Introduction to the History of Western Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff, part 1 of 50

and i want to begin by asking you to imagine that you've just taken a trip to mars and you encounter on mars a race of men who are just like us in all physical and psychological respects and you observe one peculiar thing about them namely that they walk around on their hands only this is utterly senseless their hands are torn and bleeding their hearts are pounding their faces are flushed this is a misery invoking widespread insanity your first question would be why what could explain this kind of behavior now hold that in mind and take a look at our world on earth if you look at the realm of art you will see that the dominant school represents smears which marianne series divides into two categories the neat ones and the messy ones you'll see that music of modern music represents a progression of unintelligible noises and that a good deal of modern literature and unintelligible succession of letters of the alphabet that the theater alternates between characters and garbage cans and taking part in orgies with the audience in the realm of education you will see that teachers are militantly against teaching and in favor of social adjustment and or student power that they are opposed to facts or the teaching of laws that they regard thinking as abnormal and that they tell little johnny to express his feelings with the result that he cannot read if you look at the realm of religion you will see that there are some 300 warring sects all claiming their insight into the appropriate other dimension by means of revelation and then one of the crucial conflicts in the field is in the between the orient to where they worship various types of animal and the west where they worship the pope uh you'll see the latest development in christian theology in a validly christian theology is atheism the view that god is dead and in the age of atomic energy and space travel we hear excerpts from genesis broadcast from outer space if you look to the realm of science modern science one school tells us that cause and effect no longer holds another tells us that the theory of light has refuted the law of identity most all of them tell us that science is based on arbitrary presuppositions just like religion and no more objectively valid many tell us that there are no such thing as laws simply statistics and a few chime in but one of the latest discoveries is that electrons can move from one place to the other without traversing the space in between this is a brief sample what are the net results of this rampant irrationality well if you look at it psychologically you will see that the percentage of neurosis and psychosis in the west has reached epidemic proportions if you look at it politically you will see the escalating violence the threat of nuclear war the spreading worldwide slavery the vicious senseless political murders and the inexorable march on the part of the west toward some version of fascism or communism if you want a philosophic barometer of the state of a culture there are three questions that will tell it to you what do people regard as certain what do they regard as realistic and what do they regard as human we are told today that nothing is certain but death and taxes and the skeptics aren't even sure of that we are told that the characters of tennessee williams or the ones inhabiting garbage cans are realistic but cyrano de bergerac is not we would be told that eleanor roosevelt is human but john gald is not now i submit that this is crazier than the example of mars that i begin with and that the question therefore is why but it's more complex than that because there are great things good things rational things in the world and particularly in western civilization there are the rational elements left in modern science which is an enormous achievement there is the legacy of the industrial revolution there is the remnants of america's individualist political heritage and the remnants of 19th century romantic art side by side with all the rest how are we to understand it all how are we to understand such an incredible mixture if you want a symbol that is no more eloquent than ten thousand others that could be used what i think of myself as a symbol of this mixture is a new york city skyscraper with everything that implies with a 13-story label 14. because 13 is an unlucky number this is a symbol of the mixture of modern technology and ancient numerological mysticism now why there have been better periods in the past why didn't they last where will we look for an explanation of it all the answer is the history of philosophy if you want to know why consider an analogy suppose that you were a psychotherapist and you had a patient an individual of mixed premises partly rational partly irrational and he was accordingly tortured stumbling groping and you want to understand him the first thing you would have to do is understand the cause of his troubles you have to understand what are his bad premises and why he holds them how he came to hold and then you would have to guide him to uproot his bad premises and substitute correct ones in their state to do this the crucial thing you would have to do is probe the patient's past because his present can be fully understood only as a development and resultant of his past because he is one continuous entity he builds conclusions on conclusions and to understand the crucial events in his past life is therefore urgent you have to understand those events the conclusions he drew from you have to see how and why across the course of his development he was led to form and accept certain errors and then to build upon them thereby compounding his original problems progressively stifling his better premises making himself more and more twisted confused helpless in a word you would have to reconstruct the main points of the man's intellectual development from childhood on now this analogy applies to an entire culture to stand in for the neurotic of mixed premises is western civilization the world you live in the stand-in for the psychiatrist is each one of you you live in this culture your lives and futures depend in thousands of ways on its future if you pursue values in this world you have a responsibility to your own lives and values to correct the course of the world to put it on the right