THE GREEKS

A. SOCRATES
(born c. 470 BCE, Athens [Greece]—died
399 BCE, Athens), Greek philosopher whose
way of life, character, and thought exerted a
profound influence on ancient and
modern philosophy.
Socrates was a widely recognized and
controversial figure in his native Athens, so
much so that he was frequently mocked in the
plays of comic dramatists.
(The Clouds of Aristophanes, produced in 423,
is the best-known example.) Although Socrates
himself wrote nothing, he is depicted in conversation in compositions by a small circle of
his admirers—Plato and Xenophon first among them. He is portrayed in these works as
a man of great insight, integrity, self-mastery, and argumentative skill. The impact of his
life was all the greater because of the way in which it ended: at age 70, he was brought
to trial on a charge of impiety and sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison probably
being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow citizens. Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to
be the speech Socrates gave at his trial in response to the accusations made against
him (Greek apologia means “defense”). Its powerful advocacy of the examined life and
its condemnation of Athenian democracy have made it one of the central documents of
Western thought and culture.
Philosophical And Literary Sources

While Socrates was alive, he was, as noted, the object of comic ridicule, but most of the
plays that make reference to him are entirely lost or exist only in fragmentary form—
Clouds being the chief exception. Although Socrates is the central figure of this play, it
was not Aristophanes’ purpose to give a balanced and accurate portrait of him (comedy
never aspires to this) but rather to use him to represent certain intellectual trends in
contemporary Athens—the study of language and nature and, as Aristophanes implies,
the amoralism and atheism that accompany these pursuits. The value of the play as a
reliable source of knowledge about Socrates is thrown further into doubt by the fact that,
in Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself rejects it as a fabrication. This aspect of the trial will
be discussed more fully below.
Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle preserved and praised his
memory by writing works that represent him in his most characteristic activity—
conversation. His interlocutors in these (typically adversarial) exchanges included
people he happened to meet, devoted followers, prominent political figures, and leading
thinkers of the day. Many of these “Socratic discourses,” as Aristotle calls them in
his Poetics, are no longer extant; there are only brief remnants of the conversations
written by Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Eucleides. But those composed by
Plato and Xenophon survive in their entirety. What knowledge we have of Socrates
must therefore depend primarily on one or the other (or both, when their portraits
coincide) of these sources. (Plato and Xenophon also wrote separate accounts, each
entitled Apology of Socrates, of Socrates’ trial.) Most scholars, however, do not believe
that every Socratic discourse of Xenophon and Plato was intended as a historical report
of what the real Socrates said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably
be claimed about at least some of these dialogues is that they convey the gist of the
questions Socrates asked, the ways in which he typically responded to the answers he
received, and the general philosophical orientation that emerged from these
conversations.
Xenophon
Among the compositions of Xenophon, the one that gives the fullest portrait of Socrates
is Memorabilia. The first two chapters of Book I of this work are especially important,
because they explicitly undertake a refutation of the charges made against Socrates at
his trial; they are therefore a valuable supplement to Xenophon’s Apology, which is
devoted entirely to the same purpose. The portrait of Socrates that Xenophon gives in
Books III and IV of Memorabilia seems, in certain passages, to be heavily influenced by
his reading of some of Plato’s dialogues, and so the evidentiary value of at least this
portion of the work is diminished. Xenophon’s Symposium is a depiction of Socrates in
conversation with his friends at a drinking party (it is perhaps inspired by a work of Plato
of the same name and character) and is regarded by some scholars as a valuable re-
creation of Socrates’ thought and way of life. Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (literally: “estate
manager”), a Socratic conversation concerning household organization and the skills
needed by the independent farmer, is Xenophon’s attempt to bring the qualities he
admired in Socrates to bear upon the subject of overseeing one’s property. It is unlikely
to have been intended as a report of one of Socrates’ conversations.

B. PLATO
Ancient Greek philosopher Plato founded the
Academy and is the author of philosophical
works of unparalleled influence in Western
thought.
Born circa 428 B.C.E., ancient Greek
philosopher Plato was a student of Socrates
and a teacher of Aristotle. His writings explored
justice, beauty and equality, and also
contained discussions in aesthetics, political
philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology
and the philosophy of language. Plato founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first
institutions of higher learning in the Western world. He died in Athens circa 348 B.C.E.

Background

Due to a lack of primary sources from the time period, much of Plato's life has been
constructed by scholars through his writings and the writings of contemporaries and
classical historians. Traditional history estimates Plato's birth was around 428 B.C.E.,
but more modern scholars, tracing later events in his life, believe he was born between
424 and 423 B.C.E. Both of his parents came from the Greek aristocracy. Plato's father,
Ariston, descended from the kings of Athens and Messenia. His mother, Perictione, is
said to be related to the 6th century B.C.E. Greek statesman Solon.
Some scholars believe that Plato was named for his grandfather, Aristocles, following
the tradition of the naming the eldest son after the grandfather. But there is no
conclusive evidence of this, or that Plato was the eldest son in his family. Other
historians claim that "Plato" was a nickname, referring to his broad physical build. This
too is possible, although there is record that the name Plato was given to boys before
Aristocles was born.

As with many young boys of his social class, Plato was probably taught by some of
Athens' finest educators. The curriculum would have featured the doctrines of Cratylus
and Pythagoras as well as Parmenides. These probably helped develop the foundation
for Plato's study of metaphysics (the study of nature) and epistemology (the study of
knowledge).

Plato's father died when he was young, and his mother remarried her uncle, Pyrilampes,
a Greek politician and ambassador to Persia. Plato is believed to have had two full
brothers, one sister and a half brother, though it is not certain where he falls in the birth
order. Often, members of Plato's family appeared in his dialogues. Historians believe
this is an indication of Plato's pride in his family lineage.

As a young man, Plato experienced two major events that set his course in life. One
was meeting the great Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates's methods of dialogue and
debate impressed Plato so much that he soon he became a close associate and
dedicated his life to the question of virtue and the formation of a noble character. The
other significant event was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, in
which Plato served for a brief time between 409 and 404 B.C.E. The defeat of Athens
ended its democracy, which the Spartans replaced with an oligarchy. Two of Plato's
relatives, Charmides and Critias, were prominent figures in the new government, part of
the notorious Thirty Tyrants whose brief rule severely reduced the rights of Athenian
citizens. After the oligarchy was overthrown and democracy was restored, Plato briefly
considered a career in politics, but the execution of Socrates in 399 B.C.E. soured him
on this idea and he turned to a life of study and philosophy.

