The philosophic spirit has persisted as part of the human spirit and human culture for over twenty-five centuries. This book presents examples of this spirit from its beginnings in Greek thought through the modern age. Among these examples are an account of Empedocles jumping into the volcano of Mt. Etna to join the gods, Plato's quarrel with the poets, St. Anselm's famous argument for the existence of God, Descartes's Archimedean proof of his own existence, and Kant's description of the perfect island of the Understanding. Attention is also given to Cassirer's concept of symbolic forms and Whitehead's theory of actual entities. The volume concludes with a discussion, based on the thought of Giambattista Vico, of a way to approach philosophy through a balance between the Ancient and the Moderns.
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Table of contents
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Note on Interlinear Citations
- Introduction: The Inscriptions at Delphi
- Part One Beginnings
- 1 Hesiod’s Muses
- 2 Thales of Miletus
- 3 Pythagoras of Samos
- 4 Empedocles of Agrigentum
- Part Two Ancients
- 5 Socrates’s Method
- 6 Plato’s Quarrel
- 7 Aristotle’s Ethics
- 8 Lucretius’s Poem
- Part Three Christians
- 9 Boethius’s Consolation
- 10 Anselm’s Argument
- 11 Cusanus’s Learned Ignorance
- 12 Bruno’s Infinite Worlds
- Part Four Moderns
- 13 Descartes’s Archimedean Point
- 14 Hobbes’s Leviathan
- 15 Vico’s Poetic Wisdom
- 16 Rousseau’s Promethean Discourse
- 17 Kant’s Schematism
- 18 Hegel’s Speculative Sentence
- 19 Cassirer’s Symbolic Forms
- 20 Whitehead’s Actual Entities
- Epilogue: Ancients and Moderns
- Works Cited