History of Philosophy: An Introduction
Before tackling any philosophical question, Aristotle would always consider the history of the question and try to find a “middle way” between extremes. (ItP) Therefore, in order to truly develop our philosophical reasoning skills, we ought to go over the history of each philosophical question.
Jacques Maritain says that initially religion and philosophy were confused — the former intends to give man truths that are higher than himself, which he cannot attain by reason alone, but the latter is based truly on reason. However, in the Indian, Persian, and Chinese schools, philosophy often came bundled with a religion. It was only the Greeks who recognized that philosophy was a separate science from religion.
Some of the problems that these philosophers grappled with are:
The Problem of Being: What is the nature of being? Why do things exist?
The Problem of Change: Why and how do things change from one form to another?
The Problem of Evil: Why does evil exist?
All these are perennial problems, which all philosophies, in all times have to answer. These are primarily metaphysical problems, which is to say that they deal with the deepest questions of being and reality.
But why are these problems? Let us analyze each question.
Being: Our senses tell us that things exist. But why do things exist rather than not exist? This is in, different senses, both a religious and philosophical question, which is why Hinduism and the Persian Manicheanism have different creation myths in order to explain this problem. In addition, the precise nature of being is not really known. What does it mean for something to exist? What is the nature of “being” itself, without any characteristics attached to it? This is the most profound question in all of philosophy.
Change: Our sense tell us that things change from one form to another. Water boils, condenses, and freezes. Rivers flow. But what are things exactly made of, and what are the laws governing the change of phenomena? This may seem to be completely covered by the natural sciences, but the natural sciences only give us the laws governing physical phenomena, not the nature of the phenomenon itself. In Greece, this would give us the physicist Heraclitus, who claimed that nothing was permanent and that one could not step in the same river twice, and the heroic Parmenides of Elea, who grasped the nature of being and bravely denied change itself.
Evil: Finally, there is the problem of evil. This is self-explanatory. Why is there evil in the world? Why do people do bad things, and why do unfortunate events befall both good and bad people alike? This is primarily a religious question, but it influenced the development of philosophy through Manicheanism and Plato’s theory of sin. In addition, philosophy is a useful tool to more precisely understand the truths of religion, particularly in such tricky problems like this.
For this series, the plan is to give an overview of philosophy, from Hinduism to the Major Socratics, Plato and Aristotle.