Post-structuralism came to predominate from the s onwards, including thinkers such as Michel Foucault , Jacques Derrida , Gilles Deleuze and even Roland Barthes ; it incorporated a critique of structuralism's limitations. Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around Since the usefulness of any belief at any time might be contingent on circumstance, Peirce and James conceptualized final truth as something established only by the future, final settlement of all opinion.
Western philosophy
Pragmatism attempted to find a scientific concept of truth that does not depend on personal insight revelation or reference to some metaphysical realm. It interpreted the meaning of a statement by the effect its acceptance would have on practice. Inquiry taken far enough is thus the only path to truth. For Peirce commitment to inquiry was essential to truth-finding, implied by the idea and hope that inquiry is not fruitless.
The interpretation of these principles has been subject to discussion ever since. Peirce's maxim of pragmatism is, "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
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Critics accused pragmatism falling victim to a simple fallacy: Pragmatism was later worked on by neopragmatists Richard Rorty who was the first to develop neopragmatist philosophy in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , [59] Hilary Putnam , W. Quine , and Donald Davidson.
Neopragmatism has been described as a bridge between analytic and Continental philosophy. Process philosophy is a tradition beginning with Alfred North Whitehead , who began teaching and writing on process and metaphysics when he joined Harvard University in Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in Continental departments.