After Socrates's death, Plato traveled for 12 years throughout the Mediterranean region,
studying mathematics with the Pythagoreans in Italy, and geometry, geology, astronomy
and religion in Egypt. During this time, or soon after, he began his extensive writing.
There is some debate among scholars on the order of these writings, but most believe
they fall into three distinct periods.

Early, Middle and Late Periods: An Overview

The first, or early, period occurs during Plato's travels (399-387 B.C.E.). The Apology of
Socrates seems to have been written shortly after Socrates's death. Other texts in this
time period include Protagoras, Euthyphro, Hippias Major and Minor and Ion. In these
dialogues, Plato attempts to convey Socrates's philosophy and teachings.

In the second, or middle, period, Plato writes in his own voice on the central ideals of
justice, courage, wisdom and moderation of the individual and society. The
Republic was written during this time with its exploration of just government ruled by
philosopher kings.

In the third, or late, period, Socrates is relegated to a minor role and Plato takes a closer
look at his own early metaphysical ideas. He explores the role of art, including dance,
music, drama and architecture, as well as ethics and morality. In his writings on the
Theory of Forms, Plato suggests that the world of ideas is the only constant and that the
perceived world through our senses is deceptive and changeable.

Founding the Academy

Sometime around 385 B.C.E., Plato founded a school of learning, known as the
Academy, which he presided over until his death. It is believed the school was located
at an enclosed park named for a legendary Athenian hero. The Academy operated until
529 C.E.., when it was closed by Roman Emperor Justinian I, who feared it was a
source of paganism and a threat to Christianity. Over its years of operation, the
Academy's curriculum included astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory and
philosophy. Plato hoped the Academy would provide a place for future leaders to
discover how to build a better government in the Greek city-states.

In 367 B.C.E., Plato was invited by Dion, a friend and disciple, to be the personal tutor
of his nephew, Dionysius II, the new ruler of Syracuse (Sicily). Dion believed
that Dionysius showed promise as an ideal leader. Plato accepted, hoping the
experience would produce a philosopher king. But Dionysius fell far short of
expectations and suspected Dion, and later Plato, of conspiring against him. He had
Dion exiled and Plato placed under "house arrest." Eventually, Plato returned to Athens
and his Academy. One of his more promising students there was Aristotle, who would
take his mentor's teachings in new directions.

Final Years

Plato's final years were spent at the Academy and with his writing. The circumstances
surrounding his death are clouded, though it is fairly certain that he died in Athens
around 348 B.C.E., when he was in his early 80s. Some scholars suggest that he died
while attending a wedding, while others believe he died peacefully in his sleep.

Plato's impact on philosophy and the nature of humans has had a lasting impact far
beyond his homeland of Greece. His work covered a broad spectrum of interests and
ideas: mathematics, science and nature, morals and political theory. His beliefs on the
importance of mathematics in education have proven to be essential for understanding
the entire universe. His work on the use of reason to develop a more fair and just
society that is focused on the equality of individuals established the foundation for
modern democracy.

Summary of Plato's Works

Plato wrote predominantly in the style of dialogues. The characters in his writings
debate a particular subject and examine it from multiple perspectives. Scholars typically
organize Plato's works into three different eras: early, middle, and late.
Plato's earlier works tend to focus on lessons directly inherited from his teacher. In fact,
Socrates is usually the main character and the subjects usually center on Socrates'
lessons. The most famous of the Socratic Dialogues is the Apology in which the
character of Socrates defends his beliefs against the charges of the Athenian court.
The next era is referred to as Plato's Middle Period. During this era, the character of
Socrates still remains as a fictional vehicle through which to argue philosophical
concepts but he starts to recede into the background. Plato's most famous works were
written during this time, including the Republic, the Symposium, and Phaedo. He uses
these dialogues to explore philosophical concepts such as government, love, and the
soul.
In Plato's later years, Socrates receded once again into the background and became a
very minor character in these writings. In creative works such
as Parmenides and Theaetetus, Plato questions the paradoxes of religion and
knowledge.

C. ARISTOTLE

Greek Aristoteles, (born 384 BCE,

Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece—died
322, Chalcis, Euboea), ancient Greek
philosopher and scientist, one of the
greatest intellectual figures of Western history.
He was the author of a philosophical and
scientific system that became the framework
and vehicle for both
Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic
philosophy. Even after the intellectual
revolutions of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, Aristotelian
concepts remained embedded in Western thinking.
Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the
arts,including biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, phi
losophy of mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics, political theory, psychology,
and zoology. He was the founder of formal logic, devising for it a finished system that for
centuries was regarded as the sum of the discipline; and he pioneered the study of
zoology, both observational and theoretical, in which some of his work remained
unsurpassed until the 19th century. But he is, of course, most outstanding as a
philosopher. His writings in ethics and political theory as well as in metaphysics and the
philosophy of science continue to be studied, and his work remains a powerful current in
contemporary philosophical debate.
This article deals with Aristotle’s life and thought. For the later development of
Aristotelian philosophy, see Aristotelianism. For treatment of Aristotelianism in the
full context of Western philosophy, see philosophy, Western.

