Major Educational Philosophies z2r1r

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION THE 5 MAJOR PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION EDGAR P.MOLINA JR.

2012

UNIVERSIDAD DE STA ISABEL

MAJOR EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHIES "In modern times there are opposing views about the practice of education. There is no general agreement about what the young should learn either in relation to virtue or in relation to the best life; nor is it clear whether their education ought to be directed more towards the intellect than towards the character of the soul.... And it is not certain whether training should be directed at things useful in life, or at those conducive to virtue, or at non-essentials.... And there is no agreement as to what in fact does tend towards virtue. Men do not all prize most highly the same virtue, so naturally they differ also about the proper training for it."

Aristotle wrote that age more than 2,300 years ago, and today educators are still debating the issues he raised. Different approaches to resolving these and other fundamental issues have given rise to different schools of thought in the philosophy of education. We will examine five such schools of thought: Essentialism, Progressivism, Perennialism, Existentialism, and Behaviorism. Each has many ers in American education today. Taken together, these five schools of thought do not exhaust the list of possible educational philosophies you may adopt, but they certainly present strong frameworks from which you can create your own educational philosophy.

Educational essentialism

Educational essentialism is an educational philosophy whose adherents believe that children should learn the traditional basic subjects thoroughly and rigorously. In this philosophical school of thought, the aim is to instill students with the "essentials" of academic knowledge, enacting a back-to-basics approach. Essentialism ensures that the accumulated wisdom of our civilization as taught in the traditional academic disciplines is ed on from teacher to student. Such disciplines might include Reading, Writing, Literature, Foreign Languages, History, Mathematics, Science, Art, and Music. Moreover, this traditional approach is meant to train the mind, promote reasoning, and ensure a common culture.

Progressive education Progressive education is a pedagogical movement that began in the late nineteenth century and has persisted in various forms to the present. More recently, it has been viewed as an alternative to the test-oriented instruction legislated by the No Child Left Behind educational funding act. Educational perennialism Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting pertinence to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Since details of fact change constantly, these cannot be the most important. Therefore, one should teach principles, not facts. Since people are human, one should teach first about humans, not machines or techniques. Since people are people first, and workers second if at all, one should teach liberal topics first, not vocational topics. A particular strategy with modern perennialists is to teach scientific reasoning, not facts. They may illustrate the reasoning with original s of famous experiments. This gives the students a human side to the science, and shows the reasoning in action. Most importantly, it shows the uncertainty and false steps of real science. Although perennialism may appear similar to essentialism, perennialism focuses first on personal development, while essentialism focuses first on essential skills. Essentialist curricula thus tend to be much more vocational and fact-based, and far less liberal and principle-based. Both philosophies are typically considered to be teacher-centered, as opposed to student-centered philosophies of education such as progressivism. However, since the teachers associated with perennialism are in a sense the authors of the Western masterpieces themselves, these teachers may be open to student criticism through the associated Socratic method, which, if carried out as true dialogue, is a balance between students, including the teacher promoting the discussion.

Existentialism Existentialism is the philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the experiences of the individual. Moral and scientific thinking together do not suffice to understand human existence, so a further set of categories, governed by "authenticity", is necessary to understand human existence. ("Authenticity", in the context of existentialism, is being true to one's own personality, spirit, or character. Existentialism began in the mid-19th century as a reaction against the then-dominantsystematic philosophies, such as those developed by Hegel and Kant. Søren Kierkegaard, generally considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, posited that it is the individual who is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and for living life ionately and sincerely ("authentically").Existentialism became popular in the years followingWorld War II and influenced a range of disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology. Existentialists generally regard traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience. Scholars generally consider the views of existentialist philosophers to be profoundly different from one another relative to those of other philosophies. Criticisms of existentialist philosophers include the assertions that they confuse their use of terminology and contradict themselves. Educational behaviourism Educational behaviourism is an educational philosophy built around the premise that environment determines behaviour, and regulating the environment of students to influence their behaviour in positive ways.

Christian philosophy Figure 1Baviourism

There is no record of any written works produced by Jesus. Nor is there a record of any any systematic philosophy or theology written by him. Several s of his life and many of his teachings are recorded in the New Testament. Those records form the basis for some Christian philosophies, such as Jesusism. Saul of Tarsus (later Paul the Apostle or St. Paul) was a Jew who persecuted the early Christian church and who helped to facilitate the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian. Saul

underwent a dramatic conversion, becoming a Christian leader who wrote a number of epistles, or letters, to early churches in which he taught doctrine and theology. In some ways he functioned in the manner of the popular marketplace philosophers of his day (Cynics, Skeptics, and some Stoics). A number of his speeches and debates with Greek philosophers are recorded in the Biblical Book of Acts, and his epistles became a significant source for later Christian philosophies.

Hellenistic Christian philosophy and early Christian philosophy Hellenism is the traditional designation for the Greek culture of the Roman Empire in the days of Jesus, Paul, and for centuries after. Classical philosophies of the Greeks had already expired and diluted beyond recognition except for small bands of continuators of the traditions of the Pythagoreans, of Plato, and Aristotle (whose library was lost for centuries). The new philosophies of the Hellenistic world were those of the Cynics, Skeptics, and increasingly the Stoics; it's these philosophers who bring us into the world of Hellenistic philosophy. Slowly, a more integral and rounded tendency emerged within Hellenism, but also in certain respects in opposition at times to it in regard to one philosophical problem or another, or an ensemble of problems. Here are some of those thinkers most closely associated with Hellenistic Christian philosophies, listed more or less in chronological order:



Justin Martyr: Christian apologist and philosopher whose work often focused on the doctrine of the Logos and argued that manyStoic and Platonic philosophical ideas were similar to ideas in the Old Testament

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Tertullian: Tertullian was a philosopher before he converted to Christianity; after that change of direction he remained a prolific writer in the second century A.D., and is commonly called the "Father of the Western Church." He was the first church father to use the term Trinitas in reference to the Godhead and developed the doctrine of traducianism, or the idea that the soul was inherited from the parents, the idea that God had corporeal (although not fleshly) existence, and the doctrine

of the authority of the gospels. He fought voraciously against Marcionism, and considered Greek philosophy to be incompatible with Christian wisdom. Toward the end of his life, he ed the heterodox sect of Montanism, and thus has not been canonized by the Catholic Church. 

Irenaeus of Lyons: Irenaeus is best known for his writings arguing for the unity of God, and against Gnosticism. He argued thatoriginal sin is latent in humanity, and that it was by Jesus' incarnation as a man that he "undid" the original sin of Adam, thus sanctifying life for all mankind. Irenaeus maintained the view that Christ is the Teacher of the human race through whom wisdom would be made accessible to all.



Clement of Alexandria: Theologian and apologist who wrote on Greek philosophy, using ideas from pagan literature, Stoic and Platonic philosophy, and Gnosticism to argue for Christianity



Origen: Origen was influential in integrating elements of Platonism into Christianity. He incorporated Platonic idealism into his conceptions of the Logos, and the two churches, one ideal and one real. He also held a strongly Platonic view of God, describing him as the perfect, incorporeal ideal. He was later declared a heretic for subscribing to the "too Platonistic" doctrine of the preexistence of the soul.



Augustine of Hippo: Augustine developed classical Christian philosophy, and the whole of Western thought, largely by synthesizing Hebrew and Greek thought. He drew particularly from Plato, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, and Stoicism, which he altered and refined in light of divine revelation of Christian teaching and the Scriptures. Augustine wrote extensively on many religious and philosophical topics; he employed an allegorical method of reading the Bible, further developed the doctrine of hell as endless punishment, original sin as inherited guilt, divine grace as the necessary remedy for original sin, baptismal regeneration and consequently infant baptism, inner experience and the concept of

"self", the moral necessity of human free will, and

individualelection to salvation by eternal predestination. He has been a major influence in the development of Western theology and his thought, and in particular his works, City of

God and Confessions, laid the foundations for Western Philosophy, influencing many of philosophers and making him one of the most influential figures in the history of philosophy. 

Athanasius of Alexandria: father of trinitarian orthodoxy involved in the formation of the Nicene Creed, who vehemently opposedArius, the bishop of Alexandria who held that Christ was a created being, and his following.



Dioscorus of Aphrodito



John Chrysostom



Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

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The Cappadocian Fathers: Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil the Great.

Medieval Christian philosophy Scholasticism and History of science in the Middle Ages



Peter Abelard: Abelard was a leading 12th-century philosopher and theologian, best known for his association with conceptualismand his development of the moral influence theory of atonement.



Anselm of Canterbury: Anselm is best known for the ontological argument for God's existence, i.e.: God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. But to exist is greater than not to exist. If God does not exist then he wouldn't be "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Therefore, God exists. Anselm's argumentation was used as a theological directive for conceptualizing divine perfection. He was one of the first Western thinkers to directly engage the reintroduction of Aristotle to the West. However, he didn't have all of Aristotle's works and those he had access to were from Arabic translations and Islamic commentaries. Also developed the satisfaction theory of atonement.



Thomas Aquinas: Aquinas was the student of Albert the Great, a brilliant Dominican experimentalist, much like the Franciscan,Roger Bacon, of Oxford in the 13th century. Aquinas

synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity. He believed that there was no contradiction between faith and secular reason, but that they complemented each other epistemically. He thought Aristotle had achieved the pinnacle of human striving for truth apart from divine revelation and thus adopted Aristotle's philosophy as a framework in constructing his theological and philosophical outlook. Thomas Aquinas was a professor at the prestigious University of Paris, a contemporary of Bonaventure, a Franciscan Professor at the University of Paris whose approach differed significantly from Aquinas' in favor of the more traditional Augustinian Platonism. Widelyaccepted as one of the most influential figures in the history of philosophy, his philosophy is the foundation for Thomism. His most famous work is Summa Theologica 

William of Ockham: philosopher and theologian who developed Ockham's razor and wrote extensively on metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, theology, logic, and politics



John Duns Scotus: John Duns Scotus is known as the "subtle doctor" whose hair-splitting distinctions were important contributions in scholastic thought and the modern development of logic. Scotus was also a Professor at the University of Paris, but not at the same time as Aquinas. Along with Aquinas, he is one of the two giants of Scholastic philosophy



Albert of Saxony



Alcuin of York



Adelard of Bath



Petrus Aureolus



Boëthius



Bonaventure



Roger Bacon



Gabriel Biel



John Blund



Siger of Brabant



Thomas Bradwardine



Adam de Buckfield



Jean Buridan



Walter Burley



Saint Catherine of Siena



Juan de Celaya



William of Conches



Cesare Cremonini



Henry Ercole



Vincent Ferrer



Godfrey of Fontaines



Francis of Marchia



Gaunilo of Marmoutiers



Giles of Rome



Gregory of Rimini



Robert Grosseteste



Henry of Ghent



Jerome Leocata



John of Paris



Johannes Scotus Eriugena



Marsilius of Inghen



Albertus Magnus



John Mair



Richard of Middleton



Robert of Melun



Hervaeus Natalis



Francisco Suárez



Paul of Venice



Francisco de Vitoria

Renaissance and Reformation Christian philosophy Renaissance philosophy and Protestant Reformation



Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) A preacher, theologian, and church court operative.

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Jean Bodin (1530–1596) French legal scholar and political philosopher, he wrote widely in a number of areas

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Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was not a philosopher strictly speaking; indeed, he wrote excoriatingly about philosophers. He consolidated the space of Humanism in the late Medieval scholarship of letters, and came to represent its acme. He was a leader of the development of the humanities into a department of European scholarly activities. He bent his studies to recovery and exegesis of the Hebrew Bible's ancient languages and began building the first critical text, and the New Testament became a formal scholarly text. He wrote about issues relevant to the Catholic Church and its ignorance. He spent six years in an Augustinian monastery; he was a joyful satirist; and became most famous for his book The Praise of Folly.



Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) His early work on the law of the seas was outdistanced by On the law of war and peace (1625).



Martin Luther (1483–1546) -- also not strictly a philosopher, although he knew something of William of Occam and nominalist epistemology), from an earlier era of European thought. He had also studied some philosophical materials of Augustine of Hippo, and did not follow Thomas Aquinas. Luther followed Erasmus in developing a critical text of the Biblical manuscripts. Luther went a step

beyond Erasmus in actually translating the Bible into the vernacular. Luther's German Bible had a tremendous impact on the development of the German language and its literature. 

John Calvin (1509–1564). Calvin was a dogmatician (systematic theology), as exhibited in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and an exegete who over time translated the Bible from the "original languages" in the form of his grand series of Commentaries on all but one of its books (the Book of Revelation, which provided a problem to him in its metaphory, not yielding robustly to his binomial formula of letter and spirit: either literal, or figurative). He courageously tried to avoid allegorizing, which had had a long history ever since Philo of Alexandria had interpreted the Pentateuch in an allegorical fashion that de-literalized and over-metaphorized (into symbolic systems) many ages of the ancient manuscripts of the Bible (now and developingly a critical textitself). Calvin tried to distance himself from the allegorical method of Christian interpretation of the Bible, attempted distance certainly from the method's primacy, while facing in the Gospels "the parabolic message of the Cross" (Leon Morris, etc.). Not strictly a philosopher, he had a major impact on the quest for a Protestant philosophy (see Jacob Klapwijk, "John Calvin" in the volume he edited with Griffioen and Groenewoud, Bringing into Captivity Every Thought (Eng trans 1991; pp 241–266)). Calvin's seed begat Reformational philosophy 450 years after he planted it.



Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) Influential Italian humanist philosopher who revived Neoplatonism and was a leader in the Renaissance; translated all of Plato's and Plotinus' works into Latin, as well as many Neoplatonic authors and the Corpus Hermeticum. He also wrote many commentaries on Plato and Christian authors as Pseudo Dyonisius.



Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) Italian philosopher who was a major figure in the Renaissance; at the age of 23 he proposed 900 theses on religion, natural philosophy and magic, writing the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which was a central text inRenaissance humanism and has been called the movement's manifesto



Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) was a leading Reformer who was influenced by a party in his church congregation to de-metaphorize the understanding of the Lord's Supper into a memorial only (no real presence, and no communion of saints, therefore no eschatological community of saints composed of the believers at the Communion Table).

In most cases, these writers reference something in an earlier philosopher, without adding to the ongoing problem-historical shape of Western philosophical knowledge. Between Calvin, and Arminius, born four years before Calvin's death, a Protestant Scholasticism took from various loci and authorities of the Western Middle Ages. It begins already with Luther's colleague Philip Melancthon, who turned from Luther's sola Scriptura to philosophical theology; but Protestant Scholasticism's Reformed variants are diverse. There were no real alternatives until Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven in the last century.

Modern Christian philosophy Modern philosophy

17th century 17th-century philosophy



Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English philosopher and scientist who also made contributions to the field of medicine

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Joseph Butler (1692–1752) English bishop, theologian, apologist and philosopher who offered critiques of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and influenced figures such as David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith

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Rene Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher and mathematician sometimes labelled "The Father of Modern Philosophy" who was a leading exponent of rationalism; most famous for his concept Cogito ergo sum (I Think Therefore I Am)

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Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who played a central role in the Scientific Revolution, controversially advocating heliocentrism, leading to the Galileo Affair, he also wrote about the relationship between science and religion; often labelled "The Father of Modern Science"



Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) English philosopher, writer, and clergyman who was a major apologist for natural philosophy, although he was not himself a scientist

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John Locke (1632–1704) Extremely influential political philosopher often dubbed "The Father of Classical Liberalism"; many of his philosophical concepts were developed from his religious beliefs, which included his development of the social contract theory



Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) French rationalist philosopher best known for his ideas of occasionalism and Vision in God; he drew heavily from the work of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas

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Isaac Newton (1642–1727) English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who was one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, he wrote often about religious and theological issues; authored Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica; considered by some to be the most influential scientist of all-time.



Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and philosopher who wrote widely on religion and Catholic theology. Pensées is considered a masterpiece of theological thought and Will Durant hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French prose." Also developed Pascal's Wager to argue for belief in Christianity.

18th century 18th-century philosophy



George Berkeley Influential Anglo-Irish philosopher who developed the theory of subjective idealism and who wrote prolifically in a number of areas, such as metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mathematics

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Johann Gottfried Herder, German philosopher, theologian, and literary critics who was associated with the Sturm und Drang andWeimar Classicism

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Francis Hutcheson, Scottish philosopher who was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and is associated withempiricism

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William Paley



Joseph Priestley



Karl Leonhard Reinhold

19th and early 20th century 19th-century philosophy



Owen Barfield, philosopher, author, poet, and literary critic who had a profound influence on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien



Karl

Barth:

a

Swiss

Reformed neo-orthodox theologian,

he

wrote

the

massive Church

Dogmatics (German, Kirchliche Dogmatik)—unfinished at about six million words by his death in 1968. Barth emphasized the distinction between human thought and divine reality, and that while humans may attempt to understand the divine, our concepts of the divine are never precisely aligned from the divine reality itself, although God reveals his reality in part through human language and culture. Barth strenuously disavowed being a philosopher; he considered himself a dogmatician of the Church and a preacher. The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary holds the world's most extensive collection of his works. 

Nikolai Berdyaev, Russian philosopher of religion and political theorist



Rudolf Bultmann, German Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential biblical scholars of the 20th century and a major figure in liberal Christianity and Christian existentialism; a close friend of philosopher Martin Heidegger, he based his hermeneutics on an existentialist mode of thinking, developing an interpretive perspective known as demythology



G. K. Chesterton: a British Catholic author, art and literary critic and philosopher, he applied Christian thought in the form of non-fiction, fiction, and poems addressing a variety of theological, moral, political, and economic issues, particularly the importance of seeking truth, distributism, and opposition to eugenics.



Herman Dooyeweerd, philosopher who wrote the monumental trilogy, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought



Fyodor

Dostoevsky,

Russian

writer

known

primarily

for

his

works The

Brothers

Karamazov and Crime and Punishment 

Pavel Florensky, Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher, priest, mathematician, and inventor



William K. Frankena, American philosopher who was a professor at the University of Michigan for over forty years; he specialized in moral philosophy, writing extensively about the relationship between Christianity and ethics

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Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, Russian Orthodox philosopher and futurist who was a leader in the Russian cosmism movement and major inspiration for transhumanism

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Preeminent German philosopher who was a leading figure in German Idealism and whose thought created the philosophical school known as Hegelianism, his philosophy was influenced greatly by his Lutheran religious beliefs; also wrote a number of works regarding the philosophy of religion

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Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish Lutheran philosopher, the father of existentialist philosophy and particularly the school of Christian existentialism.

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C. S. Lewis, a massively influential literary critic and medievalist, and mythologist, a mythographer in his children's fantasies, and an apologist for the Christian faith to which he adhered in the latter half of his life. He claimed not to be a philosopher, but his apologetics are foundational to the formation of a Christian worldview for many modern readers.

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John Henry Newman, a Catholic philosopher, converted from Anglicanism

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Reinhold Niebuhr, Neo-Orthodox theologian and public intellectual who developed the philosophical perspective known as Christian realism and influenced figures such as Martin Luther King Jr, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Madeline Albright, Jimmy Carter andJohn McCain

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Michael Polanyi, Hungarian-British polymath and brother of Karl Polanyi

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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, German philosopher who was a major figure in German idealism

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Edith Stein, German Roman Catholic nun, mystic and philosopher who grew up Jewish and converted to atheism before becoming a Christian, writing widely on phenomenology and existentialism

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Vladimir SolovyovRussian philosopher, theologian, and poet

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Albert Schweitzer, German-French philosopher, theologian and physician wrote widely on a number of subjects, most notably ethics and the Quest for the Historical Jesus

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Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer who he is one of the most-celebrated authors in modern literary history, known for his works such asWar and Peace and Anna Karenina; his writing was strongly influenced by his religious beliefs; he became an early champion ofChristian anarchism, writing on his religious and philosophical beliefs in works such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You and A Confession; his writings influenced figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi

Contemporary philosophy Contemporary philosophy



William J. Abraham, Irish philosopher, theologian, and United Methodist pastor teaching at Southern

Methodist

University,

known

for

his

contributions

to

the philosophy

of

religion and religious epistemology, 

Diogenes Allen, philosopher of religion who spent most of his career at Princeton Theological Seminary



William Alston, leading figure in Reformed epistemology who specializes in the philosophy of language and epistemology

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Rubem Alves, philosopher, psychoanalyst, and theologian who is a major figure in liberation theology



Robert Audi, philosopher whose work focuses on epistemology and ethics who has also written on the relationship between church and state

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C. Anthony Anderson, philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic

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G. E. M. Anscombe, British analytic philosopher who was a close friend and student of Ludwig Wittgenstein; influential in the fields of the philosophy of logic, philosophy of action, and philosophy of the mind, and ethics, writing from the perspective of Analytical Thomism



Craig Bartholomew, philosopher dealing with biblical hermeneutics, postmodernism, and deconstruction

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Francis Beckwith, social philosopher and ethicist

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Leonardo Boff, Brazilian philosopher and theologian who is one of the leading figures in liberation theology



Daniel Bonevac, logician at the University of Texas at Austin

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Jay Budziszewski, a political philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin who develops the natural law ethical tradition.



Marilyn McCord Adams, philosopher of religion and philosophical theologian who is also a leading authority on medieval philosophy



Robert Merrihew Adams, analytic philosopher specializing in metaphysics, morality, and the philosophy of religion who taught at Yale, UCLA, and Oxford; husband of Marilyn McCord Adams (see directly above)

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Maxence Caron, French write, poet, philosopher, and musicologist

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John D. Caputo: American Catholic deconstructionist theologian; most famous for his development of weak theology

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Gordon Clark, American Calvinist philosopher, polemicist, and staunch defender of Platonic realism. He developed a strictly rationalist variety of presuppositional apologetics in contrast to Van Til's fideistic approach.

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Stephen R. L. Clark, British philosopher of religion who also wrote extensively on animals and applied philosophy

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Sarah Coakley-Anglican philosopher of religion and systematic theologian who has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Lancaster University

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Paul Copan, professor of philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University currently holding the Pledger Family Endowed Chair of Philosophy and Ethics as well as president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society



Robin Collins, an expert in philosophy of science. He is thought be the leading expert on the teleological argument. He is a professor of philosophy at Messiah College. He is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Faithful Research



William Lane Craig, Evangelical apologist, philosopher and theologian; frequently participates in debate on topics related to Christianity and theism. He is known especially for his methodical presentation as well as his articulation and defense of the kalam cosmological argument.



Keith DeRose, philosopher of language and epistemologist at Yale University.



Herman Dooyeweerd, Reformational philosopher and legal scholar; brother-in-law of D.H. Th. Vollenhoven



Terry Eagleton, Not a philosopher by vocation, he is a leading British literary critic and important figure in contemporary social philosophy, often addressing religious issues from a Christian Marxist perspective



C. Stephen Evans, American historian and philosopher teaching at Baylor University



Jacques Ellul, French philosopher, legal scholar, sociologist, and legal scholar who was a leading Christian anarchist who wrote prolifically on topics such as technology, propaganda, and justice

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John Frame: an American Calvinist philosopher focused in the areas of epistemology and ethics



Étienne Gilson, who wrote The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, The Spirit of Thomism, Being and Some Philosophers, and many other works. In the field of Thomism he is considered one of the main figures credited with starting the movement within Thomism known as Existential Thomism, which emphasis the primacy of the act of Being (Esse) in understanding everything else that is.



René Girard, French philosopher of social science, anthropologist, historian and literary critic who developed the idea of mimetic desire and wrote on scapegoating, reinterpreting the atonement as an mechanism for overcoming human violence and the sacrifice system

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Juozas Girnius, Lithuanian existentialist philosopher



Robert Kane, philosopher who works on free will, now emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, who is also a Catholic

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Anthony Kenny, English philosopher specializing in the philosophy of the mind, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy; leading figure in Analytical Thomism



Luigi Giussani, an Italian priest of 1922-2005, who wrote the Why the Church?



William Hasker, American philosopher who specializing in philosophy of the mind, writing extensively on the mind-body problem and arguing for emergentism, former editor of the journal Faith and Philosophy; advocates for open theism



Robert Koons, metaphysician at the University of Texas at Austin



Peter Kreeft, an American Catholic philosopher and Christian apologist at Boston College



Roel Kuiper, Dutch historian and philosopher who is part of the Reformational philosophy movement



Jon Kvanvig, epistemologist at Baylor University



John Lennox, mathematician and philosopher of science

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Knud Ejler Løgstrup: Danish philosopher of religion who wrote widely in the area of ethics, metaphysics, and phenomonlogy



Bernard Lonergan: He was a Canadian Jesuit. The Lonergan Institute specializes in his works, while The Lonergan Review is an academic journal which is dedicated to researching and expanding upon his thought.



Aleksei Losev, Russian philosopher, philologist, and culturologist who was a leading figure in 20thcentury philosophical and religious thought



J.P. Moreland, American philosopher, apologist, and theologian



Alasdair MacIntyre, Scottish ethicist and political philosopher whose works After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?have been massively-influential in modern ethics; notable advocate of virtue ethics; argues from a Thomistic perspective



John Macquarrie, Scottish theologian and philosopher who was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Anglicanism



Gabriel Marcel, French existentialist philosopher and playwright who wrote on metaphysics, ontology, and ethics



Jean-Luc Marion, French postmodern philosopher and student of Jacques Derrida who specializes in phenomenology andphilosophical theology



Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher in the Thomistic tradition



Trenton Merricks, renowned metaphysician at the University of Virginia



Paul Moser, American philosopher focusing on the philosophy of religion and epistemology



Nancey Murphy, philosopher of science who has written extensively on postmodernism and currently teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary



Tim O'Connor, metaphysician at the Indiana University, Bloomington



Thomas Jay Oord: theologian and philosopher of religion who is a leading advocate of open theism, and writes on topics such as the relationship between science and religion and postmodernism



Jean-Michel Oughourlian French philosopher, psychologist and neuropsychiatrist has worked with René Girard, further developing a mimetic theory of desire and its religious implications



Pope John Paul II, who wrote Fides et Ratio



Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher whose work concentrates particularly on Plato and Thomas Aquinas



Alvin Plantinga. moderately Calvinist American philosopher, one of the key figures in the movement of Reformed epistemology, which synthesizes Analytical Philosophy and Christian philosophical concerns. He is professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame.



Vern

Poythress,

Calvinist

philosopher

and

New

Testament

scholar

who

advocates multiperspectivalism and specializes in the philosophy of philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, linguistics, and hermeneutics 

Stephen G. Post, American ethicist and interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the study of altruism, bioethics, and comion



Alex Pruss, metaphysician at Baylor University



Michael C. Rea, analytic philosopher specializing in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion who teaches at the University of Notre Dame



Paul Ricouer: philosopher who wrote written widely in the areas of hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of language



Hans Rookmaaker, philosopher specializing in art theory, art history, and music; friend of Francis Schaeffer



Peter Rollins: an Irish philosopher whose work brings together the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the "religious turn" of recent works by Slavoj Zizek, and traditions of apophatic theology within Christian mysticism.



Francis Schaeffer: pastor, philosopher and theologian who founded the L'Abri community in Switzerland and was a major influence in conservative evangelicalism



Egbert Schuurman, the leading philosopher of technology who actively espouses a Christian philosophical approach



Robert Spaemann, German Roman Catholic philosopher



Holmes Rolston III, American philosopher dealing with environmental ethics and the relationship between science and religion



Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, German historian and social philosopher



Pope Shenouda III, (b. Nazeer Gayed, 1923) Pope of Alexandria (1971–2012) has written on almost every aspect of Oriental Orthodox Christianity. Has pioneered Christian ecumenism and written over 150 books on many topics including theology, dogma, comparative theology, spiritual theology, and church history.



Melville Y. Stewart, editor, author of books in philosophy of religion, and a Series on Science and Religion 科学与宗教 (5-volume Series in Chinese, and 2-volume Series in English). Visiting Philosopher at various universities in China.



James K.A. Smith: a Canadian-American philosopher who draws on three different traditions of Christian

thought

(Pentecostalism,

Calvinism,

and Radical

Orthodoxy)

in

dialogue

with

deconstruction and phenomenology to create practical works for broad, general audiences 

Richard Swinburne: British philosopher of religion



Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and philosopher; won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature



Peter van Inwagen, a metaphysician who is one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of religion, teaching at the University of Notre Dame



Charles Taylor: Canadian political philosopher, philosopher of social science and social theorist



Charles Taliaferro, an expert in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of mind. He is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College and a senior research fellow at the Institute for Faithful Research



Paul Tillich Rather than beginning his philosophical work with questions of God or gods, Tillich began with a "phenomenology of the Holy." His basic thesis is that religion is Ultimate Concern. What a person is Ultimately Concerned with in regard to their Ultimate meaning and being can be understood as religion because, "There is nobody to whom nothing is sacred because no one can rid themselves of their humanity no matter how desperately they may try" (Young-Ho Chun, Tillich and Religion, 1998, pg. 14.



Denys Turner: British philosopher and theologian teaching at Yale University whose work focuses on political philosophy, social theory, and mystical theology



Nick Trakakis: Australian philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of religion and theodicy



Bas Van Fraassen, world-renowned philosopher of science, who is also a Catholic



Cornelius Van Til: Dutch-American Calvinist philosopher, who contributed especially in epistemology and developed one variety of philosophical apologetics known as presuppositional apologetics.



Gregory Vlastos: philosopher specializes in ancient philosophy



D. H. Th. Vollenhoven: Vollenhoven's Calvinism and the Reformation of Philosophy (Dutch, 1933) launched a philosophical movement that, after the massive re-inforcing effect of his brother-in-law Herman Dooyeweerd's first trilogy, Philosophy of the Law-Idea (1935–36), led to the formation of the Association for Calvinist Philosophy in 1936. For decades, Vollenhoven served as president of the aforementioned association, which has become the Association for Reformational Philosophy/ Vereniging voor Reformatorische Wijsbegeerte (VRW), still based in the Netherlands but with everenlarging interest in the rest of the world. It is disputed whether Vollenhoven's, his colleague Herman Dooyeweerd's, and many among the subsequent generations of philosophers in the Reformational philosophy movement are best described as "modern" or "postmodern," since they anticipated numerous themes that resurfaced in postmodernism, yet remain steadfastly and wouldbe distinctively Christian and non-Roman.



Keith Ward: British philosopher, theologian, and pastor who has written widely in the areas of the philosophy of religion andcomparative theology, has also made major contributions related to the relationship between science and religion; advocates for open theism



Simone Weil: French philosopher, mystic, and social activist



Cornel West, Philosopher, writer, public speaker and political activist who argues for Christian Socialism; has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Union Theological Seminary in New York



Dallas Willard: notable Christian philosopher at the University of Southern California. Willard has written extensively in philosophy but also in practical Christian theology with an emphasis in Christian spiritual formation.



