Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology ...................................................916

Philosophy of Mind ............................................................................ 917

Introduction ........................................................................................917

Philosophy of Mind as a Discipline ...................................................918

The Search for a Criterion of the Mental ...........................................919

Purposeful Behavior ........................................................................919

Intentionality ................................................................................... 922

The Scope of Application of Intentionality ....................................926

Subjective Experience ........................................................................929

Adequacy as a Criterion of the Mental ...........................................931

Core Characteristics of Subjectivity ............................................... 934

Privileged Status of Subjectivity ....................................................936

The Existence and Status of the Mind ...............................................941

The Mind as Material .........................................................................942

Eliminative Materialism .....................................................................943

Behaviorism ........................................................................................ 944

Central-State Theory .......................................................................... 945

The Mind as Immaterial ..................................................................... 946

Dualism ...............................................................................................947

Immaterialism ..................................................................................... 949

Neutral Theories .................................................................................950

The Analysis of Mental Phenomena .................................................. 952

The Cognitive .................................................................................. 953

The Affective ................................................................................... 954

The Volitional ................................................................................. 955

Some Metaphysical and Epistemological Issues .....................................956

Personal Identity Through Time ........................................................956

Personal Immortality ..........................................................................958

Knowledge of Other Minds ...............................................................959

Artificial Intelligence .........................................................................961

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Ethics ........................................................................................................ 962

Introduction ........................................................................................ 962

The Origins of Ethics ......................................................................... 963

Mythical Accounts .......................................................................... 963

Introduction of Moral Codes ....................................................... 963

Problems of Divine Origin .......................................................... 965

Prehuman Ethics .......................................................................... 966

Nonhuman Behavior .................................................................... 966

Kinship and Reciprocity .............................................................. 967

Anthropology and Ethics ............................................................. 970

Ancient Ethics .................................................................................... 974

The Middle East ........................................................................... 974

India .............................................................................................. 977

China ............................................................................................ 982

Ancient Greece ............................................................................ 984

Western Ethics from Socrates to the 20th Century ........................... 987

The Classical Period of Greek Ethics ............................................. 987

Socrates ........................................................................................ 987

Plato .............................................................................................. 989

Aristotle ........................................................................................ 992

Later Greek and Roman Ethics ....................................................... 997

The Stoics ..................................................................................... 997

The Epicureans ............................................................................ 999

Christian Ethics from the New Testament to the Scholastics ...... 1001

Ethics in the New Testament ..................................................... 1001

Augustine ................................................................................... 1004

Aquinas and the Moral Philosophy of the Scholastics ............. 1005

Renaissance and Reformation ...................................................... 1010

Machiavelli ................................................................................ 1010

The First Protestants .................................................................. 1011

The British Tradition: from Hobbes to the Utilitarians ............... 1013

Hobbes ....................................................................................... 1013

Early Intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and Clarke ..................... 1016

Shaftesbury and the Moral Sense School .................................. 1018

Butler on Self-Interest and Conscience ..................................... 1019

The Climax of Moral Sense Theory: Hutcheson and Hume .... 1020

The Intuitionist Response: Price and Reid ............................. 1024

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Utilitarianism ..........................................................................................1025

Paley .................................................................................................1025

Bentham ............................................................................................1026

Mill ...................................................................................................1027

Sidgwick ...........................................................................................1028

The Continental Tradition: from Spinoza to Nietzsche .........................1030

Spinoza .............................................................................................1030

Leibniz ..............................................................................................1031

Rousseau ...........................................................................................1032

Kant ...................................................................................................1033

Hegel .................................................................................................1039

Marx ..................................................................................................1042

Nietzsche ..........................................................................................1044

20th-Century Western Ethics .................................................................1046

Metaethics .........................................................................................1046

Moore and the Naturalistic Fallacy ..............................................1047

Modern Intuitionism .....................................................................1049

Emotivism .....................................................................................1050

Existentialism ................................................................................1052

Universal Prescriptivism ...............................................................1053

Modern Naturalism .......................................................................1056

Recent Developments in Metaethics ...............................................1059

Normative Ethics ..............................................................................1066

The Debate Over Consequentialism .............................................1066

Varieties of Consequentialism ......................................................1067

An Ethic of Prima Facie Duties ....................................................1072

Rawls’s Theory of Justice ............................................................. 1073

Rights Theories .............................................................................1075

Natural Law Ethics ........................................................................1077

Ethical Egoism ..............................................................................1079

Applied Ethics ..................................................................................1082

Applications of Equality ...............................................................1084

Environmental Ethics ....................................................................1086

War and Peace ...............................................................................1087

Abortion, Euthanasia, and the Value of Human Life ...................1088

Bioethics ........................................................................................1089

Bibliography ...........................................................................................1093

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Acknowledgments

I wish to express sincere appreciation to Francis Christie, John Farthing, and

Jay McDaniel for their assistance and lasting influence. In addition, special

thanks to my wife who has supported both me and my work for so many

years.