track again fight for your values in a world such as ours you must regard yourself as the psychotherapist of an entire culture and just as in the case of an individual so and even more so in the case of an entire civilization it develops across time its present state at any given time cannot be understood except as an outgrowth from its past the errors of today are built on the errors of the last century and they in turn on the previous and so on back to the childhood of the western world which is ancient greece to understand what exactly are the root errors of today's world why these errors developed how how they clashed with and are progressively submerging its good premises and therefore to understand what to do to cure the patient you have to reconstruct the intellectual history of the western world i don't want to take the time now to give you many examples i'll give you just schematically one consider the phenomenon of progressive education to which i allude how would you explain that except by reference to john dewey but dewey simply applied to education the principles of william james and james simply made an obvious deduction from hegel and hegel is a minor variant on kant and kant was trying to answer hume who was the last consistent consequence of the trend inaugurated by descartes and locke who were simply reformulating in the somewhat more secular way the principles of augustine who was simply reformulating in a somewhat more religious way the principles of plato who was trying to answer the dilemma posed by heraclitus and parmenides who took off from four sentences of thales with which we are beginning tonight the history of philosophy is like a philosophical psychotherapist's biographical report of a civilization and it is therefore a precondition to understanding and therefore to changing the nature and present course of the civilization that's the first and primary purpose of any course on the history of philosophy and there is a second the history of philosophy is not like the history of science it is not simply a historical antiquarian interest it is not a dead subject the only issues that a history of philosophy properly deals with are living fundamental issues perennial issues of philosophy and in the course of a proper history of philosophy you have presented to you all the main positions on all the main questions that have ever been formulated in western philosophy and consequently it is valuable in its own terms as an introduction to the whole subject of philosophy in particular it's helpful because i will not only present to you the conclusions of the various philosophers but also the arguments that they offer in favor of these conclusions almost all of the philosophic errors which are undermining the world were originally and still today are advanced by their supporters with an array of arguments claiming to prove that the viewpoint in question is true and in fact these viewpoints could not have acquired the power that they have over people's minds if they didn't have this structure of apparently supporting arguments which gives the errors at least the appearance of plausibility and rationality so if you are to fight the errors you have to know clearly the main arguments advanced forth you have to in effect hear the devil's case presented as strongly as that case permits which is not too strong but still you have to be sure you know on each issue what really is true and what is wrong with the arguments advanced for the erroneous view if you don't know this then you are not in a position to fight successfully against the errors and therefore i am going to in each case present as strongly as i can the arguments by which the various views are defended by their supporters particularly those arguments which are still widespread in terms of their public acceptance today and at the appropriate point i will present to you the criticism in each case where objectivism disagrees for the opening lectures i will defer all criticism my criticisms will essentially come either in the section on aristotle who took care of a great many errors or in the last lecture on the objectivist answer where i'll take care of everything that hasn't been covered up to that point in the end therefore i hope you have not only an increased understanding of the causes of today's world but a philosophic arsenal to help you combat successfully what needs combating and to defend what needs to fit now this is a history of philosophy so it will be appropriate very briefly to tell you what philosophy consists of i will not take time to dictate these slowly if anyone wants these exact definitions ask during the question period and i'll take the time there the word philosophy comes from two greek words fellain meaning to love and sophia meaning wisdom so etymologically it means the love of wisdom and at the very beginning it was the subject which you were in if you were in anything there was no other subject anybody who loved wisdom and wanted to acquire knowledge was by that fact a lover of wisdom he was a philosopher the ancient philosophers therefore all had views on things that we would not now regard as philosophy but as science such as physics mathematics biology etc but progressively as each of these disciplines acquired a certain stock of information on its own it split off and set up shop on its own mathematics was the first to do so and subsequently many hundreds of years later physics and chemistry and so on therefore what is philosophy as we use the term today well essentially it consists of five main divisions one is metaphysics and that is the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of the universe as a whole w-h-o-l-e metaphysics embraces two types of question one what are the main ingredients of the universe is there another dimension or only this one is there only matter or is there also mind or is there only mind or one and the second type of question under metaphysics are there any laws which are true of everything which exists of everything for instance some philosophers say the law of cause and effect is true of everything and therefore is metaphysical epistemology the branch of philosophy which defines the nature and means of human knowledge it is concerned with all questions on the order how do you know you know what does knowledge begin with are the senses valid does man have some means of