Nicholas Wolterstorff: American philosopher at Yale University associated with Reformed epistemology who has written on epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion



Christos Yannaras, Greek philosopher



Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of religion, epistemology and ethics; pioneer in the field of virtue epistemology



Dean Zimmerman, American philosopher whose work deals with metaphysics and the philosophy of ereligion



Shawn Graves, American philosopher who specializes in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

Rationalism In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification". In more technical , it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position "that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge" to the more extreme position that reason is "the unique path to knowledge". Given a pre-modern understanding of reason, rationalism is identical to philosophy, the Socratic life of inquiry, or the zetetic (skeptical) clear interpretation of authority (open to the underlying or essential cause of things as they appear to our sense of certainty). In recent decades, Leo Strauss sought to revive "Classical Political Rationalism" as a discipline that understands the task of reasoning, not as foundational, but as maieutic. Rationalism should not be confused with rationality, nor with rationalization. In politics, rationalism since the Enlightenment historically emphasized a "politics of reason" centered upon rational choice,utilitarianism, secularism, and irreligion — the antitheistic tendencies of this last aspect since having been partly ameliorated bymillennials' more tolerant and utilitarian adoption of methodological, pluralistic rationalist practices applicable irrespective of religious or political affiliation. Since the Enlightenment, rationalism is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy, as in Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. This is commonly called continental rationalism, because it was predominant in the continental schools of Europe, whereas in Britain empiricism dominated. Rationalism is often contrasted with empiricism. Taken very broadly these views are not mutually exclusive, since a philosopher can be both rationalist and empiricist.[1] Taken to extremes the empiricist view holds that all ideas come to us through experience, either through the external senses or through such inner sensations as pain and gratification, and thus that knowledge is essentially based on or

derived from experience. At issue is the fundamental source of human knowledge, and the proper techniques for ing what we think we know (see Epistemology). Proponents of some varieties of rationalism argue that, starting with foundational basic principles, like the axioms of geometry, one could deductively derive the rest of all possible knowledge. The philosophers who held this view most clearly were Baruch Spinoza andGottfried Leibniz, whose attempts to grapple with the epistemological and metaphysical problems raised by Descartes led to a development of the fundamental approach of rationalism. Both Spinoza and Leibniz asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, though they both observed that this was not possible in practicefor human beings except in specific areas such as mathematics. On the other hand, Leibniz itted in his book Monadology that "we are all mere Empirics in three fourths of our actions." Rationalism is predicting and explaining behavior based on logic.

Philosophical usage The distinction between rationalists and empiricists was drawn at a later period, and would not have been recognized by the philosophers involved. Also, the distinction was not as clear-cut as is sometimes suggested; for example, Descartes and Locke have similar views about the nature of human ideas.The three main rationalists were all committed to the importance of empirical science, and in many respects the empiricists were closer to Descartes in their methods and metaphysical theories than were Spinoza and Leibniz.

History René Descartes (1596–1650) René Descartes

Descartes thought that only knowledge of eternal truths – including the truths of mathematics, and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences – could be attained by reason alone; other knowledge, the knowledge of physics, required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method. He also argued that although dreams appear as real as sense experience, these dreams cannot provide persons with knowledge. Also, since conscious sense experience can be the cause of illusions, then sense experience itself can be doubtable. As a result, Descartes deduced that a rational pursuit of truth should doubt every belief about reality. He elaborated these beliefs in such works as Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy. Descartes developed a method to attain truths according to which nothing that cannot be recognised by the intellect (orreason) can be classified as knowledge. These truths are gained "without any sensory experience", according to Descartes. Truths that are attained by reason are broken down into elements that intuition can grasp, which, through a purely deductive process, will result in clear truths about reality. Descartes therefore argued, as a result of his method, that reason alone determined knowledge, and that this could be done independently of the senses. For instance, his famous dictum, cogito ergo sum, is a conclusion reached a priori i.e. not through an inference from experience. This was, for Descartes, an irrefutable principle upon which to ground all forms of other knowledge. Descartes posited a metaphysical dualism, distinguishing between the substances of the human body ("res extensa") and the mind or soul ("res cogitans"). This crucial distinction would be left unresolved and lead to what is known as the mind-body problem, since the two substances in the Cartesian system are independent of each other and irreducible.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Philosophy of Spinoza The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is a systematic, logical, rational philosophy developed in seventeenth-century Europe. Spinoza's philosophy is a system of ideas constructed upon basic building blocks with an internal consistency with which Spinoza tried to answer life's major questions and in which he proposed that "God exists only philosophically." He was heavily influenced by thinkers such as Descartes, Euclid and Thomas Hobbes,[9] as well as theologians in the Jewish philosophical tradition such asMaimonides.[9] But his work was in many respects a departure from the JudeoChristian tradition. Many of Spinoza's ideas continue to vex thinkers today and many of his principles, particularly regarding the emotions, have implications for modern approaches topsychology. Even top thinkers have found Spinoza's "geometrical method"difficult to comprehend: Goethe itted that he "could not really understand what Spinoza was on about most of the time." His magnum opus, Ethics, contains unresolved obscurities and has a forbidding mathematical structure modeled on Euclid's geometry. Spinoza's philosophy attracted believers such as Albert Einstein and much intellectual attention.

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) Gottfried Leibniz Leibniz was the last of the great Rationalists who contributed heavily to other fields such as mathematics. He did not develop his system, however, independently of these advances. Leibniz rejected Cartesian dualism and denied the existence of a material world. In Leibniz's view there are infinitely many simple substances, which he called "monads" (possibly taking the term from the work of Anne Conway).

Leibniz developed his theory of monads in response to both Descartes and Spinoza. In rejecting this response he was forced to arrive at his own solution. Monads are the fundamental unit of reality, according to Leibniz, constituting both inanimate and animate things. These units of reality represent the universe, though they are not subject to the laws of causality or space (which he called "wellfounded phenomena"). Leibniz, therefore, introduced his principle of pre-established harmony to for apparent causality in the world.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant started as a traditional rationalist, having studied the rationalists Leibniz and Wolff, but after studying David Hume'sworks, which "awoke [him] from [his] dogmatic slumbers", he developed a distinctive and very influential rationalism of his own, which attempted to synthesize the traditional rationalist and empiricist traditions. Kant named his branch of epistemology Transcendental Idealism, and he first laid out these views in his famous work The Critique of Pure Reason. In it he argued that there were fundamental problems with both rationalist and empiricist dogma. To the rationalists he argued, broadly, that pure reason is flawed when it goes beyond its limits and claims to know those things that are necessarily beyond the realm of all possible experience: the existence of God, free will, and the immortality of the human soul. Kant referred to these objects as "The Thing in Itself" and goes on to argue that their status as objects beyond all possible experience by definition means we cannot know them. To the empiricist he argued that while it is correct that experience is fundamentally necessary for human knowledge, reason is necessary for processing that experience into coherent thought. He therefore concludes that both reason and experience are necessary for human knowledge.

Empiricism Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism, and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory

in

perception,

the

formation

of

ideas,

over

the

notion

of innate

ideas or traditions;[2] empiricists may argue however that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sense experiences. Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered inexperiments. It is

a fundamental

part

of

the scientific method that

all hypotheses andtheories must

be tested

against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Philosophers

associated

Grosseteste, William

of

with

empiricism

Ockham, Francis

include Aristotle, Alhazen, Avicenna, Ibn

Bacon, Thomas

Hobbes, Robert

Boyle,John

Tufail,Robert Locke, George

Berkeley, Hermann von Helmholtz, David Hume, Leopold von Ranke,John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper.

Etymology The English term "empiric" derives from the Greek word ἐμπειρία, which is cognate with and translates to the Latin experientia, from which we derive the word "experience" and the related "experiment". The term was used of the Empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, who rejected the doctrines of the (Dogmatic school), preferring to rely on the observation of phenomena.

History Background Empirical method A central concept in science and the scientific method is that it must be empirically based on the evidence

of

the

senses.

Both naturaland social

sciences use

working hypotheses that

are testable by observation and experiment. The term semi-empirical is sometimes used to describe theoretical methods that make use of basic axioms, established scientific laws, and previous experimental results in order to engage in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry. Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience. This view is commonly contrasted with rationalism, which asserts that knowledge may be derived from reasonindependently of the senses. For example John Locke held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly Robert Boyle, a prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we have innate ideas. The main continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method".

Early empiricism Tabula Rasa and Nous The notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") connotes a view of mind as an originally blank or empty recorder (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experience leaves marks. This denies that humans have innate ideas. The image dates back toAristotle; What the mind (nous) thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet (grammateion) which bears no actual writing (grammenon); this is just what happens in the case of the mind. (Aristotle, On the Soul, 3.4.430a1). Aristotle's explanation of how this was possible, was not strictly empiricist in a modern sense, but rather based on his theory ofpotentiality and actuality, and experience of sense perceptions still requires the help of the active nous. These notions contrasted withPlatonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to a body on Earth (see Plato's Phaedo and Apology, as well as others). Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato, and commentators in the middle ages summarized one of his positions as "nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu" (Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses"). A drawing of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) from 1271

During

the middle

ages Aristotle's

theory

of tabula

rasa was

developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi, developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna[10] and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail.[11] For Avicenna (Ibn Sina), for example, the a tabula rasa is a pure potentiality that is actualized through education, and knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" developed through a

"syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." The intellect itself develops from a material intellect (al'aql al-hayulani), which is a potentiality "that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-'aql al-fa'il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge".So the immaterial "active intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur. In the 12th century CE the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail(known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) included the theory of tabula rasa as athought experiment in his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone. The Latintranslation of his philosophical novel, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published byEdward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation oftabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A similar Islamic theological novel, Theologus Autodidactus, was written by the Arab theologian and physician Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th century. It also dealt with the theme of empiricism through the story of a feral child on a desert island, but departed from its predecessor by depicting the development of the protagonist's mind through with society rather than in isolation from society. [12] During the 13th century Thomas Aquinas adopted the Aristotelian position that the senses are essential to mind into scholasticism, making it a dogma of Roman Catholic belief. Bonaventure (1221–1274), one of Aquinas' fiercest intellectual opponents, offered some of the strongest arguments in favour of the Platonic idea of the mind.

Renaissance Italy In the late renaissance various writers began to question the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing Niccolò

Machiavelli and his friend sco Guicciardini initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study the "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said, If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings. The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1520–1591), father of Galileo and the inventor ofmonody, made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment" was esperienza. It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed.Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei), arguably one of the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of 'Pythagoras' hammers' (the square of the numbers concerned yielded those musical intervals, not the actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, ed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience and demonstration" as the sine qua non of valid rational enquiry.

British empiricism British empiricism, though it was not a term used at the time, derives from the 17th century period of early modern philosophy andmodern science. The term became useful in order to describe differences perceived between two of its founders Francis Bacon, described as empiricist, and René Descartes, who is described as a rationalist. Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in the next

generation, are often also described as an empiricist and a rationalist respectively. John Locke, George Berkeley,

and David

Hume were

the

primary

exponents

of

empiricism

in

the

18th

century Enlightenment, with Locke being the person who is normally known as the founder of empiricism as such. In response to the early-to-mid-17th century "continental rationalism" John Locke (1632–1704) proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) a very influential view wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori, i.e., based upon experience. Locke is famously attributed with holding the proposition that the human mind is a tabula rasa, a "blank tablet," in Locke's words "white paper," on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written. There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. In both cases, a distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are unanalysable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Complex ideas combine simple ones, and divide into substances, modes, and relations. According to Locke, our knowledge of things is a perception of ideas that are in accordance or discordance with each other, which is very different from the quest for certainty of Descartes. Bishop George Berkeley A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685–1753), determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism. In response to Locke, he put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it). In his text Alciphron, Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) responded to

Berkeley's criticisms of Locke, as well as other differences between early modern philosophers, and moved empiricism to a new level ofskepticism. Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. He wrote for example, "Mr. Locke divides all arguments into demonstrative and probable. In this view, we must say, that it is only probable all men must die, or that the sun will rise to-morrow." And, "Mr. Locke, in his chapter of power, says that, finding from experience, that there are several new productions in nature, and concluding that there must somewhere be a power capable of producing them, we arrive at last by this reasoning at the idea of power. But no reasoning can ever give us a new, original, simple idea; as this philosopher himself confesses. This, therefore, can never be the origin of that idea." Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides") are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world (e.g. "the sun rises in the East") are examples of the second. All of people's "ideas", in turn, are derived from their "impressions". For Hume, an "impression" corresponds roughly with what we call a sensation. To or to imagine such impressions is to have an "idea". Ideas are therefore the faint copies of sensations. David Hume's empiricism led to numerous philosophical schools

Hume maintained that all knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, cannot be conclusively established by reason. Rather, he maintained, our beliefs are more a result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Among his many arguments Hume also added another important slant to the debate aboutscientific method — that of the problem of induction. Hume argued that it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the

justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument. Among Hume's conclusions regarding the problem of induction is that there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. Thus, as a simple instance posed by Hume, we cannot know with certainty byinductive reasoning that the sun will continue to rise in the East, but instead come to expect it to do so because it has repeatedly done so in the past. Hume concluded that such things as belief in an external world and belief in the existence of the self were not rationally justifiable. According to Hume these beliefs were to be accepted nonetheless because of their profound basis in instinct and custom. Hume's lasting legacy, however, was the doubt that his skeptical arguments cast on the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, allowing many skeptics who followed to cast similar doubt.

Pragmatism In the late 19th and early 20th century several forms of pragmatic philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms, developed mainly from discussions that took place while Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were both at Harvard in the 1870s. James popularized the term "pragmatism", giving Peirce full credit for its patrimony, but Peirce later demurred from the tangents that the movement was taking, and redubbed what he regarded as the original idea with the name of "pragmaticism". Along with its pragmatic theory of truth, this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking. Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was highly influential in laying the groundwork for today's empiricalscientific method. Although Peirce severely criticized many elements of Descartes' peculiar brand of rationalism, he did not reject rationalism outright. Indeed, he concurred with the main ideas of rationalism, most importantly the idea that rational concepts can be meaningful and the idea that rational concepts necessarily go beyond the data given by empirical observation. In later years he even emphasized the concept-driven side of the then ongoing debate between strict empiricism and strict rationalism, in part to counterbalance the excesses to which some of his cohorts had taken pragmatism under the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view. Among Peirce's major contributions was to place inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in a complementary rather than competitive mode, the latter of which had been the primary trend among the educated since David Hume wrote a century before. To this, Peirce added the concept of abductive reasoning. The combined three forms of reasoning serve as a primary conceptual foundation for the empirically based scientific method today. Peirce's approach "presupposes that (1) the objects of knowledge are real things, (2) the characters (properties) of real things do not depend on our perceptions of them, and (3) everyone who has sufficient experience of real things will agree on the

truth about them. According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".

William James In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" (L: cos, cotis whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism". First among these he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception is a two-way street. That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses. Hence, if theories are theoryladen then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference, its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique – in a word, incorrigible. This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness" – what theScholastics called its haecceity – that stands beyond control and correction. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them. This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with the work of Irvin Rock onindirect perception. Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842–1910) coined the term "radical empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism – though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective ",by which he meant to rule out the perception that there

can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. James's "radical empricism" is thus notradical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term "empirical". (His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today.) John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form a theory known as instrumentalism. The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test the pragmatic values of such experience. The value of such experience is measured by scientific instruments, and the results of such measurements generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation. Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori.

Pragmaticism Pragmaticism is a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce for his pragmatic philosophy starting in 1905, in order to distance himself and it from pragmatism, the original name, which had been used in a manner he did not approve of in the "literary journals". Peirce in 1905 announced his coinage "pragmaticism", saying that it was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (Collected Papers () 5.414). Today, outside of philosophy, "pragmatism" is often taken to refer to a compromise of aims or principles, even a ruthless search for mercenary advantage. Peirce gave other or more specific reasons for the distinction in a surviving draft letter that year and in later writings. Peirce's pragmatism, that is, pragmaticism, differed in Peirce's view from other pragmatisms by its commitments to the spirit of strict logic, the immutability of truth, the reality of infinity, and the difference between (1) actively willing to control thought, to doubt, to weigh reasons, and (2) willing not to exert the will, willing to believe. In his view his pragmatism is, strictly speaking, not itself a whole philosophy, but instead a general method for

the clarification of ideas. He first publicly formulated his pragmatism as an aspect of scientific logic along withprinciples of statistics and modes of inference in his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series of articles in 1877-8.

Pragmatic maxim Whether one chooses to call it "pragmatism" or "pragmaticism"—and Peirce himself was not always consistent about it even after the notorious renaming—his conception of pragmatic philosophy is based on one or another version of the so-called "pragmatic maxim". Here is one of his more emphatic statements of it: Pragmaticism was originally enounced in the form of a maxim, as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivablyhave practical bearings, you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object ( 5.438). In the 1909 Century Dictionary Supplement, the entry for pragmaticism, written, it now appears, by John Dewey, was pragmaticism (prag-mat′ i-sizm), n. [pragmatic + ism.] A special and limited form of pragmatism, in which the pragmatism is restricted to the determining of the meaning of concepts (particularly of philosophic concepts) by consideration of the experimental differences in the conduct of life which would conceivably result from the affirmation or denial of the meaning in question. He [the writer] framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life. . . . To serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism." C. S. Peirce, in The Monist, April, 1905, p. 166.

Pragmatism's origin Pragmatism as a philosophical movement originated in 1872 in discussions in The Metaphysical Club among Peirce, William James,Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner. The first use in print of the name pragmatism appears to have been in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with having coined the name during the early 1870s. James, among others, regarded Peirce's 1877-8 "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) as pragmatism's foundation. Peirce ( 5.11-12), like James saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes, in philosophy and elsewhere, elaborated into a new deliberate method of thinking and resolving dilemmas. Peirce differed from James and the earlyJohn Dewey, in some of their tangential enthusiasms, in being decidedly more rationalistic and realistic, in several senses of those , throughout the preponderance of his own philosophical moods. In a 1906 manuscript, Peirce wrote that, in the Metaphysical Club decades earlier, Nicholas St. John Green often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. James and Peirce, inspired by crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition, agreed with Green. John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as a vital alternative to rationalistic speculation."

Pragmatism is regarded as a distinctively American philosophy. As advocated by James, John Dewey, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, George Herbert Mead, and others, it has proved durable and popular. But Peirce did not seize on this fact to enhance his reputation, and even coined the word "pragmaticism" to distinguish his philosophical position.

The clarification of ideas in inquiry Pragmatism starts with the idea that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. Peirce's pragmatism is about conceptions of objects. His pragmatism is a method for fruitfully sorting out conceptual confusions caused, for example, by distinctions that make (sometimes needful) formal yet not practical differences. It equates any conception of an object with a conception of that object's effects to a general extent of those conceived effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. Those conceivable practical implications are the conception's meaning. The meaning is the consequent form of conduct or practice that would be implied by accepting the conception as true. Peirce's pragmaticism, in the strict sense, is about the conceptual elucidation of conceptions into such meanings — about how to make our ideas clear. Making them true, in the sense of proving and bearing them out in fruitful practice, goes beyond that. A conception's truth is its correspondence to the real, to that which would be found by investigation taken far enough. A conception's actual confirmation (if it occurs) is neither its meaning nor its truth per se, but an actual upshot. In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Peirce discusses three grades of clearness of conception: 1. Clearness of a conception familiar and readily used even if unanalyzed and undeveloped. 2. Clearness of a conception in virtue of clearness of its definition's parts, in virtue of which logicians called an idea distinct, that is, clarified by analysis of just what elements make the given idea applicable. Elsewhere, echoing Kant, Peirce calls such a definition "nominal" ( 5.553).

3. Clearness in virtue of clearness of conceivable practical implications of the object's effects as conceived of, such as can lead to fruitful reasoning, especially on difficult problems. Here he introduces that which he later called the pragmatic maxim.

By way of example of how to clarify conceptions, he addressed conceptions about truth and the real as questions of thepresuppositions of reasoning in general. To reason is to presuppose (and at least to hope), as a principle of the reasoner's self-regulation, that the truth is independent of our vagaries of opinion and is discoverable. In clearness's second grade (the "nominal" grade), he defines truth as the correspondence of a sign (in particular, a proposition) to its object, and the real as the object (be it a possibility or quality, or an actuality or brute fact, or a necessity or norm or law) to which a true sign corresponds, such that truth and the real are independent of that which you or I or any actual, definite community of inquirers think. After that needful but confined step, next in clearness's third grade (the pragmatic, practice-oriented grade) he defines truth — not as actual consensus, such that to inquire would be to poll the experts — but as that which would be reached, sooner or later but still inevitably, by research taken far enough, such that the real does depend on that ideal final opinion—a dependence to which he appeals in theoretical arguments elsewhere, for instance for the long-run validity of the rule of induction. (Peirce held that one cannot have absolute theoretical assurance of having actually reached the truth, and later said that the confession of inaccuracy and one-sidedness is an essential ingredient of a true abstract statement. Peirce argues that even to argue against the independence and discoverability of truth and the real is to presuppose that there is, about that very question under argument, a truth with just such independence and discoverability. For more on Peirce's theory of truth, see the Peirce section in Pragmatic theory of truth. Peirce's discussions and definitions of

truth

have

influenced

several

epistemic

for deflationary and correspondence theories of truth.

truth

theorists

and

been

used

as

foil

Peirce said that a conception's meaning consists in "all general modes of rational conduct" implied by "acceptance" of the conception—that is, if one were to accept, first of all, the conception as true, then what could one conceive to be consequent general modes of rational conduct by all who accept the conception as true?—the whole of such consequent general modes is the whole meaning. His pragmatism, since a conception is general, does not equate a conception's meaning, its intellectual purport, with any definite set of actual consequences or upshots corroborating or undermining the conception or its worth, nor does it equate its meaning, much less its truth (if it is true), with the conceived or actual benefit or cost of the conception itself, like a meme (or, say, propaganda), outside the perspective of its being true in what it purports. If it is true, its truth is not transitory but instead immutable and independent of actual trends of opinion. His pragmatism also bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly connotes a ruthless andMachiavellian search for mercenary or political advantage. Rather, Peirce's pragmatic maxim is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification[14] to test the truth of putative knowledge. Peirce's pragmatism, as method and theory of definitions and the clearness of ideas, is a department within his theory of inquiry, which he variously called "Methodeutic" and "Philosophical or Speculative Rhetoric". He applied his pragmatism as a method throughout his work. Peirce called his pragmatism "the logic of abduction",that is, the logic of inference to explanatory hypotheses. As a method conducive to hypotheses as well as predictions and testing, pragmatism leads beyond the usual duo of foundational alternatives, namely:



Deduction from self-evident truths, or rationalism;



Induction from experiential phenomena, or empiricism.

His approach is distinct from foundationalism, empiricist or otherwise, as well as from coherentism, by the following three dimensions:



Active process of theory generation, with no prior assurance of truth;



Subsequent application of the contingent theory in order to clarify its logical and practical implications;



Testing and evaluation of the provisional theory's utility for the anticipation of future experience, and that in dual senses of the word: prediction and control. Peirce's appreciation of these three dimensions serves to flesh out a physiognomy of inquiry far more solid than the flatter image of inductive generalization simpliciter, which is merely the relabeling of phenomenological patterns. Peirce's pragmatism was the first time the scientific method was proposed as an epistemology for philosophical questions. A theory that proves itself more successful than its rivals in predicting and controlling our world is said to be nearer the truth. This is an operational notion of truth employed by scientists. In "The Fixation of Belief", Peirce characterized inquiry in general not as the pursuit of truth per se but as the struggle to settle disturbances or conflicts of belief, irritating, inhibitory doubts, belief being that on which one is willing to act. That let Peirce frame scientific inquiry not only as a special kind of inquiry in a broader spectrum, but also, like inquiry generally, as based on actual doubts, not mere verbal doubts (such as hyperbolic doubt), which he held to be fruitless, and it let him also frame it, by the same stroke, as requiring that proof rest on propositions free from actual doubt, rather than on ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. He outlined four methods, ordered from least to most successful in achieving a secure fixation of belief:

1. The method of tenacity (policy of sticking to initial belief) — which brings comforts and decisiveness, but leads to trying to ignore contrary information and others' views, as if truth were intrinsically private, not public. The method goes against the social impulse and easily falters since one may well fail to

avoid noticing when another's opinion is as good as one's own initial opinion. Its successes can be brilliant but tend to be transitory. 2. The method of authority — which overcomes disagreements but sometimes brutally. Its successes can be majestic and long-lasting, but it cannot regulate people thoroughly enough to suppress doubts indefinitely, especially when people learn about other societies present and past. 3. The method of congruity or the a priori or the dilettante or "what is agreeable to reason" — which promotes conformity less brutally, but depends on taste and fashion in paradigms and can lead in circles over time, along with barren disputation. It is more intellectual and respectable but, like the first two methods, sustains capricious and accidental beliefs, destining some minds to doubts. 4. The method of science — the only one whereby inquiry can, by its own , go wrong (fallibilism), and purposely tests itself and criticizes, corrects, and improves itself. Peirce held that, in practical affairs, slow and stumbling ratiocination is often dangerously inferior to instinct and traditional sentiment, and that the scientific method is best suited to theoretical research, which in turn should not be bound to the other methods and to practical ends; reason's "first rule" is that, in order to learn, one must desire to learn and, as a corollary, must not block the way of inquiry. What recommends the scientific method of inquiry above all others is that it is deliberately designed to arrive, eventually, at the ultimately most secure beliefs, upon which the most successful practices can eventually be based. Starting from the idea that people seek not truth per se but instead to subdue irritating, inhibitory doubt, Peirce shows how, through the struggle, some can come to submit to truth, seek as truth the guidance of potential practice correctly to its given goal, and wed themselves to the scientific method.

Pragmaticism's name William James 1842–1910 F. C. S. Schiller 1863–193

It is sometimes stated that James' and other philosophers' use of the word pragmatism so

dismayed

Peirce

that

he

renamed

his

own

variant pragmaticism. Susan Haack has disagreed,[19] pointing out the context in which Peirce publicly introduced the latter term in 1905. Haack's excerpt of Peirce begins below at the words "But at present...," and continues with some ellipses. The fuller excerpt below s her case further: [The] word "pragmatism" has gained general recognition in a generalised sense that seems to argue power of growth and vitality. The famed psychologist, James, first took it up, seeing that his "radical empiricism" substantially answered to the writer's definition of pragmatism, albeit with a certain difference in the point of view. Next, the irably clear and brilliant thinker, Mr.Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, casting about for a more attractive name for the "anthropomorphism" of his Riddle of the Sphinx, lit, in that most remarkable paper of his on Axioms as Postulates, upon the same designation "pragmatism," which in its original sense was in generic agreement with his own doctrine, for which he has since found the more appropriate specification "humanism," while he still retains "pragmatism" in a somewhat wider sense. So far all went happily. But at present, the word begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. Sometimes the manners of the British have effloresced in scolding at the word as ill-chosen, —ill-chosen, that is, to express some meaning that it was rather designed to exclude. So then, the writer, finding his bantling "pragmatism" so promoted, feels that it is

time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism", which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. Then, in a surviving draft letter to Calderoni, dated by the editors as circa that same year 1905, Peirce said regarding his above-quoted discussion: In the April number of the Monist I proposed that the word 'pragmatism' should hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller, James, Dewey, Royce, and the rest of us, while the particular doctrine which I invented the word to denote, which is your first kind of pragmatism, should be called 'pragmaticism.' The extra syllable will indicate the narrower meaning. Indeed in the Monist article Peirce had said that the coinage "pragmaticism" was intended "to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition". Of course this does not mean that Peirce regarded his fellow pragmatist philosophers as word-kidnappers. To the contrary he had said, regarding James's and Schiller's uses of the word "pragmatism": "So far, all went happily." So it would seem that Peirce intended the coinage "pragmaticism" for two distinguishable purposes: (1) protection from literary journals and word-kidnappers, and (2) reference strictly to his own form of pragmatism, as opposed even to other pragmatisms that had not moved him to the new name. In the letter to Calderoni, Peirce did not reject all significant affiliation with fellow pragmatists, and instead said "the rest of us". Nor did he reject all such affiliation in later discussions. However, in the following year 1906, in a manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics", Peirce wrote: I have always fathered my pragmaticism (as I have called it since James and Schiller made the word [pragmatism] imply "the will to believe," the mutability of truth, the soundness of Zeno's refutation of motion, and pluralism generally), upon Kant, Berkeley, and Leibniz.... (Peirce proceeded to criticize J. S. Mill but acknowledged probable aid from Mill's Examination.)

Then, in 1908, in his article "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", mentioning both James and the journalist, pragmatist, and literary author Giovanni Papini, Peirce wrote: In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Mass., I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it "Pragmatism." In December 1877 and January 1878 I set forth the doctrine in the Popular Science Monthly, and the two parts of my essay were printed in French in the Revue Philosophique, volumes vi. and vii. Of course, the doctrine attracted no particular attention, for, as I had remarked in my opening sentence, very few people care for logic. But in 1897 Professor James remodelled the matter, and transmogrified it into a doctrine of philosophy, some parts of which I highly approved, while other and more prominent parts I regarded, and still regard, as opposed to sound logic. About the time Professor Papini discovered, to the delight of the Pragmatist school, that this doctrine was incapable of definition, which would certainly seem to distinguish it from every other doctrine in whatever branch of science, I was coming to the conclusion that my poor little maxim should be called by another name; and accordingly, in April 1905, I renamed it Pragmaticism. Peirce proceeded in "A Neglected Argument" to express both deep satisfaction and deep dismay with his fellow pragmatists. He singled F.C.S. Schiller out by name and was vague about which among the others he most particularly referred to. Peirce wrote "It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death...." Peirce remained allied with them about:

but was dismayed with their "angry hatred of strict logic" and saw seeds of philosophical death in:





the reality of generals and habits, to be understood, as arehypostatic abstractions, in



their view that "truth is mutable";

of potential concrete effects even if



their view that infinity is unreal; and

unactualized;



"such confusions of thought as of active willing

the falsity of necessitarianism;

(willing to control thought, to doubt, and to



the character of consciousness as only

weigh reasons) with willing not to exert the will

"visceral or other external sensation".

(willing to believe)".