Life
The Academy

Aristotle was born on the Chalcidic peninsula of Macedonia, in northern Greece. His
father, Nicomachus, was the physician of Amyntas III (reigned c. 393–c. 370 BCE), king
of Macedonia and grandfather of Alexander the Great (reigned 336–323 BCE). After his
father’s death in 367, Aristotle migrated to Athens, where he joined the Academy
of Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BCE). He remained there for 20 years as Plato’s pupil and
colleague.
Many of Plato’s later dialogues date from these decades, and they may reflect
Aristotle’s contributions to philosophical debate at the Academy. Some of Aristotle’s
writings also belong to this period, though mostly they survive only in fragments. Like
his master, Aristotle wrote initially in dialogue form, and his early ideas show a
strong Platonic influence. His dialogue Eudemus, for example, reflects the Platonic view
of the soul as imprisoned in the body and as capable of a happier life only when the
body has been left behind. According to Aristotle, the dead are more blessed and
happier than the living, and to die is to return to one’s real home.
Another youthful work, the Protrepticus (“Exhortation”), has been reconstructed by
modern scholars from quotations in various works from late antiquity. Everyone must do
philosophy, Aristotle claims, because even arguing against the practice of philosophy is
itself a form of philosophizing. The best form of philosophy is the contemplation of the
universe of nature; it is for this purpose that God made human beings and gave them a
godlike intellect. All else—strength, beauty, power, and honour—is worthless.
It is possible that two of Aristotle’s surviving works on logic and disputation,
the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations, belong to this early period. The former
demonstrates how to construct arguments for a position one has already decided to
adopt; the latter shows how to detect weaknesses in the arguments of others. Although
neither work amounts to a systematic treatise on formal logic, Aristotle can justly say, at
the end of the Sophistical Refutations, that he has invented the discipline of logic—
nothing at all existed when he started.
During Aristotle’s residence at the Academy, King Philip II of Macedonia (reigned 359–
336 BCE) waged war on a number of Greek city-states. The Athenians defended their
independence only half-heartedly, and, after a series of humiliating concessions, they
allowed Philip to become, by 338, master of the Greek world. It cannot have been an
easy time to be a Macedonian resident in Athens.
Within the Academy, however, relations seem to have remained cordial. Aristotle
always acknowledged a great debt to Plato; he took a large part of his philosophical
agenda from Plato, and his teaching is more often a modification than a repudiation of
Plato’s doctrines. Already, however, Aristotle was beginning to distance himself from
Plato’s theory of Forms, or Ideas (eidos; see form). (The word Form, when used to refer
to Forms as Plato conceived them, is often capitalized in the scholarly literature; when
used to refer to forms as Aristotle conceived them, it is conventionally lowercased.)
Plato had held that, in addition to particular things, there exists a suprasensible realm of
Forms, which are immutable and everlasting. This realm, he maintained, makes
particular things intelligible by accounting for their common natures: a thing is a horse,
for example, by virtue of the fact that it shares in, or imitates, the Form of “Horse.” In a
lost work, On Ideas, Aristotle maintains that the arguments of Plato’s central dialogues
establish only that there are, in addition to particulars, certain common objects of the
sciences. In his surviving works as well, Aristotle often takes issue with the theory of
Forms, sometimes politely and sometimes contemptuously. In his Metaphysics he
argues that the theory fails to solve the problems it was meant to address. It does not
confer intelligibility on particulars, because immutable and everlasting Forms cannot
explain how particulars come into existence and undergo change. All the theory does,
according to Aristotle, is introduce new entities equal in number to the entities to be
explained—as if one could solve a problem by doubling it. (See below Form.)

Travels

When Plato died about 348, his nephew Speusippus became head of the Academy, and
Aristotle left Athens. He migrated to Assus, a city on the northwestern coast of Anatolia
(in present-day Turkey), where Hermias, a graduate of the Academy, was ruler. Aristotle
became a close friend of Hermias and eventually married his ward Pythias. Aristotle
helped Hermias to negotiate an alliance with Macedonia, which angered the Persian
king, who had Hermias treacherously arrested and put to death about 341. Aristotle
saluted Hermias’s memory in “Ode to Virtue,” his only surviving poem.
While in Assus and during the subsequent few years when he lived in the city of
Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Aristotle carried out extensive scientific research,
particularly in zoology and marine biology. This work was summarized in a book later
known, misleadingly, as The History of Animals, to which Aristotle added two
short treatises, On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals. Although
Aristotle did not claim to have founded the science of zoology, his detailed observations
of a wide variety of organisms were quite without precedent. He—or one of his research
assistants—must have been gifted with remarkably acute eyesight, since some of the
features of insects that he accurately reports were not again observed until the invention
of the microscope in the 17th century.
The scope of Aristotle’s scientific research is astonishing. Much of it is concerned with
the classification of animals into genus and species; more than 500 species figure in his
treatises, many of them described in detail. The myriad items of information about the
anatomy, diet, habitat, modes of copulation, and reproductive systems of mammals,
reptiles, fish, and insects are a melange of minute investigation and vestiges of
superstition. In some cases his unlikely stories about rare species of fish were proved
accurate many centuries later. In other places he states clearly and fairly a biological
problem that took millennia to solve, such as the nature of embryonic development.
Despite an admixture of the fabulous, Aristotle’s biological works must be regarded as a
stupendous achievement. His inquiries were conducted in a genuinely scientific spirit,
and he was always ready to confess ignorance where evidence was insufficient.
Whenever there is a conflict between theory and observation, one must trust
observation, he insisted, and theories are to be trusted only if their results conform with
the observed phenomena.

In 343 or 342 Aristotle was summoned by Philip II to the Macedonian capital at Pella to
act as tutor to Philip’s 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. Little is known of
the content of Aristotle’s instruction; although the Rhetoric to Alexander was included in
the Aristotelian corpus for centuries, it is now commonly regarded as a forgery. By 326
Alexander had made himself master of an empire that stretched from the Danube to the
Indus and included Libya and Egypt. Ancient sources report that during his campaigns
Alexander arranged for biological specimens to be sent to his tutor from all parts of
Greece and Asia Minor.
 THE ROMANS

A. SENECA
Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65),
fully Lucius Annaeus Seneca and also known
simply as Seneca (/ˈsɛnɪkə/), was
a Roman Stoic philosopher,
statesman, dramatist, and—in one work—
satirist of the Silver Age of Latin literature.
Seneca, also known as Seneca the Younger,
was a significant philosopher belonging to the
Roman times. His works, essays and tragedies
majorly contributed to the development of
Stoicism, a school of thought which states that
virtue and goodness is based on knowledge. Many students and followers of stoic
approach came towards the philosophy through the contributions made by Seneca.
Seneca wrote twelve essays on philosophy, a hundred and twenty-four letters on
principles of morality, nine tragedies and satire. His writing style was engaging, as he
believed that any philosophy would be best conveyed to the reader by truly involving
him the in thought process.
Through his writings, Seneca touched the major themes of stoicism: suffering is inevitably
important, simplicity leads to contentment, the universe is being dealt with divine
rationality, and that knowledge should be gained in any and all forms. He attempted to
help his readers out by making them face their problems in life and by providing logical
steps on how to solve them. One major theme of his letters is acceptance of human
mortality and how to channel ones’ fear of death into motivation for virtue.

