HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

The history of Western philosophy dates back to Ancient

Greece, and can be divided into five periods: ancient philosophy,
medieval philosophy, Renaissance philosophy, modern philosophy,
and contemporary philosophy.http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_la_filosof
%C3%ADa_occidental - cite_note-Britannica-0
1 Ancient philosophy spans from the 6th
century BC to the 1st century AD. C, until the decline of the Roman
Empire, and includes thinkers such as http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plat
%C3%B3nPlato and Aristotle. The medieval period lasted until the end
of the 15th century, when it gave way to the Renaissance. Modern
philosophy spans from the late 16th century to the early 19th
century. Contemporary philosophy encompasses philosophical
development from the 19th century to the present, including
postmodern thinkers and writers.

Ancient Philosophy
The Greek world before the appearance of philosophy lived
installed in the mythical attitudehttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mito.
Through myths, man was able to give an explanation of natural
phenomena and social institutions. The great spiritual event that the
Greeks initiated between the 7th and 6th centuries BC. It consisted of
trying to overcome this way of thinking about the world with another
revolutionary way that bets on reason as the instrument of knowledge
and mastery of reality. It should be noted that this step should not be
understood as something abrupt but rather gradual. Mythical
influences are still noticeable in many ancient thinkers. In reality,
there were only a few people who participated in the new and
revolutionary way of thinking (those who would be called
philosophers), although little by little it became more universal. Even
in our time, the mythical attitude has not yet disappeared. This great
step from mythology to rationalist explanation is known as "the step
from myth to logos."

With this new way of thinking, the Greeks propose that things in
the world are ordered according to laws. The world is a cosmos, not
chaos, so nature does not behave first in one way and then in a
completely different way, but in its behavior there is a certain order
that follows laws, which can be discovered by reason. With the
Greeks, many of the fundamental philosophical questions appear for
the first time, and several of the possible solutions that can be given
to them are already articulated in Greek philosophy.
pre-socratic philosophy
The period in the history of Greek philosophy that extends from

its very beginning, with Thales of Miletus, to the last manifestations of

Greek thought not influenced by the thought of Socrates is often

called pre-Socratic philosophy.

Western philosophy is said to have originated in the Greek cities

of Asia Minor (Ionia) with Thales of Miletus ("all is water"), who lived
around 585 BC. His most notable students were Anaximander and
Anaximenes of Miletus ("all is air").

Other thinkers and schools emerged throughout Greece in the

following centuries. Among the most important are:

 Heraclitus, who emphasized the transitory and chaotic nature of

all things ("everything flows"; "everything is fire"; "we cannot step
into the same river twice").
 Anaxagoras, who claimed that reality was so ordered that it
must be governed in all aspects by the mind.
 The
pluralistshttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomismohttp://es.wikipedia.o
rg/wiki/Pluralismo_(filosof%C3%ADa) and atomists (Empedocles,
Democritus) who tried to understand the world as a composition of
innumerable interacting parts; and the
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escuela_ele%C3%A1tica Eleatics
Parmenides and Zeno of Elea who insisted that "all is one and
change is impossible." Parmenides and his school emphasized the
absolute, permanent and durable character of the world of truth
("being is, not being is not").
 The Sophists, travelling teachers of varying philosophical
affinities, gained fame (perhaps unfairly) for claiming that truth
was nothing more than opinion and for teaching people to argue in
order to prove any conclusion they desired.

This whole movement became increasingly concentrated in Athens,

which became the dominant city-state of Greece.
Classical Greek Philosophy
There is considerable debate about why Athenian culture
promoted philosophy, but one popular theory is that it happened
because Athens had a direct democracy. It is well known from Plato's
writings that many sophists maintained debating schools, were
respected members of society, and were well paid by their students.
It is also well known that the orators had a tremendous influence on
Athenian history, possibly even causing its failure (see Battle of
Miletus).

Another theory for the popularity of philosophical debate in

Athens was due to the use of slavery there - the workforce, mostly
slaves, performed the work that would otherwise be done by the male
population of the city. Free to work in the fields or in productive
activities, they were free to organize assemblies in Athens, and spent
long hours discussing popular philosophical questions. The theory fills
in the blanks by claiming that the students of the Sophists wanted to
acquire oratorical skills so that they could influence the Athenian
assembly, and thus become rich and respected. As winning debates
led to wealth, the subjects and methods of debate were extremely
developed.

