Trombley - A Short History of Western Thought

I regularly used to wake in a panic from a recurring nightmare in which I was the survivor of a nuclear holocaust. In the nightmare I belonged to a small band of survivors, each of whom was given a task to help towards the reconstruction of Western civilization. My job was to make a summary of philosophical ideas from ancient Greece to the present, which would be used in the rebuilt universities to teach the first generation of post-Armageddon philosophy students. Little did I know that this recurring nightmare was actually a premonition of the day when Richard Milbank would phone from Atlantic Books to ask if I would do exactly that.

Writers enjoy phone calls of the commissioning kind, so naturally I said yes straight away. Oh good, I thought, this is like a dream come true. The next morning I awoke in a blind panic with that old, familiar post-nightmare feeling... It soon passed. I rolled up my sleeves and set about organizing my task.

At the end of the day, it seemed to me, the history of philosophy boiled down to one basic question: what can we know? And that question is framed in the context of another: what do we believe? The first philosophers, it seemed to me, were concerned to separate knowledge from belief. They would do this, for instance, by replacing creation myths with a scientific explanation of how our world came to be.

The tension between belief (or faith) and knowledge (or reason) is as powerful today as it was in the time of Socrates. A 2010 Gallup poll found that 40 per cent of Americans believe that God created the world in six days; 38 per cent believe we evolved from more basic organisms, but that God played a part in the process; 16 per cent subscribe to the science-based, evolutionary evidence that human beings evolved over a long period of time. How long? Radiocarbon dating is accurate to 58,000 to 62,000 years. The fossil record dates Homo sapiens as being 200,000 years old (although they only acquired full human functionality about 50,000 years ago). Creationists argue that not only Homo sapiens but the entire world is only somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. However, the latest scientific measurement, taken from microwaves released during the Big Bang, shows the universe to be 13.75 billion years old. Science and religion are not necessarily incompatible: many scientists have been (and are today) believers. But erroneous belief and science are incompatible. Defining the difference between knowing and believing is philosophys first task.

Of course, philosophy is about complex ideas and arguments, and in writing this popular history it might be objected by some that I have made generalizations or that I have failed to do justice to one or another school of thought. On the other hand, the general reader has every right to make acquaintance with some of the greatest philosophers of the past, and to be offered some introduction to the key thinkers of today. The philosophers Immanuel Kant, Blaise Pascal and Henri Bergson were all great mathematicians, but they also managed to convey their philosophical ideas in a language that ordinary readers could understand.

Philosophy is our best means of sorting good ideas from bad, so it has always been a competitive pursuit. This is also why philosophy can be stubbornly sectarian. Modern philosophy, for instance, is split between the analytic and continental camps. The analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer didnt mince his words. He considered the work of the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre to be, quite literally, meaningless (he really did mean that their work didnt mean anything). For my part, I disagree with Ayer, while finding his work engaging and amusing, his prose brisk, and his ideas to have meaning (though their meaning may quite possibly be wrong). I also find much that I can agree with in Heidegger and Sartre, as well as plenty I cannot agree with.

But we are getting ahead of our story. In this book I have tried to give a brief overview of some of the key moments in Western philosophy, from the time of the Presocratics (around the sixth century BC) to the present day. My hope is that I have been able to convey at least some of the joy and excitement I have felt in revisiting our great philosophical tradition.

What is philosophy? Even some philosophers argue that it doesnt exist in its own right. As long ago as the seventeenth century the German mathematician and logician Joachim Jung (15871657) said it is completely dependent on material delivered by various scientific, scholarly or cultural activities. Philosophy does not have any resources of its own at its disposal. But that is merely one view. More optimistically, the Frenchmen Gilles Deleuze (192595) and Flix Guattari (193092) described it as the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts (What Is Philosophy?, 1991). According to the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana (18631952) it is a gradual mastering of experience by reason (The Life of Reason, 19056). Before that, the German phenomenologist Max Scheler (18741928) called it a love-determined movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles (On the Eternal in Man, 1960). But way before any of these, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384322 BC) simply said that it begins with wonder.

6th century BC to 1st century AD

The first philosophers were called Presocratics, because they worked in the period before the Greek philosopher Socrates (c.469399 BC), from about 585 BC to 400 BC. The prefix pre- tells us that Socrates is a chronological marker indicating a change in thought. There is a before Socrates and an after the before period is popularly understood as being characterized by a fragmented approach to knowledge, with the after Socrates period constituting a more systematic and sophisticated approach. But the work of the Presocratics might seem more fragmented than what came after only because the evidence we have of it is fragmentary. Very few original texts remain, and most of our knowledge of Presocratic thought is filtered through the verbal accounts, translations and therefore prejudices of those that followed.