Even though his writings mirror the main ideas of Stoicism, Seneca established his worth
as an independent thinker and not as a single-minded, rigid philosopher. In one of his
works, On the Private Life, he emphasizes the point by stating that he will not do what
was ordered to him by his leaders, but he will do what he was led to.

In the same book, and in On Peace of Mind, he discusses the choice of leading a practical
and political life or a life of thinking and philosophy. He asks what amount of thinking and
activity would make us live at peace with ourselves, and concludes that thinking is equally
important to acting. Philosophical thinking is the basis of our actions, and is thus important
for leading a peaceful life.

On the topic of soul, Seneca states that soul is a rational being, able to act on its own. He
holds the Stoic view that soul is physical; it is a body. He bases his theory on account of
the fact that only bodies are capable of action and can cause a reaction.

Seneca is often attributed with being the discoverer of the concept of will. He states all
human souls leave impression which affects other human souls. All souls have the power
to either accept or negate these impressions. By accepting these impressions, souls
make our bodies act accordingly. Thus all actions are completely controlled by our
decisions of accepting and rejecting certain soul impressions. We have the power to be
virtuous or evil.

On human emotions and reactions, Seneca was of the view that emotions mirror a
person’s opinion. Emotions cannot be controlled; they are illogical. He worked in great
depth on the emotion of anger and came to the conclusion that an ideal person would try
to replace his angry outburst of emotion with a response based on righteousness. He also
wrote extensively on fear of death, and how it can be tamed to achieve virtue and
greatness.

Seneca also differentiated the good from the valuable and discussed how money and
health is valuable, but not good, as it fails to bring us true happiness. According to him,
only virtue and benefiting others can bring contentment. A good person’s life, even if he
is not helping others with his actions, is still beneficial, as virtue affects from far away.

Seneca’s philosophy is one of righteousness, virtue and morality. His concepts on

theology, philosophical psychology and epistemology have been neglected for centuries.
The recent times have witnessed the revival of Senecan philosophy, as more Stoicists
and philosophers rediscover the loftiness of Seneca’s ideas.

B. MARCUS AURELIUS
The philosophy of the Roman Emperor
Marcus Aurelius can be found in a collection of
personal writings known as the Meditations.
These reflect the influence of Stoicism and, in
particular, the philosophy of Epictetus, the Stoic.
The Meditations may be read as a series of
practical philosophical exercises, following
Epictetus' three topics of study, designed to
digest and put into practice philosophical theory.
Central to these exercises is a concern with the
analysis of one's judgements and a desire to
cultivate a "cosmic perspective."

From a modern perspective Marcus Aurelius is certainly not in the first rank of ancient
philosophers. He is no Plato or Aristotle, nor even a Sextus Empiricus or Alexander of
Aphrodisias. To a certain extent this judgement is perfectly fair and reasonable. However,
in order to assess the philosophical qualities that Marcus does have and that are
displayed in the Meditations it is necessary to emphasize that in antiquity philosophy was
not conceived merely as a matter of theoretical arguments. Such arguments existed and
were important, but they were framed within a broader conception of philosophy as a way
of life. The aim was not merely to gain a rational understanding of the world but to allow
that rational understanding to inform the way in which one lived. If one keeps this
understanding of 'philosophy' in mind, then one becomes able to appreciate the function
and the philosophical value of Marcus' Meditations.

1. Life
Marcus Aurelius was born in 121 C.E.. His early education was overseen by the Emperor
Hadrian, and he was later adopted by the Emperor Antoninus Pius in 138 C.E.. After an
initial education in rhetoric undertaken by Fronto, Marcus later abandoned it in favor of
philosophy. Marcus became Emperor himself in AD 161, initially alongside Lucius Verus,
becoming sole Emperor in AD 169. Continual attacks meant that much of his reign was
spent on campaign, especially in central Europe. However, he did find time to establish
four Chairs of Philosophy in Athens, one for each of the principal philosophical traditions
(Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, andEpicurean). He died in AD 180.

