Glossary: Learn Some Keywords Of Western Philosophy
Source: http://www.ron-turner.com/westernphilosophy.html
History of Western Philosophy
I INTRODUCTION
Philosophy, Western (Greek philosophia,“love of wisdom”), the rational and critical inquiry into basic principles. Philosophy is often divided into four main branches: metaphysics, the investigation of ultimate reality; epistemology, the study of the origins, validity, and limits of knowledge; ethics, the study of the nature of morality and judgment; and aesthetics, the study of the nature of beauty in the fine arts. The two distinctively philosophical types of inquiry are analytic philosophy, which is the logical study of concepts, and synthetic philosophy, which is the arrangement of concepts into a unified system.
As used originally by the ancient Greeks, the term philosophy meant the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Philosophy comprised all areas of speculative thought and included the arts, sciences, and religion. As special methods and principles were developed in the various areas of knowledge, each area acquired its own philosophical aspect, giving rise to the philosophy of art, of science, and of religion. The term philosophy is often used popularly to mean a set of basic values and attitudes toward life, nature, and society—thus the phrase “philosophy of life.” Because the lines of distinction between the various areas of knowledge are flexible and subject to change, the definition of the term philosophy remains a subject of controversy.
Western philosophy from Greek antiquity to modern times is surveyed in the remainder of this article. For information about philosophical thought in the Far and Middle East, see Chinese Philosophy; Islam; Buddhism; Daoism (Taoism); Confucianism.
II
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Western philosophy is considered generally to have begun in ancient Greece as speculation about the underlying nature of the physical world. In its earliest form it was indistinguishable from natural science. The writings of the earliest philosophers no longer exist, except for a few fragments cited by Aristotle and by other writers of later times.
A
The Ionian School The first philosopher of historical record was Thales of the city of Miletus, on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, who practiced about 580BC. Thales, who was revered by later generations as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, was interested in astronomical, physical, and meteorological phenomena, and his scientific investigations led him to speculate that all natural phenomena are different forms of one fundamental substance, which he believed to be water, because he thought evaporation and condensation to be universal processes. Anaximander, a disciple of Thales, maintained that the first principle from which all things evolve is an intangible, invisible, infinite substance that he called apeiron,“the boundless.” He realized, however, that no observable substance could be found in all things; thus his notion of the boundless anticipated the modern notion of an unbounded universe. This substance, he maintained, is eternal and indestructible. Out of its ceaseless motion the more familiar substances, such as warmth, cold, earth, air, and fire, continuously evolve, generating in turn the various objects and organisms that make up the recognizable world.
Gaurab Gurung 