Socrates
The leading figure in the transformation of Greek philosophy
into a continuing, unified project—one still pursued today—is
Socrates, who studied under several sophists. We then know that he
spent much of his life generating discussions with everyone in Athens,
trying to determine whether anyone had any idea what he was talking
about, especially when the topic being discussed was important, such
as justice, beauty, or truth. He left no writings, but he inspired many
disciples. In his old age he became the focus of hostility among many
in the city who viewed the sophists and philosophy interchangeably
as destroyers of the city's piety and morality; and he was executed in
399 BC. Details of Socrates' life are known from three contemporary
sources: Plato'shttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plat
%C3%B3nhttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%A1logo dialogues, the
works of Aristophanes, and Xenophon's dialogues. There is no
evidence that Socrates ever published any of his own writings.
 Socrates is considered the father of political philosophy and
ethics, or moral philosophy, and is the primary source of all the major
themes of Western philosophy in general; perhaps his most important
contribution to Western thought is his dialectical mode of inquiry,
known as the Socratic method or method of "lists", which he applied
to the examination of key moral concepts such as good and justice.

Plato
Socrates' most important student was Plato, who wrote multiple
philosophical dialogues using his teacher's method of inquiry to
examine problems. The early dialogues bear some resemblance to
Socrates' style of inquiry.

Those in the "middle" developed a substantially metaphysical

and ethical system to solve these problems. The central ideas are the
World of Ideas, a theory that the mind is imbued with an innate
capacity to understand and apply concepts to the world, and that
these concepts are somehow more real, or more basically real, than
the things in the world around us; the immortality of the soul, and the
idea that it is far more important than the body; the idea that evil is a
form of ignorance, that only knowledge can lead to virtue, that art
should be subordinated to moral purposes, and that society should be
governed by a class of philosopher kings. In the later dialogues,
Socrates figures less prominently, and the World of Ideas theory is
called into question; more direct ethical questions become central.
Interestingly, in The Republic, Plato attacks the political system of
democracy, blaming it for Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars.
Plato attributes the indecision of the masses (who voted on
everything, including military strategies) as the reason for military
defeat. He proposed instead a three-tiered society, with workers,
guards, and philosophers, in ascending order of importance
(conveniently for him and his disciples, clearly), citing the
philosophers' great knowledge of ideas as the reason they were
"suited" to govern the society of the day.

Aristotle
Plato founded the Academy of Athens, and his most outstanding
student there was Aristotle. Among his most influential doctrines were
his metaphysics and the formalization of logic. It seems that Aristotle
was the first philosopher to catalogue every valid syllogism.
Eventually, Aristotle founded another school, the Lyceum.
Hellenistic philosophy
In the transition from the 4th to the 3rd century BC, after the
death of Aristotle and the decline of the Greek city-states, the wars
between the Hellenistic kings to succeed Alexander the Great made
life problematic and insecure. Two philosophical schools then arose in
Athens which, in clear opposition to the Platonic Academy and the
Aristotelian Lyceum, placed individual salvation at the centre of their
concerns: for Epicurus and his followers, on the one hand, as well as
for the Stoics around Zeno of Citium, on the other hand, philosophy
served primarily to achieve psychological well-being or peace through
ethical means.

While the followers of Pyrrhonian skepticism initially denied the

possibility of certain judgments and indubitable knowledge, Plotinus,
in the 3rd century AD, transformed Plato's theory of Ideas to give rise
to Neoplatonism. His conception of the gradation of Being (from the
“One” to matter) offered Christianity a variety of connections and was
the dominant philosophy of late antiquity.

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

Medieval philosophy was deeply concerned with the nature of

God, and with the application of logic and Aristotelian thought to
every area of life. A constant interest during this time was to prove
the existence of God, through logic, if possible. Medieval philosophy
was strongly linked to Christian philosophy, which was itself strongly
influenced by classical Islamic philosophy and by Judeo-Islamic
philosophy in the Late Middle Ages, especially by the writings of
Muslim philosophers such as Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Alhazen, Avicenna, Al-
Ghazali, Avempace and Averroes, and Jewish philosophers such as
Maimonides and Gersonides.