2. The Meditations
Marcus' reputation as a philosopher rests upon one work, the Meditations.
The Meditations take the form of a personal notebook and were probably written while
Marcus was on campaign in central Europe, c. AD 171-175. The entries appear to be in
no particular order and may simply be in the original order of composition. The repetition
of themes and the occasional groups of quotations from other authors (see
e.g. Med. 4.46, 11.33-39)add to this impression. Book One, however, is somewhat
different from the rest of the text and may well have been written separately (a plan for it
may be discerned in Med. 6.48).
The first recorded mention of the Meditations is by Themistius in AD 364. The current
Greek title - ta eis heauton ('to himself') – derives from a manuscript now lost and may be
a later addition (it is first recorded c. AD 900 by Arethas). The modern text derives
primarily from two sources: a manuscript now in the Vatican and a lost manuscript
(mentioned above), upon which the first printed edition (1558) was based.
Beyond the Meditations there also survives part of a correspondence between Marcus
and his rhetoric teacher Fronto, probably dating from earlier in Marcus' life (c. AD 138-
166), discovered as a palimpsest in 1815. However, although this interesting discovery
sheds some light on Marcus as an individual, it adds little to our understanding of his
philosophy.
3. Philosophy
a. Stoicism
According to tradition, Marcus was a Stoic. His ancient biographer, Julius Capitolinus,
describes him as such. Marcus also makes reference to a number of Stoics by whom he
was taught and, in particular, mentions Rusticus from whom he borrowed a copy of the
works of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (Med. 1.7). However, nowhere in
the Meditations does Marcus explicitly call himself a Stoic. This may simply reflect the
likelihood that Marcus was writing only for himself rather than attempting to define himself
to an audience. Yet it is probably fair to admit that Marcus was at least open to ideas from
other philosophical traditions, being impressed by Stoic philosophy, but not merely an
unthinking disciple of Stoicism.
b. The Influence of Epictetus
As has been noted, Marcus was clearly familiar with the Discourses of Epictetus, quoting
them a number of times (see Med. 11.33-38). Epictetus' fame in the second century is
noted by a number of ancient sources, being hailed as the greatest of the Stoics (Aulus
Gellius 1.2.6) and more popular than Plato (Origen Contra Celsus 6.2). If Marcus felt
drawn towards Stoicism, then Epictetus would surely have stood out as the most
important Stoic of the time. It is perhaps reasonable, then, to turn to Epictetus in order to
explore the philosophical background to the Meditations.
c. The Three topoi
Central to Epictetus' philosophy is his account of three topoi, or areas of study. He
suggests that the apprentice philosopher should be trained in three distinct areas
or topoi (see Epictetus Discourses 3.2.1-2):
1. Desires (orexeis) and aversions (ekkliseis);
2. Impulse to act (hormas) and not to act (aphormas);
3. Freedom from deception, hasty judgement, and anything else related to assents
(sunkatatheseis).
These three areas of training correspond to the three types of philosophical discourse
referred to by earlier Stoics; the physical, the ethical, and the logical (see Diogenes
Laertius 7.39). For Epictetus, it is not enough merely to discourse about philosophy. The
student of philosophy should also engage in practical training designed to digest
philosophical principals, transforming them into actions. Only this will enable the
apprentice philosopher to transform himself into the Stoic ideal of a wise person or sage
(sophos). It is to this end that the three topoi are directed.
The first topos, concerning desire (orexis), is devoted to physics. It is not enough for the
philosopher to know how Nature works; he must train his desires in the light of that
knowledge so that he only desires what is in harmony with Nature. For the Stoic, Nature
is a complex inter-connected physical system, identified with God, of which the individual
is but one part. What might be called the practical implication of this conception of Nature
is that an individual will inevitably become frustrated and unhappy if they desire things
without taking into account the operations of this larger physical system. Thus, in order to
become a Stoic sage - happy and in harmony with Nature – one must train one's desires
in the light of a study of Stoic physical theory.
The second topos, concerning impulse (hormê), is devoted to ethics. The study of ethical
theory is of course valuable in its own right but, for the Stoic training to be a sage, these
theories must be translated into ethical actions. In order to transform the way in which
one behaves, it is necessary to train the impulses that shape one's behavior. By so doing
the apprentice philosopher will be able not merely to say how a sage should act but also
to act as a sage should act.
The third topos, concerning assent (sunkatathesis), is devoted to logic. It is important to
remember here that for the Stoics the term 'logic' included not only dialectic but also much
of what one would today call epistemology. According to Epictetus every impression
(phantasia) that an individual receives often includes a value-judgement (hupolêpsis)
made by the individual. When an individual accepts or gives assent (sunkatathesis) to an
impression, assent is often given to the value-judgement as well. For instance, when one
sees someone drink a lot of wine, one often judges that they are drinking too much wine
(see e.g. Epictetus Handbook 45). Epictetus suggests that, in the light of Stoic
epistemological theory, the apprentice philosopher should train himself to analyze his
impressions carefully and be on guard not to give assent to unwarranted value-
judgements.
For Epictetus, then, the student of philosophy must not only study the three types of
philosophical discourse but also engage in these three types of philosophical training or
exercise in order to translate that theory into actions. Marcus may himself be seen as a
student of Epictetus, and so some scholars have suggested that the three topoi form a
key to understanding the Meditations. Indeed, the Meditations may be approached as an
example of a form of personal writing in which the very act of writing constituted a
philosophical exercise designed to digest the three types of philosophical theory. In other
words, the Meditations are a text produced by someone engaged in the
three topoi outlined by Epictetus. This is hinted at in Med. 9.7 where Marcus exhorts
himself to 'wipe out impression (phantasia), check impulse (hormê), and quench desire
(orexis)'.
d. Philosophical Exercises
The Meditations certainly do not present philosophical theories similar to those that one
can find in, say, the surviving works of Aristotle. Nor are they comparable to a theoretical
treatise like the Elements of Ethics by the Stoic Hierocles, possibly a contemporary of
Marcus. Nevertheless, the Meditations remain essentially a philosophical text. As has
already been noted, the Meditations are a personal notebook, written by Marcus to
himself and for his own use. They do not form a theoretical treatise designed to argue for
a particular doctrine or conclusion; their function is different. In order to understand this
function it is necessary to introduce the idea of a philosophical exercise (askêsis).
In the Meditations Marcus engages in a series of philosophical exercises designed to
digest philosophical theories, to transform his character or 'dye his soul' in the light of
those theories (see e.g. Med. 5.16), and so to transform his behavior and his entire way
of life. By reflecting upon philosophical ideas and, perhaps more importantly, writing them
down, Marcus engages in a repetitive process designed to habituate his mind into a new
way of thinking. This procedure is quite distinct from the construction of philosophical
arguments and has a quite different function. Whereas the former is concerned with
creating a particular philosophical doctrine, the latter is a practical exercise or training
designed to assimilate that doctrine into one's habitual modes of behavior. Following the
account of three types of philosophical training outlined by Epictetus, Marcus reflects in
the Meditations upon a medley of physical, ethical, and logical ideas. These written
reflections constitute a second stage of philosophical education necessary after one has
studied the philosophical theories (see e.g. Epictetus Discourses 1.26.3). By engaging in
such written philosophical exercises Marcus attempts to transform his soul or inner
disposition that will, in turn, alter his behavior. Thus, this second stage of philosophical
education is the process by which a philosophical apprentice trains himself to put theories
into practice, and so make progress towards wisdom.
e. The Point of View of the Cosmos
Of all the philosophical exercises in the Meditations the most prominent centers around
what might be called 'the point of view of the cosmos'. In a number of passages Marcus
exhorts himself to overcome the limited perspective of the individual and experience the
world from a cosmic perspective. For example:
You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your
judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole
cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each
thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that
after dissolution are equally infinite. (Med. 9.32; see also 2.17, 5.23, 7.47, 12.32)
In passages such as this Marcus makes implicit reference to a number of Stoic theories.
Here, for instance, the Stoic physics of flux inherited from Heraclitus is evoked. Perhaps
more important though is the reference to one's judgement and the claim that this is the
source of human unhappiness. Following Epictetus, Marcus claims that all attributions of
good or evil are the product of human judgements. As Epictetus put it, what upsets people
are not things themselves but rather their judgements about things (see Handbook 5).
According to Epictetus' epistemological theory (to the extent that it can be reconstructed)
the impressions that an individual receives and that appear to reflect the nature of things
are in fact already composite. They involve not only a perception of some external object
but also an almost involuntary and unconscious judgement about that perception. This
judgement will be a product of one's preconceptions and mental habits. It is this composite
impression to which an individual grants or denies assent, creating a belief. The task for
the philosopher is to subject one's impressions to rigorous examination, making sure that
one does not give assent to (i.e. accept as true) impressions that include any unwarranted
value judgements.
Marcus' personal reflections in the Meditations may be read as a series of written
exercises aimed at analyzing his own impressions and rejecting his own unwarranted
value judgements. For instance, he reminds himself:
Do not say more to yourself than the first impressions report. […] Abide always by the
first impressions and add nothing of your own from within. (Med. 8.49)
These 'first impressions' are impressions before a value judgement has been made. For
Marcus, human well-being or happiness (eudaimonia) is entirely dependent upon
correctly examining one's impressions and judgements. For once one has overcome false
value-judgements - that wealth and social standing are valuable and that one should
compete for them against others, for instance –one will experience the cosmos as a single
living being (identified with God) rather than a site of conflict and destruction. As Cicero
put it in his summary of Stoic physics:
The various limited modes of being may encounter many external obstacles to hinder
their perfect realization, but there can be nothing that can frustrate Nature as a whole,
since she embraces and contains within herself all modes of being. (On the Nature of the
Gods 2.35)
It is to this end - cultivating an experience of the cosmos as a unified living being identified
with God– that the philosophical exercises in the Meditations are directed.
4. Concluding Remarks
From a modern perspective Marcus Aurelius is certainly not in the first rank of ancient
philosophers. He is no Plato or Aristotle, nor even a Sextus Empiricus or Alexander of
Aphrodisias. To a certain extent this judgement is perfectly fair and reasonable. However,
in order to assess the philosophical qualities that Marcus does have and that are
displayed in the Meditations it is necessary to emphasize that in antiquity philosophy was
not conceived merely as a matter of theoretical arguments. Such arguments existed and
were important, but they were framed within a broader conception of philosophy as a way
of life. The aim was not merely to gain a rational understanding of the world but to allow
that rational understanding to inform the way in which one lived. If one keeps this
understanding of 'philosophy' in mind, then one becomes able to appreciate the function
and the philosophical value of Marcus' Meditations.

