A Little History of Philosophy
Nigel WarburtonEn Eski A Little History of Philosophy Sözleri ve Alıntıları
En Eski A Little History of Philosophy sözleri ve alıntılarını, en eski A Little History of Philosophy kitap alıntılarını, etkileyici sözleri 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.The Man Who Asked Questions
,
Socrates and Plato
"About 2,400 years ago in Athens a man was put to death for
asking too many questions. There were philosophers before
him, but it was with Socrates that the subject really took off. If
philosophy has a patron saint, it is Socrates."
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True Happiness, Aristotle
‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’
"You might think this
phrase comes from William Shakespeare or another great poet.
It sounds as if it should. In fact it’s from Aristotle’s book The
Nicomachean Ethics, so called because he dedicated it to his son
Nicomachus."
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We Know Nothing
,
Pyrrho
"No one knows anything – and even that’s not certain. You
shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might be
mistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted.
The best option, then, is to keep an open mind. Don’t commit,
and you won’t be disappointed. That was the main teaching of
Scepticism, a philosophy that was popular for several hundred
years in Ancient Greece and later in Rome. Unlike Plato and
Aristotle, the most extreme sceptics avoided holding firm opin-
ions on anything whatsoever. The Ancient Greek Pyrrho (c.
365–c. 270 bc) was the most famous and probably the most
extreme sceptic of all time. His life was decidedly odd."
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The Garden Path, Epicurus
"Imagine your funeral. What will it be like? Who’ll be there?
What will they say? What you are imagining must be from your
own perspective. It’s as if you are still there watching events
from a particular place, perhaps from above, or from a seat
among the mourners. Now, some people do believe that that is
a serious possibility, that after death we can survive outside a
physical body as a kind of spirit that might even be able to see
what’s going on in this world. But for those of us who believe
death is final, there is a real problem. Every time we try and
imagine not being there we have to do it by imagining that we
are there, watching what is happening when we’re not there."
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Learning Not to Care
;
Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca
"If it starts to rain just as you have to leave your house, that is
unfortunate. But if you have to go out, apart from putting on a
raincoat or getting your umbrella, or cancelling your appoint-
ment, there isn’t much you can do about it. You can’t stop the
rain no matter how much you want to. Should you be upset
about this? Or should you just be philosophical? ‘Being philo-
sophical’ simply means accepting what you can’t change. What
about the inevitable process of growing older and the shortness
of life? How should you feel about these features of the human
condition? Same again?"
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Who Is Pulling Our Strings?
Augustine
"Augustine (354–430) desperately wanted to know the truth. As
a Christian, he believed in God. But his belief left many ques-
tions unanswered. What did God want him to do? How should
he live? What should he believe? He spent most of his waking
life thinking and writing about these questions. The stakes were
very high. For people who believe in the possibility of spending
eternity in hell, making a philosophical mistake can seem to
have terrible consequences. As Augustine saw it, he might end
up burning in sulphur for ever if he was wrong. One problem he
agonized over was why God allowed evil in the world. The
answer he gave is still a popular one with many believers."
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The Consolation of Philosophy
,
Boethius
"If you were in prison awaiting execution would you spend your
last days writing a philosophy book? Boethius did. It turned out
to be the most popular book that he wrote."
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The Perfect Island
,
Anselm and Aquinas
"We all have an idea of God. We understand what ‘God’ means,
whether or not we believe that God actually exists. No doubt
you are thinking about your idea of God now. That seems
very different from saying that God actually exists. Anselm
(c.1033–1109), an Italian priest who later became Archbishop of
Canterbury, was unusual in that with his Ontological Argument
he claimed to show that, as a matter of logic, the fact that we
have an idea of God proves that God actually exists."
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The Fox and the Lion
,
Niccolò Machiavelli
"Imagine you are a prince ruling a city-state such as Florence or
Naples in sixteenth-century Italy. You have absolute power. You
can issue an order and it will be obeyed. If you want to throw
someone into jail because he has spoken out against you, or
because you suspect him of plotting to kill you, you can do that.