There has been some controversy over Peirce's relation to other pragmatists over the years and over the question of what is owed to Peirce, with visible crests in titles such as literary essayist Edward Dahlberg's "Cutpurse Philosopher"about James, in which Dahlberg claimed that Peirce had "tombstone reticences" about making accusations, and Kenneth Laine Ketner's and Walker Percy'sA Thief of Peirce,[26] in which Percy described himself as "a thief of Peirce" (page 130). Meanwhile, Schiller, James's wife Alice, and James's son Henry James III believed that James had a habit of overstating his intellectual debts to others such as Peirce. In another manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critic" dated by the editors as 1911, Peirce discussed one of Zeno's paradoxes, that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in of James's and others' difficulties with it. Peirce therein expressed regret at having used a "contemptuous" manner about such difficulties in his 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (which James had arranged), and said of James, who had died in August 1910: "Nobody has a better right to testify to the morality of his attitude toward his own thoughts than I, who knew and loved him for forty-nine or fifty years. But owing to his almost unexampled incapacity for mathematical thought, combined with intense hatred for logic — probably for its pedantry, its insistence on minute exactitude — the gêne of its barbarous formulations, etc. rendered him an easy victim to Zeno and the Achilles....", called James "about as perfect a lover of truth as it is possible for a man to be...."[ and said: "In speaking, then, of William James as I do, I am saying the most that I could of any man's intellectual morality; and with him this was but one of a whole diadem of virtues."

Reconstructivism

Reconstructivism is a philosophical theory holding that societies should continually reform themselves in order to establish more perfect governments or social networks.[1] This ideology involves recombining or recontextualizing the ideas arrived at by the philosophy of deconstruction, in which an existing system or medium is broken into its smallest meaningful elements and in which these elements are used to build a new system or medium free from the strictures of the original. Some thinkers have attempted to ascribe the term Reconstructivism to the post-postmodern art movement. In an essay by Chris Sunami, (Art Essays: Reconstructivist Art) "reconstructivist art" is described as follows: A reconstructivist art work builds upon prior, deconstructionist artworks and techniques, but adapts them to classic themes and structures, with the goal of creating works of genuine emotion and significance. In this way, reconstructivism (when it works) combines the vitality and originality of deconstructionism with the comforts, pleasures and rewards ofclassicism. The overall purpose of reconstructivism is to reawaken a sense of the Real in a world where everything has been demonstrated to be an illusion. One of the examples Sunami provides of this technique is the way some modern music incorporates deconstructed samples of older music and combines and arranges the samples in a new way as part of a new composition.

Confucianism Confucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (孔夫子 Kǒng Fūzǐ, or K'ung-fu-tzu, lit. "Master Kong", 551–479 BC).

Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han Dynasty.[1] Following the abandonment of Legalism in China after the Qin Dynasty, Confucianism became the official state ideology of China, until it was replaced by the "Three Principles of the People" ideology with the establishment of the Republic of China, and then Maoist Communism after the ROC was replaced by the People's Republic of China in Mainland China. The core of Confucianism is humanism, the belief that human beings are teachable, improvable and perfectible through personal and communal endeavour especially including self-cultivation and selfcreation. Confucianism focuses on the cultivation of virtue and maintenance of ethics, the most basic of which are ren, yi, and li. Ren is an obligation ofaltruism and humaneness for other individuals within a community, yi is the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to do good, and li is a system of norms andpropriety that determines how a person should properly act within a community. Confucianism holds that one should give up one's life, if necessary, either ively or actively, for the sake of upholding the cardinal moral values of ren and yi. Although Confucius the man may have been a believer in Chinese folk religion, Confucianism as an ideology is humanistic and non-theistic, and does not involve a belief in the supernatural or in a personal god. Cultures

and

countries

strongly

influenced

by

Confucianism

include

mainland China,Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, as well as various territories settled predominantly byChinese people, such as Singapore. Although Confucian ideas prevail in these areas, few people outside of academia identify themselves as Confucian, and instead see Confucian ethics as a complementary

guideline

for

other

ideologies

includingdemocracy, Marxism, capitalism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.

and

beliefs,

Names and Etymology Strictly speaking, there is no term in Chinese which directly corresponds to "Confucianism." Several different are used in different situations, several of which are of modern origin:



"School of the scholars" (Chinese: 儒家; pinyin: Rújiā)



"Teaching of the scholars" (Chinese: 儒教; pinyin: Rújiào)



"Study of the scholars" (simplified Chinese: 儒学; traditional Chinese: 儒學; pinyin: Rúxué)



"Teaching of Confucius" (Chinese: 孔教; pinyin: Kǒngjiào)



"Kong Family's Business" (Chinese: 孔家店; pinyin: Kǒngjiādiàn)[14]

Three of these use the Chinese character 儒 rú, meaning "scholar". These names do not use the name "Confucius" at all, but instead center on the figure or ideal of the Confucian scholar; however, the suffixes of jiā, jiào, and xué carry different implications as to the nature of Confucianism itself. Rújiā contains the character jiā, which literally means "house" or "family". In this context, it is more readily construed as meaning "school of thought", since it is also used to construct the names of philosophical

schools

contemporary

with

Confucianism:

for

example,

the

Chinese

names

for Legalism and Mohism end in jiā. Rújiào and Kǒngjiào contain the Chinese character jiào, the noun "teach", used in such as as "education", or "educator". The term, however, is notably used to construct the names of religions in Chinese: the for Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and other religions in Chinese all end with jiào. Rúxué contains xué 'study'. The term is parallel to -ology in English, being used to construct the names of academic fields: the Chinese names of fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, political science, economics, and sociology all end in xué.

Themes in Confucian thought Six books Confucius taught six books to followers when he was in state of lu,there were:



Classic of Poetry（诗),is a collection of former prophecy



Book of Documents（书）,is a collection of history recorded by vassals.



Book of Rites（礼）,is a collection of fomer laws.



Book of Music（乐）,is a collection about former rituals.



I Ching or Classic of Change(易）,this book is descibed "Classic of all Classics" ,"Primate Classic" by Confucians even today



Spring and Autumn Annals（春秋）,annuals of the whole land during that period ,maybe written by Confucius to reveal the Classic of Change.

The six books' name is traditionally written in a sequence "诗书礼乐易春秋".When the Classic of Change(易）is verbal,it could read as "Poetry,documents,rites,music changed the annals of Spring and Autumn." There is also a Chinese idiom "A big dream such like Spring and Autumn"(春秋大梦）.

Humanism Humanism is at the core in Confucianism. A simple way to appreciate Confucian thought is to consider it as being based on varying levels of honesty, and a simple way to understand Confucian thought is to examine the world by using the logic of humanity. In practice, the primary foundation and function of Confucianism is as an ethical philosophy to be practiced by all the of a society. Confucian

ethics is characterized by the promotion of virtues, encomed by the Five Constants, or the Wuchang (五常), extrapolated by Confucian scholars during the Han Dynasty.[16] The five virtues are:



Rén (仁, Humaneness)



Yì (義, Righteousness or Justice)



Lǐ (禮, Propriety or Etiquette)



Zhì (智, Knowledge)



Xìn (信, Integrity).

These are accompanied by the classical Sìzì (四字) with four virtues:



Zhōng (忠, Loyalty)



Xiào (孝, Filial piety)



Jié (節, Continency)



Yì (義, Righteousness).

There are still many other elements, such as Chéng (誠, honesty), Shù (恕, kindness and forgiveness), Lián (廉, honesty and cleanness), Chǐ (恥, shame, judge and sense of right and wrong), Yǒng (勇, bravery), Wēn (溫, kind and gentle), Liáng (良, good, kindhearted), Gōng (恭, respectful, reverent), Jiǎn (儉, frugal), Ràng (讓, modestly, self-effacing). Among all elements, Ren and Yi are fundamental.

Ren Ren (Confucianism) Ren is one of the basic virtues promoted by Confucius, and is an obligation of altruism and humaneness for other individuals within a community.[3] Confucius' concept of humaneness

(Chinese: 仁; pinyin: rén) is probably best expressed in the Confucian version of theethic of reciprocity, or the Golden Rule: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." Confucius never stated whether man was born good or evil, noting that 'By nature men are similar; by practice men are wide apart'[18]—implying that whether good or bad, Confucius must have perceived all men to be born with intrinsic similarities, but that man is conditioned and influenced by study and practise. Xunzi's opinion is that men originally just want what they instinctively want despite positive or negative results it may bring, so cultivation is needed. In Mencius' view, all men are born to share goodness such as comion and good heart, although they may become wicked. The Three Character Classic begins with "People at birth are naturally good (kind-hearted)", which stems from Mencius' idea. All the views eventually lead to recognize the importance of human education and cultivation. Rén also has a political dimension. If the ruler lacks rén, Confucianism holds, it will be difficult if not impossible for his subjects to behave humanely. Rén is the basis of Confucian political theory: it presupposes an autocratic ruler, exhorted to refrain from acting inhumanely towards his subjects. An inhumane ruler runs the risk of losing the "Mandate of Heaven", the right to rule. A ruler lacking such a mandate need not be obeyed. But a ruler who reigns humanely and takes care of the people is to be obeyed strictly, for the benevolence of his dominion shows that he has been mandated by heaven. Confucius himself had little to say on the will of the people, but his leading follower Mencius did state on one occasion that the people's opinion on certain weighty matters should be considered.

Etiquette Li (Confucianism) In Confucianism, the term "li" (Chinese: 禮; pinyin: lǐ), sometimes translated into English as rituals, customs, rites, etiquette, or morals, refers to any of the secular social functions of daily life, akin to the Western term for culture. Confucius considered education and music as various elements of li. Li were

codified and treated as a comprehensive system of norms, guiding the propriety or politeness which colors everyday life. Confucius himself tried to revive the etiquette of earlier dynasties. It is important to note that, although li is sometimes translated as "ritual" or "rites", it has developed a specialized meaning in Confucianism, as opposed to its usual religious meanings. In Confucianism, the acts of everyday life are considered rituals. Rituals are not necessarily regimented or arbitrary practices, but the routines that people often engage in, knowingly or unknowingly, during the normal course of their lives. Shaping the rituals in a way that leads to a content and healthy society, and to content and healthy people, is one purpose of Confucian philosophy.

Loyalty Loyalty (Chinese: 忠; pinyin: zhōng) is the equivalent of filial piety on a different plane. It is particularly relevant for the social class to which most of Confucius' students belonged, because the only way for an ambitious young scholar to make his way in the Confucian Chinese world was to enter a ruler's civil service. Like filial piety, however, loyalty was often subverted by the autocratic regimes of China. Confucius had advocated a sensitivity to the realpolitik of the class relations in his time; he did not propose that "might makes right", but that a superior who had received the "Mandate of Heaven" (see below) should be obeyed because of his moral rectitude. In later ages, however, emphasis was placed more on the obligations of the ruled to the ruler, and less on the ruler's obligations to the ruled. Loyalty was also an extension of one's duties to friends, family, and spouse. Loyalty to one's family came first, then to one's spouse, then to one's ruler, and lastly to one's friends. Loyalty was considered one of the greater human virtues. Confucius also realized that loyalty and filial piety can potentially conflict.

Filial piety Filial piety "Filial piety" (Chinese: 孝; pinyin: xiào) is considered among the greatest of virtues and must be shown towards both the living and the dead (including even remote ancestors). The term "filial" (meaning "of a child") characterizes the respect that a child, originally a son, should show to his parents. This relationship was extended by analogy to a series of five relationships (Chinese: 五倫; pinyin:wǔlún): The Five Bonds



Ruler to Ruled



Father to Son



Husband to Wife



Elder Brother to Younger Brother



Friend to Friend

Specific duties were prescribed to each of the participants in these sets of relationships. Such duties were also extended to the dead, where the living stood as sons to their deceased family. This led to the veneration of ancestors. The only relationship where respect for elders wasn't stressed was the Friend to Friend relationship. In all other relationships, high reverence was held for elders. The idea of Filial piety influenced the Chinese legal system: a criminal would be punished more harshly if the culprit had committed the crime against a parent, while fathers often exercised enormous power over their children. A similar differentiation was applied to other relationships. Now filial piety is also built into law. People have the responsibility to provide for their elderly parents according to the law. The main source of our knowledge of the importance of filial piety is the Classic of Filial Piety, a work attributed to Confucius and his son but almost certainly written in the 3rd century BCE. The Analects,

the main source of the Confucianism of Confucius, actually has little to say on the matter of filial piety and some sources believe the concept was focused on by later thinkers as a response to Mohism. Filial piety has continued to play a central role in Confucian thinking to the present day.

Relationships Relationships are central to Confucianism. Particular duties arise from one's particular situation in relation to others. The individual stands simultaneously in several different relationships with different people: as a junior in relation to parents and elders, and as a senior in relation to younger siblings, students, and others. While juniors are considered in Confucianism to owe their seniors reverence, seniors also have duties of benevolence and concern toward juniors. This theme of mutuality is prevalent in East Asian cultures even to this day. Social harmony—the great goal of Confucianism—therefore results in part from every individual knowing his or her place in the social order, and playing his or her part well. When Duke Jing of Qi asked about government, by which he meant proper istration so as to bring social harmony, Confucius replied: There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son. (Analects XII, 11, trans. Legge) Mencius says: "When being a child, yearn for and love your parents; when growing mature, yearn for and love your lassie; when having wife and child(ren), yearn for and love your wife and child(ren); when being an official (or a staffer), yearn for and love your sovereign (and/or boss).

The gentleman Junzi

The term jūnzǐ (Chinese: 君子; literally "lord's child") is crucial to classical Confucianism. Confucianism exhorts all people to strive for the ideal of a "gentleman" or "perfect man". A succinct description of the "perfect man" is one who "combines the qualities of saint, scholar, and gentleman." In modern times the masculine translation in English is also traditional and is still frequently used. Elitism was bound up with the concept, and gentlemen were expected to act as moral guides to the rest of society. They were to:



cultivate themselves morally;



show filial piety and loyalty where these are due;



cultivate humanity, or benevolence.

The great exemplar of the perfect gentleman is Confucius himself. Perhaps the tragedy of his life was that he was never awarded the high official position which he desired, from which he wished to demonstrate the general well-being that would ensue if humane persons ruled and istered the state. The opposite of the Jūnzǐ was the Xiǎorén (Chinese: 小人; pinyin: xiǎorén; literally "small person"). The character 小 in this context means petty in mind and heart, narrowly self-interested, greedy, superficial, or materialistic.

Rectification of names Rectification of Names Confucius believed that social disorder often stemmed from failure to perceive, understand, and deal with reality. Fundamentally, then, social disorder can stem from the failure to call things by their proper names,

and

his

solution

to

this

was Zhèngmíng (Chinese: [正名];pinyin: zhèngmíng;

"rectification of "). He gave an explanation of zhengming to one of his disciples.

literally

Zi-lu said, "The vassal of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to ister the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?" The Master replied, "What is necessary to rectify names." "So! indeed!" said Zi-lu. "You are wide off the mark! Why must there be such rectification?" The Master said, "How uncultivated you are, Yu! The superior man cannot care about the everything, just

as

he

cannot

go

to

check

all

himself!

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore if the superior have got everything the a propriate name,he would find it convient to give orders.If he give orders ,it will be always appropriately carried out.Then,he cannot blame you,because you can always appropicately.." (Analects XIII, 3, tr. Legge) Xun Zi chapter (22) "On the Rectification of Names" claims the ancient sage-kings chose names (Chinese: [名]; pinyin: míng) that directly corresponded with actualities (Chinese: [實]; pinyin: shí), but later generations confused terminology, coined new nomenclature, and thus could no longer distinguish right from wrong.

Governance Confucian temple in Kaohsiung, Taiwan,Republic of China To govern by virtue, let us compare it to the North Star: it stays in its place, while the myriad stars wait upon it. (Analects II, 1)

Another key Confucian concept is that in order to govern others one must first govern oneself. When developed sufficiently, the king's personal virtue spreads beneficent influence throughout the kingdom. This idea is developed further in the Great Learning, and is tightly linked with the Taoist concept of wu wei (simplified Chinese: 无为; traditional Chinese: 無為;pinyin: wú wéi): the less the king does, the more gets done. By being the "calm center" around which the kingdom turns, the king allows everything to function smoothly and avoids having to tamper with the individual parts of the whole. This idea may be traced back to early Chinese shamanistic beliefs, such as the king being the axle between the sky, human beings, and the Earth.Another complementary view is that this idea may have been used by ministers and counselors to deter aristocratic whims that would otherwise be to the detriment of the state's people.

Meritocracy In teaching, there should be no distinction of classes. (Analects XV, 39) The main basis of his teachings was to seek knowledge, study, and become a better person. Although Confucius claimed that he never invented anything but was only transmitting ancient knowledge (see Analects VII, 1), he did produce a number of new ideas. Many European and American irers such as Voltaire and H. G. Creel point to the revolutionary idea of replacing nobility of blood with nobility of virtue. Jūnzǐ (君子, lit. "lord's child"), which originally signified the younger, non-inheriting, offspring of a noble, became, in Confucius' work, an epithet having much the same meaning and evolution as the English "gentleman". A virtuous plebeian who cultivates his qualities can be a "gentleman", while a shameless son of the king is only a "small man". That he itted students of

different classes as disciples is a clear demonstration that he fought against the feudal structures that defined pre-imperial Chinese society. Another new idea, that of meritocracy, led to the introduction of the Imperial examination system in China. This system allowed anyone who ed an examination to become a government officer, a position which would bring wealth and honour to the whole family. The Chinese Imperial examination system seems to have been started in 165 BC, when certain candidates for public office were called to the Chinese capital for examination of their moral excellence by the emperor. Over the following centuries the system grew until finally almost anyone who wished to become an official had to prove his worth by ing written government examinations. His achievement was the setting up of a school that produced statesmen with a strong

sense

of

patriotism

(Chinese: 儒家; pinyin: Rújiā).

During

and

duty,

the Warring

known States

as

Period and

Rujia the

early Han Dynasty, China grew greatly and the need arose for a solid and centralized cadre of government officers able to read and write istrative papers. As a result, Confucianism was promoted by the emperor and the men its doctrines produced became an effective counter to the remaining feudal aristocrats who threatened the unity of the imperial state. During the Han Dynasty, Confucianism developed from an ethical system into a political ideology used to legitimize the rule of the political elites. Most Chinese emperors used a mix of Legalism and Confucianism as their ruling doctrine, often with the latter embellishing the former. The practice of using the Confucian meritocracy to justify political actions continues in countries in theSinosphere, including post-economic liberalization People's Republic of China, Chiang Kai-Shek's Republic of China, and modernSingapore.

Influence in 17th-century Europe Life and works of Confucius, by Prospero Intorcetta, 1687

The works of Confucius were translated into European languages through the agency of Jesuit scholars stationed in China. Matteo Ricci was among the very earliest to report on the thoughts of Confucius, and father Prospero Intorcetta wrote about the life and works of Confucius in Latin in 1687. Translations of Confucian texts influenced European thinkers of the period, particularly among the Deists and other philosophical groups of the Enlightenment who were interested by the integration of the system of morality of Confucius into Western civilization. Confucianism influenced Gottfried Leibniz, who was attracted to the philosophy because of its perceived similarity to his own. It is postulated that certain elements of Leibniz's philosophy, such as "simple substance" and "preestablished harmony", were borrowed from his interactions with Confucianism. The French philosopher Voltaire was also influenced by Confucius, seeing the concept of Confucian rationalism as an alternative to Christian dogma. He praised Confucian ethics and politics, portraying the sociopolitical hierarchy of China as a model for Europe. Confucius has no interest in falsehood; he did not pretend to be prophet; he claimed no inspiration; he taught no new religion; he used no delusions; flattered not the emperor under whom he lived... —Voltaire

Influence on Islamic thought From the late 17th century onwards a whole body of literature known as the Han Kitab developed amongst the Hui Muslims of China who infused Islamic thought with Confucianism. Especially the works of Liu Zhi such as Tiānfāng Diǎnlǐ（天方典禮） sought to harmonize Islam with not only Confucianism but Daoism and is considered to be one of the crowning achievements of the Chinese Muslim culture.

Influence in modern times Important military and political figures in modern Chinese history continued to be influenced by Confucianism, like the Muslim warlordMa Fuxiang. The New Life Movement relied heavily on Confucianism. Referred to variously as the Confucian hypothesis and as a debated component of the more allencoming Asian Development Model, there exists among political scientists and economists a theory that Confucianism plays a large latent role in the ostensibly non-Confucian cultures of modernday East Asia, in the form of the rigorous work ethic it endowed those cultures with. These scholars have held that, if not for Confucianism's influence on these cultures, many of the people of the East Asia

region

would

not

have

been

able

to

modernize

and

industrialize

as

quickly

as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and even China have done. Most scholars attribute the origins of this idea to futurologist Herman Kahn's World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond. In years since, this hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited. See Hicks' of it referenced above for details, or for an alternate and more current explanation, Cristobal Kay's "Why East Asia Overtook Latin America: Agrarian Reform, Industrialization, and Development."

Criticism For many years since the era of Confucius, various critiques of Confucianism have arisen, including Laozi's philosophy and Mozi's critique. Lu Xun also criticised Confucianism heavily for shaping Chinese people into the condition they had reached by the late Qing Dynasty: his criticisms are well portrayed in two of his works, A Man's Diary and The True Story of Ah Q.

In modern times, waves of critique along with vilification against Confucianism arose. The Taiping Rebellion, May Fourth Movement andCultural Revolution are some upsurges of those waves in China. Taiping rebels described many sages in Confucianism as well as gods in Taoism and Buddhism as mere legends. Marxists during the Cultural Revolution described Confucius as the general representative of the class of slave owners. Numerous opinions and interpretations of Confucianism (of which many are actually opposed by Confucianism) were invented. In South Korea, there has been long criticism to Confucianism. Many Koreans believe Confucianism has not contributed to the modernization of Korea. For example, South Korean writer Kim-kyongli wrote a criticism named "Must Kill Confucius, This Nation will be Solved" (공자가 죽어야 나라가 산다, gongjaga jug-eoya nalaga sanda). The writer said that filial relationships are one-side and blind. He writes that if these circumstance continue, social problems will continue to be caused by society and the government forcing Confucian filial obligations onto families.

Women in Confucian thought Confucianism "largely defined the mainstream discourse on gender in China from the Han dynasty onward," and its strict, obligatory gender roles as a cornerstone of family, and thus, societal stability, continue to shape social life throughout East Asia. Confucians taught that a virtuous woman was supposed to uphold 'three subordinations': be subordinate to her father before marriage, to her husband after marriage, and to her son after her husband died. Men could remarry and have concubines, whereas women were supposed to uphold the virtue of chastity when they lost their husbands. Chaste widows were revered as heroes during the Ming andQing periods,[34] and were deemed so central to China‘s culture and the fate of all peoples, the Yongle Emperor distributed 10,000 copies of the Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü Zhuan) to various non-Chinese countries for their moral instruction. The book served as Confucianism's seminal textbook for Chinese women for

two millennia, but cementing the "cult of chastity" as an exemplar of Chinese superiority also condemned many widows to lives of "poverty and loneliness." However, recent reexaminations of Chinese gender roles suggest that many women flourished within Confucianism.[34] During the Han dynasty period, the important Confucian text Lessons for Women (Nüjie), was written by Ban Zhao (45-114 CE): by a woman, for women. She wrote the Nüjie ostensibly for her daughters, instructing them on how to live proper Confucian lives as wives and mothers. Although this is a relatively rare instance of a female Confucian voice, Ban Zhao almost entirely accepts the prevailing views concerning women's proper roles; they should be silent, hard-working, and compliant. She stresses the complementarity and equal importance of the male and female roles according to yin-yang theory, but she clearly accepts the dominance of the yang-male. Her only departure from the standard male versions of this orthodoxy is that she insists on the necessity of educating girls and women. We should not underestimate the significance of this point, as education was the bottom line qualification for being a junzi or "noble person,"...her example suggests that the Confucian prescription for a meaningful life as a woman was apparently not stifling for all women. Even some women of the literate elite, for whom Confucianism was quite explicitly the norm, were able to flourish by living their lives according to that model. In 2009, for the first time women (and ethnic minorities and people living overseas) were officially recognized as being descendants of Confucius. These additions more than tripled the number of officially recognized descendants of Confucius.

Debate over classification Ever since Europeans first encountered Confucianism, the issue of how Confucianism should be classified has been subject to debate. In the 16th and the 17th centuries, the earliest European arrivals in China, the Christian Jesuits, considered Confucianism to be an ethical system, not a religion, and one that was compatible with Christianity.The Jesuits, including Matteo Ricci, saw Chinese rituals as

"civil rituals" that could co-exist alongside the spiritual rituals of Catholicism.]By the early 18th century, this initial portrayal was rejected by the Dominicans and Franciscans, creating a dispute among Catholics in East Asia that was known as the "Rites Controversy". The Dominicans and Franciscans argued that ancestral worship was a form of pagan idolatry that was contradictory to the tenets of Christianity. This view was reinforced by Pope Benedict XIV, who ordered a ban on Chinese rituals. This debate continues into the modern era. There is consensus among scholars that, whether or not it is religious, Confucianism is definitively non-theistic. Confucianism is humanistic, and does not involve a belief in the supernatural or in a personal god. On spirituality, Confucius said to Chi Lu, one of his students, that "You are not yet able to serve men, how can you serve spirits?"Attributes that are seen as religious—such as ancestor worship, ritual, and sacrifice—were advocated by Confucius as necessary for social harmony; however, these attributes can be traced to the traditional non-Confucian Chinese beliefs of Chinese folk religion, and are also practiced by Daoists and Chinese Buddhists. Scholars recognize that classification ultimately depends on how one defines religion. Using stricter definitions of religion, Confucianism has been described as a moral science or philosophy. But using a broader definition, such as Frederick Streng's characterization of religion as "a means of ultimate transformation",Confucianism could be described as a "sociopolitical doctrine having religious qualities." With the latter definition, Confucianism is religious, even if non-theistic, in the sense that it "performs some of the basic psycho-social functions of full-fledged religions", in the same way that nontheistic ideologies like Communism do.

Hindu philosophy Hindu philosophy is traditionally divided into six āstika (Sanskrit: आस्तिक "orthodox") schools of thought,[1] or darśanas (

, "views"), which accept the Vedas as supreme revealed scriptures. Three

other nāstika (नास्तिक "heterodox") schools do not accept theVedas as authoritative. The āstika schools are:

1. Samkhya, an atheistic and strongly dualist theoretical exposition of consciousness andmatter. 2. Yoga, a school emphasizing meditation, contemplation and liberation. 3. Nyaya or logic, explores sources of knowledge. Nyāya Sūtras. 4. Vaisheshika, an empiricist school of atomism 5. Mimāṃsā, an anti-ascetic and anti-mysticist school of orthopraxy 6. Vedanta, the last segment of knowledge in the Vedas, or the 'Jnan' (knowledge) 'Kanda' (section). Vedanta came to be the dominant current of Hinduism in the post-medieval period. The nāstika schools are (in chronological order): 1. Cārvāka 2. Jainism 3. Buddhism However, medieval philosophers like Vidyāraṇya classify Indian philosophy into sixteen schools, where schools belonging to Saiva,Pāṇini and Raseśvara thought are included with others, and the three Vedantic schools Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita (which had emerged as distinct schools by then) are classified separately. In Hindu history, the distinction of the six orthodox schools was current in the Gupta period "golden age" of Hinduism. With the disappearance of Vaisheshika and Mimamsa, it was obsolete by the later Middle Ages, when the various sub-schools of Vedanta (Dvaita "dualism", Advaita Vedanta "nondualism" and others) began to rise to prominence as the main divisions of religious philosophy. Nyaya survived into the 17th century as Navya Nyaya "Neo-Nyaya", while Samkhya gradually lost its status as an independent school, its tenets absorbed into Yoga and Vedanta.

Overview 1. ^ a b c Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita have evolved from an older Vedanta school and all of them accept Upanishads and Brahma Sutras as standard texts. 2. ^ This is the century in which Patañjali flourished. However, Yoga existed before Patañjali's lifetime. 3. ^ Dated by the century in which Gaudapada flourished. 4. ^ Vyasa wrote a commentary on Yoga Sutras called Samkhyapravacanabhasya.(Radhankrishnan, Indian Philosophy, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971 edition, Volume II, p. 344.)

Samkhya Samkhya Samkhya is the oldest of the orthodox philosophical systems in Hinduism. It espouses dualism between consciousness and matterby postulating two "irreducible, innate and independent realities 1) consciousness itself or Purusha (Sanskrit:

, self, atma or soul) 2) primordial materiality

or Prakriti (creative agency or energy)". The unconscious primordial materiality, Prakriti consists of varying levels of three dispositions or categories of qualities (gunas)— activity (rajas), inactivity (tamas) and harmony (sattva). An imbalance in the intertwined relationship of these three dispositions causes the world to evolve from Prakriti. This evolution from Prakriti causes the creation of 23 constituents, including intellect (buddhi,mahat), ego (ahamkara) and mind (manas). Samkhya theorizes the existence of are many living souls (Jeevatmas) who possess consciousness.

Samkhya holds that Puruṣa, the eternal pure consciousness, due to ignorance, identifies itself with products of Prakriti such as intellect (buddhi) and ego (ahamkara). This results in endless transmigration and suffering. However, once the realization arises that Puruṣa is distinct from Prakriti, the Self is no longer subject to transmigration and absolute freedom (kaivalya) arises. Western dualism deals with the distinction between the mind and the body, whereas in Samkhya it is between the soul and matter. The concept of the atma (soul) is different from the concept of the mind and mind itself thought to an evolute of matter, rather than the soul. Soul is absolute reality that is allpervasive, eternal, indivisible, attributeless, pure consciousness. It is non-matter and is beyond intellect. Originally, Samkhya was not theistic, but in confluence with Yoga it developed a theistic variant.

Yoga In Indian philosophy, Yoga is the name of one of the six orthodox philosophical schools. The Yoga philosophical system is closely allied with the Samkhya school. The Yoga school as expounded by Patanjali accepts the Samkhya psychology and metaphysics, but is more theistic than the Samkhya, as evidenced by the addition of a divine entity to the Samkhya's twenty-five elements of reality. The parallels between Yoga and Samkhya were so close that Max Müller says that "the two philosophies were in popular parlance distinguished from each other as Samkhya with and Samkhya without a Lord...." The intimate relationship between Samkhya and Yoga is explained by Heinrich Zimmer: "These two are regarded in India as twins, the two aspects of a single discipline. Sāmkhya provides a basic theoretical exposition of human nature, enumerating and defining its elements, analyzing their manner of co-operation in a state of bondage (bandha), and describing their state of disentanglement or separation in release (mokṣa), while Yoga treats specifically of the dynamics of the process for the disentanglement, and outlines practical techniques for the gaining of release, or 'isolation-integration' (kaivalya)."

The foundational text of the Yoga school is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, who is regarded as the founder of the formal Yoga philosophy. The Sutras of the Yoga philosophy are ascribed to Patanjali, who may have been, as Max Müller explains, "the author or representative of the Yoga-philosophy without being necessarily the author of the Sutras."