C. EPICTETUS
(/ˌɛpɪkˈtiːtəs/;[1] Greek: Ἐπίκτητος, Epíkt
ētos; c. 55 – 135 AD) was
a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born
a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present
day Pamukkale, Turkey) and lived
in Rome until his banishment, when he
went to Nicopolis in
northwestern Greece for the rest of his
life. His teachings were written down and
published by his pupil Arrian in
his Discourses and Enchiridion.

One of the most notable philosophers of the discipline of Stoicism, Epictetus was born in
55 AD to a slave woman in Hierapolis, a Greek city located in Asia Minor. Epictetus means
‘acquired’, which is a reference to his status as a slave during most of his youth. Epictetus
and his mother were owned by Epaphroditus, who served as an administrator at Nero’s
court. He spent most of his youth in Rome, but he had to leave Rome when Epaphroditus
came into some disaccord with

the Domitian’s government. Epictetus was not treated harshly by his master, in fact, he
was allowed the exclusive privilege to pursue education, and due his master’s influential
social status, Epictetus benefitted from the tutelage of Musonius Rufus, an influential
philosopher of the Stoic discipline.Upon gaining his freedom, Epictetus began teaching
philosophy and constructing his own ideologies. In 89 AD, Domitian exiled all
philosophers from Rome, hence, Epictetus was forced to leave his native city as well. He
settled in Nicopolis, in Northwest Greece and founded his own school. In Nicopolis,
Epictetus found the fame that was denied to him in the constricting atmosphere of Rome,
it is said that his influenced even transcended that of Plato’s. His institute was frequented
by the most eminent Roman philosophers, and his students included affluent citizens
such as, Flavian Arrian. Arrian is also largely responsible for collecting, compiling and
editing the works of Epictetus, which, despite his painstaking meticulousness remain
partial and incomplete. Epictetus’ works have been conveyed to the masses mainly
through the efforts of his pupil, and it is still widely debated whether the works were his
own or that of his Flavian Arrian. His works can be found in the eight books of the
‘Discourses’ and ‘Encheiridion’, however, his theories appear as scattered and
uncoordinated due to their disorganization.

The Discourses contains his theories on a wide range of diverse subjects such as fear,
poverty, illness and anger. Epictetus’ philosophies provide the approach to construct a
fulfilling and peaceful life, to continuously improve the circumstances and essence of
one’s existence, and to excel in one’s abilities. Epictetus introduced the concept of
achieving eudemonia to the Stoic school of philosophy, which can be literally translated
as flourishing and refers to attaining a state of contentment and blissful satisfaction.
The Encheiridion, also called The Handbook in English, provides discourse on day-to-day
events that we all encounter, and basically serves as a simplification of the philosophies
put forward in the Discourses. It talks about free will and power, and explains power as a
course of action taken towards circumstances, for fulfilment of desires and to create
diversions. It goes on to advocate that our body, property, official positions, and
reputations are not within our power and thus subjected to restrain and the power of other
individuals, whereas the things that lie within the sphere of our power are free by the
course of nature. Epictetus proposes that if one assumes that the things which lie outside
our power and are subjected to the authority and command of others, are actually
controllable and can be manipulated, one will suffer from hindrances, difficulties and will
eventually end up blaming one’s fate and society. However, if one is able to distinguish
between the affairs that our controllable and the one’s that can be subjected to our
authority, one can form a balance in life, and be able to lead life with free will and without
any disturbances. For centuries, the teachings of The Handbook have served as a guide
for Christians and Pagans alike.