You have troops ready to do whatever you tell them. But you are
surrounded by other city-states run by ambitious rulers who
would love to conquer your territory. How should you behave?
Should you be honest, keep your promises, always act with
kindness, think the best of people?"
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Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Thomas Hobbes
"Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was one of England’s greatest
political thinkers. What’s less well known is that he was also an
early fitness fanatic. He would go out for a long walk every
morning, striding quickly up hills so as to get out of breath. In
case he had any good ideas while out he had a special stick
made with an inkwell in the handle. This tall, red-faced,
cheerful man with a moustache and a little wispy beard had
been a sickly child. But as an adult he was extremely healthy and
played real tennis into old age. He ate lots of fish, drank very
little wine, and used to sing – behind closed doors, and out of
earshot – to exercise his lungs. And, of course, like most philos-
ophers, he had a highly active mind. The result was that he lived
to 91, an exceptional age for the seventeenth century when
average life expectancy was 35."
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Could You Be Dreaming?
René Descartes
"You hear the alarm, turn it off, crawl out of bed, get dressed,
have breakfast, get ready for the day. But then something unex-
pected happens: you wake up and realize that it was all just a
dream. In your dream you were awake and getting on with life,
but in reality you were still curled up under the duvet snoring
away. If you’ve had one of these experiences you’ll know what I
mean. They’re usually called ‘false awakenings’ and they can be
very convincing. The French philosopher René Descartes
(1596–1650) had one and it set him thinking. How could he be
sure that he wasn’t dreaming?"
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Place Your Bets
Blaise, Pascal
"If you toss a coin it can come up heads or tails. There is a 50/50
chance of either, unless the coin has a bias. So it doesn’t really
matter which side you bet on as it is just as likely each time you
toss the coin that heads will come up as tails. If you aren’t sure
whether or not God exists, what should you do? Is it like tossing
a coin? Should you gamble on God not existing, and live your
life as you please? Or would it be more rational to act as if God
does exist, even if the odds on this being true are very long?
Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who did believe in God, thought hard
about this question."
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The Lens Grinder
,
Baruch Spinoza
"Most religions teach that God exists somewhere outside
the world, perhaps in heaven. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)
was unusual in thinking that God is the world. He wrote
about ‘God or Nature’, to make this point – meaning that the
two words refer to the same thing. God and nature are two
ways of describing a single thing. God is nature and nature is
God. This is a form of pantheism – the belief that God is every-
thing. It was a radical idea that got him into quite a lot of
trouble."
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The Prince and the Cobbler
,
John Locke and Thomas Reid
"What were you like as a baby? If you have one, look at a photo-
graph taken at the time. What do you see? Was that really you?
You probably look quite different now. Can you remember what
it was like being a baby? Most of us can’t. We all change over
time. We grow, develop, mature, decline, forget things. Most of
us get wrinklier, eventually our hair turns white or falls out, we
change our views, our friends, our dress sense, our priorities. In
what sense, then, will you be the same person as that baby when
you are old? This question of what makes someone the same
person over time is one that vexed the English philosopher John
Locke (1632–1704)."
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The Elephant in the Room
,
George Berkeley (and John Locke)
"Have you ever wondered if the light really does go off when you
shut the fridge door and no one can see it? How could you tell?
Perhaps you could rig up a remote camera. But then what
happens when you turn the camera off? What about a tree
falling in a forest where no one can hear it? Does it really make
a noise? How do you know your bedroom continues to exist
unobserved when you aren’t in it? Perhaps it vanishes every
time you go out. You could ask someone else to check for you.
The difficult question is: does it carry on existing when nobody
is observing it? It’s not clear how you could answer these ques-
tions. Most of us think that objects do continue to exist unob-
served because that is the simplest explanation. Most of us too
believe that the world we observe is out there somewhere: it
doesn’t just exist in our minds."
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