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Zusammenfassung von A Brief History of Thought

Name: A Brief History of Thought
Rating: 4.3 (269 reviews)
Author: Luc Ferry

Luc Ferry

A Philosophical Guide to Living

4.3 (269 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

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Westliche Philosophie Theoretische Philosophie Ethik & Moral Stoizismus

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A Brief History of Thought
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What’s in it for me? Learn about the twists and turns of Western philosophy through the ages.

For anyone starting out with philosophy, it’s easy to get disheartened. Incomprehensible jargon, long-winded sentences and a jumble of abstract ideas often obscure precious insights into what it means to be human and how we should live our lives – like trying to admire a beautiful view through a dirty window.

But these blinks offer you a sure and simple path through that morass, taking Western thought’s most complex and vital ideas and distilling them into language that everyone can understand. Starting with ancient Greek conceptions of the universe and finishing with the rise of contemporary humanism, you will learn about all the major phases in Western philosophy’s development.

More than that, these blinks will show you how different philosophical schools have applied their wisdom concretely, enabling adherents to overcome their fear of death and live happier, more content and more meaningful lives.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

how philosophy and religion are similar;
why Christianity supplanted Greek philosophy; and
how Friedrich Nietzsche ushered in a new age of thinking.

Philosophy has three primary dimensions.

To outline the history of philosophy, we must understand what it is – how it works, and what it seeks to achieve.

So, what is philosophy?

Unfortunately, there’s no universally accepted definition – philosophers are a notoriously opinionated and argumentative group. But we can arrive at a satisfactory description with a bit of thought.

To begin with, humans are, in philosophical language, finite beings: mortal creatures occupying a limited patch of space and time. And, unlike other animals, we’re aware of these limits. A dog or lion, for instance, has no advance knowledge of their death. They’re only concerned with the present moment. But humans live knowing that they – and their loved ones – will inevitably die.

This shadow of death forces us to contemplate what to do with our fleeting time on Earth. It also instills us with deep terror – fear of losing loved ones, fear of the unknown, fear of nothingness.

This angst prevents us from living a wholly contented life, full of love and satisfaction. And from the start, philosophy and religion have tried to help us conquer this fear – but they go about it in entirely different ways.

Religion – and particularly Christianity – promises to save us from the fear of death through faith. If we have faith in God, He will save us by admitting us into heaven, where we’ll reunite with our loved ones for eternity.

Philosophy, on the other hand, promises to save us by using our own logic and reasoning. By trying to understand ourselves, other people and the world we inhabit, philosophy hopes to conquer the anxiety surrounding death.

Toward this end, philosophical thinking comprises three stages.

First is theory. This involves thinking deeply about the nature of reality. But our knowledge of reality is filtered through the tools we use to comprehend it, and so theory studies those tools too. How do we pinpoint the causes of natural phenomena? What are the ways through which we can establish a statement as “true?” These questions make up the second part of theory.

Second is ethics. This is more practical and studies humanity. In particular, it asks how we should behave and coexist with one another.

Third is wisdom or salvation. This is the ultimate goal of religion and philosophy and asks what – if any – meaning there is to life, and how we can live a fulfilled life free from the suffocating fear of our mortality.

And one of the first philosophies to utilize this three-stage system was Stoicism.

Stoicism attempted to explain the functioning of the universe and humankind’s place within it.

One of the most influential philosophical movements in ancient Greece was Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium in the third century BC. To outline it, we’ll follow the three stages of philosophy outlined in the previous blink: theory, ethics and salvation.

According to the Stoics, the universe was similar to an animal. Each part of it was like an organ: specifically created to play a small role in helping the whole body to function. The result, they thought, was a perfectly harmonious, pre-ordained natural order between each part of the universe. They thought this order formed the fundamental nature, or essence, of reality, which they called kosmos. For the Stoics, this order existed within the universe and not external to it, like the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Christianity supplanted Greek philosophy and revolutionized human thinking.

Although Christianity isn’t a philosophy because it emphasizes faith over reason, it’s still a system of thought that displaced Greek philosophy and had an immeasurable impact on the course of history.

How did this come about? Let’s again follow it through the stages of theory, ethics and salvation.

The scientific revolution unleashed systems of thought that led to modern philosophy.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, humankind blew apart its previous conceptions of reality. For example, in the models of the universe developed by astronomers and mathematicians like Nicolaus Copernicus, the cosmos was an infinite void, with Earth definitely not at its center. Meanwhile, in the wake of theories developed by physicists like Isaac Newton, people understood the universe to be governed by forces that could be precisely measured and calculated.

It’s hard to comprehend the chasm of fear this would’ve opened for people at this time. Now that the universe seemed to be infinite and coldly mechanical, humans needed a new ethical order and way in which to interpret their place within the world. Also, with the afterlife now revealed to be a fiction for some, they needed a new form of salvation.

Immanuel Kant took up Rousseau's humanism and applied it to ethics.

Rousseau’s radical new way of thinking about human freedom provoked a question that paved the way for new ideas about ethics. The question was this: With so much freedom available to them, how could human beings structure their behavior according to clear ethical guidelines?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant took up this question in the eighteenth century, developing a theory of ethics for a new world in which humans were considered free actors. He came to two conclusions that would dramatically impact modern thought and become the basis of modern humanism.

Friedrich Nietzsche dismantled humanism and ushered in the age of postmodern philosophy.

So far, we’ve seen several watershed moments in the development of Western thought. But we can’t speak of philosophical revolutions without mentioning the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

We can read Nietzsche’s philosophy as a crusade against what he called nihilism. For Nietzsche, all doctrines – from Christianity and humanism to socialism – suppose that there’s a better world to be had and that we should sideline the present moment in favor of striving for it. They all had utopias to work toward and things they valued more than everyday life, like God and humanity. Nietzsche saw these as destroying and denying the importance and value of life as it is. Nihilism was, for Nietzsche, a denial of life.

Contemporary humanism offers a way past the cynicism of postmodernism.

One criticism leveled against Nietzsche is the following: If we’re constantly trying to deconstruct all our values and thought systems and if we maintain that there’s nothing superior to the here and now, where are we headed? The postmodern thinking Nietzsche helped usher in risks putting the real and concrete world on a pedestal and worshipping it.

But there’s another path. We can take the insights gained from postmodernism and use them to rethink humanism. This is contemporary humanism.

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Worum geht es in A Brief History of Thought?

A Brief History of Thought (1996) chronicles the big moments in the history of Western philosophy in a lucid and accessible way – from the Stoicism of classical Greece right through to twentieth-century postmodernism. Not simply a description of abstract ideals, it shows how we can apply the wisdom of the world’s best thinkers to live happier and more meaningful lives.

Wer A Brief History of Thought lesen sollte

Those who find philosophy cryptic and confusing
History students not up to speed with the development of Western thought
Introspective humans searching for a meaning to life

Über den Autor

Dr. Luc Ferry is a French philosopher and prolific author, whose books include On Love: A Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (2012) and The New Ecological Order (1992). Between 1996 and 2011 he was Professor of Philosophy at Paris Diderot University, and from 2002 until 2004 was Minister of Education for the French government.

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