Epictetus’ mainly dealt with the construction of a moral philosophy that could aid mankind
in the construction and improvement of a better life. He wanted his teachings to practical
and rational, yet at the same time, they provided individuals with tools of moral
consultation and self-reflection. Epictetus placed much emphasis on the strong
development of character, and believed that fear creates hindrances, therefore, humans
should not attempt to change things that cannot be changed. His teachings preach that
while externalities are unchangeable, the internal of an individual is subjected to constant
change and development, and the circumstances that create fright and panic, can be
altered from unfavorable to favorable, depending on how they are dealt with. He further
stated that humans are not fearful of events or circumstances, but rather the conceptual
framework of the events and the terror that accompanies with the understanding of their
notions. And one can only overcome his fears if he takes control of his emotions, instructs
himself and does not give in to fear by acting rationally.

Epictetus’ philosophical contributions have played a vital role in the evolution of the Stoic
school of philosophy. His work had influenced the masses for centuries, and was also
adopted by Emperor Marcus Aurelius as the central doctrine of his empire.
 THE MIDDLE AGES

A. AUGUSTINE
St. Augustine, also called Saint
Augustine of Hippo, original Latin
name Aurelius Augustinus, (born
November 13, 354, Tagaste, Numidia
[now Souk Ahras, Algeria]—
died August 28, 430, Hippo Regius
[now Annaba, Algeria]; feast day August
28), bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430,
one of the Latin Fathers of the Church
and perhaps the most significant
Christian thinker after St. Paul.
Augustine’s adaptation of classical
thought to Christian teaching created a
theological system of great power and lasting influence. His numerous written works,
the most important of which are Confessions (c. 400) and The City of God (c. 413–426),
shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much
of medieval and modern Christian thought. In Roman Catholicism he is formally
recognized as a doctor of the church.
Augustine is remarkable for what he did and extraordinary for what he wrote. If none of
his written works had survived, he would still have been a figure to be reckoned with,
but his stature would have been more nearly that of some of his contemporaries.
However, more than five million words of his writings survive, virtually all displaying the
strength and sharpness of his mind (and some limitations of range and learning) and
some possessing the rare power to attract and hold the attention of readers in both his
day and ours. His distinctive theological style shaped Latin Christianity in a way
surpassed only by Scripture itself. His work continues to hold contemporary relevance,
in part because of his membership in a religious group that was dominant in the West in
his time and remains so today.
Intellectually, Augustine represents the most influential adaptation of the
ancient Platonic tradition with Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin Christian
world. Augustine received the Platonic past in a far more limited and diluted way than
did many of his Greek-speaking contemporaries, but his writings were so widely read
and imitated throughout Latin Christendom that his particular synthesis of Christian,
Roman, and Platonic traditions defined the terms for much later tradition and debate.
Both modern Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity owe much to Augustine,
though in some ways each community has at times been embarrassed to own up to
that allegiance in the face of irreconcilable elements in his thought. For example,
Augustine has been cited as both a champion of human freedom and
an articulate defender of divine predestination, and his views on sexuality were humane
in intent but have often been received as oppressive in effect.
Life Overview