Nyaya The Nyaya school is based on the Nyaya Sutras. They were written by Aksapada Gautama, probably in the second century BCE. The most important contribution made by this school is its methodology. This methodology is based on a system of logic that has subsequently been adopted by the majority of the Indian schools. This is comparable to the relationship between Western science and philosophy, which was derived largely from Aristotelian logic. Nevertheless, Nyaya was seen by its followers as more than logical in its own right. They believed that obtaining valid knowledge was the only way to gain release from suffering, and they took great pains to identify valid sources of knowledge and distinguish these from mere false opinions. According to Nyaya, there are exactly four sources of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony. Knowledge obtained through each of these is either valid or invalid. Nyaya developed several criteria of validity. In this sense, Nyaya is probably the closest Indian equivalent to analytic philosophy. The later Naiyanikas gave logical proofs for the existence and uniqueness of Ishvara in response to Buddhism, which, at that time, was fundamentally non-theistic. An important later development in Nyaya was the system of Navya-NyÄya.

Vaisheshika The Vaisheshika school postulates an atomic pluralism in which all objects in the physical universe are reducible to certain types of atoms, and Brahman is regarded as the fundamental force that causes

consciousness in these atoms. The school was founded by the sage Kaṇāda (or Kana-bhuk, literally, atom-eater) around the 2nd century BC.[17] Major ideas contained in the Vaisheshika Sutraare:



There are nine classes of realities: four classes of atoms (earth, water, light and air), space (akasha), time (kāla), direction (dik), infinity of souls (Atman), mind (manas).



Individual souls are eternal and pervade material body for a time.



There are seven categories (padārtha) of experience — substance, quality, activity, generality, particularity, inherence and non-existence.

Although the Vaisheshika school developed independently from the Nyaya, the two eventually merged because of their closely related metaphysical theories. In its classical form, however, the Vaisheshika school differed from the Nyaya in one crucial respect: where Nyaya accepted four sources of valid knowledge, the Vaisheshika accepted only two—–perception and inference.

Purva Mimamsa The main objective of the Purva Mimamsa school was to establish the authority of the Vedas. Consequently, this school's most valuable contribution to Hinduism was its formulation of the rules of Vedic interpretation. Its adherents propounded unquestionable faith in the Vedas and regular performance of the yajñas, or fire-sacrifices. They believed in the power of the mantras and yajñas to sustain all the activity of the universe. In keeping with this belief, they placed great emphasis on dharma, which consisted of the performance of Vedic rituals. The Mimamsa philosophers accepted the logical and philosophical teachings of the other schools, but felt they did not sufficiently emphasize attention to right action. They believed that the other schools of thought that aimed for release (moksha) were not allowed for complete freedom from desire and selfishness, because the very striving for liberation stemmed from a simple desire to be free. According

to Mimamsa thought, only by acting in accordance with the prescriptions of the Vedas may one attain salvation. The Mimamsa school later shifted its views and began to teach the doctrines of Brahman and freedom. Its adherents then advocated the release or escape of the soul from its constraints through enlightened activity. Although Mimamsa does not receive much scholarly attention, its influence can be felt in the life of the practising Hindu, because all Hindu ritual, ceremony, and law is influenced by this school.

Vedanta The Vedanta,

or later Mimamsa

school,

concentrates

on

the

philosophical

teachings

of

the Upanishads rather than the ritualistic injunctions of the Brahmanas. Etymologically, Vedanta means, the last segment of knowledge in the Vedas. It is also known as the 'Jnan' (knowledge) 'Kanda' (section). While, the earlier segments of the Vedas are called 'Karma Kanda'. Parts of Vedas that focus on spiritual practices such as worship, devotion and meditation are called 'Upasana Kanda'. While the traditional Vedic rituals continued to be practiced as meditative and propitiatory rites, a more knowledge-centered understanding began to emerge. These were mystical aspects of Vedic religion that focused on meditation, self-discipline, and spiritual connectivity, more than traditional ritualism. The more abstruse Vedanta is the essence of the Vedas, as encapsulated in the Upanishads. Vedantic thought drew on Vedic cosmology, hymns and philosophy. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is believed to have appeared as far back as 3,000 years ago. While thirteen or so Upanishads are accepted as principal, over a hundred exist. The most significant contribution of Vedantic thought is the idea that self-consciousness is continuous with and indistinguishable from consciousness of Brahman. The aphorisms of the Vedanta sutras are presented in a cryptic, poetic style, which allows for a variety of interpretations. Consequently, the Vedanta separated into six sub-schools, each interpreting the texts in its own way and producing its own series of sub-commentaries.

Advaita Advaita Vedanta Advaita literally means "non-duality." This is the oldest and most widely acknowledged Vedantic school. Its first great consolidator wasAdi Shankaracharya (788 CE – 820 CE), who continued the line of thought of the Upanishadic teachers, and that of his teacher's teacher Gaudapada. He wrote extensive commentaries on the major Vedantic scriptures and was successful in the revival and reformation of Hindu thinking and way of life. According to this school of Vedanta, Brahman is the only reality, and there exists nothing whatsoever which is not Brahman. The appearance of dualities and differences in this world is an superimposition on Brahman, called Maya. Maya is the illusionary and creative aspect of Brahman, which causes the world to arise. Maya is neither existent nor non-existent, but appears to exist temporarily, as in case of any illusion (for example mirage). When

a

person

tries

to

know Brahman through

his

mind,

due

to

the

influence

of Maya, Brahman appears as God (Ishvara), separate from the world and from the individual. In reality, there is no difference between the individual soul (Jivatman) and Brahman. The spiritual practices such as: devotion to God, meditation & self-less action etc. purifies the mind and indirectly helps in perceiving the real. One whose vision is obscured by ignorance he does not see the non-dual nature of reality; as the blind do not see the resplendent Sun.[19]Hence, the only direct cause of liberation is selfknowledge which directly removes the ignorance.[20] After realization, one sees one's own self and the Universe as the same, non-dual Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss-Absolute.

Vishishtadvaita Vishishtadvaita

Ramanujacharya (c. 1037–1137 CE) was the foremost proponent of the philosophy of Vishishtadvaita or qualified non-dualism. Vishishtadvaita advocated the concept of a Supreme Being with essential qualities or attributes. Vishishtadvaitins argued against the Advaitin conception of Brahman as an impersonal empty oneness. They saw Brahman as an eternal oneness, but also as the source of all creation, which was omnipresent and actively involved in existence. To them the sense of subjectobject perception was illusory and a sign of ignorance. However, the individual's sense of self was not a complete illusion since it was derived from the universal beingness that is Brahman. Ramanuja saw Vishnu as a personification of Brahman.

Dvaita Dvaita Vedanta

(dualistic

conclusions

of

the Vedas)

school

of

philosophy

was

founded

by Madhvacharya (c. 1238–1317 CE). It espouses dualism by theorizing the existence of two separate realities. The first and the more important reality is that of Vishnu or Brahman. Vishnu is the supreme Self, God, the absolute truth of the universe, the independent reality. The second reality is that of dependent but equally real universe that exists with its own separate essence. Everything that is composed of the second reality, such as individual soul (Jiva), matter, etc. exist with their own separate reality. The distinguishing factor of this philosophy as opposed to Advaita Vedanta (monistic conclusion of Vedas) is that God takes on a personal role and is seen as a real eternal entity that governs and controls the universe. Five further distinctions are made— (1) Vishnu is distinct from souls; (2) Vishnu is distinct from matter; (3) Souls are distinct from matter; (4) A soul is distinct from another soul, and (5) Matter is distinct from other matter. Souls are eternal and are dependent upon the will of Vishnu. This theology attempts to address the problem of evil with the idea that souls are not created. Because the existence of individuals is grounded in the divine, they are depicted as reflections, images or even shadows of the

divine, but never in any way identical with the divine. Salvation therefore is described as the realization that all finite reality is essentially dependent on the Supreme.

Dvaitadvaita (Bhedabheda) Dvaitadvaita was proposed by Nimbarka, a 13th century Vaishnava Philosopher from the Andhra region. According to this philosophy there are three categories of existence: Brahman, soul, and matter. Soul and matter are different from Brahman in that they have attributes and capacities different from Brahman. Brahman exists independently, while soul and matter are dependent. Thus soul and matter have an existence that is separate yet dependent. Further, Brahman is a controller, the soul is the enjoyer, and matter the thing enjoyed. Also, the highest object of worship is Krishna and his consort Radha, attended by thousands of gopis, or cowherdesses; of the celestial Vrindavana; and devotion consists in self-surrender.

Shuddhadvaita Shuddhadvaita is the "purely non-dual" philosophy propounded by Vallabhacharya (1479–1531 CE). The founding philosopher was also the guru of the Vallabhā sampradāya ("tradition of Vallabh") or Puśtimārg ("The path of grace"), a Hindu Vaishnava tradition focused on the worship of Krishna.

Acintya Bheda Abheda Achintya Bheda Abheda Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534), was stating that the soul or energy of God is both distinct and non-distinct from God, whom he identified as Krishna, Govinda, and that this, although unthinkable,

may be experienced through a process of loving devotion (bhakti). He followed the Dvaita concept of Sri Madhva. This philosophy of "inconceivable oneness and difference".

Shaivism Early history of Shaivism is difficult to determine.However, the Śvetāśvatara Upanishad (400 – 200 BCE)]is considered to be the earliest textual exposition of

a systematic philosophy of

Shaivism.Shaivism is represented by various philosophical schools, including non-dualist (abheda), dualist (bheda), and non-dualist-with-dualist (bhedābheda) perspectives. Vidyaranya in his works mentions three major schools of Shaiva thought— Pashupata Shaivism, Shaiva Siddhanta and Pratyabhijña (Kashmir Shaivism).

Pashupata Shaivism Pashupata Shaivism is the oldest of the major Shaivite schools.[29] The philosophy of Pashupata sect was systematized by Lakulish in the 2nd century CE. Pashu in Pashupati refers to the effect (or created world), the word designates that which is dependent on something ulterior. Whereas, Pati means the cause (or prinripium), the word designates the Lord, who is the cause of the universe, the pati, or the ruler. Pashupatas disapproved of the Vaishnava theology, known for its doctrine servitude of souls to the Supreme Being, on the grounds that dependence upon anything could not be the means of cessation of pain and other desired ends. They recognized that those depending upon another and longing for independence will not be emancipated because they still depend upon something other than themselves. According to Pashupatas, soul possesses the attributes of the Supreme Deity when it becomes liberated from the 'germ of every pain'. Pashupatas divided the created world into the insentient and the sentient. The insentient was the unconscious and thus dependent on the sentient or conscious. The insentient was further divided into effects and causes. The effects were of ten kinds, the earth, four elements and their qualities, colour

etc. The causes were of thirteen kinds, the five organs of cognition, the five organs of action, the three internal organs, intellect, the ego principle and the cognising principle. These insentient causes were held responsible for the illusive identification of Self with non-Self. Salvation in Pashupata Shaivism involved the union of the soul with God through the intellect.

Shaiva Siddhanta Considered normative Tantric Shaivism, Shaiva Siddhanta[ provides the normative rites, cosmology and theological categories of Tantric Shaivism. Being a dualistic philosophy, the goal of Shaiva Siddhanta is to become an ontologically distinct Shiva (through Shiva's grace).This tradition later merged with the Tamil Saiva movement and expression of concepts of Shaiva Siddhanta can be seen in the bhakti poetry of the Nayanars.

Kashmir Shaivism Kashmir Shaivism arose during the eighth or ninth century CE in Kashmir and made significant strides, both philosophical and theological, until the end of the twelfth century CE.[40] It is categorized by various scholars as monistic idealism (absolute idealism, theistic monism, realistic idealism, transcendental physicalism or concrete monism. It is a school of Śaivism consisting of Trikaand its philosophical articulation Pratyabhijña. Even though, both Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta are non-dual philosophies which give primacy to Universal Consciousness (Chit or Brahman), in Kashmir Shavisim, as opposed to Advaita, all things are a manifestation of this Consciousness. This implies that from the point of view of Kashmir Shavisim, the phenomenal world (Śakti) is real, and it exists and has its being in Consciousness (Chit). Whereas, Advaita holds that Brahman is inactive (niṣkriya) and the phenomenal world is an illusion

(māyā). The objective of human life, according to Kashmir Shaivism, is to merge in Shiva or Universal Consciousness, or to realize one's already existing identity with Shiva, by means of wisdom, yoga and grace.

Buddhist philosophy Buddhist philosophy is the elaboration and explanation of the delivered teachings of theBuddha as found in the Tripitaka and Agama. Its main concern is with explicating thedharmas constituting reality. A recurrent theme is the reification of concepts, and the subsequent return to the Buddhist middle way. Early

Buddhism avoided

speculative

thought

on metaphysics, phenomenology, ethics,

andepistemology, but was based instead on empirical evidence gained by the sense organs (ayatana). Nevertheless, Buddhist scholars have addressed ontological and metaphysical issues subsequently. Particular points of Buddhist philosophy have often been the subject of disputes between different schools of Buddhism. These elaborations and disputes gave rise to various schools in early Buddhism of Abhidhamma,

and

to

the Mahayana traditions

and

schools

of

the prajnaparamita, Madhyamaka, buddha-nature and Yogacara.

Indian background The historical Buddha lived during a time of spiritual and philosophical revival in Northern India when the established mythologies and cosmological explanations of the vedas came under rational scrutiny. As well as the Buddha's own teachings, new ethical and spiritual philosophies such as those of Mahavira became established during this period when alternatives to the mainstream religion arose in an atmosphere of freethought and renewed vitality in spiritual endeavour. This general cultural movement is today known as the Sramanic tradition and the epoch of new thought as the axial era. These heterodox groups held widely divergent opinions but were united by a critical attitude towards the

established

religion

whose

explanations

they

found

unsatisfactory

and

whose animal

sacrifices increasingly distasteful and irrelevant. In Greece, China and India there was a return to fundamental questions and a new interest in the question of how humans should live.

Life and teachings of the Buddha Biography According to the traditional s, Gautama, the future Buddha, was a prince who grew up in an environment of luxury and opulence. He became convinced that sense-pleasures and wealth did not provide the satisfaction that human beings longed for deep within. He abandoned worldly life to live as a mendicant. He studied under a number of teachers, developing his insight into the problem of suffering. After his awakening he regarded himself as a physician rather than a philosopher. Whereas philosophers merely had views about things, he taught the Noble Eightfold Path which liberates from suffering.

Philosophy The Buddha discouraged his followers from indulging in intellectual disputation for its own sake, which is fruitless, and distracting from true awakening. Nevertheless, the delivered sayings of the Buddha contain a philosophical component, in its teachings on the working of the mind, and its criticisms of the philosophies of his contemporaries. According to the scriptures, during his lifetime the Buddha remained silent when asked several metaphysical questions. These regarded issues such as whether the universe is eternal or noneternal (or whether it is finite or infinite), the unity or separation of the body and the self, the complete inexistence of a person after Nirvana and death, and others.

Emphasis on awakening One explanation for this silence is that such questions distract from activity that is practical to realizing enlightenment and bring about the danger of substituting the experience of liberation by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith. Experience is [...] the path most elaborated in early Buddhism. The doctrine on the other hand was kept low. The Buddha avoided doctrinal formulations concerning the final reality as much as possible in order to prevent his followers from resting content with minor achievements on the path in which the absence of the final experience could be substituted by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith, a situation which sometimes occurs, in both varieties, in the context of Hindu systems of doctrine.

Attachments to the skandhas Another explanation is that both affirmative and negative positions regarding these questions are based on attachment to and misunderstanding of the aggregates and senses. That is, when one sees these things for what they are, the idea of forming positions on such metaphysical questions simply does not occur.

Emptiness Another closely related explanation is that reality is devoid of sensory mediation and conception, or empty, and therefore language itself is a priori inadequate without direct experience. Thus, the Buddha's silence does not indicate misology or disdain for philosophy. Rather, it indicates that he viewed the answers to these questions as not understandable by the unenlightened. Dependent arising provides a framework for analysis of reality that is not based on metaphysical assumptions

regarding existence or non-existence, but instead on imagining direct cognition of phenomena as they are presented to the mind. This informs and s the Buddhist approach to liberation from adventitious distortion and engaging in the Noble Eightfold Path. The Buddha of the earliest Buddhists texts describes Dharma (in the sense of "truth") as "beyond reasoning" or "transcending logic", in the sense that reasoning is a subjectively introduced aspect of the way unenlightened humans perceive things, and the conceptual framework which underpins their cognitive process, rather than a feature of things as they really are. Going "beyond reasoning" means in this context penetrating the nature of reasoning from the inside, and removing the causes for experiencing any future stress as a result of it, rather than functioning outside of the system as a whole. Some Buddhist scholars assert words are inadequate to describe the goal of the Buddhist path, but concerning the usefulness of words in the path itself, schools differ radically.

Early Buddhism Basic teachings Certain basic teachings appear in many places throughout the early texts, so most scholars conclude that the Buddha must at least have taught these teachings:[10]



Three marks of existence



Five aggregates



Dependent arising



Karma and rebirth



The four noble truths



The Noble Eightfold Path



Nirvana

According to these scholars, there was something they variously call "earliest Buddhism", "original Buddhism" or "pre-canonical Buddhism". Some scholars disagree, and have proposed other theories.[11] According to some scholars, the philosophical outlook of earliest Buddhism was primarily negative, in the sense that it focused on what doctrines to reject more than on what doctrines to accept.[a]Only knowledge that is useful in achieving enlightenment is valued. According to this theory, the cycle of philosophical upheavals that in part drove the diversification of Buddhism into its many schools and sects only began once Buddhists began attempting to make explicit the implicit philosophy of the Buddha and the early suttas. Other scholars reject this theory. After the death of the Buddha, attempts were made to gather his teachings and transmit them in a commonly agreed form, first orally, then also in writing (the Tripiṭaka).

Dukkha Dukkha, often translated as suffering, is the inherent unsatifactoriness of life. This unsatifactoriness drives our yearning for a better way of life, yet keeps us imprisoned in wordly existence and rebirth.

Dependent origination Dependent origination The working of the rising and ceasing of suffering is explained by Pratitya-samutpada, dependent origination. It states that events are not predetermined, nor are they random. It rejects notions of direct causation, which are necessarily undergirded by a substantialist metaphysics. Instead, it posits the arising of events under certain conditions which are inextricable, such that the processes in question at no time, are considered to be entities.

Dependent origination posits that certain specific events, concepts, or realities are always dependent on other specific things. Craving, for example, is always dependent on, and caused by, emotion. Emotion is always dependent on with our surroundings. This chain of causation purports to show that the cessation of decay, death, and sorrow is indirectly dependent on the cessation of craving. This concept leaves no room for the existence of everlasting, absolute entities. The world must be thought of in procedural , not in of things or substances. Likewise,

Anatta The Buddha asserted the non inherently existent concept of the ego, in opposition to the Upanishadic concept of an unchangingultimate self. The Buddha held that attachment to the appearance of a permanent self in this world of change is the cause of suffering, and the main obstacle to liberation. The apparent ego is merely the result of identification with the temporary aggregates, the components of the individual human being's body and consciousness at any given moment in time.

Ethics Buddhist ethics

Eightfold Path Although there are many ethical tenets in Buddhism that differ depending on whether one is a monk or a layman, and depending on individual schools, the Buddhist system of ethics can be summed up in the eightfold path: And this, monks, is the noble truth of the way of practice leading to the cessation of suffering -precisely this Noble Eightfold Path – right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. The purpose of living an ethical life is to escape the suffering inherent in samsara. Skillful actions condition the mind in a positive way and lead to future happiness, while the opposite is true for unskillful

actions. Ethical discipline also provides the mental stability and freedom to embark upon mental cultivation via meditation. The part of the Noble Eightfold path that covers morality/ethics is right speech, right action and right livelihood. The other parts cover concentration and wisdom, with wisdom being covered by right view and right intention and the remaining three belonging to concentration. The three aggregates are not included under the noble eightfold path, friend Visakha, but the noble eightfold path is included under the three aggregates. Right speech, right action, & right livelihood come under the aggregate of virtue. Right effort, right mindfulness, & right concentration come under the aggregate of concentration. Right view & right resolve come under the aggregate of discernment. [14]

Precepts While the precepts for monks and nuns differ somewhat depending on which tradition one has ordained in (Tibetan, Thai Theravadan, etc.), the precepts for laymen and laywomen followers of the Buddha are the same. There are the five precepts that all followers of the Buddha must observe if they hope to be reborn as a human being and there are the ten precepts which are an expansion of five precepts, with four of the five being repeated in the list of ten. So excluding the redundancy of the two lists, there are eleven precepts to follow. The five and ten precepts must be followed if one hopes to be reborn in one of the various heavenly realms. The eleven precepts are: 1) Do not kill 2) Do not steal 3) Do not commit sexual improprieties 4) Do not speak falsely (don't lie) 5) Do not speak harshly (yelling, insulting, etc.) 6) Do not speak divisively or slanderously 7) Do not speak thoughtlessly (no unnecessary speech, idle chit-chat) 8) Do not covet 9) Do not have ill will toward others (don't maliciously wish harm on others) 10) Do not hold wrong views (believe in karma, understand the four noble truths, etc.) 11) Do not use intoxicants (the one precept of the five precepts that is not repeated in the list of the ten precepts).

Textual authority Decisive in distinguishing Buddhism from what is commonly called Hinduism is the issue of epistemological justification. All schools of Indian logic recognize various sets of valid justifications for knowledge, or pramāṇa. Buddhism recognizes a set that is smaller than the others. For some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism the received textual tradition is an epistemological category equal to perception and inference (although this is not necessarily true for some other schools). Thus, in the Hindu schools, if a claim was made that could not be substantiated by appeal to the textual canon, it would be considered as ridiculous as a claim that the sky was green and, conversely, a claim which could not be substantiated via conventional means might still be justified through textual reference, differentiating this from the epistemology of modern science.

Early Buddhist schools The

main

early

Buddhist

philosophical

schools

are

the Abhidharma schools,

particularly Sarvāstivāda and Theravāda.

Sarvastivadin realism Early Buddhist philosophers and exegetes of the Sarvāstivādins created a pluralist metaphysical and phenomenological system, in which all experiences of people, things and events can be broken down into smaller and smaller perceptual or perceptual-ontologicalunits called "dharmas".

Other schools incorporated some parts of this theory and criticized others. The Sautrāntikas, another early school, and the Theravādins, now the only modern survivor of the early Buddhist schools, criticized the realist standpoint of the Sarvāstivādins.

Theravada Theravada promotes the concept of vibhajjavada (Pāli, literally "Teaching of Analysis") to nonBuddhists. This doctrine says that insight must come from the aspirant's experience, critical investigation, and reasoning instead of by blind faith. As the Buddha said according to the canonical scriptures: Do not accept anything by mere tradition ... Do not accept anything just because it accords with your scriptures ... Do not accept anything merely because it agrees with your pre-conceived notions ... But when you know for yourselves—these things are moral, these things are blameless, these things are praised by the wise, these things, when performed and undertaken, conduce to well-being and happiness—then do you live acting accordingly.

Mahayana Mahayana often adopts a pragmatic concept of truth: doctrines are regarded as conditionally "true" in the sense of being spiritually beneficial. In modern (State controlled) Chinese Buddhism, all doctrinal traditions are regarded as equally valid. Main Mahayana philosophical schools and traditions include the prajnaparamita, Madhyamaka, Tathagatagarbha, Yogācāra, Huayan, and Tiantai schools.

Indian Mahayana Prajnaparamita The Prajanaparamita-sutras emphasize the emptiness of the five skandhas. The Heart sutra, a text from the prajnaparamita-sutras, articulates this in the following saying in which the five skandhas are said to be "empty": "Oh, Sariputra, Form Does not Differ From the Void, And the Void Does Not Differ From Form. Form is Void and Void is Form; The Same is True For Feelings, Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness".

Madhyamaka Madhyamaka The Mahāyānist Nāgārjuna, one of the most influential Buddhist thinkers, promoted classical Buddhist emphasis on phenomena and attacked Sarvāstivāda realism and Sautrāntika nominalism in his magnum opus, The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way(Mūlamadhyamakakārikā). Nagarjuna asserted a direct connection between, even identity of, dependent origination, selflessness (anatta), and emptiness (śūnyatā). He pointed out that implicit in the early Buddhist concept of dependent origination is the lack of any substantial being (anatta) underlying the participants in origination, so that they have no independent existence, a state identified as emptiness (śūnyatā), or emptiness of a nature or essence (svabhāva).

Tathagatagarbha Tathagatagarbha The tathāgathagarbha sutras, in a departure from mainstream Buddhist language, insist that the potential for awakening is inherent to every sentient being. They marked a shift from a largely apophatic (negative) philosophical trend within Buddhism to a decidedly morecataphatic (positive) modus. Prior to the period of these scriptures, Mahāyāna metaphysics had been dominated by teachings on emptiness in the form ofMadhyamaka philosophy. The language used by this approach is primarily negative, and the tathāgatagarbha genre of sutras can be seen as an attempt to state orthodox Buddhist teachings of dependent origination using positive language instead, to prevent people from being turned away from Buddhism by a false impression of nihilism. In these sutras the perfection of the wisdom of not-self is stated to be the true self; the ultimate goal of the path is then characterized using a range of positive language that had been used previously in Indian philosophy by essentialist philosophers, but which was now transmuted into a new Buddhist vocabulary to describe a being who has successfully completed the Buddhist path. The word "self" (atman) is used in a way idiosyncratic to these sutras; the "true self" is described as the perfection of the wisdom ofnot-self in the Buddha-Nature Treatise, for example. Language that had previously been used by essentialist non-Buddhist philosophers was now adopted, with new definitions, by Buddhists to promote orthodox teachings. The tathāgatagarbha does not, according to some scholars, represent a substantial self; rather, it is a positive language expression ofemptiness and represents the potentiality to realize Buddhahood through

Buddhist

practices.

In

this

interpretation,

of tathāgatagarbha is soteriological rather than theoretical.

the

intention

of

the

teaching

The tathāgathagarbha,

the Theravāda doctrine

of bhavaṅga,

and

the Yogācāra store

consciousness were all identified at some point with the luminous mind of the Nikāyas. In the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Buddha insists that while pondering upon Dharma is vital, one must then relinquish fixation on words and letters, as these are utterly divorced from liberation and the Buddha-nature.

Yogacara Yogacara The Yogacara-school tries to explain the arising of suffering by explaining the workings of our mind. It takes the concepts of the five skandhas and the six consciousnesses, to explain how manas creates vijnapti, concepts to which we cling.

Chinese Buddhism Huayan and Avatamsaka-sutra Huayan school The Huayan developed

the

doctrine

of

"interpenetration"

or

"coalescence"

(Wylie: zung-'jug;

Sanskrit: yuganaddha), based on theAvataṃsaka Sūtra, a Mahāyāna scripture. It holds that all phenomena (Sanskrit: dharmas) are intimately connected (and mutually arising). Two images are used to convey this idea. The first is known as Indra's net. The net is set with jewels which have the extraordinary property that they reflect all of the other jewels. The second image is that of the world text. This image portrays the world as consisting of an enormous text which is as large as the universe itself. The words of the text are composed of the phenomena that make up the world. However, every atom of the world contains the whole text within it. It is the work of a Buddha to let out the text so that

beings can be liberated from suffering. The doctrine of interpenetration influenced the Japanese monk Kūkai, who founded theShingon school of Buddhism. It is iconographically represented by yabyum. Interpenetration and essence-function are mutually informing in the East Asian Buddhist traditions, especially the Korean Buddhist tradition.

Tibetan Buddhism The Tibetan tantra entitled the "All-Creating King" (Kunjed Gyalpo Tantra) also emphasizes how Buddhist realization lies beyond the range of discursive/verbal thought and is ultimately mysterious. Samantabhadra, states there: The mind of perfect purity ... is beyond thinking and inexplicable..." Also later, the famous Indian Buddhist practitioner and teacher, mahasiddha Tilopa discouraged any intellectual activity in his six words of advice.

Comparison with other philosophies Baruch Spinoza, though he argued for the existence of a permanent reality, asserts that all phenomenal existence is transitory. In his opinion sorrow is conquered "by finding an object of knowledge which is not transient, not ephemeral, but is immutable, permanent, everlasting." Buddhism teaches that such a quest is bound to fail. David Hume, after a relentless analysis of the mind, concluded that consciousness consists of fleeting mental states. Hume's Bundle theory is a very similar concept to the Buddhist skandhas, though his denial of causation lead him to opposite conclusions in other areas. Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy had some parallels in Buddhism. Ludwig Wittgenstein's "word games" closely parallel the warning that intellectual speculation is a red herring to understanding, as found in the Buddhist Parable of the Poison Arrow. Friedrich Nietzsche, although himself dismissive of Buddhism as yet another nihilism, developed his philosophy of accepting

life-as-it-exists and self-cultivation, which is extremely similar to Buddhism as better understood in the West. Heidegger's ideas on being and nothingness have been held by some to be similar to Buddhism today. An alternative approach to the comparison of Buddhist thought with Western philosophy is to use the concept of the Middle Way in Buddhism as a critical tool for the assessment of Western philosophies. In this way Western philosophies can be classified in Buddhist as eternalist or nihilist. In a Buddhist view all philosophies are to be considered non-essential.

Socrates

Socrates (ˈsɒkrətiːz/; Greek: Σωκράηης, Ancient Greek pronunciation: [sɔːkrátɛːs],Sōkrátēs; c. 469 BC – 399 BC) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the s of later classical writers, especially

the

writings

of

his

students Plato andXenophon,

and

the

plays

of

his

contemporary Aristophanes. Many would claim that Plato's dialogues are the most comprehensive s of Socrates to survive from antiquity. Through his portrayal in Plato's dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who also lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socratic method, or elenchus. The latter remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. It is Plato's

Socrates that also made important and lasting contributions to the fields of epistemology and logic, and the influence of his ideas and approach remains strong in providing a foundation for much western philosophy that followed.

Biography The Socratic problem An accurate picture of the historical Socrates and his philosophical viewpoints is problematic: an issue known as the Socratic problem. As Socrates did not write philosophical texts, the knowledge of the man, his life, and his philosophy is entirely based on writings by his students and contemporaries. Foremost among them is Plato; however, works by Xenophon, Aristotle, and Aristophanes also provide important insights.[3] The difficulty of finding the ―real‖ Socrates arises because these works are often philosophical or dramatic texts rather than straightforward histories. Aside from Thucydides (who makes no mention of Socrates or philosophers in general) and Xenophon, there are in fact no straightforward histories contemporary with Socrates that dealt with his own time and place. A corollary of this is that sources that do mention Socrates do not necessarily claim to be historically accurate, and are often partisan (those who prosecuted and convicted Socrates have left no testament). Historians therefore face the challenge of reconciling the various texts that come from these men to create an accurate and consistent of Socrates' life and work. The result of such an effort is not necessarily realistic, merely consistent. Plato is frequently viewed as the most informative source about Socrates' life and philosophy. At the same time, however, many scholars believe that in some works Plato, being a literary artist, pushed his avowedly brightened-up version of "Socrates" far beyond anything the historical Socrates was likely to have done or said; and that Xenophon, being an historian, is a more reliable witness to the historical Socrates. It is a matter of much debate which Socrates Plato is describing at any given point—the historical figure, or Plato's fictionalization. As Martin Cohen has put it, Plato, the idealist, offers "an idol,

a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of the 'Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings as a heretic." It is also clear from other writings and historical artifacts, however, that Socrates was not simply a character, or an invention, of Plato. The testimony of Xenophon and Aristotle, alongside some of Aristophanes' work (especially The Clouds), is useful in fleshing out a perception of Socrates beyond Plato's work.

