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30 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What are two ways to study philosophy?
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1) Problems approach: take a problem and see how it was handled by past philosophers and how it is treated by contemporary ones.
2) Historical approach: see how each era defined the important issues and responded to them. |
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When, where, and why did western philosophy emerge?
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6th century bc, greece, as the first attempt to provide a thoroughly secular and rational explanation of the natural world.
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Who were the first group of philosophers? To what did they limit their explanations and was their mode of justification?
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the pre-socratic milesians. limited their explanations of the world to natural elements, such as air, water, heat, and condensation. their mode: analytical reason and logic.
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What was the question that dominated the 6th century? From where does it arise?
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what is the basic reality underlying the world, the changeless stuff of which all things are made?
the question arises from a pessimistic view of change, in which everything is transient, and nothing seems permanent. Early philosophers felt there must be some "ageless, deathless" reality underlying the world as we know it0 something eternal and unchanging from which everything is derived. |
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Name some pre-socratic milesians and their ideas as to what eternal substance of everything was
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Thales (624-550 BC): water
Anaximander (611-547 BC): "boundless" or indeterminate in character Anaximenes (588-524): air, if it could be differentiated into various forms of opposing principles. |
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What did the Eleatics argue?
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one unchanging, eternal reality could not be identified with any of the elements known to ordinary experience, but had to be defined simply as the proper object of logical thought. What is real is a special kind of object defined in terms of rational thought.
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What is idealism?
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the belief that nothing exists but what is thought; "to be is to be perceived."
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What is rationalism?
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belief that what is real is what is rational.
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What is the objectification of reason as a principle of reality
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this means reality is defined as what is consistenly thought and without contradiction.
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The Pythagoreans (Pythagoras 572-497) supported the early trend toward idealism and rationalism.. what did they believe?
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the basic substance of the world consisted of mathematical entities. the underlying reality of the world was mathematical and ideal.
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What was one major development arising out of the milesian investigation into the one underlying substance of the world?
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the view that the underlying reality consisted of abstract ideal objects of thought.
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What did the atomists, who were the forerunners of modern materialism, argue?
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many unchanging, eternal, self-consistent entities of a physical nature which they called "atoms." there is nothing in reality but these atoms and empty space, everything is to be explained as different arrangements of atoms.
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What two philosophers established a powerful synthesis of pre-Socratic thought?
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Plato and his student Aristotle.
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What was Socrates primarily interested in?
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moral problems of justice, piety, and so on.
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What did Plato combine and explain?
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He combined the pythagoran and eleatic conception of reality with the socratic concern with morality, and explained the multiplicity of the ordinary physical world on the basis of eternal, unchanging, ideal entities.
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On the basis of what did Plato go on to try to explain the ordinary world of sense particulars
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Forms
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What one important accomplishment of the middle ages?
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the wedding of philosophy and theology
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In the classical era, philosophy is characterized by an overriding concern with...
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the nature of reality
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modern philosophy is characterized by a concern with
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knowledge. their goal was to discover the most secure foundation possible for our knowledge of the external world.
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Who was the first major figure of the modern period?
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Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
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What did rene descartes argue? And what direction did he end up going?
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knowledge must be erected on a solid foundation of certainty.
the direction of subjective idealism |
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What were the two forms that the idealism of descartes took?
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1) Continental Rationalists (including Descartes, Spinoza [1632-1677], and Leibniz [1646-1716]) who stressed the importance of reason in the acquisition of knowledge.
2) British Empiricists (Hobbes [1588-1679], Locke [1632-1704], Berkeley [1685-1753], and Hume [1711-1776]) who stressed the role of sensation and observation. |
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Who did the rationalists look to primarily? The empiricists?
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1) Plato
2) Aristotle and the atomists |
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What did rationalists and empiricists agree on?
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that our knowledge of the external world had to be constructed out of subjective certainties, regardless of whether they were derived from our reasoning faculty or our faculty of sensation.
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The empiricists began on the materialist note that our sensations are caused by the interaction of our bodies with the physical world. But as it gradually became clear to Berkeley and Hume that this was only a supposition of which we could be no means be certain, empiricism moved progressively toward the kind of idealism knows as....
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phenomenalism
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What did much of the debate between rationalists and empiricists center upon?
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the possibility of a priori knowledge.
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Name of the philosophers who worked out a compromise between empiricists and rationalists. How did he do this?
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immanuel kant (1724-1804)
He borrowed plato's distinction of matter and form and held that the materials of our knowledge come from sensation (conceding to the empiricists,) while the form of our knowledge comes from reason and the other cognitive faculties (which he interpreted the rationalists to mean). |
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the twentieth century was characterized by a revolution against...
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the past. dominant mood was to denounce all previous philosophy as a colossal mistake and the begin reexamining the nature of philosophy itself and the reconstruction of its foundations.
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What was the positive character of the 20th century revolution?
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a break with the metaphysical dream of discovering the real nature of the world and a new conception of the role of philosophy as the analysis of meaning
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What did the positive character mean to analysts who consisted of John Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and P.F. Strawson?
For the phenonmenologists such as edmund husserl, jean-paul sartre, and and maurice merlearu-ponty? |
meant the analysis of words and concepts
the analysis and meaning of the most general structures of our experience. |