An early effort was the cosmological argument, conventionally

attributed to Thomas Aquinas. The argument, roughly, is that
everything that exists has a cause. Therefore, there must be an
uncaused first cause, and that is God. Aquinas also adapted this
argument to prove the goodness of God. Everything has some
goodness, and the cause of everything is better than the thing
caused. Therefore, the first thing is the best possible thing. Similar
arguments are used to prove God's power and uniqueness.

Another important argument proving the existence of God was

the ontological argument, created by Anselm of Canterbury. It
basically says that God has all the good characteristics possible.
Existence is good, and therefore God has it, and therefore God exists.
This argument has been used in different ways from Descartes
onwards.

The application of Aristotelian logic proceeded to have the

student memorize a long set of syllogisms. Memorization consisted of
diagrams, or learning a key sentence, with the first letter of each
word reminding the student of the names of the syllogisms.

Each syllogism had a name, for example "Modus Ponens" had

the form "If A is true, then B is true. "A is true, therefore B is true."

Most college logic students have memorized Aristotle's 19 two-

subject syllogisms, enabling them to correctly connect a subject and
an object. A few geniuses developed three-subject systems, or
described a way to develop three-subject rules.

Besides Aquinas, other important names of the medieval period

include Duns Scotus and Peter Abelard.

MODERN PHILOSOPHY
As with many periodizations, there are multiple current uses for
the term "modern philosophy." One such usage is to date modern
philosophy from the "Age of Reason," when systematic philosophy
became common, which excludes Erasmus and Machiavelli as
"modern philosophers." Another way is to date it, in the same way
that most of the modern period is dated, from the Renaissance. For
some, modern philosophy ended in 1800 with the rise of Hegelianism
and idealism.

A general view would then have Erasmus, Francis Bacon,

Niccolò Machiavelli and Galileo Galilei as representatives of the rise of
empiricism and humanism.

17th century philosophy

 The philosophy of the 17th century is dominated by the need to
organize philosophy into rational, skeptical, logical and axiomatic, as
René Descartes, Blaise Pascal and Thomas Hobbes did, trying to
integrate religious beliefs within philosophical frameworks, and,
usually fighting atheism, adopting the idea of material reality, and the
dualism between spirit and matter. The extension, and reaction,
against this would be the
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monismomonism of George Berkeley
and Baruch Spinoza.

Philosophy of the 18th century

Eighteenth-century philosophy deals with the period
often called the early part of "the Enlightenment" in the
shorter form of the world, and focuses on the emergence of
systematic empiricism. In this way, Denis Diderot, Voltaire,
Rousseau and culminating with Kant and the political
philosophy of the American revolution are part of the
Enlightenment.

CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
19th century philosophy
The 19th century took the radical notions of self-
organization and intrinsic order from the metaphysics of
Goethe and Kant, and proceeded to the long elaboration of
the tension between systematic and organic development.
The most notable was the work of Hegel, who proposed a
dialectical framework for the ordering of knowledge. From
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarxMarx and
Engels'http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels criticism of
Hegelian dialectics, materialist dialectics and historical
materialism were born, as well as Marxism as a current of
thought. The 19th century would also include Schopenhauer's
denial of the will. With respect to the 18th century, it was
scientific developments that would challenge philosophy: the
most important was the work of Charles Darwin, which was
based on the idea of organic self-regulation found in
philosophers such as Adam Smith.

Philosophy of the 20th century

The 20th century is concerned with the upheavals
produced by a series of conflicts in the philosophical
discourse on the foundations of knowledge, with classical
certainties overthrown, and with new social, economic,
scientific and logical problems. Twentieth-century philosophy
was determined to try to reform and preserve, or to alter or
abolish, old systems of knowledge. Seminal figures include
Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst
Mach and John Dewey. Epistemology and its foundation were
his central concern, as can be seen in the work of Martin
Heidegger, Karl Popper, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bertrand Russell
and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Phenomenologically oriented
metaphysics supported existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus) and finally
post-structuralist philosophy (Jean-François Lyotard, Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida). Also notable was
the emergence of "pop" philosophers who promulgated
systems for dealing with the world. Conversely, some
philosophers have attempted to define and rehabilitate old
philosophical traditions. Most notably, Hans-Georg Gadamer
and Alasdair MacIntyre, have revived the tradition of
Aristotelianism.