Get a Grip on Philosophy

New Edition

Neil Turnbull

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780486497372
• eBook ISBN: 9780486783246
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Don't know Socrates from Sartre? Can't handle Kant? This lively introduction traces the history of Western philosophy, from the works of Plato and Aristotle to those of Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault. Easy-to-understand explanations cover all branches of philosophy, illustrating changing interpretations of the meaning of life and outlining key ideas of famous thinkers.
Author Neil Turnbull offers memorable examples and analogies, injecting a playful modern tone into potentially obscure subjects. Loaded with sidebars, comic illustrations, and bulleted points, the book's reader-friendly format offers digestible portions from a banquet of philosophical traditions, including thought-provoking tastes of works by Aquinas, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Hume, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and many others.

CHAPTER 1

MAGIC AND METAPHYSICS

Where then, did philosophical forms of questioning originate? How did they relate to the pre-philosophical world that gave birth to them? These are important questions and at the moment the answers to them are highly controversial. Some have suggested that philosophical inquiry has its roots in Indian culture, especially in the Vedic traditions that were eventually to give root to Hinduism and Buddhism (that latter being a religion that in fact is more like a philosophy than a religion in the strict sense). Others have suggested an Egyptian and/or Babylonian origin. However, such claims are highly speculative, and at the moment we are forced to accept the orthodox view that the first philosophers, at least in the way the term has been defined here, were Greek. Thus although other civilizations can lay claim to their own forms of wisdom, the wisdom that we term philosophy is probably essentially Greek in origin and so it is the Greeks who have most directly bequeathed to the West its most valued intellectual inheritance.

STANLEY CAVELL

The modern American philosopher Stanley Cavell has claimed that philosophical questions are a response to a real experience that can take hold of human beings at anytime. However, it was the ancient Greeks who were the first to clearly articulate these experiences and to systematically try to find answers to the questions they seemed to raise.

IT STARTED IN THE MED

Some 2,700 years ago in the Greek colonies of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor (in what is now Turkey) there emerged a particular (and for the time highly peculiar) way of thinking about humans and their wider environment that was to have an enormous influence on the future course of world history. For some reason, that is still unclear, certain individuals began to ask radically different kinds of questions. To put the matter very simply, certain individuals began to wonder about the nature of existence and ask where everything comes from and what everything, essentially, is. More specifically they asked themselves the most basic, and most difficult, metaphysical question – why is there anything at all? Metaphysics thus begins with the thoughts of these ancient Greeks and the questions originally asked by these early philosophers still appear philosophically relevant today. Even those of us who value our more technically precise modern intellectual sensibilities can still find something intellectually important in these early philosophizings.

I am the walrus

ANCIENT MAGIC

Ancient magic worked according to two principles: mimesis, or the idea that a person could take on the power of a particular person or thing by imitating it, and contagion, that the power of a particular person or thing could be transmitted by simple contact with it.

a time before philosophy

MAGIC AND MYTH

Prior to the arrival of Greek thinking in Europe, it probably fair to say that people’s thoughts were largely shaped by myths and that their thinking was basically magical rather than rational. By this, I don’t mean that pre-philosophical peoples went around performing silly tricks of various kinds. No, what I am suggesting here is that they viewed the world as populated by hidden mysterious occult powers — a pantheon of spirits, influences, ‘Gods,’ ‘demi-Gods’ and their various messengers and helpers. These beings were believed to communicate with people indirectly, via dreams, signs and omens. In pre-philosophical cultures, objects were not just things that stand apart but beings imbued with intentions of various kinds, and it was believed possible to influence these objects by means of appropriately ritualized forms of thought. There was no rational discussion possible between humans and this spirit world as the spirits generally weren’t listening, but there were ‘techniques’ through which they could be made to listen and ultimately ‘bought off.’ Moreover, these forces had the power to determine an individual’s life, and the only way to ensure safety and security was to placate them – often by means of sacrifice, sometimes human sacrifice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this culture was by and large a culture of fear, and was a long way from the culture of confident questioning engendered by philosophy that remains at the core of many cultures to this day. But it was also a culture where such fears could be overcome by specific practices, especially practices associated with wishing and wishing away.

a shaman

MAGIC AND REASON

In magical cultures, it was widely believed that you could alter the world just by thinking about it in a specific way. The basic form of thought in this respect was the wish. In magical cultures, to wish for something to happen was to create a context where it might happen and to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Dover Edition
• Introduction: The Question of Philosophy
• Chapter 1: Magic and Metaphysics
• Chapter 2: Truth and Opinion
• Chapter 3: God and the Universe
• Chapter 4: The Rise of the Technocrats
• Chapter 5: Romantics and Revolutionaries
• Chapter 6: Endgames
• Chapter 7: The Return of the Good
• Index