An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, 20th Anniversary Edition

Anthony Kenny

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119452805
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In 1998, the first edition of Anthony Kenny's comprehensive history of Western philosophy was published, to be met with immediate praise and critical acclaim. As the first book since Bertrand Russell's 1945 A History of Western Philosophy to offer a concise single-author review of the complete history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the modern masters of the 20 th century, Kenny's work fills a critical gap in the modern philosophy reading list and offers valuable guidance for the general reader of philosophy—an ideal starting point for anyone with an interest in great thinkers and the family lines of philosophical evolution.

Widely considered to be one of the most thorough and accessible historical reviews in philosophy, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy has earned an estimable and distinctive reputation, both for the compelling writing style of Anthony Kenny, one of the most respected and accomplished living philosophers, and for the rich collection of paintings, illustrations, maps, and photos included with every chapter to complement this review of 2, 500 years of philosophical thought.

Newly revised and expanded for a special 20 th anniversary publication, the latest edition of An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy contains all of Kenny's original writings on the history of Western philosophy from ancient to modern, along with new writings on the philosophy of the mid-20 th century, covering important contributions from continental philosophers and philosophers of the post-Wittgenstein anglophone tradition, including the work of many women who have too often been neglected by the historical record.

I
Philosophy in Its Infancy

The earliest Western philosophers were Greeks: men who spoke dialects of the Greek language, who were familiar with the Greek poems of Homer and Hesiod, and who had been brought up to worship Greek Gods like Zeus, Apollo, and Aphrodite. They lived not on the mainland of Greece, but in outlying centres of Greek culture, on the southern coasts of Italy or on the western coast of what is now Turkey. They flourished in the sixth century BC, the century which began with the deportation of the Jews to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar and ended with the foundation of the Roman Republic after the expulsion of the young city's kings.

These early philosophers were also early scientists, and several of them were also religious leaders. In the beginning the distinction between science, religion, and philosophy was not as clear as it became in later centuries. In the sixth century, in Asia Minor and Greek Italy, there was an intellectual cauldron in which elements of all these future disciplines fermented together. Later, religious devotees, philosophical disciples, and scientific inheritors could all look back to these thinkers as their forefathers.

Pythagoras, who was honoured in antiquity as the first to bring philosophy to the Greek world, illustrates in his own person the characteristics of this early period. Born in Samos, off the Turkish coast, he migrated to Croton on the toe of Italy. He has a claim to be the founder of geometry as a systematic study (see Figure 1). His name became familiar to many generations of European schoolchildren because he was credited with the first proof that the square on the long side of a right-angled triangle is equal in area to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. But he also founded a religious community with a set of ascetic and ceremonial rules, the best-known of which was a prohibition on the eating of beans. He taught the doctrine of the transmigration of souls: human beings had souls which were separable from their bodies, and at death a person's soul might migrate into another kind of animal. For this reason, he taught his disciples to abstain from meat; once, it is said, he stopped a man whipping a puppy, claiming to have recognized in its whimper the voice of a dear dead friend. He believed that the soul, having migrated into different kinds of animal in succession, was eventually reincarnated as a human being. He himself claimed to remember having been, some centuries earlier, a hero at the siege of Troy.

Figure 1 The Pythagoreans discovered the relationships between frequency and pitch in the notes of the octave scale, as shown in this diagram held up for Pythagoras in Raphael's School of Athens. (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, USA/Bridgeman Images)

The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was called in Greek ‘metempsychosis’. Faustus, in Christopher Marlowe's play, having sold his soul to the devil, and about to be carried off to the Christian Hell, expresses the desperate wish that Pythagoras had got things right.

Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true

This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd

Unto some brutish beast.

Pythagoras' disciples wrote biographies of him full of wonders, crediting him with second sight and the gift of bilocation, and making him a son of Apollo.

The Milesians

Pythagoras' life is lost in legend. Rather more is known about a group of philosophers, roughly contemporary with him, who lived in the city of Miletus in Ionia, or Greek Asia. The first of these was Thales, who was old enough to have foretold an eclipse in 585. Like Pythagoras, he was a geometer, though he is credited with rather simpler theorems, such as the one that a circle is bisected by its diameter. Like Pythagoras, he mingled geometry with religion: when he discovered how to inscribe a right-angled triangle inside a circle, he sacrificed an ox to the gods. But his geometry had a practical side: he was able to measure the height of the pyramids by measuring their shadows. He was also interested in astronomy: he identified the constellation of the little bear, and pointed out its use in navigation. He was, we are told, the first Greek to fix the length of the year as 365 days, and he made estimates of the sizes of the sun and moon.

Thales was perhaps the first philosopher to ask questions about the structure and nature of the cosmos as a whole. He maintained that the earth rests on water, like a log floating in a stream. (Aristotle asked, later: what does the water rest on?) But earth and its inhabitants did not just rest on water: in some sense, so Thales believed, they were all made out of water. Even in antiquity, people could only conjecture the grounds for this belief: was it because all animals and plants need water, or because the seeds of everything are moist?

Because of his theory about the cosmos Thales was called by later writers a physicist or philosopher of nature (‘physis’ is the Greek word for ‘nature’). Though he was a physicist, Thales was not a materialist: he did not, that is to say, believe that nothing existed except physical matter. One of the two sayings which have come down from him verbatim is ‘everything is full of gods’. What he meant is perhaps indicated by his claim that the magnet, because it moves iron, has a soul. He did not believe in Pythagoras' doctrine of transmigration, but he did maintain the immortality of the soul.