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Preface

The concepts that lie at the heart of philosophy antedate historical record

by thousands of years. In one form or another, the concept of immortality

probably extends back at least to the Neanderthals some tens of thousands of

years ago. They seem to have developed some notion of an afterlife, as is

evident in their burial sites and symbolism. In prehistory, magic also displays

unmistakable philosophical underpinnings: it appeals to causes unseen and not

yet understood. Abstraction and idealized forms can be traced back to the Cro-

Magnon, who lived more than ten thousand years ago. The ghastly practice of

human sacrifice, which already indicates some complex set of beliefs about

the world, can be traced back at least this far.

When did people first envision gods and goddesses who must be

appeased? When did they first believe in forces behind the scenes and

mysteries in the very stuff of life? When did they begin to speculate about the

creation of the world, and in what terms? When did they move beyond the

"facts" of nature to speculation, to spirituality, to wonder? When did these

beliefs and speculations begin to consolidate into that cantankerous discipline

that the Greeks called philosophy? How did the numerous gods and goddesses

of the early ancient world become one? In 1370 B.C.E., the Egyptian pharaoh

Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV) proclaimed belief in one God, centuries before

the birth of Moses. Abraham, we are told, had such a belief in a single God

five hundred years earlier. How much of philosophy is an effort to come to

terms with that demand for unity and concern for that which is “beyond” us?

In the pages that follow, I have tried to write a history of philosophy that

is simple and straightforward but captures the complexity and diversity of the

subject. The reader may rightly wonder why this volume is so large, but when

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I tried to cut, it was not my authorial egos that were bruised but the history

itself. What is sufficiently inessential to omit? Of course, I have made such

decisions, thousands of them, but, nevertheless, the richness of the subject was

persuasive. At the risk of massive oversimplification, we have tried for

inclusiveness. And we took heart as we read our German philosophical

counterpart, Hans Joachim Störig, whose “short history” weighs in at 750

pages.

I have tried to keep my own biases out of the text – not always

successfully. I have also tried to glean some sense of a global perspective on

philosophy, but have not made a false attempt to avoid taking a distinctively

“Western” perspective in doing so. There is no point in apologizing for this.

Philosophy in all its forms and cultures is wondrous.

Zaine Ridling, Ph.D.

Kansas City, Missouri, USA

June 2001

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Introduction

This book has three basic purposes: (1) to provide an overview of the

history of philosophy in the West; (2) to relate philosophical ideas and

movements to their historical background and to the cultural history of their

time; and (3) to trace the changing conception of the definition, the function,

and the task of philosophy.

It is a paradox faced by all of those who attempt to write the history of

philosophy that the “philosophy” whose history they write probably would not

have been defined exactly alike by any two of the major figures whom they

judge it fitting to include in their accounts. For throughout its long and varied

history in the West, “philosophy” has meant many different things. Some of

these have been a search for the wisdom of life (the meaning closest to the

Greek words from which the term is derived); an attempt to understand the

universe as a whole; an examination of man’s moral responsibilities and social

obligations; an effort to fathom the divine intentions and man’s place with

reference to them; an effort to ground the enterprise of natural science; a

rigorous examination of the origin, extent, and validity of men’s ideas; an

exploration of the place of will or consciousness in the universe; an

examination of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty; an effort to codify

the rules of human thought in order to promote rationality and the extension of

clear thinking. Even these do not exhaust the meanings that have been

attached to the philosophical enterprise, but they give some idea of its extreme

complexity and many-sidedness.

