A brief history of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny in 2019
1. Philosophy in its infancy
1.1 The Milesians
1.2 Xenophanes
1.3 Heraclitus
1.4 The school of Parmenides
1.5 Empedocles
1.6 The Atomists
2. The Athens of Socrates
2.1 The Athenian Empire
2.2 Anaxagoras
2.3 The sophists
2.4 Socrates
2.5 The Euthyphro
2.6 The Crito
2.7 The Phaedo
3. The philosophy of Plato
3.1 Life and works
3.2 The theory of ideas
3.3 Plato’s republic
3.4 The Theaetetus and the Sophist
4. The system of Artistotle
4.1 Plato’s pupil, Alexander’s teacher
4.2 The foundation of logic
4.3 The theory of drama
4.4 Moral philosophy: virtue and happiness
4.5 Moral philosophy: wisdom and understanding
4.6 Politics
4.7 Science and explanation
4.8 Words and things
4.9 Motion and change
4.10 Soul, sense, and intellect
5. Greek philosophy after Aristotle
5.1 The Hellenistic Era
5.2 Epicureanism
5.3 Stoicism
5.4 Scepticism
5.5 Rome and its empire
5.6 Jesus of Nazareth
5.7 Christianity and Gnosticism
5.8 Neo-Platonism
6. Early Christian philosophy
6.1 Arianism and Orthodoxy
6.2 The theology of incarnation
6.3 The life of Augustine
6.4 The City of God and the Mystery of Grace
6.5 Boethius and Philoponus
7. Early Medieval philosophy
7.1 John the Scot
7.2 Alkindi and Avicenna
7.3 The Feudal system
7.4 Saint Anselm
7.5 Abelard and Heloise
7.6 Abelard’s logic
7.7 Abelard’s ethics
7.8 Averroes
8. Philosophy in the Thirteenth century
8.1 An age of innovation
8.2 Sain Bonaventure
8.3 Thirteenth-Century logic
8.4 Aquinas’ life and works
8.5 Aquinas’ natural theology
8.7 Aquinas on essence and existence
8.8 Aquinas’ Philosophy of Mind
8.9 Aquinas’ Moral Philosophy
9. Oxford philosophers
9.1 The Fourteenth-Century University
9.2 Duns Scotus
9.3 Ockham’s logic of language
9.4 Ockham’s political theory
9.6 The Oxford calculators
9.7 John Wyclif
10. Renaissance philosophy
10.1 The renaissance
10.2 Free-will: Rome vs. Louvain
10.3 Renaissance Platonism
10.4 Machiavelli
10.5 More’s Utopia
10.7 Post-Reformation Philosophy
10.8 Bruno and Galileo
10.9 Francis Bacon
11. The age of Descartes
11.1 The wars of religion
11.2The life of Descartes
11.3 The doubt and the Cogito
11.4 The essence of mind
11.5 God, mind, and body
11.6 The material world
12. English philosophy in the Seventeenth Century
12.1 The Empiricism of Thomas Hobbes
12.2 Hobbes’ political philosophy
12.3 The political theory of John Locke
12.4 Locke on ideas and qualities
12.5 Substances and persons
13. Continental philosophy in the age of Louis XIV
13.1 Blaise Pascal
13.2 Spinoza and Malebranche
13.3 Leibniz
14. British philosophy in the Eighteenth century
14.1 Berkeley
14.2 Hume’s Philosophy of Mind
14.3 Hume on causation
14.4 Reid and Common Sense
15. The Enlightenment
15.1 The Philosophes
15.2 Rousseau
15.3 Revolution and romanticism
16. The critical philosophy of Kant
16.1 Kant’s Copernican Revolution
16.2 The Transcendental Aesthetic
16.2 The Transcendental Analytic: The Deduction of the Categories
16.3 The Transcendental Dialectic: The Paralogisms of Pure Reason
16.4 The Transcendental Dialectic: The Antinomies of Pure Reason
16.5 The Transcendental Dialectic: The Critique of Natural Theology
16.6 Kant’s Moral Philosophy
17. German Idealism and Materialism
17.1 Fichte
17.2 Hegel
- The subject matter of logic is the Absolute, the totality of reality, familiar to us from earlier philosophers as Being. We start from the thesis that the Absolute is pure Being. But pure Being without any qualities is nothing; so we are led to the antithesis ‘The Absolute is nothing’. This thesis and antithesis are overcome by synthesis: the union of Being and Unbeing is becoming, and so we say ‘The Absolute is Becoming’.