Thales was no mere theorist. He was a political and military adviser to King Croesus of Lydia, and helped him to ford a river by diverting a stream. Foreseeing an unusually good olive crop, he took a lease on all the oil-mills, and made a fortune. None the less, he acquired a reputation for unworldly absent-mindedness, as appears in a letter which an ancient fiction-writer feigned to have been written to Pythagoras from Miletus:

Thales has met an unkind fate in his old age. He went out from the court of his house at night, as was his custom, with his maidservant to view the stars, and forgetting where he was, as he gazed, he got to the edge of a steep slope and fell over. In such wise have the Milesians lost their astronomer. Let us who were his pupils cherish his memory, and let it be cherished by our children and pupils.

A more significant thinker was a younger contemporary and pupil of Thales called Anaximander, a savant who made the first map of the world and of the stars, and invented both a sundial and an all-weather clock. He taught that the earth was cylindrical in shape, like a section of a pillar. Around the world were gigantic tyres, full of fire; each tyre had a hole through which the fire could be seen, and the holes were the sun and moon and stars. The largest tyre was twenty-eight times as great as the earth, and the fire seen through its orifice was the sun. Blockages in the holes explained eclipses and the phases of the moon. The fire within these tyres was once a great ball of flame surrounding the infant earth, which had gradually burst into fragments which enrolled themselves in bark-like casings. Eventually the heavenly bodies would return to the original fire.

The things from which existing things come into being are also the things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement of time.

Here physical cosmogony is mingled not so much with theology as with a grand cosmic ethic: the several elements, no less than men and gods, must keep within bounds everlastingly fixed by nature.

Though fire played an important part in Anaximander's cosmogony, it would be wrong to think that he regarded it as the ultimate constituent of the world, like Thales' water. The basic element of everything, he maintained, could be neither water nor fire, nor anything similar, or else it would gradually take over the universe. It had to be something with no definite nature, which he called the ‘infinite’ or ‘unlimited’. ‘The infinite is the first principle of things that exist: it is eternal and ageless, and it contains all the worlds.’

Anaximander was an early proponent of evolution. The human beings we know cannot always have existed, he argued. Other animals are able to look after themselves, soon after birth, while humans require a long period of nursing; if humans had originally been as they are now they could not have survived. He maintained that in an earlier age there were fish-like animals within which human embryos grew to puberty before bursting forth into the world. Because of this thesis, though he was not otherwise a vegetarian, he preached against the eating of fish.

The infinite of Anaximander was a concept too rarefied for some of his successors. His younger contemporary at Miletus, Anaximenes, while agreeing that the ultimate element could not be fire or water, claimed that it was air, from which everything else had come into being. In its stable state, air is invisible, but when it is moved and condensed it becomes first wind and then cloud and then water, and finally water condensed becomes mud and stone. Rarefied air, presumably, became fire, completing the gamut of the elements. In support of his theory, Anaximenes appealed to experience: ‘Men release both hot and cold from their mouths; for the breath is cooled when it is compressed and condensed by the lips, but when the mouth is relaxed and it is exhaled it becomes hot by reason of its rareness.’ Thus rarefaction and condensation can generate everything out of the underlying air. This is naive, but it is naive science: it is not mythology, like the classical and biblical stories of the flood and of the rainbow.

Anaximenes was the first flat-earther: he thought that the heavenly bodies did not travel under the earth, as his predecessors had claimed, but rotated round our heads like a felt cap. He was also a flat-mooner and a flat-sunner: ‘the sun and the moon and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness’.

Xenophanes

Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were a trio of hardy and ingenious speculators. Their interests mark them out as the forebears of modern scientists rather more than of modern philosophers. The matter is different when we come to Xenophanes of Colophon (near present-day Izmir), who lived into the fifth century. His themes and methods are recognizably the same as those of philosophers through succeeding ages. In particular he was the first philosopher of religion, and some of the arguments he propounded are still taken seriously by his successors.

Xenophanes detested the religion found in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, whose stories blasphemously attributed to the gods theft, trickery, adultery, and all kinds of behaviour that, among humans, would be shameful and blameworthy. A poet himself, he savaged Homeric theology in satirical verses, now lost. It was not that he claimed himself to possess a clear insight into the nature of the divine; on the contrary, he wrote, ‘the clear truth about the gods no man has ever seen nor any man will ever know’. But he did claim to k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Philosophy in Its Infancy
• Chapter II: The Athens of Socrates
• Chapter III: The Philosophy of Plato
• Chapter IV: The System of Aristotle
• Chapter V: GREEK PHILOSOPHY AFTER ARISTOTLE
• Chapter VI: Early Christian Philosophy
• Chapter VII: Early Medieval Philosophy
• Chapter VIII: Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century
• Chapter IX: Oxford Philosophers
• Chapter X: Renaissance Philosophy
• Chapter XI: The Age of Descartes
• Chapter XII: English Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century
• Chapter XIII: Continental Philosophy in the Age of Louis XIV
• Chapter XIV: British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter XV: The Enlightenment
• Chapter XVI: The Critical Philosophy of Kant
• Chapter XVII: German Idealism and Materialism
• Chapter XVIII: The Utilitarians
• Chapter XIX: Three Nineteenth-Century Philosophers
• Chapter XX: Three Modern Masters
• Chapter XXI: Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics
• Chapter XXII: Continental Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century
• Chapter XXIII: The Philosophy of Wittgenstein
• Chapter XXIV: Recent Continental Philosophy
• Chapter XXV: Recent Analytic Philosophy
• Afterword
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Ebook plates
• Index
• End User License Agreement