History of Philosophy

From Ancient to Contemporary

Objectives:
At the end of the session, students are expected to:
1. Understand and explain critically the basic Philosophical
underpinnings and approaches to the study of the cosmos
and man.
2. Share to the whole class their individual analytic
reflection on the philosophies of every philosopher
present in the history of philosophy.
Pre-socratic/Ancient Period

• Polytheist
• Concerned with the cosmos, to what constitutes the universe.
• Cosmocentric
• The question on man could not be totally divorced from the
cosmological, since man was conceived as part of nature.
The Nature of Questioning (Pre-socratic/ancient)
• Natural observation and reason to prove the beginning of everything.
• Man is a microcosm.
• The search for the truth about man was simultaneously the search
for the truth about the universe.
• What is the primary stuff of the universe?
• What is the nature of the universe?
• From where does everything originated?
• From what is everything created?
Thales of Miletus

• Father of Ionian School of Philosophy.

• Asserted that the world originated from water and was sustained
by water.
• The earth floated on water.
• The First Philosopher.
• The first one to question reality (philosophizing).
Anaximander

• The primary element of the universe is Apeiron (all-enfolding, all-

controlling, immortal)
• Material cause is not water but infinite, eternal and ageless.
• He speculated and argued about "the Boundless" as the origin
of all that is.
• He also worked on the fields of what we now call geography and
biology.
Anaximenes

• Student of Anaximander.
• Anaximenes is best known for his doctrine that air is the source
of all things.
• Primary element is determinate (Air) primary substance.
• Matter is air.
• Everything undergoes rarefraction or condensation.
Pythagoras

• Purification and Mortality.

• Math is the purifier of the soul.
• All things are number.
• He was the founder of the influential philosophical and religious
movement or cult called Pythagoreanism.
• He was probably the first man to actually call himself a
philosopher.
Socrates

• Ethics and Religion.

• Socratic Method, Know thyself.
• He is best known for his association with the Socratic method of
question and answer, his claim that he was ignorant (or aware of
his own absence of knowledge), and his claim that the
unexamined life is not worth living, for human beings.
Plato

• Ring of Gyges
• “Why should I be moral?”
• Theory of forms.
• It is most of all from Plato that we get the theory of Forms,
according to which the world we know through the senses is
only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and unchanging world of
the Forms.
Aristotle

• Man is a rational animal.

• Aristotle’s emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief
in the scientific method forms the backdrop for most of his work.
• Ethics and politics: Aristotle identifies the highest good with
intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one who cultivates
certain virtues based on reasoning.
Medieval Period
• Monotheist
• Theocentric
• With the coming and predominance of Christianity in Medieval Europe,
philosophy became the handmaid of theology.
• Reason was the companion of faith; to make faith reasonable.
• Man was viewed still as part of nature but nature now was God's
creation, and next to the angels, was the noblest of God's creatures,
created in His image and likeness
• Philosophy became the search for the ultimate causes of things,
eventually leading to the truth about God.
• Man's ideal was to contemplate God and His creation, and his action
was to conform to the natural moral law implanted in his reason
Nature of Questioning

• Theocentric
• Reason has become the companion of faith.
• What is the nature of the Supreme Being?
• Who is really the ultimate cause of everything?
ST. Augustine
• City of God
• notions of God and the attributes that he has, many of which are even
now well-known among believers. For example, God is all-powerful (i.e.,
omnipotent), all-knowing (i.e., omniscient), and all-good (i.e., omni-
benevolent). Other commonly discussed attributes of God are that he is
eternal, that he is present everywhere (i.e., omnipresent) and that he has
foreknowledge of future events.
• God’s goodness means that he does no evil. Yet, God’s justness means
that he rewards good and punishes evil. Thus, God indeed causes some
suffering through punishment, but he is not the cause of evil actions
themselves.
• The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and
thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods.
ST. Anselm
• Ontological argument.
• Goodness exists in a variety of ways and degrees.
• This would be impossible without an absolute standard of good, in
which all goods participate.
• Therefore, an absolute standard of good exists, which is God.
St. Anselm

• God is defined as “The Greatest Possible Being.”

• The Greatest Possible Being must have every quality that would
make it greater (or more superior) than it would be otherwise
• Having the quality of real existence is greater than having the
quality of imaginary existence.
• Therefore, the Greatest Possible Being must have the quality of
real existence.
ST. Thomas Aquinas
• 5 proofs of God’s existence
• Aquinas offers five ways of proving God. Briefly, they are these:
1. There must be a first mover of things that are in the process of
change and motion.
2. There must be a first efficient cause of the events that we see
around us.
3. There must be a necessary being to explain the contingent beings
in the world around us.
4. There must be an ultimately good thing to explain the good that we
see in lesser things.
5. There must be an intelligent being who guides natural objects to
their ends or purposes.
Modern Period

• Anthropocentric
• Subjectivism
• Reason is now liberated to faith. It’s enough to know the truth
about the existence of everything and every thing.
• What is man? Who is man?
• How do we know what we know? Are things that we know true?
MODERN PERIOD
• ANTHROPOCENTRIC
• The question of man was now the foreground of other questionings on nature
or on God. Reason was now liberated from nature and faith; and sufficient to
inquire on its own truth.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) introduced a Copernican revolution in
philosophy: Rather than reason conforming to the object or nature, it is the
object or nature that must be subjected to the a priori conditions of the mind,
or the subject.
• Anthropocentrism reached its climax in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1631) Built system of the Mind in the process of
evolving itself in a kind of dialectic, of reason putting an other to itself
(antithesis) and coming to a resolution (synthesis)
Rene Descartes

• French Philosopher & the father of modern philosophy.

• Impressed by the progress of the sciences and mathematics.
• Started on someone certitude, an indubitable, that which cannot
be doubted because if it can be doubted, then all else are
dubitable.
• Cartesian Meditations - a methodic Cartesian doubt. "Cogito,
ergo sum" (“I think, therefore I am") Everything was dubitable,
for Descartes, even his own body, all except for one fact - the
fact that he was doubting. He could not doubt that he was
doubting; and doubting, being a mode of thinking.
Jean-Paul Sartre
• Absolute Freedom
• Understanding human existence rather than the world.
• to develop an ontological account of what it is to be human.
• Existence precedes Essence
CONTEMPORARY
Existentialism
Giving value of the uniqueness of every individual.
Five features of Existentialism
 
Phenomenology- Intentionality of consciousness.
Significant Human Experiences
 
 
What makes man truly human? What is my greater purpose? How
should I live my life?
To what extent are our choices and actions considered “ Free”?
What’s the meaning of life?
Soren Keirkegaard
• the acknowledged Father of Existentialism.
• Kierkegaard emphasized the individual, man who cannot be place in a
“cog in a machine” a part of a system.
• Reacting against the rationalism of Hegel, he stressed the infinite
passion of man. Truth is what is held on with the passion of the
infinite.
• Philosophy became the search for the meaning of life. The search for
truth was now the search for meaning.
Gabriel Marcel- Primary & Secondary Reflection
Martin Heidegger – Dasein
Martin Buber- I-Thou
Emmanuel Levinas- Ethics of the Face