- Hegel does make use of Aristotle’s definition of God when he describes the Absolute as being the Thought which thinks itself. But it turns out that the self-awareness of the Absolute comes at the end, not at the beginning, of this life-cycle, and it is brought into existence by the philosophical reflection of human beings. It is the history of philosophy which brings the Absolute face to face with itself.
17.3 Marx and the Young Hegelians
- Marx divided the past, present, and future history of the relations of production into six phases: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and ultimate communism
- He based this conclusion on two economic theories: the labour theory of value, and the theory of surplus value.
- Under capitalism, however, prices in the market are determined not by true value, but by supply and demand. The capitalist, who owns the raw material and the means of production, having paid the worker a wage equal to his day’s subsistence, say 1, can often sell the product for many times that sum, say 10. The difference between the subsistence wage and the market price is the surplus value, in this case 9. Under capitalism, no part ofthis surplus value is returned to the worker, it is all pocketed by the employer. The effect is that only one-tenth ofthe labourer’s work is for his own benefit; nine-tenths of it is just to produce profit for the capitalist.
17.4 Capitalism and its discontents
18. The Utilitarians
18.1 Jeremy Bentham
18.2 The Utilitarianism of J.S. Mill
18.3 Mill’s Logic
19. Three Nineteenth-Century Philosophers
19.1 Schopenhauer
19.2 Kierkegaard
19.3 Nietzsche
20. Three Modern Masters
20.1 Charles Darwin
20.2 John Henry Newman
20.3 Sigmund Freud
21. Logic and the foundations of mathematics
21.1 Frege’s logic
21.2 Frege’s logicism
21.3 Frege’s philosophy of logic
21.4 Russell’s paradox
21.5 Russell’s theory of descriptions
21.6 Logical analysis
22. Continental philosophy in the early twentieth century
22.1 Henri Bergson
22.2 Husserl’s phenomenology
22.3 The existentialism of Heidegger
22.4 The existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir
23. The philosophy of Wittgenstein
23.1 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Its central doctrine is the picture theory of meaning. According to this theory, language consists of propositions which picture the world. Propositions are the perceptible expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are logical pictures of facts; the world is the totality of facts.
23.2 Logical positivism
23.3 Philosophical investigations
24. Recent continental philosophy
24.1 The Frankfurt School
24.2 Jacques Derrida
25. Recent analytic philosophy
25.1 Elizabeth Anscombe
25.2 W.V.O. Quine
25.3 Donald Davidson
- a satisfactory theory of meaning must give an account of how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words
25.4 Peter Geach
25.5 Peter Strawson
25.7 The Cartesian revival
- Philosophers who have been convinced by Wittgenstein see qualia as just the latest example of the ineffable private experiences that the private language argument was supposed to have killed off. But certainly in the United States many philosophers appear comfortable with the idea, and it has been passed on also to neuroscientists, many of whom have thereby become unconscious dualists. Many philosophers and psychologists believe that the task of a scientific theory of the mind is to establish a principle of correlation between the occurrence of mental states and processes and the occurrence of states and processes in the brain. This correlation would only be a possibility if mental events (e.g. thoughts, or flashes of understanding) were them? selves measureable in the way in which physical events are measurable.
25.8 Analytical ethics
25.9 John Rawls
- Mainstream, systematic philosophy aims at truth, but there is another form of philosophy that aims at self-formation, which Rorty styles ‘edification’. Edification is a project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking. Edifying philosophers are sceptical about systematic philosophy.
- ‘Great systematic philosophers, like great scientists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation.’
- one can concede to [Rorty] that Descartes did great damage to philosophy by giving it an epistemological turn without agreeing that the damage is irreparable. It is, in fact, possible to return to the pre-Cartesian, Aristotelian conception of human nature, and it is perfectly arguable that this was what that great edifier Wittgenstein actually achieved.
- ‘What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the understanding, but of the will. The job to be done is really a job on oneself.’