A History of Western Philosophy

600 BCE – 400

Ancient Greece & Rome

What is the first principle of all things?

In the sixth century BCE, thinkers in Miletus on the Ionian coast began explaining nature by natural causes rather than by myth. Thales said everything comes from water. The answer looks naive now, but the way of asking changed everything: the world was treated as a whole that reason could grasp.

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400 – 1400

The Middle Ages

How can faith and reason live together?

After the western Roman Empire collapsed, most Greek philosophical texts were lost to the Latin world. Augustine had already grafted Platonism onto Christianity; Boethius, writing in prison, composed the Consolation of Philosophy and preserved a beginner's logic for later centuries.

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1400 – 1600

The Renaissance

Man is the maker of himself.

Fifteenth-century Italy rediscovered the classical texts and rediscovered the human being. In the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico has God tell Adam that he may shape himself into whatever he chooses. It was a new beginning: humanity was no longer just one link in the chain of creation.

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1600 – 1800

The Early Modern Age

I think, therefore I am.

Seventeenth-century philosophers watched the new science being born and set out to relay the foundations of knowledge. Descartes began from universal doubt and found one point that could not be doubted: the thinking self. Spinoza and Leibniz followed the rationalist road, building systems with the rigour of geometry.

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1800 – 1900

The Nineteenth Century

History marches on; God is dead.

After Kant, the German idealists refused the limits reason had drawn for itself. Fichte began from the I, Schelling turned to nature, and Hegel made all of history the process by which Spirit comes to know itself. His system was vast enough to suffocate, and it provoked a century of revolt.

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1900 – present

The Twentieth Century to Today

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Twentieth-century philosophy split into two rivers that barely spoke to each other. In the English-speaking world Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein defined philosophy's task as the clarification of language and logic, the Vienna Circle set out to sweep every unverifiable proposition out the door, and Quine and Kripke later invited metaphysics back in.

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