极简哲学史 A Quick History of Philosophy - 2

Medieval Philosophy

After about the 4th or 5th Century A.D., Europe entered the so-called Dark Ages, during which little or no new thought was developed. By the 11th Century, though, there was a renewed flowering of thought, both in Christian Europe and in Muslim and Jewish Middle East. Most of the philosophers of this time were mainly concerned with proving the existence of God and with reconciling Christianity/Islam with the classical philosophy of Greece (particularly Aristotelianism). This period also saw the establishment of the first universities, which was an important factor in the subsequent development of philosophy.

Among the great Islamic philosophers of the Medieval period were Avicenna (11th century, Persian) and Averröes (12th century, Spanish/Arabic). Avicenna tried to reconcile the rational philosophy of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism with Islamic theology, and also developed his own system of Logic, known as Avicennian Logic. He also introduced the concept of the "tabula rasa" (the idea that humans are born with no innate or built-in mental content), which strongly influenced later Empiricists like John Locke. Averröes's translations and commentaries on Aristotle (whose works had been largely lost by this time) had a profound impact on the Scholastic movement in Europe, and he claimed that Avicenna's interpretations were a distortion of genuine Aristotelianism. The Jewish philosopher Maimonidesalso attempted the same reconciliation of Aristotle with the Hebrew scripturesaround the same time.

The Medieval Christian philosophers were all part of a movement called Scholasticism which tried to combine Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology and semantics (the theory of meaning) into one discipline, and to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers (particularly Aristotle) with Christian theology. The Scholastic method was to thoroughly and critically read the works of renowned scholars, note down any disagreements and points of contention, and then resolve them by the use of formal Logic and analysis of language. Scholasticism in general is often criticized for spending too much time discussing infinitesimal and pedantic details (like how many angels could dance on the tip of a needle, etc).

St. Anselm (best known as the originator of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God by abstract reasoning alone) is often regarded as the first of the Scholastics, and St. Thomas Aquinas (known for his five rational proofs for the existence of God, and his definition of the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues) is generally considered the greatest, and certainly had the greatest influence on the theology of the Catholic Church. Other important Scholasticsincluded Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Each contributed slight variations to the same general beliefs - Abelard introduced the doctrine of limbo for unbaptized babies; Scotus rejected the distinction between essence and existence that Aquinas had insisted on; Ockham introduced the important methodological principle known as Ockham's Razor, that one should not multiply arguments beyond the necessary; etc.

Roger Bacon was something of an exception, and actually criticized the prevailing Scholastic system, based as it was on tradition and scriptural authority. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of Empiricism (the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience) and of the modern scientific method.

The revival of classical civilization and learning in the 15th and 16th Centuryknown as the Renaissance brought the Medieval period to a close. It was marked by a movement away from religion and medieval Scholasticism and towards Humanism(the belief that humans can solve their own problems through reliance on reasonand the scientific method) and a new sense of critical inquiry.

Among the major philosophical figures of the Renaissance were: Erasmus (who attacked many of the traditions of the Catholic Church and popular superstitions, and became the intellectual father of the European Reformation); Machiavelli (whose cynical and devious Political Philosophy has become notorious); Thomas More (the Christian Humanist whose book "Utopia" influenced generations of politicians and planners and even the early development of Socialist ideas); and Francis Bacon (whose empiricist belief that truth requires evidence from the real world, and whose application of inductive reasoning - generalizations based on individual instances - were both influential in the development of modern scientific methodology).

Early Modern Philosophy

The Age of Reason of the 17th Century and the Age of Enlightenment of the **18th Century **(very roughly speaking), along with the advances in science, the growth of religious tolerance and the rise of liberalism which went with them, mark the real beginnings of modern philosophy. In large part, the period can be seen as an ongoing battle between two opposing doctrines, Rationalism (the belief that all knowledge arises from intellectual and deductive reason, rather than from the senses) and Empiricism (the belief that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience).