Life Carnelian gem imprint representing Socrates, Rome, 1st century BC-1st century AD. Details about Socrates can be derived from three contemporary sources: the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon (both devotees of Socrates), and the plays of Aristophanes. He has been depicted by some scholars, including Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, as a champion of oral modes of communication, standing up at the dawn of writing against its haphazard diffusion.[6] Aristophanes' play The Clouds portrays Socrates as a clown who teaches his students how to bamboozle their way out of debt. Most of Aristophanes' works, however, function as parodies. Thus, it is presumed this characterization was also not literal. According to Plato, Socrates' father was Sophroniscus and his mother Phaenarete, a midwife. Though she was characterized as undesirable in temperament, Socrates married Xanthippe, who was much younger than he. She bore for him three sons, Lamprocles, Sophroniscus andMenexenus. His

friend Crito of Alopece criticized him for abandoning his sons when he refused to try to escape before his execution.[11] It is unclear how Socrates earned a living. Ancient texts seem to indicate that Socrates did not work. In Xenophon's Symposium, Socrates is reported as saying he devotes himself only to what he regards as the most important art or occupation: discussing philosophy. In The Clouds Aristophanes portrays Socrates as accepting payment for teaching and running a sophist school with Chaerephon, while in Plato's Apology and Symposium and in Xenophon's s, Socrates explicitly denies accepting payment for teaching. More specifically, in the Apology Socrates cites his poverty as proof he is not a teacher. According to Timon of Phlius and later sources, Socrates took over the profession of stonemasonry from his father. There was a tradition in antiquity, not credited by modern scholarship, that Socrates crafted the statues of the Three Graces, which stood near the Acropolis until the 2nd century AD. Several of Plato's dialogues refer to Socrates' military service. Socrates says he served in the Athenian army

during

three

campaigns:

atPotidaea, Amphipolis,

and Delium.

In

the Symposium Alcibiades describes Socrates' valour in the battles of Potidaea and Delium, recounting how Socrates saved his life in the former battle (219e-221b). Socrates' exceptional service at Delium is also mentioned in theLaches by the General after whom the dialogue is named (181b). In the Apology, Socrates compares his military service to his courtroom troubles, and says anyone on the jury who thinks he ought to retreat from philosophy must also think soldiers should retreat when it seems likely that they will be killed in battle. In 406 he was a member of the Boule, and his tribe the Antiochis held the Prytany on the day the Generals of the Battle of Arginusae, who abandoned the slain and the survivors of foundered ships to pursue the defeated Spartan navy, were discussed. Socrates was theEpistates and resisted the unconstitutional demand for a collective trial to establish the guilt of all eight Generals, proposed byCallixeinus. Eventually, Socrates refused to be cowed by threats of impeachment and imprisonment

and blocked the vote until his Prytany ended the next day, whereupon the six Generals who had returned to Athens were condemned to death. In 404 the Thirty Tyrants sought to ensure the loyalty of those opposed to them by making them complicit in their activities. Socrates and four others were ordered to bring a certain Leon of Salamis from his home for unjust execution. Socrates quietly refused, his death averted only by the overthrow of the Tyrants soon afterwards.

Trial and death Trial of Socrates The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Socrates lived during the time of the transition from the height of the Athenian hegemony to its decline with the defeat by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. At a time whenAthens sought to stabilize and recover from its humiliating defeat, the Athenian public may have been entertaining doubts about democracy as an efficient form of government. Socrates appears to have been a critic of democracy, and some scholars interpret his trial as an expression of political infighting. Claiming loyalty to his city, Socrates clashed with the current course of Athenian politics and society. He praises Sparta, archrival to Athens, directly and indirectly in various dialogues. One of Socrates' purported offenses to the city was his position as a social and moral critic. Rather than upholding a status quo and accepting the development of what he perceived as immorality within his region, Socrates questioned the collective notion of "might makes right" that he felt was common in Greece during this period. Plato refers to Socrates as the "gadfly" of the state (as the gadfly stings the horse into action, so Socrates stung various Athenians), insofar as he irritated some people with

considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness. His attempts to improve the Athenians' sense of justice may have been the source of his execution. According to Plato's Apology, Socrates' life as the "gadfly" of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded that no-one was wiser. Socrates believed that what the Oracle had said was a paradox, because he believed he possessed no wisdom whatsoever. He proceeded to test the riddle by approaching men considered wise by the people of Athens—statesmen, poets, Bust of Socrates in theVatican Museum

and artisans—in order to refute the Oracle's pronouncement. Questioning them, however, Socrates concluded that, while each man thought he knew a great deal and was wise, in fact they knew very little and were not wise at all. Socrates realized that the Oracle was correct, in that while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all, which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance. Socrates' paradoxical wisdom made the prominent Athenians he publicly questioned look foolish, turning them against him and leading to accusations of wrongdoing. Socrates defended his role as a gadfly until the end: at his trial, when Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, he suggested a wage paid by the government and free dinners for the rest of his life instead, to finance the time he spent as Athens' benefactor. He was, nevertheless, found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety ("not believing in the gods of the state"),and subsequently sentenced to death by drinking a mixture containing poison hemlock. According to Xenophon's story, Socrates purposefully gave a defiant defense to the jury because "he believed he would be better off dead". Xenophon goes on to describe a defense by Socrates that explains the rigors of old age, and how Socrates would be glad to circumvent them by being sentenced

to death. It is also understood that Socrates also wished to die because he "actually believed the right time had come for him to die." Xenophon and Plato agree that Socrates had an opportunity to escape, as his followers were able to bribe the prison guards. He chose to stay for several reasons:

1. He believed such a flight would indicate a fear of death, which he believed no true philosopher has. 2. If he fled Athens his teaching would fare no better in another country as he would continue questioning all he met and undoubtedly incur their displeasure. 3. Having knowingly agreed to live under the city's laws, he implicitly subjected himself to the possibility of being accused of crimes by its citizens and judged guilty by its jury. To do otherwise would have caused him to break his "social contract" with the state, and so harm the state, an act contrary to Socratic principle. The full reasoning behind his refusal to flee is the main subject of the Crito. Socrates' death is described at the end of Plato's Phaedo. Socrates turned down the pleas of Crito to attempt an escape from prison. After drinking the poison, he was instructed to walk around until his legs felt numb. After he lay down, the man who istered the poison pinched his foot. Socrates could no longer feel his legs. The numbness slowly crept up his body until it reached his heart. Shortly before his death, Socrates speaks his last words to Crito: "Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt." Asclepius was the Greek god for curing illness, and it is likely Socrates' last words meant that death is the cure—and freedom, of the soul from the body. Additionally, in Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths, Robin Waterfield adds another interpretation of Socrates' last words. He suggests that Socrates was a voluntary scapegoat; his death was the purifying remedy for Athens‘ misfortunes. In this view, the token of appreciation for Asclepius would represent a cure for the ailments of Athens.

Philosophy Socratic method

SOCRATIC METHOD Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic method or method of "elenchus", which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the Good and Justice. It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. To solve a problem, it would be broken down into a series of questions, the answers to which gradually distill the answer a person would seek. The influence of this approach is most strongly felt today in the use of the scientific method, in which hypothesis is the first stage. The development and practice of this method is one of Socrates' most enduring contributions, and is a key factor in earning his mantle as the father of political philosophy, ethicsor moral philosophy, and as a figurehead of all the central themes in Western philosophy. To illustrate the use of the Socratic method; a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine one's own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs. In fact, Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others." An alternative interpretation of the dialectic is that it is a method for direct perception of the Form of the Good. Philosopher Karl Popper describes the dialectic as "the art of intellectual intuition, of visualising the divine originals, the Forms or Ideas, of unveiling the Great Mystery behind the common man's

everyday world of appearances." In a similar vein French philosopher Pierre Hadot suggests that the dialogues are a type of spiritual exercise. "Furthermore," writes Hadot, "in Plato's view, every dialectical exercise, precisely because it is an exercise of pure thought, subject to the demands of the Logos, turns the soul away from the sensible world, and allows it to convert itself towards the Good."

Philosophical beliefs The beliefs of Socrates, as distinct from those of Plato, are difficult to discern. Little in the way of concrete evidence exists to demarcate the two. The lengthy presentation of ideas given in most of the dialogues may be deformed by Plato, and some scholars think Plato so adapted the Socratic style as to make the literary character and the philosopher himself impossible to distinguish. Others argue that he did have his own theories and beliefs, but there is much controversy over what these might have been, owing to the difficulty of separating Socrates from Plato and the difficulty of interpreting even the dramatic writings concerning Socrates. Consequently, distinguishing the philosophical beliefs of Socrates from those of Plato and Xenophon is not easy and it must be ed that what is attributed to Socrates might more closely reflect the specific concerns of these thinkers. The matter is complicated because the historical Socrates seems to have been notorious for asking questions but not answering, claiming to lack wisdom concerning the subjects about which he questioned others.[20] If anything in general can be said about the philosophical beliefs of Socrates, it is that he was morally, intellectually, and politically at odds with his many of his fellow Athenians. When he is on trial for heresy and corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, he uses his method of elenchos to demonstrate to the jurors that their moral values are wrong-headed. He tells them they are concerned with their families, careers, and political responsibilities when they ought to be worried about the "welfare of their souls". Socrates' assertion that the gods had singled him out as a divine emissary seemed to provoke irritation, if not outright ridicule. Socrates also questioned the Sophistic doctrine that arete (virtue) can be taught. He liked to observe that successful fathers (such as the prominent military generalPericles) did not

produce sons of their own quality. Socrates argued that moral excellence was more a matter of divine bequest than parental nurture. This belief may have contributed to his lack of anxiety about the future of his own sons. Socrates frequently says his ideas are not his own, but his teachers'. He mentions several influences: Prodicus the rhetor andAnaxagoras the philosopher. Perhaps surprisingly, Socrates claims to have been deeply influenced by two women besides his mother: he says that Diotima, a witch and priestess from Mantinea, taught him all he knows about eros, or love; and that Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, taught him the art of rhetoric. John Burnet argued that his principal teacher was the Anaxagorean Archelaus but his ideas were as Plato described them; Eric A. Havelock, on the other hand, considered Socrates' association with the Anaxagoreans to be evidence of Plato's philosophical separation from Socrates.

Socratic paradoxes Many of the beliefs traditionally attributed to the historical Socrates have been characterized as "paradoxical" because they seem to conflict with common sense. The following are among the socalled Socratic Paradoxes:

No one desires evil. 

No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly.



Virtue—all virtue—is knowledge.



Virtue is sufficient for happiness.

The phrase Socratic paradox can also refer to a self-referential paradox, originating in Socrates' phrase, "I know that I know nothingnoble and good".

Knowledge One of the best known sayings of Socrates is "I only know that I know nothing". The conventional interpretation of this remark is that Socrates' wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. Socrates believed wrongdoing was a consequence of ignorance and those who did wrong knew no better. The one thing Socrates consistently claimed to have knowledge of was "the art of love", which he connected with the concept of "the love of wisdom", i.e., philosophy. He never actually claimed to be wise, only to understand the path a lover of wisdom must take in pursuing it. It is debatable whether Socrates believed humans (as opposed to gods like Apollo) could actually become wise. On the one hand, he drew a clear line between human ignorance and ideal knowledge; on the other, Plato's Symposium (Diotima's Speech) and Republic (Allegory of the Cave) describe a method for ascending to wisdom. In

Plato's Theaetetus (150a),

Socrates

compares

himself

to

a

true

matchmaker

(προμνηζηικός promnestikós), as distinguished from a panderer (προᾰγωγός proagogos). This distinction is echoed in Xenophon's Symposium (3.20), when Socrates jokes about his certainty of being able to make a fortune, if he chose to practice the art of pandering. For his part as a philosophical interlocutor, he leads his respondent to a clearer conception of wisdom, although he claims he is not himself a teacher (Apology). His role, he claims, is more properly to be understood as analogous to a midwife (μαῖα maia). Socrates explains that he is himself barren of theories, but knows how to bring the theories of others to birth and determine whether they are worthy or mere "wind eggs" (ἀνεμιαῖον anemiaion). Perhaps significantly, he points out that midwives are barren due to age, and women who have never given birth are unable to become midwives; they would have no experience or knowledge of birth and would be unable to separate the worthy infants from those that should be left on the hillside to be exposed. To judge this, the midwife must have experience and knowledge of what she is judging.

Virtue Bust of Socrates in the Palermo Archaeological Museum.

Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on selfdevelopment rather than the pursuit of material wealth.[ He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace His actions lived up to this: in the end, Socrates accepted his death sentence when most thought he would simply leave Athens, as he felt he could not run away from or go against the will of his community; as mentioned above, his reputation for valor on the battlefield was without reproach. The idea that there are certain virtues formed a common thread in Socrates' teachings. These virtues represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that "virtue was the most valuable of all possessions; the ideal life was spent in search of the Good. Truth lies beneath the shadows of existence, and it is the job of the philosopher to show the rest how little they really know."

Politics It is often argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world only the wise man can understand", making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. In Plato's dialogue the Republic, Socrates openly objected to the democracy that ran Athens during his adult life. It was not only Athenian democracy: Socrates found short of ideal any government that did not conform to his presentation of a perfect regime led by philosophers, and Athenian government was far from that. It is, however, possible that the Socrates of Plato'sRepublic is colored by Plato's own views. During the last years of Socrates' life, Athens was in continual flux due to political upheaval. Democracy was at last overthrown by a junta known as the Thirty Tyrants, led by Plato's relative, Critias, who had been a

friend of Socrates. The Tyrants ruled for about a year before the Athenian democracy was reinstated, at which point it declared an amnesty for all recent events. Socrates' opposition to democracy is often denied, and the question is one of the biggest philosophical debates when trying to determine exactly what Socrates believed. The strongest argument of those who claim Socrates did not actually believe in the idea of philosopher kings is that the view is expressed no earlier than Plato's Republic, which is widely considered one of Plato's "Middle" dialogues and not representative of the historical Socrates' views. Furthermore, according to Plato's Apology of Socrates, an "early" dialogue, Socrates refused to pursue conventional politics; he often stated he could not look into other's matters or tell people how to live their lives when he did not yet understand how to live his own. He believed he was a philosopher engaged in the pursuit of Truth, and did not claim to know it fully. Socrates' acceptance of his death sentence, after his conviction by the Boule (Council), can also be seen to this view. It is often claimed much of the antidemocratic leanings are from Plato, who was never able to overcome his disgust at what was done to his teacher. In any case, it is clear Socrates thought the rule of the Thirty Tyrants was also objectionable; when called before them to assist in the arrest of a fellow Athenian, Socrates refused and narrowly escaped death before the Tyrants were overthrown. He did however fulfill his duty to serve as Prytanis when a trial of a group of Generals who presided over a disastrous naval campaign were judged; even then he maintained an uncompromising attitude, being one of those who refused to proceed in a manner not ed by the laws, despite intense pressure. Judging by his actions, he considered the rule of the Thirty Tyrants less legitimate than the Democratic Senate that sentenced him to death.

Covertness In

the

Dialogues

of

Plato,

Socrates

sometimes

seems

to



a mystical side,

discussing reincarnation and the mystery religions; however, this is generally attributed to Plato. Regardless, this cannot be dismissed out of hand, as we cannot be sure of the differences between the

views of Plato and Socrates; in addition, there seem to be some corollaries in the works of Xenophon. In the culmination of the philosophic path as discussed in Plato's Symposium, one comes to the Sea of Beauty or to the sight of "the beautiful itself" (211C); only then can one become wise. (In the Symposium, Socrates credits his speech on the philosophic path to his teacher, the priestess Diotima, who is not even sure if Socrates is capable of reaching the highest mysteries.) In the Meno, he refers to theEleusinian Mysteries, telling Meno he would understand Socrates' answers better if only he could stay for the initiations next week. Further confusions result from the nature of these sources, insofar as the Platonic Dialogues are arguably the work of an artist-philosopher, whose meaning does not volunteer itself to the ive reader nor again the lifelong scholar. Plato himself was a playwright before taking up the study of philosophy. His works are, indeed, dialogues; Plato's choice of this, the medium of Sophocles, Euripides, and the fictions of theatre, may reflect the everinterpretable nature of his writings, as he has been called a "dramatist of reason". What is more, the first word of nearly all Plato's works is a significant term for that respective dialogue, and is used with its' many connotations in mind. Finally, the Phaedrus and the Symposium each allude to Socrates' coy delivery of philosophic truths in conversation; the Socrates of the Phaedrus goes so far as to demand such dissembling and mystery in all writing. The covertness we often find in Plato, appearing here and there couched in some enigmatic use of symbol and/or irony, may be at odds with the mysticism Plato's Socrates expounds in some other dialogues. These indirect methods may fail to satisfy some readers. Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daemonic sign", an averting (ἀποηρεπηικός apotreptikos) inner voice Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort ofinsanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates'

characterization of the phenomenon as "daemonic" may suggest that its' origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts.

Satirical playwrights He was prominently lampooned in Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, produced when Socrates was in his mid-forties; he said at his trial (according to Plato) that the laughter of the theater was a harder task to answer than the arguments of his accs. Søren Kierkegaard believed this play was a more accurate representation of Socrates than those of his students. In the play, Socrates is ridiculed for his dirtiness, which is associated with the Laconizing fad; also in plays by Callias, Eupolis, and Telecleides. Other comic poets who lampooned Socrates include Mnesimachus and Ameipsias. In all of these, Socrates and the Sophists were criticised for "the moral dangers inherent in contemporary thought and literature".

Prose sources Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle are the main sources for the historical Socrates; however, Xenophon and Plato were direct disciples of Socrates, and they may idealize him; however, they wrote the only continuous descriptions of Socrates that have come down to us in their complete form. Aristotle refers frequently, but in ing, to Socrates in his writings. Almost all of Plato's works center on Socrates. However, Plato's later works appear to be more his own philosophy put into the mouth of his mentor.

The Socratic dialogues Socratic dialogue The Socratic Dialogues are a series of dialogues written by Plato and Xenophon in the form of discussions between Socrates and other persons of his time, or as discussions between Socrates'

followers over his concepts. Plato's Phaedo is an example of this latter category. Although his Apology is a monologue delivered by Socrates, it is usually grouped with the Dialogues. The Apology professes to be a record of the actual speech Socrates delivered in his own defense at the trial. In the Athenian jury system, an "apology" is composed of three parts: a speech, followed by a counter-assessment, then some final words. "Apology" is atransliteration, not a translation, of the Greek apologia, meaning "defense"; in this sense it is not apologetic according to our contemporary use of the term. Plato generally does not place his own ideas in the mouth of a specific speaker; he lets ideas emerge via the Socratic Method, under the guidance of Socrates. Most of the dialogues present Socrates applying this method to some extent, but nowhere as completely as in the Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro go through several iterations of refining the answer to Socrates' question, "...What is the pious, and what the impious?" In Plato's Dialogues, learning appears as a process of ing. The soul, before its incarnation in the body, was in the realm ofIdeas (very similar to the Platonic "Forms"). There, it saw things the way they truly are, rather than the pale shadows or copies we experience on earth. By a process of questioning, the soul can be brought to the ideas in their pure form, thus bringingwisdom. Especially for Plato's writings referring to Socrates, it is not always clear which ideas brought forward by Socrates (or his friends) actually belonged to Socrates and which of these may have been new additions or elaborations by Plato – this is known as the Socratic Problem. Generally, the early works of Plato are considered to be close to the spirit of Socrates, whereas the later works – includingPhaedo and Republic – are considered to be possibly products of Plato's elaborations.

Legacy Immediate influence Immediately, the students of Socrates set to work both on exercising their perceptions of his teachings in politics and also on developing many new philosophical schools of thought. Some of Athens' controversial and anti-democratic tyrants were contemporary or posthumous students of Socrates including Alcibiades and Critias. Critias' cousin, Plato would go on to found the Academy in 385 BC, which gained so much notoriety that 'Academy' became the base word for educational institutions in later European languages such asEnglish, French, and Italian. Plato's protege, another important figure of the Classical era, Aristotle went on to tutor Alexander the Greatand also to found his own school in 335 BC- the Lyceum, whose name also now means an educational institution. While

Socrates

was

shown

to

demote

the

importance

of

institutional

knowledge

like mathematics or science in relation to the human condition in his Dialogues, Plato would emphasize it with metaphysical overtones mirroring that of Pythagoras – the former who would dominate Western thought well into the Renaissance. Aristotle himself was as much of a philosopher as he was a scientist with rudimentary work in the fields of biology and physics. Socratic thought which challenged conventions, especially in stressing a simplistic way of living, became divorced from Plato's more detached and philosophical pursuits. This idea was inherited by one of Socrates' older students, Antisthenes, who became the originator of another philosophy in the years after Socrates' death: Cynicism. Antisthenes attacked Plato and Alcibiades over what he deemed as their betrayal of Socrates' tenets in his writings. The idea of asceticism being hand in hand with an ethical life or one with piety, ignored by Plato and Aristotle and somewhat dealt with by the Cynics, formed the core of another philosophy in 281 BC – Stoicism when Zeno of Citium would discover Socrates' works and then learn from Crates, a Cynic

philosopher. None of the schools however, would inherit his tendency to openly associate with and respect women or the regular citizen.

Later historical effects While some of the later contributions of Socrates to Hellenistic Era culture and philosophy as well as the Roman Era have been lost to time, his teachings began a resurgence in both medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East alongside those of Aristotle and Stoicism. Socrates is mentioned in the dialogue Kuzari by

Jewish

philosopher

and

rabbi Yehuda

Halevi in

which

a

Jew

instructs

the Khazar king about Judaism. al-Kindi, a well-known Arabic philosopher, introduced and tried to reconcile Socrates and Hellenistic philosophy to an Islamic audience, referring to him by the name 'Suqrat'. Socrates' stature in Western philosophy returned in full force with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason

in

Europe

when

political

theory

began

to

resurface

under

those

like Locke and Hobbes. Voltaire even went so far as to write a satirical play about the Trial of Socrates. There were a number of paintings about his life including Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasureby Jean-Baptiste Regnault and The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David in the later 18th century. To this day, the Socratic Method is still used in classroom and law school discourse to expose underlying issues in both subject and the speaker. He has been rewarded with accolades ranging from numerous mentions in pop culture such as the movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and a Greek rock band to numerous busts in academic institutions in recognition of his contribution to education.

Criticism

Evaluation and reaction to Socrates has been undertaken with both historical and philosophical inquiry from the time of his death to the present day with a multitude of conclusions and perspectives. One of the initial criticisms levied against the philosopher was presented at his trial – that he was not the proponent of a philosophy but an individual with a method of undermining the fabric of Athenian society, a charge carried by the 500-man jury of Athenians that sentenced him to death. Although he was not directly prosecuted for his connection to Critias, leader of the Spartan-backed Thirty Tyrants, he was seen as a controversial figure, who mentored oligarchs who became abusive tyrants, and undermined Athenian democracy. The Sophist establishment he railed at in life survived him, but by the 3rd century BC, was rapidly overtaken by the many philosophical schools of thought that Socrates influenced. Socrates' death is considered iconic and his status as a martyr of philosophy overshadowed most contemporary and posthumous criticism at the time. However, Xenophon attempts to explain that Socrates purposely welcomed the hemlock due to his old age using the arguably self-destructive testimony to the jury as evidence. Direct criticism of Socrates almost disappears at this point, but there is a noticeable preference for Plato or Aristotle over the elements of Socratic philosophy distinct from those of his students, even into the Middle Ages. Modern scholarship holds that, with so much of the philosopher obscured and possibly altered by Plato, it is impossible to gain a clear picture of Socrates amidst all the seeming contradictions. That both Cynicism and Stoicism, which carried heavy influence from Socratic thought, were unlike or even contrary to Platonism further illustrates this. The ambiguity and lack of reliability serves as the modern basis of criticism – that it is near impossible to know the real Socrates. Some controversy also exists about claims of Socrates exempting himself from the homosexual customs of ancient Greece and not believing in the Olympian gods to the point of being monotheistic or if this was an attempt by later Medieval scholars to reconcile him with the morals of the era. However, it is still commonly taught and held with little exception that Socrates is the founder of modern Western philosophy, to the point that philosophers before him are referred to as pre-Socratic.

Ahmadiyya viewpoint Mirza Tahir Ahmad (the fourth Caliph of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community) argued in his book Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth that Socrates was a prophet of the ancient Greeks. The apparent prophetic qualities of Socrates are indeed a subject for debate. His constant reference to the oracle and how it performs the active function of a moral com by preventing him from unseemly acts could easily be taken as a reference to – or substitute for revelation. Similarly, Socrates often refers to God in the singular as opposed to the plural and actively rejected the Greek pantheon of Gods and Goddesses unless citing them as examples of their falseness.

Paulo Freile‘s Problem approach to childhood education. Embracing cultural conflicts as opportunities for learning, she met with eight early childhood teachers in a diverse urban community who were trying to affirm diversity and enhance students‘ agency. Those in-service preschool teachers problematized everyday issues and engage in dialogic, collective, critical learning process. She engaged in ethnographic observations of participating teachers' classroom and of our own culture circle to learn from the process through filed note, video and audio recordings, interviews, and artifacts. A cultural circle, a group of individuals involved in learning who see their reality with a political analysis, comes as an important theme in the paper. In employing cultural circle, she claims that educators should investigate the context, practice, lives and experience of participants. Therefore, cultural circle curriculum is based on students‘ lives, practices and beliefs. She believes that education is a means for change and transformation. The author also wants to see how theory and practice meet in a real classroom and took part in teachers‘ meeting. She found out from the co-reflection and analysis of a teacher cultural

circle that the cultural circle can be safe communities of learners to engage in collective problemsolving and honoring multiple voices and perspectives.

Plato and Philosophy of Education Idealism Plato Inscribed herma of Plato. (Berlin, Altes Museum).

Plato Date: 424/423 BC - 348/347 BC Plato's educational philosophy was grounded in his vision of the ideal Republic, wherein theindividual was best served by being subordinated to a just society. He advocated removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, with great care being taken to differentiate children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. Education would be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, and music and art, which he considered the highest form of endeavor.

Plato believed that talent was distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children born in any social class. He builds on this by insisting that those suitably gifted are to be trained by the state so that they may be qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What this establishes is essentially a system of selective public education premised on the assumption that an educated minority of the population are, by virtue of their education (and inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance. Plato's writings contain some of the following ideas: Elementary education would be confined to the guardian class till the age of 18, followed by two years of compulsory military trainingand then by higher education for those who qualified. While elementary education made the soul responsive to the environment, higher education helped the soul to search for truth which illuminated it. Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to train and blend gentle and fierce qualities in the individual and create a harmonious person. At the age of 20, a selection was made. The best one would take an advanced course in mathematics, geometry, astronomy and harmonics. The first course in the scheme of higher education would last for ten years. It would be for those who had a flair for science. At the age of 30 there would be another selection; those who qualified would study dialectics and metaphysics, logic and philosophy for the next five years. They would study the idea of good and first principles of being. After accepting junior positions in the army for 15 years, a man would have completed his theoretical and practical education by the age of 50.

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant Date: 1724–1804 Immanuel Kant believed that education differs from training in that the latter involves thinking whereas the former does not. In addition to educating reason, of central importance to him was the development of character and teaching of moral maxims. Kant was a proponent of public education and of learning by doing.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Date: 1770–1831

Realism Aristotle Bust of Aristotle. Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 B.C.

Main article: Aristotle Date: 384 BC - 322 BC Only fragments of Aristotle's treatise On Education are still in existence. We thus know of his philosophy of education primarily through brief ages in other works. Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education.[1] Thus, for example, he considered repetition to be a key tool to develop good habits. The teacher was to lead the student systematically; this differs, for example, from Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas (though the comparison is perhaps incongruous since Socrates was dealing with adults). Aristotle placed great emphasis on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught. Subjects he explicitly mentions as being important included reading, writing and mathematics; music; physical education; literature and history; and a wide range of sciences. He also mentioned the importance of play. One of education's primary missions for Aristotle, perhaps its most important, was to produce good and virtuous citizens for the polis.All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. [2]

Avicenna Avicenna Date: 980 AD - 1037 AD

In the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which dates back to at least the 10th century. Likemadrasahs (which referred to higher education), a maktab was often attached to a mosque. In the 11th century, Ibn Sina (known asAvicenna in the West), wrote a chapter dealing with the maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working at maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the

value

of competition andemulation among

pupils

as

well

as

the

usefulness

of

group discussions and debates. Ibn Sina described the curriculum of a maktabschool in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a maktab school.[5] Ibn Sina wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6 and be taught primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that they should be taught the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics, language, literature, Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to a variety of practical skills). Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period of specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be given a choice to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine, geometry,trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as the student's emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken into . The empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the "human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know" and that knowledge is attained through "empiricalfamiliarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is developed through a

"syllogistic method ofreasoning; observations lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the material intellect (al-„aql al-hayulani), that potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-„aql al-fa„il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge."

Ibn Tufail Ibn Tufail Date: c. 1105 - 1185 In the 12th century, the Andalusian-Arabian philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) demonstrated the empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' as a thought experiment through his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, Philosophus Autodidactus, published byEdward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".

John Locke John Locke Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, and Essay concerning Human Understanding Date: 1632-1704 Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind: he expresses the belief that education maketh the man, or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet", with the statement, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education."[9] Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences." He argued that the "associations of ideas" that one makes when

young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self: they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In his Essay, in which is introduced both of these concepts, Locke warns against, for example, letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the night for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so ed, that he can no more bear the one than the other." "Associationism", as this theory would come to be called, exerted a powerful influence over eighteenthcentury thought, particularlyeducational theory, as nearly every educational writer warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the

development

of psychology and

other

new

disciplines

with David Hartley's attempt to discover a biological mechanism for associationism in his Observations on Man (1749).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin de La Tour Main article: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Date: 1712-1778 Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's philosophy, rejected it as impractical due to the decayed state of society. Rousseau also had a different theory of human development; where Plato held that people are born with skills appropriate to different castes (though he did not regard these skills as being inherited), Rousseau held that there was one developmental process common to all humans. This was an intrinsic, natural process, of which the primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from Locke's 'tabula rasa' in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature, which drove the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings.