It is difficult to determine whether any common element can be found

within this diversity and whether any core meaning can be discovered for

philosophy that could serve as a universal and all-inclusive definition. But a

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first attempt in this direction might be to define philosophy either as “a

reflection upon the varieties of human experience” or as “the rational,

methodical, and systematic consideration of those topics that are of greatest

concern to man.” Vague and indefinite as such definitions are, they do suggest

two important facts about philosophizing: (1) that it is a reflective, or

meditative, activity and (2) that it has no explicitly designated subject matter

of its own but is a method or type of mental operation (like science or like

history) that can take any area or subject matter or type of experience as its

object. Thus, although there are a few single-term divisions of philosophy of

long standing – such as logic, ethics, epistemology (the theory of knowledge),

or metaphysics (theory of the nature of Being) – its divisions are probably best

expressed by phrases that contain the preposition “of” – such as philosophy of

nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of law, or philosophy of art.

Part of what makes it difficult to find a consensus among philosophers

about the definition of their discipline is precisely that they have frequently

come to it from different fields, with different interests and concerns, and that

they therefore have different areas of experience upon which they find it

especially necessary or meaningful to reflect. St. Thomas Aquinas (a

Dominican friar of the 13th century), George Berkeley (a bishop of the Irish

Church in the 18th century), and Søren Kierkegaard (a Danish divinity student

in the 19th century) all saw philosophy as a means to assert the truths of

religion and to dispel the Materialistic or Rationalistic errors that, in their

opinion, had led to its decline. Pythagoras in ancient south Italy, René

Descartes in the late Renaissance, and Bertrand Russell in the 20th century

have been primarily mathematicians whose views of the universe and of

human knowledge have been vastly influenced by the concept of number and

by the method of deductive thinking. Some philosophers, such as Plato or the

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British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, have been

obsessed by problems of political arrangement and social living, so that

whatever else they have done in philosophy has been stimulated by a desire to

understand and, ultimately, to change the social and political behavior of men.

And still others – such as the Milesians (the first philosophers of Greece);

Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan philosopher; and, in the 20th century, Alfred

North Whitehead, a process metaphysician – have begun with an interest in

the physical composition of the natural world, so that their philosophies

resemble more closely the generalizations of physical science than those of

religion or sociology.

The history of Western philosophy reveals in detail the concentrated

activity of a multitude of serious and able men reflecting upon, reasoning

about, and considering deeply the nature of their experience. But throughout

this diversity certain characteristic oppositions habitually recur, such as the

division between monists, dualists, and pluralists in metaphysics; between

Materialists and Idealists in cosmological theory; between Nominalists and

Realists in the theory of signification; between Rationalists and Empiricists in

the theory of knowledge; between Utilitarians, self-realizationists, and

proponents of duty in moral theory; and between partisans of logic and

partisans of emotion in the search for a responsible guide to the wisdom of

life.

Many of these fundamental oppositions among philosophers will be

treated in the article that follows. But if any single opposition is taken as

central throughout the history of Western philosophy at every level and in

every field, it is probably that between the critical and the speculative

impulses. These two divergent motivations tend to express themselves in two

divergent methods: that of analysis and that of synthesis. Plato’s Politeia (The

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Republic) is an example of the second. The Principia Ethica (1903) of G.E.

Moore, a founder of linguistic philosophy, is an example of the first.

Beginning with a simple question about justice, Politeia in its discursiveness

slowly but progressively brings more and more areas into the discussion: first

ethics, then politics, then educational theory, then theory of knowledge, and

finally metaphysics. Starting with one specific question, Plato finally managed

to make his discussion as broad as the world. Principia Ethica does just the

opposite. Beginning with a general question – What is good? – it

progressively breaks up this question into a whole series of subordinate

questions, analyzing meanings ever more minutely, growing narrower and

narrower but always with the utmost modesty and sincerity, striving for

increasing simplicity and exactitude.

The analytic, or critical, impulse treats any subject matter or topic by

concentrating upon the part, by taking it apart in the service of clarity and

precision. It was essentially the method of Aristotle and of Peter Abelard, a

medieval Scholastic; of David Hume, a Scottish sceptic, and of Rudolf

Carnap, a 20th-century semantic Positivist; and of Russell and Moore. The

synthetic, or speculative, impulse operates by seeking to comprehend the

whole, by putting it all together in the service of unity and completeness. It is

essentially the method of Parmenides, a Pre-Socratic monist, and of Plato; of

St. Thomas and of Benedict de Spinoza, a modern Jewish Rationalist; of

G.W.F. Hegel, a German Idealist, and of Whitehead. Throughout philosophy’s

history, each of the two traditions has made its insistent claim.

There is one philosophical tradition – that of Positivism – that sees

philosophy as originating in the obscure mists of religion and coming finally

to rest in the pure sunshine of scientific clarity. This represents a necessary

progress, because Positivism considers it a scandal when philosophers speak a