This revolution in philosophical thought was sparked by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, the first figure in the loose movement known as Rationalism, and much of subsequent Western philosophy can be seen as a responseto his ideas. His method (known as methodological skepticism, although its aim was actually to dispel Skepticism and arrive at certain knowledge), was to shuck off everything about which there could be even a suspicion of doubt (including the unreliable senses, even his own body which could be merely an illusion) to arrive at the single indubitable principle that he possessed consciousness and was able to think ("I think, therefore I am"). He then argued (rather unsatisfactorily, some would say) that our perception of the world around us must be created for us by God. He saw the human body as a kind of machine that follows the mechanical laws of physics, while the mind (or consciousness) was a quite separate entity, not subject to the laws of physics, which is only able to influence the body and deal with the outside world by a kind of mysterious two-way interaction. This idea, known as Dualism (or, more specifically, Cartesian Dualism), set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the "mind-body problem" for centuries after. Despite Descartes' innovation and boldness, he was a product of his times and never abandoned the traditional idea of a God, which he saw as the one true substance from which everything else was made.

The second great figure of Rationalism was the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza, although his conception of the world was quite different from that of Descartes. He built up a strikingly original self-contained metaphysical system in which he rejected Descartes' Dualism in favor of a kind of Monism where mind and body were just two different aspects of a single underlying substance which might be called Nature(and which he also equated with a God of infinitely many attributes, effectively a kind of Pantheism). Spinoza was a thoroughgoing Determinist who believed that absolutely everything (even human behavior) occurs through the operation of necessity, leaving absolutely no room for free will and spontaneity. He also took the Moral Relativist position that nothing can be in itself either good or bad, except to the extent that it is subjectively perceived to be so by the individual (and, anyway, in an ordered deterministic world, the very concepts of Good and Evil can have little or no absolute meaning).

The third great Rationalist was the German Gottfried Leibniz. In order to overcome what he saw as drawbacks and inconsistencies in the theories of Descartes and Spinoza, he devised a rather eccentric metaphysical theory of monads operating according to a pre-established divine harmony. According to Leibniz's theory, the real world is actually composed of eternal, non-material and mutually-independent elements he called monads, and the material world that we see and touch is actually just phenomena (appearances or by-products of the underlying real world). The apparent harmony prevailing among monads arises because of the will of God(the supreme monad) who arranges everything in the world in a deterministic manner. Leibniz also saw this as overcoming the problematic interaction between mind and matter arising in Descartes' system, and he declared that this must be the best possible world, simply because it was created and determined by a perfect God. He is also considered perhaps the most important logician between Aristotle and the mid-19th Century developments in modern formal Logic.

Another important 17th Century French Rationalist (although perhaps of the second order) was Nicolas Malebranche, who was a follower of Descartes in that he believed that humans attain knowledge through ideas or immaterial representations in the mind. However, Malebranche argued (more or less following St. Augustine) that all ideas actually exist only in God, and that God was the only active power. Thus, he believed that what appears to be "interaction" between body and mind is actually caused by God, but in such a way that similar movements in the body will "occasion" similar ideas in the mind, an idea he called Occasionalism.

In opposition to the continental European Rationalism movement was the equally loose movement of British Empiricism, which was also represented by three main proponents.

The first of the British Empiricists was John Locke. He argued that all of our ideas, whether simple or complex, are ultimately derived from experience, so that the knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely limited both in its scopeand in its certainty (a kind of modified Skepticism), especially given that the real inner natures of things derive from what he called their primary qualities which we can never experience and so never know. Locke, like Avicenna before him, believed that the mind was a tabula rasa (or blank slate) and that people are born without innate ideas, although he did believe that humans have absolute natural rightswhich are inherent in the nature of Ethics. Along with Hobbes and Rousseau, he was one of the originators of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical underpinning for democracy, republicanism, Liberalismand Libertarianism, and his political views influenced both the American and French Revolutions.

The next of the British Empiricists chronologically was Bishop George Berkeley, although his Empiricism was of a much more radical kind, mixed with a twist of Idealism. Using dense but cogent arguments, he developed the rather counter-intuitive system known as Immaterialism (or sometimes as Subjective Idealism), which held that underlying reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas, and that individuals can only directly know these ideas or perceptions (although not the objects themselves) through experience. Thus, according to Berkeley's theory, an object only really exists if someone is there to see or sense it ("to be is to be perceived"), although, he added, the infinite mind of God perceives everything all the time, and so in this respect the objects continue to exist.