Rousseau wrote in his book Emile that all children are perfectly designed organisms, ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults, but due to the malign influence of corrupt society, they often fail to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational method which consisted of removing the child from society—for example, to a country home—and alternately conditioning him through changes to his environment and setting traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome. Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of a problem of legitimation for teaching. He advocated that adults always be truthful with children, and in particular that they never hide the fact that the basis for their authority in teaching was purely one of physical coercion: "I'm bigger than you." Once children reached the age of reason, at about 12, they would be engaged as free individuals in the ongoing process of their own. He once said that a child should grow up without adult interference and that the child must be guided to suffer from the experience of the natural consequences of his own acts or behaviour. When he experiences the consequences of his own acts, he advises himself. "Rousseau divides development into five stages (a book is devoted to each). Education in the first two stages seeks to the senses: only when Émile is about 12 does the tutor begin to work to develop his mind. Later, in Book 5, Rousseau examines the education of Sophie (whom Émile is to marry). Here he sets out what he sees as the essential differences that flow from sex. 'The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and ive' (Everyman edn: 322). From this difference comes a contrasting education. They are not to be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework: Nature means them to think, to will, to love to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men. They should learn many things, but only such things as suitable' (Everyman edn.: 327)." Émile

Mortimer Jerome Adler Mortimer Jerome Adler Date: 1902-2001

Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelianand Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research. Adler was married twice and had four children. Adler was a proponent of educational perennialism.

Harry S. Broudy Harry Broudy Date: 1905-1998 Broudy's philosophical views were based on the tradition of classical realism, dealing with truth, goodness, and beauty. However he was also influenced by the modern philosophy existentialism and instrumentalism. In his textbook Building a Philosophy of Education he has two major ideas that are the main points to his philosophical outlook: The first is truth and the second is universal structures to be found in humanity's struggle for education and the good life. Broudy also studied issues on society's demands on school. He thought education would be a link to unify the diverse society and urged the society to put more trust and a commitment to the schools and a good education.

Scholasticism Thomas Aquinas Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1476)

Main article: Thomas Aquinas Date: c. 1225 - 1274 See Religious perennialism

John Milton John Milton Of Education Date: 1608-1674 The objective of medieval education was an overtly religious one, primarily concerned with uncovering transcendental truths that would lead a person back to God through a life of moral and religious choice (Kreeft 15). The vehicle by which these truths were uncovered was dialectic: To the medieval mind, debate was a fine art, a serious science, and a fascinating entertainment, much more than it is to the modern mind, because the medievals believed, like Socrates, that dialectic could uncover truth. Thus a ‗scholastic disputation‘ was not a personal contest in cleverness, nor was it ‗sharing opinions‘; it was a shared journey of discovery (Kreeft 14-15). Pragmatism John Dewey John Dewey Date: 1859-1952 In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, Dewey stated that education, in its broadest sense, is the means of the "social continuity of life" given the "primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent in a social group". Education is therefore a necessity, for "the life of the group goes on." [13] Dewey was a proponent

ofEducational Progressivism and was a relentless campaigner for reform of education, pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual experiences.

William James William James Date: 1842–1910 William Heard Kilpatrick Main article: William Heard Kilpatrick Date: 1871-1965 William Heard Kilpatrick was a US American philosopher of education and a colleague and a successor of John Dewey. He was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th century. Kilpatrick developed the Project Method for early childhood education, which was a form of Progressive Education organized curriculum and classroom activities around a subject's central theme. He believed that the role of a teacher should be that of a "guide" as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that children should direct their own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to explore their environment, experiencing their learning through the natural senses.[15] Proponents of Progressive Education and the Project Method reject traditional schooling that focuses on memorization, rote learning, strictly organized classrooms (desks in rows; students always seated), and typical forms of assessment.

Nel Noddings Nel Noddings Date: 1929– Noddings' first sole-authored book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan‘s ground-breaking work in the ethics of care In a Different Voice. While her work on ethics continued, with the publication of Women and Evil (1989) and later works on moral education, most of her later publications have been on the philosophy of education

and educational theory. Her most significant works in these areas have been Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993) and Philosophy of Education (1995).

Richard Rorty Richard Rorty Date: 1931–2007

Analytic Philosophy Richard Stanley Peters Richard Stanley Peters Date: 1919-

Paul H. Hirst

Existentialism Karl Jaspers Karl Jaspers Date: 1883-1969

Martin Buber Martin Buber Date:1878-1965

Maxine Greene Maxine Greene Date: ? –

Critical Theory Paulo Freire Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire Date: 1921-1997 A Brazilian committed to the cause of educating the impoverished peasants of his nation andcollaborating with them in the pursuit of their liberation from what he regarded as "oppression,"

Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking concept of education," in which the student was viewed as an empty to be filled by the teacher. Freire also suggests that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student; he comes close to suggesting that the teacher-student dichotomy be completely abolished, instead promoting the roles of the participants in the classroom as the teacher-student (a teacher who learns) and the student-teacher (a learner who teaches). In its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority. Aspects of the Freirian philosophy have been highly influential in academic debates over "participatory development" and development more generally. Freire's emphasis on what he describes as "emancipation" through interactive participation has been used as a rationale for the participatory focus of development, as it is held that 'participation' in any form can lead to empowerment of poor or marginalised groups. Freire was a proponent of critical pedagogy. "He participated in the import of European doctrines and ideas into Brazil, assimilated them to the needs of a specific socio-economic situation, and thus expanded and refocused them in a thought-provoking way"

Postmodernism Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger Date:1889-1976 Heidegger's philosophizing about education was primarily related to higher education. He believed that teaching and research in the university should be unified and aim towards testing and interrogating the "ontological assumptions presuppositions which implicitly guide research in each domain of knowledge."

Hans-Georg Gadamer Hans-Georg Gadamer Date:1900-2002

Jean-François Lyotard

Main article: Jean-François Lyotard Date:1924-1998

Michel Foucault Michel Foucault Date: 1926-1984

Normative Educational Philosophies "Normative philosophies or theories of education may make use of the results of [philosophical thought] and of factual inquiries about human beings and the psychology of learning, but in any case they propound views about what education should be, what dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how and in whom it should do so, and what forms it should take. In a full-fledged philosophical normative theory of education, besides analysis of the sorts described, there will normally be propositions of the following kinds: 1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right; 2. Basic factual premises about humanity and the world; 3. Conclusions, based on these two kinds of premises, about the dispositions education should foster; 4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology of learning and methods of teaching; and 5. Further conclusions about such things as the methods that education should use."

Perennialism Educational perennialism Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Since details of fact change constantly, these cannot be the most important. Therefore, one should teach principles, not facts. Since people are human, one should teach first about humans, not machines or techniques. Since people are people first, and workers second if at all, one should teach liberal topics first, not vocational topics. The focus is primarily on teaching reasoning and wisdom rather than facts, the liberal arts rather than vocational training.

Allan Bloom Alexander Sutherland Neill

Main article: Allan Bloom Date: 1930-1992 Bloom, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, argued for a traditionalGreat Books-based liberal education in his lengthy essay The Closing of the American Mind.

Progressivism Educational Progressivism Educational progressivism is the belief that education must be based on the principle that humans are social animals who learn best in real-life activities with other people.Progressivists, like proponents of most educational theories, claim to rely on the best available scientific theories of learning. Most progressive educators believe that children learn as if they were scientists, following a process similar to John Dewey's model of learning: 1) Become aware of the problem. 2) Define the problem. 3) Propose hypotheses to solve it. 4) Evaluate the consequences of the hypotheses from one's past experience. 5) Test the likeliest solution.[4]

Jean Piaget Jean Piaget Date: 1896-1980 Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology". Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual." Piaget created the International Centre

for Genetic Epistemology inGeneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing." Jean Piaget described himself as an epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book "Genetic Epistemology" (ISBN 978-0-393-00596-7): "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

Jerome Bruner Jerome Bruner Date: 1915Another important contributor to the inquiry method in education is Bruner. His books The Process of Education and Toward a Theory of Instruction are landmarks in conceptualizing learning and curriculum development. He argued that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. This notion was an underpinning for his concept of the spiral curriculum which posited the idea that a curriculum should revisit basic ideas, building on them until the student had grasped the full formal concept. He emphasized intuition as a neglected but essential feature of productive thinking. He felt that interest in the material being learned was the best stimulus for learning rather than external motivation such as grades. Bruner developed the concept ofdiscovery learning which promoted learning as a process of constructing new ideas based on current or past knowledge. Students are encouraged to discover facts and relationships and continually build on what they already know.

Essentialism Educational essentialism

Educational essentialism is an educational philosophy whose adherents believe that children should learn the traditional basic subjects and that these should be learned thoroughly and rigorously. An essentialist program normally teaches children progressively, from less complex skills to more complex.

William Chandler Bagley William Chandler Bagley Date: 1874-1946 William Chandler Bagley taught in elementary schools before becoming a professor of education at the University of Illinois, where he served as the Director of the School of Education from 1908 until 1917. He was a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia, from 1917 to 1940. An opponent of pragmatism and progressive education, Bagley insisted on the value of knowledge for its own sake, not merely as an instrument, and he criticized his colleagues for their failure to emphasize systematic study of academic subjects. Bagley was a proponent of educational essentialism.

Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy Social Reconstructionism and Critical pedagogy Critical pedagogy is an "educational movement, guided by ion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action." Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements for social justice.

George Counts George Counts Date: 1889–1974

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori and Samuel Sidney McClure

Main article: Maria Montessori Date: 1870-1952 The Montessori method arose from Dr. Maria Montessori's discovery of what she referred to as "the child's true normal nature" in 1907, which happened in the process of her experimental observation of young children given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity.The method itself aims to duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about, sustain and their true natural way of being.

Waldorf Waldorf education Waldorf education (also known as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education) is a humanistic approach to pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The educational philosophy's overarching goals are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, morally responsible and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.

Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner Date: 1861-1925 Steiner founded a holistic educational impulse on the basis of his spiritual philosophy (anthroposophy). Now known as Steiner or Waldorf education, his pedagogy emphasizes a balanced development of cognitive, affective/artistic, and practical skills (head, heart, and hands). Schools are normally self-

istered by faculty; emphasis is placed upon giving individual teachers the freedom to develop creative methods. Steiner's theory of child development divides education into three discrete developmental stages predating but with close similarities to the stages of development described by Piaget. Early childhood education occurs through imitation; teachers provide practical activities and a healthy environment. Steiner believed that young children should meet only goodness. Elementary education is strongly artsbased, centered on the teacher's creative authority; the elementary school-age child should meet beauty. Secondary education seeks to develop the judgment, intellect, and practical idealism; the adolescent should meet truth.

Democratic Education Democratic school Democratic education is a theory of learning and school governance in which students and staff participate freely and equally in a school democracy. In a democratic school, there is typically shared decision-making among students and staff on matters concerning living, working, and learning together.

A. S. Neill A. S. Neill Date: 1883-1973 Neill founded Summerhill School, the oldest existing democratic school in Suffolk, England in 1921. He wrote a number of books that now define much of contemporary democratic education philosophy. Neill believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about the child's upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood.

Classical Education Classical education movement

The Classical education movement advocates a form of education based in the traditions of Western culture, with a particular focus on education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages. The term "classical education" has been used in English for several centuries, with each era modifying the definition and adding its own selection of topics. By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and languages. In the 20th and 21st centuries it is used to refer to a broad-based study of the liberal arts and sciences, as opposed to a practical or preprofessional program. Classical Education can be described as rigorous and systematic, separating children and their learning into three rigid categories, Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques

Rousseau (French: [ʒɑʒak

ʁuso];

28

June

1712 –

2

July

1778)

was

aGenevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism of French expression. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought. His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of preromanticism[1] and romanticism in fiction.[2] Rousseau's autobiographical writings—his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau was a successful composer of music. He wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and he made contributions to music as a theorist.

During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of thephilosophes among of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau, a Freemason,[3] was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.

Biography Youth Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Rousseau was proud that his family, of the moyen order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. Throughout his life, he generally signed his books "Jean Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva".[4]

Geneva, in theory, was governed democratically by its male voting citizens, a minority of the population. In fact, the city was ruled by a secretive executive committee, called the "Little Council", which was made up of 25 of its wealthiest families. In 1707, a patriot called Pierre Fatio protested at this situation, and the Little Council had him shot. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father Isaac was not in the city at this time, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather ed Fatio and was penalized for it.[5] The house where Rousseau was born at number 40, place du

Bourg-de-Four. Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, was a watchmaker who, notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music. "A Genevan watchmaker," Rousseau wrote, "is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches."[6] Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, the daughter of a Calvinist preacher, died of puerperal fever nine days after his birth. He and his older brother François were brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne. Rousseau had no recollection of learning to read, but he ed how when he was 5 or 6 his father encouraged his love of reading: “

Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances [i.e., adventure stories], which had been my mother's. My father's design was only to improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights together and could not bear to give over until at the conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in the morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, "Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art."

”

— Confessions, Book 1

Not long afterward, Rousseau abandoned his taste for escapist stories in favor of the antiquity of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which he would read to his father while he made watches. When Rousseau was 10, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught tresing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him. He remarried, and from that

point Jean-Jacques saw little of him.[7] Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing. Rousseau, who was always deeply moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister. Les

Charmettes:

where

Rousseau

lived

withMme

de

Warens in 1735-6, now a museum dedicated to Rousseau. Virtually, all our information about Rousseau's youth has come from his posthumously published Confessions, in which the chronology is somewhat confused, though recent scholars have combed the archives for confirming evidence to fill in the blanks. At age 13, Rousseau was apprenticed first to a notary and then to an engraver who beat him. At 15, he ran away from Geneva (on 14 March 1728) after returning to the city and finding the city gates locked due to the curfew. In ading Savoy he took shelter with a Roman Catholic priest, who introduced him toFrançoiseLouise de Warens, age 29. She was a noblewoman of Protestant background who was separated from her husband. As professional lay proselytizer, she was paid by the King of Piedmont to help bring Protestants to Catholicism. They sent the boy to Turin, the capital of Savoy (which included Piedmont, in what is now Italy), to complete his conversion. This resulted in his having to give up his Genevan citizenship, although he would later revert to Calvinism in order to regain it. In converting to Catholicism, both De Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity of man. Leo Damrosch writes, "an eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy still required believers to declare ‗that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good'."[8] De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins.

Adulthood Finding himself on his own, since his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau ed himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy) and . During this time, he lived on and off with De Warens, whom he idolized and called his "maman". Flattered by his devotion, De Warens tried to get him started in a profession, and arranged formal music lessons for him. At one point, he briefly attended a seminary with the idea of becoming a priest. When Rousseau reached 20, De Warens took him as her lover, while intimate also with the steward of her house. The sexual aspect of their relationship (in fact a ménage à trois) confused Rousseau and made him uncomfortable, but he always considered De Warens the greatest love of his life. A rather profligate spender, she had a large library and loved to entertain and listen to music. She and her circle, comprising educated of the Catholic clergy, introduced Rousseau to the world of letters and ideas. Rousseau had been an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself in earnest to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and music. At 25, he came into a small inheritance from his mother and used a portion of it to repay De Warens for her financial of him. At 27, he took a job as a tutor in Lyon.

In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune. His system, intended to be compatible

with typography,

is

based

on

a

single

line,

displaying

numbers

representing intervals between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. Believing the system was impractical, the Academy rejected it, though they praised his mastery of the subject, and urged him to try again. Palazzo belonging to Tommaso Querini at 968 Cannaregio Venice that served as the French Embassy during Rousseau's period as Secretary to the Ambassador From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau had an honorable but ill-paying post as a secretary to the Comte de Montaigue, the French ambassador to Venice. This awoke in him a lifelong love for Italian music, particularly opera: I had brought with me from Paris the prejudice of that city against Italian music; but I had also received from nature a sensibility and niceness of distinction which prejudice cannot withstand. I soon contracted that ion for Italian music with which it inspires all those who are capable of feeling its excellence. In listening to barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was... —Confessions Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly.[9] After 11 months, Rousseau quit, taking from the experience a profound distrust of government bureaucracy.

Return to Paris Returning to Paris, the penniless Rousseau befriended and became the lover of Thérèse Levasseur, a seamstress who was the sole of her mother and numerous ne'er-do-well siblings. At first, they did not live together, though later Rousseau took Thérèse and her mother in to live with him as his servants, and himself assumed the burden of ing her large family. According to his Confessions, before she moved in with him, Thérèse bore him a son and as many as four other children (there is no independent verification for this number[10]). Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thérèse to give each of the newborns up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor". "Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she [Thérèse] allowed herself to be overcome" (Confessions). In his letter to Madame de Francueil in 1751, he first pretended that he wasn't rich enough to raise his children but in book IX of the confessions, he gave the true reasons of his choice : " I trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less." Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son, but no record could be found. When Rousseau subsequently became celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment of his children was used by his critics, includingVoltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for ad hominem attacks. In an irony of fate, Rousseau's later injunction to women to breastfeed their own babies (as had previously been recommended by the French natural scientist Buffon), probably saved the lives of thousands of infants.[citation needed] While in Paris, Rousseau became a close friend of French philosopher Diderot and, beginning with some articles on music in 1749,[11]contributed numerous articles to Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopédie, the most famous of which was an article on political economy written in 1755. Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with Diderot. His genius lay in his strikingly original way of putting things rather than in the originality, per se, of his thinking. In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to

Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a lettre de cachet for opinions in his "Lettre sur les aveugles," that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection. Rousseau had read about an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon to be published in the Mercure de on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. He wrote that while walking to Vincennes (about three miles from Paris), he had a revelation that the arts and sciences were responsible for the moral degeneration of mankind, who were basically good by nature. According to Diderot, writing much later, Rousseau had originally intended to answer this in the conventional way, but his discussions with Diderot convinced him to propose the paradoxical negative answer that catapulted him into the public eye. Rousseau's 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame. Rousseau continued his interest in music. He wrote both the words and music of his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), which was performed for King Louis XV in 1752. The king was so pleased by the work that he offered Rousseau a lifelong pension. To the exasperation of his friends, Rousseau turned down the great honor, bringing him notoriety as "the man who had refused a king's pension." He also turned down several other advantageous offers, sometimes with a brusqueness bordering on truculence that gave offense and caused him problems. The same year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their performance ofGiovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, prompted the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of French music against ers of the Italian style. Rousseau as noted above, was an enthusiastic er of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameauand others, making an important contribution with his Letter on French Music.

Return to Geneva (1754) On returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and

Basis of Inequality Among Men (the Discourse on Inequality), which elaborated on the arguments of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-yearold Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (also based on memories of his idyllic youthful relationship with Mme de Warens). Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness and landlady Madame d'Epinay, whom he treated rather highhandedly. He resented being at Mme d'Epinay's beck and call and detested the insincere conversation and shallow atheism of the Encyclopedistes whom he met at her table. Wounded feelings gave rise to a bitter three-way quarrel between Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay; her lover, the philologist Grimm; and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau. Diderot later described Rousseau as being, "false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked ... He sucked ideas from me, used them himself, and then affected to despise me".

The mestizo Pierre Alexandre du Peyrou, rich inhabitant of Neufchâtel, plantation owner, writer, friend and publisher of some of Rousseau's oeuvre. His mansion was Le Palais du Peyrou. Rousseau's break with the Encyclopedistes coincided with the composition of his three major works, in all of which he emphasized his fervent belief in a spiritual origin of man's soul and the universe, in contradistinction to the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie, andd'Holbach. During this period Rousseau enjoyed the and patronage of the Duc de Luxembourg, and the Prince de Conti, two of the richest and most powerful nobles in . These men truly liked Rousseau and enjoyed his ability to

converse on any subject, but they also used him as a way of getting back at Louis XV and the political faction surrounding his mistress, Mme de Pompadour. Even with them, however, Rousseau went too far, courting rejection when he criticized the practice of tax farming, in which some of them engaged. Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was published in 1761 to immense success. The book's rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauty of the Swiss countryside struck a chord in the public and may have helped spark the subsequent nineteenth century craze for Alpine scenery. In 1762, Rousseau published Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique (in English, literally Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political Right) in April. Even his friend Antoine-Jacques Roustan felt impelled to write a polite rebuttal of the chapter on Civil Religion in the Social Contract, which implied that the concept of a Christian Republic was paradoxical since Christianity taught submission rather than participation in public affairs. Rousseau even helped Roustan find a publisher for the rebuttal. Rousseau published Emile: or, On Education in May. The final section of Émile, "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," was intended to be a defense of religious belief. Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of humble peasant background (plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had met as a teenager) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in itself a daring innovation for the time. The vicar's creed was that of Socinianism (or Unitarianism as it is called today). Because it rejected original sin and divine Revelation, both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense. A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay. Moreover, Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. This religious indifferentism caused Rousseau and his books to be banned from and Geneva. He was condemned from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were burned, and warrants were

issued for his arrest.[16] Former friends such as Jacob Vernes of Geneva could not accept his views, and wrote violent rebuttals. Rousseau is forced to flee A sympathetic observer, British philosopher David Hume, "professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau's books were banned in Geneva and elsewhere." Rousseau, he wrote, "has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country ... as not to render such an open attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous.'" Rousseau, who thought he had been defending religion, was crushed. Forced to flee arrest, he made his way, with the help of the Duc of Luxembourg and Prince de Conti, to Neuchâtel, a Canton of the Swiss Confederation that was a protectorate of thePrussian crown. His powerful protectors discreetly assisted him in his flight, and they helped to get his banned books (published in Holland by Marc-Michel Rey) distributed in disguised as other works, using false covers and title pages. In the town of Môtiers, he sought and found protection under Lord Keith, who was the local representative of the free-thinking Frederick the Great of Prussia. While in Môtiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse, 1765). In Britain (1765) After his house in Môtiers was stoned on the night of 6 September 1765, Rousseau took refuge in Great Britain with Hume, who found lodgings for him at a friend's country estate in Wootton in Staffordshire. Neither Thérèse nor Rousseau was able to learn English or make friends. Isolated, Rousseau, never very emotionally stable, suffered a serious decline in his mental health and began to experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume and others. ―He is plainly mad, after having long been maddish‖, Hume wrote to a friend. [19] Rousseau's letter to Hume, in which he

articulates the perceived misconduct, sparked an exchange which was published in Paris and received with great interest at the time. The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris (1767) Although officially barred from entering before 1770, Rousseau returned in 1767 under a false name. In 1768 he went through a marriage of sorts to Thérèse (marriages between Catholics and Protestants were illegal), whom he had always hitherto referred to as his "housekeeper". Though she was illiterate, she had become a remarkably good cook, a hobby her husband shared. In 1770 they were allowed to return to Paris. As a condition of his return he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private readings in 1771. At the request of Madame d'Epinay, who was anxious to protect her privacy, however, the police ordered him to stop, and the Confessions was only partially published in 1782, four years after his death. All his subsequent works were to appear posthumously. In 1772, Rousseau was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his last major political work. In 1776, he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of JeanJacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In order to himself, he returned to copying music, spending his leisure time in the study of botany.

Final years

Although a celebrity, Rousseau's mental health did not permit him to enjoy his fame. His final years were largely spent in deliberate withdrawal. However, he did respond favorably to an approach from the

composer Gluck, whom he met in 1774. Gluck ired Rousseau as "a pioneer of the expressive natural style" in music.[20] One of Rousseau's last pieces of writing was a critical yet enthusiastic analysis of Gluck's opera Alceste. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the marquis René Louis de Girardin atErmenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died, aged 66. Rousseau was initially buried at Ermenonville on the Ile des Peupliers, which became a place of pilgrimage for his many irers. Sixteen years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, where they are located directly across from those of his contemporary, Voltaire. His tomb, in the shape of a rustic temple, on which, in bas relief an arm reaches out, bearing the torch of liberty, evokes Rousseau's deep love of nature and of classical antiquity. In 1834, the Genevan government somewhat reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny Île Rousseau in Lake Geneva. Today he is proudly claimed as their most celebrated native son. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

Philosophy Theory of Natural Human

The statue of Rousseau on the Île Rousseau, Geneva.

“

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the

”

fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical State of Nature as a normative guide. Rousseau criticized Hobbes for asserting that since man in the "state of nature . . . has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue". On the contrary, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature" and he especially praised the irable moderation of the Caribbeans in expressing the sexual urge despite the fact that they live in a hot climate, which "always seems to inflame the ions". Rousseau asserted that the stage of human development associated with what he called "savages" was the best and most optimal in human development, between the less-than optimal extreme of brute animals on the one hand and the extreme of decadent civilization on the other. "...nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man." Referring to the stage of human development which Rousseau associates with savages, Rousseau writes: "Hence although men had become less forebearing, and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a middle position

between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never to have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species."

Stages of human development Rousseau believed that the savage stage was not the first stage of human development, but the third stage. Rousseau held that this third savage stage of human societal development was an optimum, between the extreme of the state of brute animals and animal-like "ape-men" on the one hand, and the extreme of decadent civilized life on the other. This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage,[25] which Arthur Lovejoy' conclusively showed misrepresents Rousseau's thought. The expression, "the noble savage" was first used in 1672 by British poet John Dryden in his play The Conquest of Granada.[27]Rousseau wrote that morality was not a societal construct, but rather "natural" in the sense of "innate," an outgrowth from man's instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise the emotions of comion or empathy. These were sentiments shared with animals, and whose

existence

even Hobbes acknowledged.[28] Frontispiece and title page of an edition of Rousseau's Discourse

on

published in 1755 in Holland.

Inequality (1754),

Contrary to what his many detractors have claimed, Rousseau never suggests that humans in the state of nature act morally; in fact, such as "justice" or "wickedness" are inapplicable to prepolitical society as Rousseau understands it. Morality proper, i.e., self-restraint, can only develop through careful education in a civil state. Humans "in a state of Nature" may act with all of the ferocity of an animal. They are good only in a negative sense, insofar as they are self-sufficient and thus not subject to the vices of political society. In fact, Rousseau's natural man is virtually identical to a solitarychimpanzee or other ape, such as the orangutan as described byBuffon; and the "natural" goodness of humanity is thus the goodness of an animal, which is neither good nor bad. Rousseau, a deteriorationist, proposed that, except perhaps for brief moments of balance, at or near its inception, when a relative equality among men prevailed, human civilization has always been artificial, creating inequality, envy, and unnatural desires. In Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, intoamour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power ofreason. In contrast, amour-propre is artificial and encourages man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction. It had been invoked by Vauvenargues, among others. In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for idleness and luxury have contributed to the corruption of man. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty; and he concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of true friendship by replacing it with jealousy, fear, and suspicion.

In contrast to the optimistic view of other Enlightenment figures, for Rousseau, progress has been inimical to the well-being of humanity, that is, unless it can be counteracted by the cultivation of civic morality and duty. Only in civil society, can man be ennobled—through the use of reason: The age from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man. Society corrupts men only insofar as the Social Contract has not de facto succeeded, as we see in contemporary society as described in the Discourse on Inequality (1754). In this essay, which elaborates on the ideas introduced in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau traces man's social evolution from a primitive state of nature to modern society. The earliest solitary humans possessed a basic drive for self-preservation and a natural disposition to comion or pity. They differed from animals, however, in their capacity for free will and their potential perfectibility. As they began to live in groups and form clans they also began to experience family love, which Rousseau saw as the source of the greatest happiness known to humanity. As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of

agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: They began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self esteem. Rousseau posits that the original, deeply flawed Social Contract (i.e., that of Hobbes), which led to the modern state, was made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful, who tricked the general population into surrendering their liberties to them and instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society. Rousseau's own conception of the Social Contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy. In the last chapter of the Social Contract, Rousseau would ask "What is to be done?" He answers that now all men can do is to cultivate virtue in themselves and submit to their lawful rulers. To his readers, however, the inescapable conclusion was that a new and more equitable Social Contract was needed. Like other Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau was critical of the Atlantic slave trade.

Political theory Île Rousseau, Geneva.

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article Economie Politique (Discourse on Political Economy), featured in Diderot'sEncyclopédie. The

treatise begins with the dramatic opening lines, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they." Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while also becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by ing together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly (Book III, Chapter XV). The kind of republican government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva was a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau's principles. could not meet Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big. Much subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free: The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy. ... It is, however, an unfortunately obscure and controversial notion. Some commentators see it as no more than the dictatorship of the proletariat or the tyranny of the urban poor (such as may perhaps be seen in

the French Revolution). Such was not Rousseau's meaning. This is clear from the Discourse on Political Economy, where Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place".

Education and child rearing Emile: or, On Education “

‗The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated.‖ – Rousseau, Emile.

”

Rousseau‘s philosophy of education is not concerned with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather with developing the pupil‘s character and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which he will have to live. The hypothetical boy, Émile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor. Today we would call this the disciplinary method of "natural consequences" since, like modern psychologists[, Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The tutor will make sure that no harm results to Émile through his learning experiences.

Rousseau was one of the first to advocate developmentally appropriate education; and his description of the stages of child developmentmirrors his conception of the evolution of culture. He divides childhood into stages: the first is to the age of about 12, when children are guided by their emotions and impulses. During the second stage, from 12 to about 16, reason starts to develop; and finally the third stage, from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develops into an adult. Rousseau recommends that the young adult learn a manual skill such as carpentry, which requires creativity and thought, will keep him out of trouble, and will supply a fallback means of making a living in the event of a change of fortune. (The most illustrious aristocratic youth to have been educated this way may have been Louis XVI, whose parents had him learn the skill of locksmithing.) The sixteen-year-old is also ready to have a companion of the opposite sex. Although his ideas foreshadowed modern ones in many ways, in one way they do not: Rousseau was a believer in the moral superiority of the patriarchal family on the antique Roman model. Sophie, the young woman Émile is destined to marry, as a representative of ideal womanhood, is educated to be governed by her husband while Émile, as representative of the ideal man, is educated to be selfgoverning. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational and political philosophy; it is essential to his of the distinction between private, personal relations and the public world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it depends on the subordination of women, in order for both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function as Rousseau imagines it could and should. Rousseau anticipated the modern idea of the bourgeois nuclear family, with the mother at home taking responsibility for the household and for childcare and early education. Feminists, beginning in the late 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 have criticized Rousseau for his confinement of women to the domestic sphere—unless women were domesticated and constrained by modesty and shame, he feared[34] "men would be tyrannized by women... For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses... men would finally be their victims...."] His contemporaries saw it differently because Rousseau thought that mothers should breastfeed their

children. Marmontel wrote that his wife thought, "One must forgive something," she said, "in one who has taught us to be mothers." Rousseau's detractors have blamed him for everything they do not like in what they call modern "childcentered" education. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centered Education and its Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau, a development he regards as

bad.

Good

or

bad,

the

theories

of

educators

such

as

Rousseau's

near

contemporaries Pestalozzi, Mme de Genlis, and later, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey, which have directly influenced modern educational practices do have significant points in common with those of Rousseau.