knowledge over and above the senses for instance reason if so what is reason how does it operate if you say by logic what does it mean to be logical if you say by concepts what are concepts and how are they related to sense experience if you say man has some faculty of knowledge over and above reason in the senses then what faculty for instance faith revelation lsd women's intuition etc what are the claims of any of those candidates two means of uh knowledge can man acquire knowledge is there anything outside his province of knowledge etching all that is epistemology now there is an offshoot of metaphysics and epistemology uh which is helpful to know just for purposes of ancient philosophy and that's something we can call philosophical psychology it's not really a separate branch of philosophy it really is the application of metaphysics and epistemology to a philosopher's view of the nature of man the basic philosophical nature of man not experimental observations which would be scientific psychology but philosophical psychology and that would deal with such questions as does man have free will or is he determined what is the relationship between reason and emotions things of that order we will in presenting plato and aristotle i will present their views of man under the title of their psychology although if you want you can call that simply the application of their metaphysics and epistemology to the theory of the nature of men then there is of course ethics or morality i'll use the two terms as synonymous and as an audience of students of objectivism you surely know what that is the branch of philosophy concern to define a code of values to guide human choices and actions but then there is politics the application of ethics to social questions the branch of philosophy which defines the proper nature of society and particularly the proper functions of government and you of course know what that is and then there is aesthetics which is the branch of philosophy concerned with art the nature and purpose of art and the standards by which it is to be objectively evaluated we will not discuss aesthetics except very peripherally in this course we'll concentrate on the big four metaphysics and epistemology being the base of any philosophy ethics being the application to how an individual should live politics being the application of ethics to social questions philosophy therefore really consists of three basic questions what is there that's metaphysics how do you know that's epistemology and so on that's ethics and politics if you wanted an overall definition of philosophy i would simply repeat it all in one sentence as follows philosophy is the subject which studies the nature of the universe and of man's means of knowing the universe and which on this basis provides a code of values to guide human actions and institutions now in the early days of philosophy they did not have complete systems of philosophy with organized views in all of these branches they had only isolated ideas on separate individual questions at least so far as we know from the few fragments that remain to us the first overall systematic philosopher who has views of an organized kind in every branch is plato thereafter all major philosophers have systematic philosophies now one more word before we plunge in regarding the chronological division of the history of philosophy so you have a perspective to know what's coming so you don't sit in suspense wondering who's coming next the history of philosophy is divided into three broad periods ancient medieval and modern ancient is dated from the 6th century bc until about the 6th century a. d a period of about 10 1200 years it's officially declared to be dead in 529 a.

d when all of the pagan non-christian schools were formally closed and non-christian philosophy was prohibited in the west medieval philosophy is the period when christian philosophy dominates the scene and it picks up two or three hundred years after jesus around the fourth fifth century a. d and uh dominates the field entirely until the renaissance in the 15th century a. d so there's a thousand years and then modern philosophy is the period from the renaissance 15th century to the present by convention the present century the one in which you live is called contemporary philosophy which we will not get to in this course since we stopped in the 18th century now you see that gives us a big program we have about 2 400 years to cover from the 6th bc to the 1800s and we have 12 lectures so that averages 200 years per lecture we can be thankful though for the dark ages because we'll cover hundreds in one second now within ancient philosophy there are four main divisions there are a group of people of whom we know very little that came before socrates and who are therefore very logically called the pre-socratics uh in most of these people we do not know when they were born or when they died but simply that they were alive and kicking in some year and that is called their floor you with f-l-o-r-u-i-t which means they were flourishing in this year and that's you assume that they were born 30 or 40 or 50 years earlier and or died 30 or 40 50 years after it we don't have any connected works from this period except little excerpts we have fragments from the father of philosophy thales we have four sentences from heraclitus we have 130 and so on and that of course is enormously difficult to interpret but we don't have to worry about the academic difficulties there and we'll be on those tonight and next week then we come to two philosophers who are really a unit socrates who is 469 to 399 bc plato's teacher and then plato 427 to 347 bc so i say we'll treat those as one unit regarding socrates as simply uh a man who gave plato some very uh seminal ideas which he proceeded to develop then aristotle 384 to 322 bc plato's pupil for 20 years who then developed a philosophic system diametrically opposed to plato and then a group of second-rate philosophers stretching across hundreds of years as ancient philosophy waned and died they included the followers of epicurus the stoics skeptics neoplatonists and sunday others and they are collectively called post-aristotelians the winding up phase of ancient philosophy and we cover all of those in one evening here medieval philosophy has two main eras there is uh the augustinian period augustine himself is 354 to 430 a.