The third, and perhaps greatest, of the British Empiricists was David Hume. He believed strongly that human experience is as close are we are ever going to get to the truth, and that experience and observation must be the foundations of any logical argument. Hume argued that, although we may form beliefs and make inductive inferences about things outside our experience (by means of instinct, imagination and custom), they cannot be conclusively established by reason and we should not make any claims to certain knowledge about them (a hard-line attitude verging on complete Skepticism). Although he never openly declared himself an atheist, he found the idea of a God effectively nonsensical, given that there is no way of arriving at the idea through sensory data. He attacked many of the basic assumptions of religion, and gave many of the classic criticisms of some of the arguments for the existence of God (particularly the teleological argument). In his Political Philosophy, Hume stressed the importance of moderation, and his work contains elements of both Conservatism and Liberalism.

Among the "non-aligned" philosophers of the period (many of whom were most active in the area of Political Philosophy) were the following:

• Thomas Hobbes, who described in his famous book "Leviathan" how the natural state of mankind was brute-like and poor, and how the modern state was a kind of "social contract" (Contractarianism) whereby individuals deliberately give up their natural rights for the sake of protection by the state (accepting, according to Hobbes, any abuses of power as the price of peace, which some have seen as a justification for authoritarianism and even Totalitarianism);
• Blaise Pascal, a confirmed Fideist (the view that religious belief depends wholly on faith or revelation, rather than reason, intellect or natural theology) who opposed both Rationalism and Empiricism as being insufficient for determining major truths;
• Voltaire, an indefatigable fighter for social reform throughout his life, but wholly cynical of most philosophies of the day, from Leibniz's optimism to Pascal's pessimism, and from Catholic dogma to French political institutions;
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose discussion of inequality and whose theory of the popular will and society as a social contract entered into for the mutual benefit of all (Contractarianism) strongly influenced the French Revolutionand the subsequent development of Liberal, Conservative and even Socialisttheory;
• Adam Smith, widely cited as the father of modern economics, whose metaphor of the "invisible hand" of the free market (the apparent benefits to society of people behaving in their own interests) and whose book "The Wealth of Nations" had a huge influence on the development of modern Capitalism, Liberalism and Individualism; and
• Edmund Burke, considered one of the founding fathers of modern Conservatism and Liberalism, although he also produced perhaps the first serious defense of Anarchism.

Towards the end of the Age of Enlightenment, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant caused another paradigm shift as important as that of Descartes 150 years earlier, and in many ways this marks the shift to Modern philosophy. He sought to move philosophy beyond the debate between Rationalism and Empiricism, and he attempted to combine those two apparently contradictory doctrines into one overarching system. A whole movement (Kantianism) developed in the wake of his work, and most of the subsequent history of philosophy can be seen as responses, in one way or another, to his ideas.

Kant showed that Empiricism and Rationalism could be combined and that statements were possible that were both synthetic (a posteriori knowledge from experience alone, as in Empiricism) but also a priori (from reason alone, as in Rationalism). Thus, without the senses we could not become aware of any object, but without understanding and reason we could not form any conception of it. However, our senses can only tell us about the appearance of a thing (phenomenon) and not the "thing-in-itself" (noumenon), which Kant believed was essentially unknowable, although we have certain innate predispositions as to what exists (Transcendental Idealism). Kant's major contribution to Ethics was the theory of the Categorical Imperative, that we should act only in such a way that we would want our actions to become a universal law, applicable to everyone in a similar situation (Moral Universalism) and that we should treat other individuals as ends in themselves, not as mere means (Moral Absolutism), even if that means sacrificing the greater good. Kant believed that any attempts to prove God's existence are just a waste of time, because our concepts only work properly in the empirical world (which God is above and beyond), although he also argued that it was not irrational to believe in something that clearly cannot be proven either way(Fideism).