Religion Having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva as part of his period of moral reform, Rousseau maintained a profession of that religious philosophy and of John Calvin as a modern lawgiver throughout the remainder of his life.[38] His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism. At the time, however, Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded by the Savoyard vicar in Émile, was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. His assertion in the Social Contract that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens may have been another reason for Rousseau's condemnation in Geneva. Unlike many of the more radical Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion. But he repudiated the doctrine of original sin, which plays so large a part in Calvinism (in Émile, Rousseau writes "there is no original perversity in the human heart").

In the 18th century, many deists viewed God merely as an abstract and impersonal creator of the universe, which they likened to a giant machine. Rousseau's deism differed from the usual kind in its intense emotionality. He saw the presence of God in his creation, including mankind, which, apart from the harmful influence of society, is good, because God is good. Rousseau's attribution of a spiritual value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of 19th-century Romanticism towards nature and religion. Rousseau was upset that his deistic views were so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophes were ignored. He defended himself against critics of his religious views in his "Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force."

Legacy A plaque commemorating the bicentenary of Rousseau's birth. Issued by the city of Geneva on 28 June 1912. The legend at the bottom says "Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays" ("love your country"), and shows Rousseau's father gesturing towards the window. The scene is drawn from a footnote to the Letter to d'Alembert where Rousseau recalls witnessing the popular celebrations following the exercises of the St Gervais regiment. Rousseau's idea of the volonté générale ("general will") was not original with him but rather belonged to a well-established technical vocabulary of juridical and theological writings in use at the time. The phrase was used by Diderot and also by Montesquieu(and by his teacher, the Oratorian friar Nicolas Malebranche). It served to designate the common interest embodied in legal tradition, as distinct from and transcending people's private and particular interests at any particular time.

The concept was also an important aspect of the more radical 17th-century republican tradition of Spinoza, from whom Rousseau differed in important respects, but not in his insistence on the importance of equality. This emphasis on equality is Rousseau's most important and consequential legacy, causing him to be both reviled and applauded: While Rousseau's notion of the progressive moral degeneration of mankind from the moment civil society established itself diverges markedly from Spinoza's claim that human nature is always and everywhere the same ... for both philosophers the pristine equality of the state of nature is our ultimate goal and criterion ... in shaping the "common good", volonté générale, or Spinoza's mens una, which alone can ensure stability and political salvation. Without the supreme criterion of equality, the general will would indeed be meaningless. ... When in the depths of the French Revolution the Jacobin clubs all over regularly deployed Rousseau when demanding radical reforms. and especially anything— such as land redistribution—designed to enhance equality, they were at the same time, albeit unconsciously, invoking a radical tradition which reached back to the late seventeenth century.

Stoicism Stoicism (Greek Στωικισμός) is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens byZeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection", would not suffer such emotions. Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and humanfreedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved. Later Stoics, such as Seneca and Epictetus, emphasized that because "virtue is sufficient for happiness", a sage was immune to misfortune. This belief is similar to the meaning of the phrase "stoic

calm", though the phrase does not include the "radical ethical" Stoic views that only a sage can be considered truly free, and that all moral corruptions are equally vicious. From its founding, Stoic doctrine was popular with a following throughout Greece and theRoman Empire, including the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, until the closing of all philosophy schools in 529 AD by order of the Emperor Justinian I, who perceived their pagan character as being at odds with the Christian faith.

Basic tenets “ Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be itting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subjectmatter of the art of living is each ” person's own life. —Epictetus[5] The

Stoics

provided

a

unified



of

the

world,

consisting

of

formal logic, non-

dualistic physics and naturalistic ethics. Of these, they emphasized ethics as the main focus of human knowledge, though their logical theories were of more interest for later philosophers. Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual's ethical and moral well-being: "Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature." This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy," and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all men alike are products of nature."

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regard to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes." A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy,"[7] thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole." This viewpoint was later described as "Classical Pantheism" (and was adopted by Dutch philosopherBaruch Spinoza). Stoicism became the foremost popular philosophy among the educated elite in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire, to the point where, in the words of Gilbert Murray "nearly all the successors of Alexander [...] professed themselves Stoics."

History Antisthenes, founder of the Cynic school of philosophy Beginning at around 301 BC, Zeno taught philosophy at the Stoa Poikile (i.e., "the painted porch"), from which his philosophy got its name.[12] Unlike the other schools of philosophy, such as the Epicureans, Zeno chose to teach his philosophy in a public space, which was acolonnade overlooking the central gathering place of Athens, the Agora. Zeno's ideas developed from those of the Cynics, whose founding father, Antisthenes, had been a disciple of Socrates. Zeno's most influential follower was Chrysippus, who was responsible for the molding of what is now called Stoicism. Later Roman Stoics focused on promoting a life in harmony within the universe, over which one has no direct control. Scholars usually divide the history of Stoicism into three phases:



Early Stoa, from the founding of the school by Zeno to Antipater.



Middle Stoa, including Panaetius and Posidonius.



Late Stoa, including Musonius Rufus, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

As A. A. Long states, no complete work by any Stoic philosopher survives from the first two phases of Stoicism. Only Roman texts from the Late Stoa survive. Stoic logic Propositional logic Diodorus Cronus, who was one of Zeno's teachers, is considered the philosopher who first introduced and developed an approach to logic now known as propositional logic. This is an approach to logic based on statements or propositions, rather than , making it very different from Aristotle's term logic. Later, Chrysippus developed this approach to logic into a system that became known as Stoic logic and included a deductive system (Stoic Syllogistic) which was considered a rival to Aristotle's Syllogistic. New interest in Stoic logic came in the 20th century, when important developments in logic were based on propositional logic. Susanne Bobzien wrote, "The many close similarities between Chrysippus' philosophical logic and that of Gottlob Frege are especially striking." Bobzien also notes that "Chrysippus wrote over 300 books on logic, on virtually any topic logic today concerns itself with, includingspeech act theory, sentence analysis, singular and plural expressions, types

of predicates, indexicals, existential

propositions,sentential

connectives, negations, disjunctions, conditionals, logical consequence, valid argument forms, theory of deduction,propositional logic, modal logic, tense logic, epistemic logic, logic of suppositions, logic of imperatives, ambiguity and logicalparadoxes."[15] Stoic Categories The Stoics held that all being (ὄνηα) -- though not all things (ηινά) -- is corporeal. They accepted the distinction

between concrete bodies

and abstract ones,

but

rejected Aristotle's belief

that

purely incorporeal being exists. Thus, they accepted Anaxagoras' idea (as did Aristotle) that if an object

is hot, it is because some part of a universal heat body had entered the object. But, unlike Aristotle, they extended the idea to cover all accidents. Thus if an object is red, it would be because some part of a universal red body had entered the object. They held that there were four Categories. substance (ὑποκείμενον) The primary matter, formless substance, (ousia) that things are made of quality (ποιόν) The way matter is organized to form an individual object; in Stoic physics, a physical ingredient (pneuma: air or breath), which informs the matter somehow disposed (πως ἔχον) Particular characteristics, not present within the object, such as size, shape, action, and posture Somehow disposed in relation to something (πρός τί πως ἔχον) Characteristics related to other phenomena, such as the position of an object within time and space relative to other objects Epistemology The

Stoics

believed

that knowledge can

be

attained

through

the

use

of reason. Truth can be distinguished from fallacy; even if, in practice, only an approximation can be made. According to the Stoics, the senses constantly receive sensations: pulsations that from objects through the senses to the mind, where they leave an impression in the imagination (phantasia). (An impression arising from the mind was called a phantasma.)] The mind has the ability to judge (sunkatathesis)—approve or reject—an impression, enabling it to distinguish a true representation ofreality from one that is false. Some impressions can be assented to immediately, but others can only achieve varying

degrees of hesitant approval, which can be labeled belief or opinion (doxa). It is only through

reason

that

we

achieve

clear

comprehension

and

conviction

(katalepsis). Certain and true knowledge (episteme), achievable by the Stoic sage, can be attained only by ing the conviction with the expertise of one's peers and the collective judgment of humankind. Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object that is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 11. Stoic physics and cosmology Main article: Stoic physics According to the Stoics, the universe is a material, reasoning substance, known as God or Nature, which the Stoics divided into two classes, the active and the ive. The ive substance is matter, which "lies sluggish, a substance ready for any use, but sure to remain unemployed if no one sets it in motion." The active substance, which can be called Fate, or Universal Reason (Logos), is an intelligent aether or primordial fire, which acts on the ive matter: The universe itself is god and the universal outpouring of its soul; it is this same world's guiding principle, operating in mind and reason, together with the common nature of

things and the totality that embraces all existence; then the foreordained might and necessity of the future; then fire and the principle of aether; then those elements whose natural state is one of flux and transition, such as water, earth, and air; then the sun, the moon, the stars; and the universal existence in which all things are contained. —Chrysippus, in Cicero, de Natura Deorum, i. Everything is subject to the laws of Fate, for the Universe acts only according to its own nature,

and

the

nature

of

the

ive

matter

it

governs.

The souls of people and animals are emanations from this primordial fire, and are, likewise, subject to Fate: Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things that exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the structure of the web. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iv. 40. Individual souls are perishable by nature, and can be "transmuted and diffused, assuming a fiery nature by being received into the Seminal Reason (logos spermatikos) of the Universe." Since right Reason is the foundation of both humanity and the universe, it follows that the goal of life is to live according to Reason, that is, to live a life according to Nature. Stoic ethics and virtues The ancient Stoics are often misunderstood because the they used pertained to different concepts in the past than they do today. The word 'stoic' has come to mean 'unemotional' or indifferent to pain, because Stoic ethics taught freedom from 'ion'

by following 'reason.' The Stoics did not seek to extinguish emotions; rather, they sought to transform them by a resolute 'askēsis' that enables a person to develop clear judgment and inner calm. Logic, reflection, and concentration were the methods of such self-discipline. Borrowing from the Cynics, the foundation of Stoic ethics is that good lies in the state of the soul itself; in wisdom and self-control. Stoic ethics stressed the rule: "Follow where reason leads." One must therefore strive to be free of the ions, bearing in mind that the ancient meaning of 'ion' was "anguish" or "suffering", that is, "ively" reacting to external events—somewhat different from the modern use of the word. A distinction was made between pathos (plural pathe) which is normally translated as ion,propathos or instinctive reaction (e.g., turning pale and trembling when confronted by physical danger) and eupathos, which is the mark of the Stoic sage (sophos). The eupatheia are feelings that result from correct judgment in the same way as ions result from incorrect judgment. The idea was to be free of suffering through apatheia (Greek: ἀπάθεια) or peace of mind (literally, 'without ion'), where peace of mind was understood in the ancient sense—being objective or

having

"clear

judgment"

and

the

maintenance

of equanimity in the face of life's highs and lows. For the Stoics, 'reason' meant not only using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature—the logos, or universal reason, inherent in all things. Living according to reason and virtue, they held, is to live in harmony with the divine order of the universe, in recognition of the common reason and essential value of all people. The

four

cardinal

virtues

of

the

Stoic

philosophy

are wisdom(Sophia), courage (Andreia), justice (Dikaiosyne), and temperance (Sophrosyne), a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.

Following Socrates, the Stoics held that unhappiness and evil are the results of human ignorance of the reason in nature. If someone is unkind, it is because they are unaware of their own universal reason, which leads to the conclusion of kindness. The solution to evil and unhappiness then, is the practice of Stoic philosophy—to examine one's own judgments and behavior and determine where they diverge from the universal reason of nature. The Stoics accepted that suicide was permissible for the wise person in circumstances that might prevent them from living a virtuous life. Plutarch held that accepting life under tyranny would have compromised Cato's self-consistency (constantia) as a Stoic and impaired his freedom to make the honorable moral choices. Suicide could be justified if one fell victim to severe pain or disease, but otherwise suicide would usually be seen as a rejection of one's social duty. The doctrine of "things indifferent" In philosophical , things that are indifferent are outside the application of moral law, that is without tendency to either promote or obstruct moral ends. Actions neither required nor forbidden by the moral law, or that do not affect morality, are called morally indifferent. The doctrine of things indifferent (ἀδιάθορα, adiaphora) arose in the Stoic school

as

a corollary of

its

diametric

opposition

of

virtue

and

vice

(καθήκονηα kathekon and ἁμαρηήμαηα hamartemata, respectively "convenient actions," or actions in accordance with nature, and mistakes). As a result of this dichotomy, a large class of objects were left unassigned and thus regarded as indifferent. Eventually three sub-classes of "things indifferent" developed: things to prefer because they assist life according to nature; things to avoid because they hinder it; and things indifferent in the narrower sense.

The principle of adiaphora was also common to the Cynics and Sceptics. The conception of things indifferent is, according to Kant, extra-moral.The doctrine of things indifferent was revived during the Renaissance by Philip Melanchthon. Spiritual exercise Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor Philosophy for a Stoic is not just a set of beliefs or ethical claims, it is a way of life involving constant practice and training (or askesis, see asceticism). Stoic philosophical and spiritual practices included logic, Socratic dialog and self-dialog, contemplation of death, training attention to remain in the present moment of Eastern meditation),

daily

reflection

(similar on

everyday

to problems

some

forms

and

possible

solutions, hypomnemata, and so on. Philosophy for a Stoic is an active process of constant practice and self-reminder. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius defines several such practices. For example, in Book II, part 1: Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together... Prior to Aurelius, Epictetus in his Discourses distinguished between three topoi: judgment, desire and inclination. According to French philosopher Pierre Hadot,

Epictetus identifies these three acts with logic, physics and ethics respectively. Hadot writes that in the Meditations "Each maxim develops either one of these very characteristic topoi, or two of them or three of them." The practices of spiritual exercises have been described as influencing those of reflective practice by Seamus Mac Suibhne . Parallels between Stoic spiritual exercises and modern cognitive-behavioral therapy have been detailed at length in Robertson's The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Social philosophy A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism: All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. In the Discourses, Epictetus comments on man's relationship with the world: "Each human being is primarily a citizen of his own commonwealth; but he is also a member of the great city of gods and men, where of the city political is only a copy." This sentiment echoes that of Diogenes of Sinope, who said "I am not an Athenian or aCorinthian, but a citizen of the world." They held that external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social relationships. Instead they advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Greco–Roman world, and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities, such as Cato the Younger and Epictetus. In particular, they were noted for their urging of clemency toward slaves. Seneca exhorted, "Kindly that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal with yourself breathes, lives, and dies."

Stoicism and Christianity See also: Neostoicism The major difference between the two philosophies is Stoicism's pantheism where God is never fully transcendent but always immanent. God as the world-creating entity is personalized in Christian thought, but Stoicism equates God with the totality of the universe; the Stoic idea that all being is corporeal was deeply contrary to Christianity. Also, Stoicism, unlike Christianity, does not posit a beginning or end to the universe, nor does it assert that the individual continues to exist beyond death. Stoicism

was

later

regarded

by

the Fathers

of

the

Church as

a

'pagan

philosophy', nonetheless, some of the central philosophical concepts of Stoicism were employed by the early Christian writers. Examples include the "logos", "virtue", "Spirit", and "conscience". But the parallels go well beyond the sharing (or borrowing) of terminology. Both Stoicism and Christianity assert an inner freedom in the face of the external world, a belief in human kinship with Nature (or God), and a sense of the innate depravity—or "persistent evil"—of humankind as well as the futility and temporarity of worldly possessions and attachments. Both encourageAscesis with respect to the ions and inferior emotions (viz. lust, envy and anger) so that the higher possibilities of one's humanity can be awakened and developed. Stoic writings such as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius have been highly regarded by many Christians throughout the centuries. The Stoic ideal of dision is accepted to this day as the perfect moral state by the Eastern Orthodox. St. Ambrose of Milan was known for applying Stoic philosophy to his theology.

Modern usage The word "stoic" commonly refers to someone indifferent to pain, pleasure, grief, or joy. The modern usage as "person who represses feelings or endures patiently" was first cited in 1579 as a noun, and 1596 as an adjective.[34] In contrast to the term "epicurean", theStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Stoicism notes, "the sense of the English adjective 'stoical' is not utterly misleading with regard to its philosophical origins."

Stoic quotations Below are some quotations from major Stoic philosophers, selected to illustrate common Stoic beliefs: Epictetus:



"Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire." (iv.1.175)



"Where is the good? In the will. Where is the evil? In the will. Where is neither of them? In those things that are independent of the will." (ii.16.1)



"Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them." (Ench. 5)



"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone." (iii.24.2)



"I am formed by nature for my own good: I am not formed for my own evil." (iii.24.83)



"Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own; nothing to grow to you that may give you agony when it is torn away." (iv.1.112)

Marcus Aurelius:



"Get rid of the judgment, get rid of the 'I am hurt,' you are rid of the hurt itself." (viii.40)



"Everything is right for me that is right for you, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late that comes in due time for you. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, O Nature. From you are all things, in you are all things, to you all things return." (iv.23)



"If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word that you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this." (iii.12)



"How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life!" (xii.13)



"Outward things cannot touch the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they ission to the soul, nor can they turn or move the soul; but the soul turns and moves itself alone." (v 19)



"Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own com also" (vi.19)



"Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands." (iv.3)

Seneca the Younger:



"The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live." (Ep. 101.15)



"That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away." (Ep. 59.18)



"Let Nature deal with matter, which is her own, as she pleases; let us be cheerful and brave in the face of everything, reflecting that it is nothing of our own that perishes." (De Provid. v.8)



"Virtue is nothing else than right reason." (Ep. 66.32)

Stoic philosophers List of Stoic philosophers



Zeno of Citium (332–262 BC), founder of Stoicism and the Stoic Academy (Stoa) in Athens



Aristo of Chios, pupil of Zeno;



Herillus of Carthage



Cleanthes (of Assos) (330–232 BC), second head of Stoic Academy



Chrysippus (280–204 BC), third head of the academy



Diogenes of Babylon (230–150 BC)



Antipater of Tarsus (210–129 BC)



Panaetius of Rhodes (185–109 BC)



Posidonius of Apameia (c. 135 BC – 51 BC)



Diodotus (c. 120 BC – 59 BC), teacher of Cicero



Cato the Younger (94–46 BC)



Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD)



Musonius Rufus



Rubellius Plautus



Thrasea Paetus



Epictetus (55–135 AD)



Hierocles (2nd century AD)



Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD)

Epicureanism "Epicurean" redirects here. For other uses, see Epicurean (disambiguation). Epicurus

Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus, founded around 307 BCE. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. FollowingAristippus—about whom very little is known—Epicurus believed that pleasure is the greatest good. But the way to attain pleasure was to live modestly and to gain knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of one's desires. This led one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia). The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares pleasure to be the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life make it different from "hedonism" as it is commonly understood. Epicureanism was originally a challenge to Platonism, though later it became the main opponent of Stoicism. Epicurus and his followers shunned politics. After the death of Epicurus, his school was headed by Hermarchus; later many Epicurean societies flourished in the Late Hellenistic era and during the Roman era (such as those in Antiochia, Alexandria,Rhodes, and Ercolano). The poet Lucretius is its

most well-known Roman proponent. By the end of the Roman Empire, having undergone Christian attack and repression, Epicureanism had all but died out, and would be resurrected in the 17th century by the atomist Pierre Gassendi, who adapted it to the Christian doctrine. Some writings by Epicurus have survived. Some scholars consider the epic poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius to present in one unified work the core arguments and theories of Epicureanism. Many of the papyrus scrolls unearthed at the Villa of the Papyri atHerculaneum are Epicurean texts. At least some are thought to have belonged to the Epicurean Philodemus.

History The school of Epicurus, called "The Garden," was based in Epicurus' home and garden. It had a small but

devoted

following

in

his

included Hermarchus, Idomeneus, Colotes, Polyaenus,

lifetime. and Metrodorus.

Its Epicurus

emphasized

friendship as an important ingredient of happiness, and the school seems to have been a moderately ascetic community which rejected the political limelight of Athenian philosophy. They were fairly cosmopolitan

by

Athenian

standards,

including

women

and

slaves,

and

were

probablyvegetarians (Stevenson 2005). The school's popularity grew and it became, along with Stoicism and Skepticism, one of the three dominant schools of Hellenistic Philosophy, lasting strongly through the later Roman Empire. Another major source of information is the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, although he was highly critical, denouncing the Epicureans as unbridled hedonists, devoid of a sense of virtue and duty, and guilty of withdrawing from public life. Another ancient source is Diogenes of Oenoanda, who composed a large inscription atOenoanda in Lycia. A library in the Villa of the Papyri, in Herculaneum, was presumably owned by Julius Caesar's father-inlaw, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The scrolls which the library consisted of were preserved albeit in carbonized form by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Several of these Herculaneum papyri which are unrolled and deciphered were found to contain a large number of works

by Philodemus, a late Hellenistic Epicurean, and Epicurus himself, attesting to the school's enduring popularity. The task of unrolling and deciphering the over 1800 charred papyrus scrolls continues today. After the official approval of Christianity by Constantine the Great, Epicureanism was repressed. Epicurus' materialist theories that the gods were physical beings composed of atoms who were unconcerned with human affairs and had not created the universe, and his general teaching that one's own pleasure, rather than service to God, was the greatest good were essentially irreconcilable with Christian teachings. The school endured a long period of obscurity and decline. The early Christian writer Lactantius criticizes Epicurus at several points throughout his Divine Institutes. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the Epicureans are depicted as heretics suffering in the sixth circle of hell. In fact, Epicurus is the first heretic seen, and he appears to represent the ultimate heresy. The word for a heretic in the Talmudic literature is "Apiqoros" (‫)סורוקיפא‬, and Epicurus is titled in Modern Greek idiom as the "Dark Philosopher". By the 16th century, the works of Diogenes Laertius were being printed in Europe. In the 17th century the French Franciscan priest, scientist and philosopher Pierre Gassendi wrote two books forcefully reviving

Epicureanism.

Shortly

thereafter,

and

clearly

influenced

by

Gassendi, Walter

Charleton published several works on Epicureanism in English. Attacks by Christians continued, most forcefully by the Cambridge Platonists. In the Modern Age, scientists adopted atomist theories, while materialist philosophers embraced Epicurus' hedonist ethics and restated his objections to natural teleology. Religion Epicureanism emphasizes the neutrality of the gods, that they do not interfere with human lives. It states that gods, matter, and souls are all made up of atoms. Souls are made from atoms, and gods possess souls, but their souls adhere to their bodies without escaping. Humans have the same kind of

souls, but the forces binding human atoms together do not hold the soul forever. The Epicureans also used the atomist theories of Democritus and Leucippus to assert that man has free will. They held that all thoughts are merely atoms swerving randomly. This explanation served to satisfy people who wondered anxiously about their role in the universe. The Riddle of Epicurus, or Problem of evil, is a famous argument against the existence of an allpowerful and providential God or gods. As recorded by Lactantius: God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak - and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful - which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them? —[1] This type of trilemma argument (God is omnipotent, God is good, but Evil exists) was one favoured by the ancient Greek skeptics, and this argument may have been wrongly attributed to Epicurus by Lactantius, who, from his Christian perspective, regarded Epicurus as an atheist. According to Reinhold F. Glei, it is settled that the argument of theodicy is from an academical source which is not only not epicurean, but even anti-epicurean. The earliest extant version of this trilemma appears in the writings of the skeptic Sextus Empiricus. Epicurus' view was that there were gods, but that they were neither willing nor able to prevent evil. This was not because they were malevolent, but because they lived in a perfect state of ataraxia, a state everyone should strive to emulate; it is not the gods who are upset by evils, but people. Epicurus conceived the gods as blissful and immortal yet material beings made of atoms inhabiting themetakosmia: empty spaces between worlds in the vastness of infinite space. In spite of his

recognition of the gods, the practical effect of this materialistic explanation of the gods' existence and their complete non-intervention in human affairs renders his philosophy akin in divine effects to the attitude of Deism. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the flaming tombs of the Epicureans are located within the sixth circle of hell (Inferno, Canto X). They are the first heretics seen and appear to represent the ultimate, if not quintessential, heresy. Similarly, according to Jewish Mishnah, Epicureans (apiqorsim, people who share the beliefs of the movement) are among the people who do not have a share of the "World-toCome" (afterlife or the world of the Messianic era). Parallels may be drawn to Buddhism, which similarly emphasizes a lack of divine interference and aspects of its atomism. Buddhism also resembles Epicureanism in its temperateness, including the belief that great excesses leads to great dissatisfaction.

Philosophy The philosophy originated by Epicurus flourished for seven centuries. It propounded an ethic of individual pleasure as the sole or chief good in life. Hence, Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one's lifetime, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering incurred by overindulgence in such pleasure. The emphasis was placed on pleasures of the mind rather than on physical pleasures. Therefore, according to Epicurus, with whom a person eats is of greater importance than what is eaten. Unnecessary and, especially, artificially produced desires were to be suppressed. Since learning,culture, and civilization as well as social and political involvements could give rise to desires that are difficult to satisfy and thus result in disturbing one's peace of mind, they were discouraged. Knowledge was sought only to rid oneself of religious fears and superstitions, the two primary fears to be eliminated being fear of the gods and of death. Viewing marriage and what attends it as a threat to one's peace of mind, Epicurus lived a celibate life but did not impose this restriction on his followers.

The philosophy was characterized by an absence of divine principle. Lawbreaking was counseled against because of both the shame associated with detection and the punishment it might bring. Living in fear of being found out or punished would take away from pleasure, and this made even secret wrongdoing inadvisable. To the Epicureans, virtue in itself had no value and was beneficial only when it served as a means to gain happiness. Reciprocity was recommended, not because it was divinely ordered or innately noble, but because it was personally beneficial. Friendships rested on the same mutual basis, that is, the pleasure resulting to the possessors. Epicurus laid great emphasis on developing friendships as the basis of a satisfying life. of all the things which wisdom has contrived which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship —quoted by Cicero, While the pursuit of pleasure formed the focal point of the philosophy, this was largely directed to the "static pleasures" of minimizing pain, anxiety and suffering. In fact Epicurus referred to life as a "bitter gift". When we say...that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. —[7] The Epicureans believed in the existence of the gods, but believed that the gods were made of atoms just like everything else. It was thought that the gods were too far away from the earth to have any

interest in what man was doing; so it did not do any good to pray or to sacrifice to them. The gods, they believed, did not create the universe, nor did they inflict punishment or bestow blessings on anyone, but they were supremely happy; this was the goal to strive for during one's own human life. "Live unknown was one of [key] maxims. This was completely at odds with all previous ideas of seeking fame and glory, or even wanting something so apparently decent as honor." Epicureanism rejects immortality and mysticism; it believes in the soul, but suggests that the soul is as mortal as the body. Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."

Ethics Epicurus was an early thinker to develop the notion of justice as a social contract. He defined justice as an agreement "neither to harm nor be harmed." The point of living in a society with laws and punishments is to be protected from harm so that one is free to pursue happiness. Because of this, laws that do not contribute to promoting human happiness are not just. He gave his own unique version of the Ethic of Reciprocity, which differs from other formulations by emphasizing minimizing harm and maximizing happiness for oneself and others: It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly (agreeing "neither to harm nor

be

harmed",

and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.[11] Epicureanism incorporated a relatively full of the social contract theory, following after a vague description of such a society inPlato's Republic. The social contract theory established by Epicureanism is based on mutual agreement, not divine decree.

Epicurean physics Epicurus' philosophy of the physical world is found in his Letter to Herodotus: Diogenes Laertius 10.3483. If a limited form lives within an unlimited void, the form could only wander aimlessly about, because what is unlimited is ungraspable; meaning, the limited form would travel forever, for it does not have any obstacles. The void would have to be limited in quality and the form of an unlimited quality, for an unlimited form can oscillate and seemingly grasp—practically, but not literally—an unlimited number of spots within the limited void. So therefore all living things on Earth are unlimited, and the Earth on which they live and the universe around it, is limited. Forms can change, but not their inherent qualities, for change can only affect their shape. Some things can be changed and some things cannot be changed because forms that are unchangeable cannot be destroyed if certain attributes can be removed; for attributes not only have the intention of altering an unchangeable form, but also the inevitable possibility of becoming—in relation to the form's disposition to its present environment—both an armor and a vulnerability to its stability. Further proof that there are unchangeable forms and their inability to be destroyed, is the concept of the "non-evident." A form cannot come into being from the void—which is nothing; it would be as if all forms come into being spontaneously, needless of reproduction. The implied meaning of "destroying" something is to undo its existence, to make it not there anymore, and this cannot be so: if the void is that which does not exist, and if this void is the implied destination of the destroyed, then the thing in reality cannot be destroyed, for the thing (and all things) could not have existed in the first place (as Lucretius said, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing). This totality of forms is eternal and unchangeable. Atoms move, in the appropriate way, constantly and for all time. Forms first come to us in images or "projections"--outlines of their true selves. For an image to be perceived by the human eye, the "atoms"

of the image must cross a great distance at enormous speed and must not encounter any conflicting atoms along the way. The presence of atomic resistance equal atomic slowness; whereas, if the path is deficient of atomic resistance, the traversal rate is much faster (and clearer). Because of resistance, forms must be unlimited (unchangeable and able to grasp any point within the void) because, if they weren't, a form's image would not come from a single place, but fragmented and from several places. This confirms that a single form cannot be at multiple places at the same time. And the senses warrant us other means of perception: hearing and smelling. As in the same way an image traverses through the air, the atoms of sound and smell traverse the same way. This perceptive experience is itself the flow of the moving atoms; and like the changeable and unchangeable forms, the form from which the flow traverses is shed and shattered into even smaller atoms, atoms of which still represent the original form, but they are slightly disconnected and of diverse magnitudes. This flow, like that of an echo, reverberates (off one's senses) and goes back to its start; meaning, one's sensory perception happens in the coming, going, or arch, of the flow; and when the flow retreats back to its starting position, the atomic image is back together again: thus when one smells something one has the ability to see it too [because atoms reach the one who smells or sees from the object.] And this leads to the question of how atomic speed and motion works. Epicurus says that there are two kinds of motion: the straight motion and the curved motion, and its motion traverse as fast as the speed of thought. Epicurus proposed the idea of 'the space between worlds' (metakosmia) the relatively empty spaces in the infinite void where worlds had not been formed by the ing together of the atoms through their endless motion.

