A. Kenny – A New History of Western Philosophy (4 Volumes)

Автор: A. Kenny
Название книги: A New History of Western Philosophy (4 Volumes)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Философия
Страницы: 364+353+371+364
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Sir Anthony Kenny here tells the fascinating story of the birth of philosophy and its remarkable flourishing in the ancient Mediterranean world. This is the initial volume of a four-book set in which Kenny will unfold a magisterial new history of Western philosophy, the first major single-author history of philosophy to appear in decades.
Ancient Philosophy spans over a thousand years and brings to life the great minds of the past, from Thales, Pythagoras, and Parmenides, to Socrates, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Augustine. The book's great virtue is that it is written by one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. Instead of an uncritical, straightforward recitation of known facts–Plato and his cave of shadows, Aristotle's ethics, Augustine's City of God–we see the major philosophers through the eyes of a man who has spent a lifetime contemplating their work. Thus we do not simply get an overview of Aristotle, for example, but a penetrating and insightful critique of his thought. Kenny offers an illuminating account of the various schools of thought, from the Pre-Socratics to the Epicureans. He examines the development of logic and reason, ancient ideas about physics (“how things happen”), metaphysics and ethics, and the earliest thinking about the soul and god.
Vividly written, but serious and deep enough to offer a genuine understanding of the great philosophers, Kenny's lucid and stimulating history will become the definitive work for anyone interested in the people and ideas that shaped the course of Western thought.

Why should one study the history of philosophy? There are many
reasons, but they fall into two groups: philosophical and historical.
We may study the great dead philosophers in order to seek illumination
upon themes of present-day philosophical inquiry. Or we may wish to
understand the people and societies of the past, and read their philosophy
to grasp the conceptual climate in which they thought and acted. We may
read the philosophers of other ages to help to resolve philosophical
problems of abiding concern, or to enter more fully into the intellectual
world of a bygone era.
In this history of philosophy, from the beginnings to the present
day, I hope to further both purposes, but in diVerent ways in diVerent
parts of the work, as I shall try to make clear in this Introduction. But
before outlining a strategy for writing the history of philosophy, one must
pause to reXect on the nature of philosophy itself. The word ‘philosophy’
means diVerent things in diVerent mouths, and correspondingly ‘the
history of philosophy’ can be interpreted in many ways. What it signiWes
depends on what the particular historian regards as being essential to
philosophy.
This was true of Aristotle, who was philosophy’s Wrst historian, and of
Hegel, who hoped he would be its last, since he was bringing philosophy to
perfection. The two of them had very diVerent views of the nature of
philosophy. Nonetheless, they had in common a view of philosophical
progress: philosophical problems in the course of history became ever
more clearly deWned, and they could be answered with ever greater
accuracy. Aristotle in the Wrst book of his Metaphysics and Hegel in his
Lectures on the History of Philosophy saw the teachings of the earlier philosophers
they recorded as halting steps in the direction of a vision they were
themselves to expound.
Only someone with supreme self-conWdence as a philosopher could
write its history in such a way. The temptation for most philosopher
historians is to see philosophy not as culminating in their own work, but
rather as a gradual progress to whatever philosophical system is currently in fashion. But this temptation should be resisted. There is no force that
guarantees philosophical progress in any particular direction.
Indeed, it can be called into question whether philosophy makes any
progress at all. The major philosophical problems, some say, are all still
being debated after centuries of discussion, and are no nearer to any
deWnitive resolution. In the twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein wrote:
You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same
philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still
troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why
it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always
introduces us to the same questions. . . . I read ‘philosophers are no nearer to the
meaning of ‘‘reality’’ than Plato got’. What an extraordinary thing! How remarkable
that Plato could get so far! Or that we have not been able to get any further!
Was it because Plato was so clever? (MS 213/424)
The diVerence between what we might call the Aristotelian and the
Wittgensteinian attitude to progress in philosophy is linked with two
diVerent views of philosophy itself. Philosophy may be viewed as a science,
on the one hand, or as an art, on the other. Philosophy is, indeed, uniquely
diYcult to classify, and resembles both the arts and the sciences.
On the one hand, philosophy seems to be like a science in that the
philosopher is in pursuit of truth. Discoveries, it seems, are made in
philosophy, and so the philosopher, like the scientist, has the excitement
of belonging to an ongoing, cooperative, cumulative intellectual venture. If
so, the philosopher must be familiar with current writing, and keep abreast
of the state of the art. On this view, we twenty-Wrst-century philosophers
have an advantage over earlier practitioners of the discipline. We stand, no
doubt, on the shoulders of other and greater philosophers, but we do stand
above them. We have superannuated Plato and Kant.
On the other hand, in the arts, classic works do not date. If we want to
learn physics or chemistry, as opposed to their history, we don’t nowadays
read Newton or Faraday. But we read the literature of Homer and Shakespeare
not merely to learn about the quaint things that passed through
people’s minds in far-oV days of long ago. Surely, it may well be argued, the
same is true of philosophy. It is not merely in a spirit of antiquarian
curiosity that we read Aristotle today. Philosophy is essentially the work of individual genius, and Kant does not supersede Plato any more than
Shakespeare supersedes Homer.
There is truth in each of these accounts, but neither is wholly true and
neither contains the whole truth. Philosophy is not a science, and there is
no state of the art in philosophy. Philosophy is not a matter of expanding
knowledge, of acquiring new truths about the world; the philosopher is
not in possession of information that is denied to others. Philosophy is not
a matter of knowledge, it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of
organizing what is known. But because philosophy is all-embracing, is so
universal in its Weld, the organization of knowledge it demands is something
so diYcult that only genius can do it. For all of us who are not
geniuses, the only way in which we can hope to come to grips with
philosophy is by reaching up to the mind of some great philosopher of
the past.
Though philosophy is not a science, throughout its history it has had an
intimate relation to the sciences. Many disciplines that in antiquity and in
the Middle Ages were part of philosophy have long since become independent
sciences. A discipline remains philosophical as long as its concepts
are unclariWed and its methods are controversial. Perhaps no scientiWc
concepts are ever fully clariWed, and no scientiWc methods are ever totally
uncontroversial; if so, there is always a philosophical element left in every
science. But once problems can be unproblematically stated, when concepts
are uncontroversially standardized, and where a consensus emerges
for the methodology of solution, then we have a science setting up home
independently, rather than a branch of philosophy.
Philosophy, once called the queen of the sciences, and once called their
handmaid, is perhaps better thought of as the womb, or the midwife, of the
sciences. But in fact sciences emerge from philosophy not so much by
parturition as by Wssion. Two examples, out of many, may serve to
illustrate this.