d and he represents the attempt to develop christianity on a platonous basis and that dominates the scene for hundreds and hundreds of years until about the time of the second main era which is the thomystic era of medieval philosophy under the influence of thomas aquinas who is 1225-1274 and he represents the attempt to combine christianity with the philosophy of aristotle thereby as we shall see opening the door to the collapse of christian influence and the development of the renaissance the 15th and 16th centuries have nothing of any interest they simply represent the time when the modern world went back to school to study ancient philosophy and find out what had happened that they have lost knowledge of during the medieval period so a modern philosophy of any distinctive kind begins again in the 17th century and divides into two famous schools the one fathered by rene descartes in the 17th century uh and we will see him and his followers that's called the rationalist school i'll explain the term as we get there and the one followed by john locke reaching its climax and david hume the final one in this course the empiricist school that is a chronological survey of what to expect would you elaborate on the definition of philosophy explaining why the five main branches you included are grouped together while psychology mathematics etc are omitted yes there are two common denominators to the five main branches one is the universality of their scope and the second is their necessity as guides to human action any human action philosophy is above all else the all-embracing subject metaphysics studies the entire universe not just any one species or subdivision not just matter or mind or life but everything epistemology does not ask how do you acquire knowledge of physics or chemistry or astronomy or of cooking but of everything and the same for the other branches ethics does not ask how should a tailor a butcher or a candle maker live but how should any man live how should any government be organized how should any work of art be judged in this sense philosophy the essential element of all of them is that they are universal not specialized which is why philosophy deals with the kind of issues that anybody can think about it does not require specialized information of one particular subcategory of reality the other common denominator is they are all these branches that i mentioned provide indispensable guides to action metaphysics of course does not directly tell you how to live but it gives you the precondition the nature of reality but every other branch tells you how to act epistemology says do this if you want to know ethics says do this in your choices politics says do this in your government aesthetic says do this in your art and therefore the essence of philosophy is telling man how to function conceptually existentially socially aesthetically those are the two common denominators in contrast all the so-called special sciences psychology mathematics etc are either restricted to one subcategory of reality like human behavior which psychology used to describe today describes rats or mathematics which is restricted to quantitative relations or whatever it happens to be and they are not normative they do not tell you how you should behave in any field but simply describe the way things are yes i better clarify that statement i said last time that in philosophy no special knowledge of any one area of reality was required i didn't say that as a defining characteristic but a consequence of the fact that philosophic principles are universal you can find them anywhere so it's not that you don't have to know anything about reality but wherever you look for instance whatever you look at it is what it is and so you can get the law of identity from peaches or art or battleships you see so it's not that you don't have to look at reality but you can find philosophic principles anywhere precisely because they're universal now you raised the question well what about aesthetics don't you have to know about music to have a philosophy of music and about painting to have a philosophy of painting obviously yes but then that is already applied philosophy that is specialized philosophy that is a union of abstract philosophy which is what i was defining in a particular field now as soon as you start to apply philosophy to a particular area you obviously have to have specialized knowledge of that area if you're going to have a philosophy of education epistemology by itself will not give it to you it'll give you the base but then you have to think what kind of curriculum is proper and what age should children be taught what and with what motive and etc if you're going to have a philosophy of law politics will give you the base but it won't tell you what should the constitution say and how many sessions of congress should there be and how many houses of congress should there be and you know who owns the oil rights to what kind of land and etc so you have to know a great deal of particular material and the same is obviously chewing philosophy of music or philosophy of science whatever it happens to be i was talking about philosophy abstractly the basic branches not the detailed applications are philosophical psychology and epistemology synonyms no philosophical psychology in the sense that i use it in this course is the philosophical theory of the nature of man his basic nature and it essentially includes questions such as does man have free will or not or is he determined does uh he is he motivated by purpose or is it simply a mechanistic being are emotions basically opposite to the reason or is there some relationship between the two etc now all of those questions in a way are really resolved in metaphysics and epistemology so philosophical psychology as we use the term in this course is simply the application to the theory of man of your conclusions in metaphysics and epistemology it's not really a separate subject it's just a convenient pedagogical device epistemology of course is specifically the theory of the nature and means of knowledge it will have an effect on your view of man but it's not exactly the same thing it will have a crucial effect if you say that reason is impotent you'll have a sophist type view of man or some equivalent but that doesn't mean that it's exactly the same thing do i recommend any history of philosophy text for this course well i can recommend readings uh i wouldn't want to go in great length for it with it but i was certainly happy to recommend readings that you can do if you wish the course doesn't presuppose them the best introductory history of philosophy that i know is a history of western philosophy by w.