Epistemology Epicurean epistemology has three criteria of truth: sensations (aisthêsis), preconceptions (prolepsis), and feelings (pathê). Prolepsis is sometimes translated as "basic grasp" but could also be described as "universal ideas": concepts that are understood by all. An example of prolepsis is the word "man"

because every person has a preconceived notion of what a man is. Sensations or sense perception is knowledge that is received from the senses alone. Much like modern science, epicurean philosophy posits thatempiricism can be used to sort truth from falsehood. Feelings are more related to ethics than Epicurean physical theory. Feelings merely tell the individual what brings about pleasure and what brings about pain. This is important for the Epicurean because these are the basis for the entire Epicurean ethical doctrine. According to Epicurus, the basic means for our understanding of things are the 'sensations' (aestheses), 'concepts' (prolepsis), 'emotions' (pathe) and the 'focusing of thought into an impression' (phantastikes epiboles tes dianoias). Epicureans reject dialectic as confusing (parelkousa) because for the physical philosophers it is sufficient to use the correct words which refer to the concepts of the world. Epicurus then, in his work On the Canon, says that the criteria of truth are the senses, the preconceptions and the feelings. Epicureans add to these the focusing of thought into an impression. He himself is referring to those in his Epitome to Herodotus and in Principal Doctrines. The senses are the first criterion of truth, since they create the first impressions and testify the existence of the external world. Sensory input is neither subjective nor deceitful, but the misunderstanding comes when the mind adds to or subtracts something from these impressions through our preconceived notions. Therefore, our sensory input alone cannot lead us to inaccuracy, only the concepts and opinions that come from our interpretations of our sensory input can. Therefore our sensory data is the only truly accurate thing which we have to rely for our understanding of the world around us. And whatever image we receive by direct understanding by our mind or through our sensory organs of the shape or the essential properties that are the true form of the solid object, since it is created by the constant repetition of the image or the impression it has left behind. There is always inaccuracy and

error involved in bringing into a judgment an element that is additional to sensory impressions, either to confirm [what we sensed] or deny it. —[13] Epicurus said that all the tangible things are real and each impression comes from existing objects and is determined by the object that causes the sensations. —[14] Therefore all the impressions are real, while the preconceived notions are not real and can be modified. If you battle with all your sensations, you will be unable to form a standard for judging which of them are incorrect. —[15] The concepts are the categories which have formed mentally according to our sensory input, for example the concepts "man", "warm", and "sweet", etc. These concepts are directly related to memory and can be recalled at any time, only by the use of the respective word. (Compare the anthropological Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). Epicurus also calls them "the meanings that underlie the words" (hypotetagmena tois phthongois: semantic substance of the words) in his letter to Herodotus. The feelings or emotions (pathe) are related to the senses and the concepts. They are the inner impulses that make us feel like or dislike about certain external objects, which we perceive through the senses, and are associated with the preconceptions that are recalled. In this moment that the word "man" is spoken, immediately due to the concept [or category of the idea] an image is projected in the mind which is related to the sensory input data. —[16]

First of all Herodotus, we must understand the meanings that underlie the words, so that by referring to them, we may be able to reach judgments about our opinions, matters of inquiry, or problems and leave everything undecided as we can argue endlessly or use words that have no clearly defined meaning. —[17] Apart from these there is the assumption (hypolepsis), which is either the hypothesis or the opinion about something (matter or action), and which can be correct or incorrect. The assumptions are created by our sensations, concepts and emotions. Since they are produced automatically without any rational analysis and verification (see the modern idea of the subconscious) of whether they are correct or not, they need to be confirmed (epimarteresis: confirmation), a process which must follow each assumption. For beliefs they [the Epicureans] use the word hypolepsis which they claim can be correct or incorrect. —[18] Referring to the "focusing of thought into an impression" or else "intuitive understandings of the mind", they are the impressions made on the mind that come from our sensations, concepts and emotions and form the basis of our assumptions and beliefs. All this unity (sensation – concept or category – emotion – focusing of thought into an impression) leads to the formation of a certain assumption or belief (hypolepsis). (Compare the modern anthropological concept of a "world view".) Following the lead of Aristotle, Epicurus also refers to impressions in the form of mental images which are projected on the mind. The "correct use of impressions" was something adopted later by the Stoics. Our assumptions and beliefs have to be 'confirmed', which actually proves if our opinions are either accurate or inaccurate. This verification and confirmation (epimarteresis) can only be done by means of the "evident reason" (henargeia), which means what is self-evident and obvious through our sensory input.

An example is when we see somebody approaching us, first through the sense of eyesight, we perceive that an object is coming closer to us, then through our preconceptions we understand that it is a human being, afterwards through that assumption we can recognize that he is someone we know, for example Theaetetus. This assumption is associated with pleasant or unpleasant emotions accompanied by the respective mental images and impressions (the focusing of our thoughts into an impression), which are related to our feelings toward each other. When he gets close to us, we can confirm () that he is Socrates and not Theaetetus through the proof of our eyesight. Therefore, we have to use the same method to understand everything, even things which are not observable and obvious (adela, imperceptible), that is to say the confirmation through the evident reason (henargeia). In the same way we have to reduce (reductionism) each assumption and belief to something that can be

proved

through

the

self-evident

reason

(empirically

verified).Verification

theory and reductionism have been adopted, as we know, by the modern philosophy of science. In this way, one can get rid of the incorrect assumptions and beliefs (biases) and finally settle on the real (confirmed) facts. Consequently the confirmation and lack of disagreement is the criterion of accuracy of something, while non-confirmation and disagreement is the criterion of its inaccuracy. The basis and foundation of [understanding] everything are the obvious and self-evident [facts]. —[19] All the above mentioned criteria of knowledge form the basic principles of the [scientific] method, that Epicurus followed in order to find the truth. He described this method in his work On the Canon or On the Criteria. If you reject any sensation and you do not distinguish between the opinion based on what awaits confirmation and evidence already available based on the senses, the feelings and every intuitive faculty of the mind, you will send the remaining sensations into a turmoil with your foolish opinions, thus

getting rid of every standard for judging. And if among the perceptions based on beliefs are things that are verified and things that are not, you are guaranteed to be in error since you have kept everything that leads to uncertainty concerning the correct and incorrect. —[20] (Based on excerpt from Epicurus' Gnoseology 'Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics Analysis and Fragments', Nikolaos Bakalis, Trafford Publishing 2005, ISBN 1-4120-4843-5)

Tetrapharmakos Tetrapharmakos Tetrapharmakos, or "The four-part cure", is Epicurus' basic guideline as to how to live the happiest possible life. This poetic doctrine was handed down by an anonymous Epicurean who summed up Epicurus' philosophy on happiness in four simple lines: Don't fear god, Don't worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure. —Philodemus, Herculaneum Papyrus, 1005, 4.9-14

Philosophical analysis Philosophical analysis (from Greek: Φιλοζοθική ανάλσζη) is a general term for techniques typically used by philosophers in theanalytic tradition that involve "breaking down" (i.e. analyzing) philosophical issues. Arguably the most prominent of these techniques is the analysis of concepts (known as conceptual analysis). This article will examine the major philosophical techniques associated with the notion of analysis, as well as examine the controversies surrounding it.

Method of analysis While analysis is characteristic of the analytic tradition in philosophy, what is to be analyzed (the analysandum) often varies. Some philosophers focus on analyzing linguistic phenomena, such as sentences, while others focus on psychological phenomena, such assense-data. However, arguably the most prominent analyses are of concepts or propositions, which is known as conceptual analysis(Foley 1996). Conceptual analysis consists primarily in breaking down or analyzing concepts into their constituent parts in order to gain knowledge or a better understanding of a particular philosophical issue in which the concept is involved (Beaney 2003). For example, the problem of free will in philosophy involves various key concepts, including the concepts of freedom, moral responsibility, determinism, ability, etc. The method of conceptual analysis tends to approach such a problem by breaking down the key concepts pertaining to the problem and seeing how they interact. Thus, in the long-standing debate on whether free will is compatible with the doctrine of determinism, several philosophers have proposed analyses of the relevant concepts to argue for either compatibilism or incompatibilism. A famous example of conceptual analysis at its best is Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions. Russell attempted to analyze propositions that involved definite descriptions (such as "The tallest spy"), which pick out a unique individual, and indefinite descriptions(such as "a spy"), which pick out a set of individuals. Take Russell's analysis of definite descriptions as an example.[1] Superficially, definite descriptions have the standard subject-predicate form of a proposition. For example, "The present king of is bald" appears to be predicating "baldness" of the subject "the present king of ". However, Russell noted that this is problematic, because there is no present king of ( is no longer a monarchy). Normally, to decide whether a proposition of the standard subject-predicate form is true or false, one checks whether the subject is in the extension of the predicate. The proposition is then true if and only if the subject is in the extension of the predicate. The problem is that there is no present king of , so the present king of cannot be found on the list of bald

things or non-bald things. So, it would appear that the proposition expressed by "The present king of is bald" is neither true nor false. However, analyzing the relevant concepts and propositions, Russell proposed that what definite descriptions really express are not propositions of the subjectpredicate form, but rather they express existentially quantified propositions. Thus, "The present king of " is analyzed, according to Russell's theory of descriptions, as "There exists an individual who is currently the king of , there is only one such individual, and that individual is bald." Now one can determine the truth-value of the proposition. Indeed, it is false, because it is not the case that there exists a unique individual who is currently the king of and is bald—since there is no present king of (Bertolet 1999). Controversy While the method of analysis is characteristic of contemporary analytic philosophy, its status continues to be a source of great controversy even among analytic philosophers. Several current criticisms of the analytic method derive from W.V. Quine's famous rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction. While Quine's critique is well-known, it is highly controversial. Further, the analytic method seems to rely on some sort of definitional structure of concepts, so that one can give necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept. For example, the concept "bachelor" is often analyzed as having the concepts "unmarried" and "male" as its components. Thus, the definition or analysis of "bachelor" is thought to be an unmarried male. But one might worry that these so-called necessary and sufficient conditions do not apply in every case. Wittgenstein, for instance, argues that language (e.g., the word 'bachelor') is used for various purposes and in an indefinite number of ways. Wittgenstein's famous thesis states that meaning is determined by use. This means that, in each case, the meaning of 'bachelor' is determined by its use in a context. So if it can be shown that the word means different things across different contexts of use, then cases where its meaning cannot be essentially defined as 'married bachelor' seem to constitute counterexamples to this method of analysis. This is just one example of a critique of the analytic

method derived from a critique of definitions. There are several other such critiques (Margolis & Laurence

2006).

This

criticism

is

often

said

to

have

originated

primarily

with

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. A third critique of the method of analysis derives primarily from psychological critiques of intuition. A key part of the analytic method involves analyzing concepts via "intuition tests". Philosophers tend to motivate various conceptual analyses by appeal to their intuitions about thought experiments. (See DePaul and Ramsey (1998) for a collection of current essays on the controversy over analysis as it relates to intuition and reflective equilibrium.) In short, some philosophers feel strongly that the analytic method (especially conceptual analysis) is essential to and defines philosophy—e.g. Jackson (1998), Chalmers (1996), and Bealer (1998). Yet, some philosophers argue that the method of analysis is problematic—e.g. Stich (1998) and Ramsey (1998). Some, however, take the middle ground and argue that while analysis is largely a fruitful method of inquiry, philosophers should not limit themselves to only using the method of analysis.

Phenomenology (philosophy) Phenomenology (from Greek: phainómenon "that the philosophical study

of

the

structures

of

which

appears";

subjective

experience

and lógos "study") and

consciousness.

is As

a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century byEdmund Husserl and was

later

expanded

upon

by

a

circle

of

his

followers

at

the

universities

of Göttingen and Munich in . It then spread to , the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work. Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures ofconsciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. This

phenomenological ontology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another. Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by himself but also by students such as Edith Stein, by existentialists, such as Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and sociologists Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin.

Overview Stephen Hicks writes that to understand phenomenology, one must identify its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguished between "phenomena" (objects as interpreted by human sensibility and understanding), and "noumena" (objects as things-in-themselves, which humans cannot directly experience). According to Hicks, 19thcentury Kantianism operated in two broad camps: structural linguistics and phenomenology. Hicks writes, "In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have." In its most basic form, phenomenology thus attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded assubjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgments, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience. [ Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano isintentionality (often described as "aboutness"), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways,

through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual ing of it. Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when one details the constitution of an identical coherent thing by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described here: The ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct reaction to thepsychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time. Although previously employed by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, it was Husserl‘s adoption of this term (circa 1900) that propelled it into becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual‘s ―lived experience.‖[5] Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Scepticroots, called epoché, Husserl‘s method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the ―science of experience,‖ the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, Husserl‘s theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness,

which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not ―in‖ the mind but rather conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy. According to Maurice Natanson (1973, p. 63), “The radicality of the phenomenological method is both continuous and discontinuous with philosophy‟s general effort to subject experience to fundamental, critical scrutiny: to take nothing for granted and to show the warranty for what we claim to know.”

In practice, it entails an unusual combination of discipline and detachment to suspend, or bracket, theoretical explanations and second-hand information while determining one's ―naive‖ experience of the matter. The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea, or a perception. According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. According to Rüdiger Safranski (1998, 72), ―[Husserl and his followers‘] great ambition was to disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or the world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew.‖ Martin Heidegger modified Husserl‘s conception of phenomenology because of (what Heidegger perceived as) Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the primacy of one‘s existence (i.e., the mode of being of Dasein), which cannot be reduced to one‘s

consciousness of it. From this angle, one‘s state of mind is an ―effect‖ rather than a determinant of existence, including those aspects of existence that one is not conscious of. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology, making it at once both personal and mysterious. As one consequence of Heidegger‘s modification of Husserl‘s conception, phenomenology became increasingly relevant to psychoanalysis. Whereas Husserl gave priority to a depiction of consciousness that was fundamentally alien to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, Heidegger offered a way to conceptualize experience that could accommodate those aspects of one‘s existence that lie on the periphery of sentient awareness.

Phenomenological terminology Intentionality Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness is always the consciousness of something. The word itself should not be confused with the "ordinary" use of the word intentional, but should rather be taken as playing on the etymological roots of the word. Originally, intention referred to a "stretching out" ("in tension," lat. intendere[3][4]), and in this context it refers to consciousness "stretching out" towards its object (although one should be careful with this image, seeing as there is not some consciousness first that, subsequently, stretches out to its object. Rather, consciousness occurs as the simultaneity of a conscious act and its object.) Intentionality is often summed up as "aboutness." Whether this something that consciousness is about is in direct perception or in fantasy is inconsequential to the concept of intentionality itself; whatever consciousness is directed at, that is what consciousness is conscious of. This means that the object of consciousness doesn't have to be a physical object apprehended in perception: it can just as well be a fantasy or a memory. Consequently, these "structures" of consciousness, i.e., perception, memory, fantasy, etc., are called intentionalities.

The cardinal principle of phenomenology, the term intentionality originated with the Scholastics in the medieval period and was resurrected by Brentano who in turn influenced Husserl‘s conception of phenomenology, who refined the term and made it the cornerstone of his theory of consciousness. The meaning of the term is complex and depends entirely on how it is conceived by a given philosopher. The term should not be confused with ―intention‖ or the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious ―motive‖ or ―gain.‖

Intuition Intuition in phenomenology refers to those cases where the intentional object is directly present to the intentionality at play; if the intention is "filled" by the direct apprehension of the object, you have an intuited object. Having a cup of coffee in front of you, for instance, seeing it, feeling it, or even imagining it - these are all filled intentions, and the object is then intuited. The same goes for the apprehension of mathematical formulae or a number. If you do not have the object as referred to directly, the object is not intuited, but still intended, but then emptily. Examples of empty intentions can be signitive intentions - intentions that only imply or refer to their objects.

Evidence In everyday language, we use the word evidence to signify a special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a proposition: State A is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In phenomenology, however, the concept of evidence is meant to signify the "subjective achievement of truth." This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence to subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the structure of having something present in intuition with the addition of having it present as intelligible: "Evidence is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself."

Noesis and Noema Noema In Husserl's phenomenology, which is quite common, this pair of , derived from the Greek nous (mind), designate respectively the real content, noesis, and the ideal content, noema, of an intentional act (an act of consciousness). The Noesis is the part of the act that gives it a particular sense or character (as in judging or perceiving something, loving or hating it, accepting or rejecting it, and so on). This is real in the sense that it is actually part of what takes place in the consciousness (or psyche) of the subject of the act. TheNoesis is always correlated with a Noema; for Husserl, the full Noema is a complex ideal structure comprising at least a noematic sense and a noematic core. The correct interpretation of what Husserl meant by the Noema has long been controversial, but the noematic sense is generally understood as the ideal meaning of the act and the noematic core as the act's referent or object as it is meant in the act. One element of controversy is whether this noematic object is the same as the actual object of the act (assuming it exists) or is some kind of ideal object.

Empathy and Intersubjectivity Empathy and Intersubjectivity In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own body as another. While we often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that we focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as our intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's original , this was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of your own lived-body. Thelived body is your own body as experienced by yourself, as yourself. Your own body manifests itself to you mainly as your possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets you reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing your point of view. This helps you differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and

still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (you can touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you experience being touched). The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available - available to all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity is reduced to subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist position, cf. for instance intersubjective verifiability). In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences oneself as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences oneself as existing objectively for these Others; one experiences oneself as the noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject in another's empathic experience. As such, one experiences oneself as objectively existing subjectivity. Intersubjectivity is also a part in the constitution of one's lifeworld, especially as "homeworld."

Lifeworld Main article: Lifeworld The lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is the "world" each one of us lives in. One could call it the "background" or "horizon" of all experience, and it is that on which each object stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning it can only hold for us. The lifeworld is both personal and intersubjective (it is then called a "homeworld"), and, as such, it does not enclose each one of us in asolus ipse.

Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901) In the first edition of the Logical Investigations, still under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as "descriptive psychology." Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The first volume of the Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, begins with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e., the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic under psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy, and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.

Logical positivism Logical positivism (also known as logical empiricism, scientific philosophy, and neo-positivism) is a philosophy that combinesempiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology. It may be considered as a type of analytic philosophy. Logical positivism, in the formal sense, began from discussions of a group known as the First Vienna Circle which gathered during the earliest years of the 20th century in Vienna at the Café Central. After World War I, Hans Hahn, a member of that early group, helped bring Moritz Schlick to Vienna. Schlick's Vienna Circle, along with Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle, propagated the new doctrines more widely during the 1920s and early 1930s. It was Otto Neurath's advocacy that made the movement self-conscious and more widely known. A 1929 pamphlet written by Neurath, Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap summarized the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at that time. The doctrines included the opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; the rejection of metaphysics not as wrong but as having no meaning; a criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work; the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable by a single standard language of science; and above all the project of rational reconstruction, in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language.

During the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed, mainly because of political upheaval and the deaths of Hahn and Schlick. The most prominent proponents of logical positivism emigrated to the United Kingdom and the United States, where they influenced American philosophy considerably. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. Ultimately, it failed to solve many of the problems with which it was centrally concerned, and after the Second World War, its doctrines increasingly came under attack by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, Willard Van Orman Quine, J. L. Austin, Peter Strawson, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.

Summary During the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's formalism was developed by a group of philosophers in Vienna and Berlin, who formed the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle into a doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Logical positivism used formal logic to underpin an empiricist of our knowledge of the world. Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other of the Vienna Circle, claimed that the truths of logic and mathematics weretautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else was nonsense. The claims of ethics and aesthetics were subjective preferences. Theology and other metaphysics were pseudostatements, neither true nor false, simply meaningless nonsense. Karl Popper's insistence upon the role of falsification in the philosophy of science was a reaction to the logical positivists. With the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in and Austria, some of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled , mainly to Britain and the USA, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in the Anglophone world. Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a very limited function. For them, philosophy is concerned with the organization of thoughts, rather than having distinct topics of its own. The positivists adopted the principle of verificationism, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to

reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.

Themes Logical positivism was a movement without a fixed set of doctrines. The logical positivists held a wide range of views on many matters. Nonetheless, they were all interested in science and skeptical of theology and metaphysics. Early, most logical positivists proposed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. Many logical positivists endorsed forms of materialism, metaphysical naturalism, and empiricism. (See James Ladyman, Understanding Philosophy of Science, p. 147)

Verifiability criterion of meaning Perhaps the view for which the logical positivists are best known is the verifiability criterion of meaning, or verificationism. In one of its earlier and stronger formulations, this is the doctrine that a proposition is "cognitively meaningful" only if there is a finite procedure for conclusively determining its truth. An intended consequence of this opinion, for most logical positivists, is that metaphysical, theological, and ethical statements fail this criterion, and so are not cognitively meaningful. They distinguished cognitive from other varieties of meaningfulness (e.g. emotive, expressive, figurative), and most authors concede that the non-cognitive statements of the history of philosophy possess some other kind of meaningfulness. The positive characterization of cognitive meaningfulness varies from author to author. It has been described as the property of having a truth value, corresponding to a possible state of affairs, naming a proposition, or being intelligible or understandable in the sense in which scientific statements are intelligible or understandable.

Strong and weak verificationism In response to criticism of verificationism, A. J. Ayer proposed a weak version. In Language, Truth and Logic he defines the distinction between "strong" and "weak" verification: "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience." (Ayer 1946:50) It is this sense of verifiable that causes the problem of verification with negative existential claims and positive universal claims. However, the weak sense of verification states that a proposition is "verifiable... if it is possible for experience to render it probable" (ibid.). After establishing this distinction, Ayer claims that "no proposition, other than a tautology, can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis" (Ayer 1946:51), and therefore can only be subject to weak verification. This defense was controversial among logical positivists, some of whom touted strong verification, and claimed that general propositions were indeed nonsense.[

Analytic and synthetic knowledge Logical positivists divided knowledge into analytic and synthetic categories. Analytic knowledge, such as mathematical theorems, is tautological (it is entirely deducable from its presuppositions) and thus can be validated a priori. Synthetic knowledge, such as assertions about the real world, must be verified a posteriori by observation. Logical positivists rejected the existence of any synthetic a priori knowledge. (For example, the scientific progress of general relativity demonstrates that philosophers are wrong to pronounce a priori that space should have a Euclidean nature.) The analyticsynthetic distinction was attacked by Quine's 1951 paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Logical positivists also distinguished observational and theoretical . This distinction was criticised by Popper, who emphasised even basic observations as being "theory-laden".

Unified science Another characteristic feature of logical positivism is the commitment to "Unified Science"; that is, the development of a common language or, in Neurath's phrase, a "universal slang" in which all scientific

propositions can be expressed. The adequacy of proposals or fragments of proposals for such a language was often asserted on the basis of various "reductions" or "explications" of the of one special science to the of another, putatively more fundamental one. Sometimes these reductions consisted of set-theoretic manipulations of a few logically primitive concepts (as in Carnap's (1928) Logical Structure of the World); sometimes these reductions consisted of allegedly analytic or a priori deductive relationships (as in Carnap's Testability and Meaning). A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept.

History Origins The main influences on the early logical positivists were the positivist Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and the youngLudwig Wittgenstein. Mach's influence is most apparent in the logical positivists' persistent concern with metaphysics, the unity of science, and the interpretation of the theoretical of science, as well as the doctrines of reductionism and phenomenalism, later abandoned by many positivists. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a text of great importance for the positivists. The Tractatus introduced many doctrines which later influenced logical positivism, including the concept of philosophy as a "critique of language," and the possibility of making a theoretically principled distinction

between

intelligible

and

nonsensical

discourse.

The Tractatus also

adhered

to

acorrespondence theory of truth which the positivists adopted, although some, like Otto Neurath, preferred a form of coherentism. Wittgenstein's influence is also evident in certain formulations of the verification principle. Compare, for example, Proposition 4.024 of the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein asserts that we understand a proposition when we know what happens if it is true, with Schlick's assertion that "To state the circumstances under which a proposition is true is the same as stating its meaning." The tractarian doctrine that the truths of logic are tautologies was widely believed among the

logical positivists. Wittgenstein also influenced the logical positivists' interpretation of probability. According to Neurath, some logical positivists disliked the Tractatus, since they thought it included a great deal of metaphysics. Contemporary developments in logic and the foundations of mathematics, especially Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's monumental Principia Mathematica, impressed the more mathematically minded logical positivists such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap. "Language-planning" and syntactical techniques derived from these developments were used to defend logicism in the philosophy of mathematics and various reductionist theses. Russell's theory of types was employed to great effect in Carnap's early anti-metaphysical polemics. Immanuel Kant also had an important influence on the positivists, both positive and negative. Negatively, Kant was often scorned by the positivists in their early debates, and Kant's doctrine of synthetic a priori truths was the doctrine they most wished to discredit. However, Kant's opinions about the nature of physical objects pervaded the protocol sentence debate, and Kantian opinions of the relationship between philosophy and science were shared by the positivists to some degree.

Logical positivism in Positivism in is thought to have developed in response to Hegelian and neo-Hegelian metaphysics, which was a famous philosophy in .[18] Hegelian successors such as F.H. Bradley attempted to explain reality by postulating metaphysical entities that did not have any empirical basis. Logical positivists in response wanted to stop such metaphysical entities from being used as an explanation. Another, less well-known factor that encouraged logical positivism was the urgency of solving new philosophical problems raised by new scientific developments. The Vienna Circle under the influence of Moritz Schlick and the Berlin Circle under the influence of Hans Reichenbach consisted of scientists,

mathematicians, and scientists turned philosophers, who shared a common goal of solving new problems in the philosophy of science.

Influence Logical positivism spread throughout almost the entire western world. It was disseminated throughout the European continent. It was spread to Britain by the influence of A. J. Ayer. And later, it was brought to American universities by of the Vienna Circle after they fled Europe and settled in the United States during and after WWII. Logical positivism was essential to the development of early analytic philosophy. The term subsequently came to be almost interchangeable with "analytic philosophy" during the first half of the twentieth century. Logical positivism was immensely influential in thephilosophy of language. It represented the dominant philosophy of science between World War I and the Cold War.

Criticisms Early critics of logical positivism said that its fundamental tenets could not themselves be formulated consistently. The verifiability criterion of meaning did not seem verifiable; but neither was it simply a logical tautology, since it had implications for the practice of science and the empirical truth of other statements. This presented severe problems for the logical consistency of the theory.] Another problem was that universal claims (e.g. "(all) philosophers are mortal") are problematic in of verification.[20][21] The verifiability criterion was seen as being too strong. In its initial formulation, it made universal statements meaningless, and this was seen as a problem for science. This led to the weakening of the criterion. Witgenstein's principle of verifiability posed fairly obvious problems in any scientific context. No universal generalization can ever be verified. Perhaps independently, Karl Popper perceived the same problem… This led him to replace the requirement of verfiability with that of falsifiability, though only as a criterion to demarcate science from metaphysics, and not as one to be also used to demarcate

meaningful from meaningless claims. It is also unclear what the status of the principle itself is, that is, whether it is meaningful by its own criterion of meaningfulness. Carnap, as well as other of the Vienna Circle including Hahn and Neurath, realized that a weaker criterion of meaningfulness was necessary. Thus began the program of the "liberalization of empiricism." There was no unanimity within the Vienna Circle on this point. The differences between the are sometimes described as those between a conservative "right" wing, led by Schlick and Waismann, which rejected both the liberalization of empiricism and the epistemological antifoundationalism of the move [from phenomenalism] to physicalism, and a radical "left" wing, led by Neurath and Carnap, which endorsed the opposite views. The "left" wing also emphasized fallibilism and pragmatics; Carnap went far enough along this line to suggest that empiricism itself was a proposal to be accepted on pragmatic grounds. This difference also reflected political attitudes insofar as Neurath and, to a lesser extent, Carnp viewed science

as

a

tool

for

social

reform.

The precise formulation of what came to be called the criterion of cognitive significance took three decades (see Hempel 1950; Carnap 1956 and 1961)… In an important pair of papers, "Testability and Meaning," Carnap (1936-1937) replaced the requirement of verification with that of confirmation; at this stage, he made no attempt to quantify the latter. Individual replace sentences as the unit of meaning. Universal generalizations are no longer problematic; though they cannot be conclusively verified, they can yet be confirmed. Moreover, in "Testability and Meaning," theoretical no longer require explicit definition from observational ones in order to acquire meaning; the connection between the two may be indirect through a system of implicit definitions. Carnap also provides an important pioneering discussion of disposition predicates. —Sahotra Sarkar, The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia

Karl Popper's objection A well-known critic of logical positivism was Karl Popper, who published the book Logik der Forschung in 1934 (translated by himself asThe Logic of Scientific Discovery, published 1959). In it he argued that the positivists' criterion of verifiability was too strong a criterion for science, and should be replaced by a criterion of falsifiability. Popper thought that falsifiability was a better criterion because it did not invite the philosophical problems inherent in ing an inductive inference, and it allowed statements from the physical sciences which seemed scientific but which did not satisfy the verification criterion. Popper's concern was not with distinguishing meaningful from meaningless statements, but distinguishing scientific from metaphysical statements. Unlike the positivists, he did not claim that metaphysical statements must be meaningless; he also claimed that a statement which was "metaphysical" and unfalsifiable in one century (like the ancient Greek philosophy about atoms) could, in another century, be developed into falsifiable theories that have the metaphysical views as a consequence, and thus become scientific. Popper denied that science need rely on inductive reasoning, or that inductive reasoning actually exists, although most philosophers think it obvious that science does rely on it.

Hilary Putnam's objection According to Hilary Putnam, a former student of Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap, making an observational/theoretical

distinction

is

meaningless.

The

"received

view"

operates

on

the correspondence rule that states "The observational are taken as referring to specified phenomena or phenomenal properties, and the only interpretation given to the theoretical is their explicit definition provided by the correspondence rules." Putnam argues that introducing this dichotomy of observational and theoretical is the problem from which to start. Putnam demonstrates this with four objections:

1. Something is referred to as "observational" if it is observable directly with our senses. Then an observation term cannot be applied to something unobservable. If this is the case, there are no observation . 2. With Carnap's classification, some unobservable are not even theoretical and belong to neither observation nor theoretical . Some theoretical refer primarily to observation . 3. Reports of observation frequently contain theoretical . 4. A scientific theory may not contain any theoretical (an example of this is Darwin's original theory of evolution).

Subsequent objections from Quine and Kuhn Subsequent philosophy of science tends to use certain aspects of both of these approaches. Willard Van Orman Quine criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements and the reduction of meaningful statements to immediate experience. Work byThomas Kuhn has claimed that it is not possible to provide truth conditions for science independent of its historical paradigm. But even this criticism was not unknown to the logical positivists: Otto Neurath compared science to a boat which we must rebuild on the open sea.

Contemporary status within philosophy Key tenets of logical positivism, including its atomistic philosophy of science, the verifiability principle, and the fact–value distinction, came under attack after the Second World War by philosophers such as Nelson Goodman, Quine, J. L. Austin, and Peter Strawson. Nicholas G. Fotion comments that "By the late 1960s it became obvious that the movement had pretty much run its course." Most philosophers consider logical positivism to be, as John more expressed it, "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes". By the late 1970s, its ideas were so generally recognized to be seriously defective that one of its own main proponents,A. J. Ayer, could say in an interview: "I

suppose the most important [defect]...was that nearly all of it was false." It retains an important place in the history of analytic philosophy as the antecedent of contemporary philosophies, such as constructive empiricism,positivism, and postpositivism.