Augustine was born in Tagaste, a modest Roman community in a river valley 40 miles
(64 km) from the Mediterranean coast in Africa, near the point where the veneer of
Roman civilization thinned out in the highlands of Numidia. Augustine’s parents were of
the respectable class of Roman society, free to live on the work of others, but their
means were sometimes straitened. They managed, sometimes on borrowed money, to
acquire a first-class education for Augustine, and, although he had at least one brother
and one sister, he seems to have been the only child sent off to be educated. He
studied first in Tagaste, then in the nearby university town of Madauros, and finally
at Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa. After a brief stint teaching in Tagaste, he
returned to Carthage to teach rhetoric, the premier science for the Roman gentleman,
and he was evidently very good at it.
While still at Carthage, he wrote a short philosophical book aimed at displaying his own
merits and advancing his career; unfortunately, it is lost. At the age of 28, restless and
ambitious, Augustine left Africa in 383 to make his career in Rome. He taught there
briefly before landing a plum appointment as imperial professor of rhetoric at Milan. The
customary residence of the emperor at the time, Milan was the de facto capital of the
Western Roman Empire and the place where careers were best made. Augustine tells
us that he, and the many family members with him, expected no less than a provincial
governorship as the eventual—and lucrative—reward for his merits.
Augustine’s career, however, ran aground in Milan. After only two years there, he
resigned his teaching post and, after some soul-searching and apparent idleness, made
his way back to his native town of Tagaste. There he passed the time as
a cultured squire, looking after his family property, raising the son, Adeodatus, left him
by his long-term lover (her name is unknown) taken from the lower classes, and
continuing his literary pastimes. The death of that son while still an adolescent left
Augustine with no obligation to hand on the family property, and so he disposed of it
and found himself, at age 36, literally pressed into service against his will as a junior
clergyman in the coastal city of Hippo, north of Tagaste.
The transformation was not entirely surprising. Augustine had always been a dabbler in
one form or another of the Christian religion, and the collapse of his career at Milan was
associated with an intensification of religiosity. All his writings from that time onward
were driven by his allegiance to a particular form of Christianity both orthodox
and intellectual. His coreligionists in North Africa accepted his distinctive stance and
style with some difficulty, and Augustine chose to associate himself with the “official”
branch of Christianity, approved by emperors and reviled by the most enthusiastic and
numerous branches of the African church. Augustine’s literary and intellectual abilities,
however, gave him the power to articulate his vision of Christianity in a way that set him
apart from his African contemporaries. His unique gift was the ability to write at a high
theoretical level for the most-discerning readers and still be able to deliver sermons with
fire and fierceness in an idiom that a less-cultured audience could admire.
Made a “presbyter” (roughly, a priest, but with less authority than modern clergy of that
title) at Hippo in 391, Augustine became bishop there in 395 or 396 and spent the rest
of his life in that office. Hippo was a trading city, without the wealth and culture of
Carthage or Rome, and Augustine was never entirely at home there. He would travel to
Carthage for several months of the year to pursue ecclesiastical business in
an environment more welcoming to his talents than that of his adopted home city.
Augustine’s educational background and cultural milieu trained him for the art of
rhetoric: declaring the power of the self through speech that differentiated the speaker
from his fellows and swayed the crowd to follow his views. That Augustine’s training and
natural talent coincided is best seen in an episode when he was in his early 60s and
found himself quelling by force of personality and words an incipient riot while visiting
the town of Caesarea Mauretanensis. The style of the rhetorician carried over in his
ecclesiastical persona throughout his career. He was never without controversies to
fight, usually with others of his own religion. In his years of rustication and early in his
time at Hippo, he wrote book after book attacking Manichaeism, a Christian sect he had
joined in his late teens and left 10 years later when it became impolitic to remain with
them.
For the next 20 years, from the 390s to the 410s, he was preoccupied with the struggle
to make his own brand of Christianity prevail over all others in Africa. The native African
Christian tradition had fallen afoul of the Christian emperors who
succeeded Constantine (reigned 305–337) and was reviled as schismatic; it was
branded with the name of Donatism after Donatus, one of its early leaders. Augustine
and his chief colleague in the official church, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage, fought a
canny and relentless campaign against it with their books, with their recruitment of
support among church leaders, and with careful appeal to Roman officialdom. In 411
the reigning emperor sent an official representative to Carthage to settle the quarrel. A
public debate held in three sessions during June 1–8 and attended by hundreds of
bishops on each side ended with a ruling in favour of the official church. The ensuing
legal restrictions on Donatism decided the struggle in favour of Augustine’s party.
Even then, approaching his 60th year, Augustine found—or manufactured—a last great
challenge for himself. Taking offense at the implications of the teachings of a traveling
society preacher named Pelagius, Augustine gradually worked himself up to a polemical
fever over ideas that Pelagius may or may not have espoused. Other churchmen of the
time were perplexed and reacted with some caution to Augustine, but he persisted,
even reviving the battle against austere monks and dignified bishops through the 420s.
At the time of his death, he was at work on a vast and shapeless attack on the last and
most urbane of his opponents, the Italian bishop Julian of Eclanum.
Through these years, Augustine had carefully built for himself a reputation as a writer
throughout Africa and beyond. His careful cultivation of selected correspondents had
made his name known in Gaul, Spain, Italy, and the Middle East, and his books were
widely circulated throughout the Mediterranean world. In his last years he compiled a
careful catalog of his books, annotating them with bristling defensiveness to deter
charges of inconsistency. He had opponents, many of them heated in their attacks on
him, but he usually retained their respect by the power and effectiveness of his writing.
His fame notwithstanding, Augustine died a failure. When he was a young man, it was
inconceivable that the Pax Romana could fall, but in his last year he found himself and
his fellow citizens of Hippo prisoners to a siege laid by a motley army of invaders who
had swept into Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. Called the Vandals by
contemporaries, the attacking forces comprised a mixed group of “barbarians” and
adventurers searching for a home. Hippo fell shortly after Augustine’s death
and Carthage not long after. The Vandals, holders to a more fiercely particularist
version of the Christian creed than any of those Augustine had lived with in Africa,
would rule in Africa for a century, until Roman forces sent from Constantinople invaded
again and overthrew their regime. But Augustine’s legacy in his homeland was
effectively terminated with his lifetime. A revival of orthodox Christianity in the 6th
century under the patronage of Constantinople was brought to an end in the 7th century
with the Islamic invasions that permanently removed North Africa from the sphere of
Christian influence until the thin Christianization of French colonialism in the 19th
century.
Augustine survived in his books. His habit of cataloging them served his surviving
collaborators well. Somehow, essentially the whole of Augustine’s
literary oeuvre survived and escaped Africa intact. The story was told that his mortal
remains went to Sardinia and thence to Pavia (Italy), where a shrine concentrates
reverence on what is said to be those remains. Whatever the truth of the story, some
organized withdrawal to Sardinia on the part of Augustine’s followers, bearing his body
and his books, is not impossible and remains the best surmise.
 B. BONAVENTURE
Saint Bonaventure (/ˈbɒnəˌvɛntʃər, ˌbɒnəˈvɛ
n-/; Italian: Bonaventura [ˌbɔnavenˈtuːra]; 1221 – 15
July 1274),[4] born Giovanni di Fidanza, was an
Italian medieval Franciscan, scholastic theologian a
nd philosopher. The seventh Minister General of
the Order of Friars Minor, he was also Cardinal
Bishop of Albano. He was canonised on 14 April
1482 by Pope Sixtus IV and declared a Doctor of
the Church in the year 1588 by Pope Sixtus V. He
is known as the "Seraphic Doctor" (Latin: Doctor
Seraphicus). Many writings believed in the Middle
Ages to be his are now collected under the
name Pseudo-Bonaventure.
Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) was one of the most influential medieval theologians and
philosophers. He is celebrated for his outstanding ability to reconcile the opposing theological
and philosophical traditions. In 1482, he was canonised by Pope Sixtus IV and one century
later, Pope Sixtus V declared him Doctor of the Church.
Early Life
Little is known about Bonaventure’s early life. He was born as Giovanni di Fidanza in 1221 at
Bagnoregio in Latium (at the time an integral part of the Papal States) to Giovanni di Fidanza
and Maria Ritella. During his childhood, he fell severely ill and according to Bonaventure, he
recovered due to the intercession of St. Francis of Assisi. At the age of 14, he went to Paris to
study at the University of Paris. In 1243, he was awarded master of arts degree and in the same
year, he joined the Franciscan Order and took the name Bonaventure.
Later Life
After graduating at the University of Paris, he studied theology in the French capital. In 1254, he
became master of theology and taught at the Franciscan school until 1257. In the same year, he
was awarded a doctor degree at the University of Paris and soon thereafter, he was elected as
minister general of the Franciscan Order. His election on the position of the minister general of
the Franciscans was influenced greatly by his successful defence of the mendicant orders
against the secular professors. These were led by William of Saint-Amour who wanted to
exclude the members of the mendicant orders from the teaching positions at the University of
Paris.
At the time when Bonaventure became the minister general of the Franciscans, the order was
divided into the so-called Spirituals who were strictly advocating poverty and the Relaxati who
proposed a more relaxed lifestyle. With his authority, he managed to restore the unity of the
Order and reformed it in the spirit of its founder, St. Francis. In 1260, Bonaventure reformed the
Order’s constitution as well as successfully defended it from Gerard of Abbeville, a theologian
and opponent of the mendicants at the University of Paris. Later, he also stood up against the
attempts to exclude revelation from philosophy by some masters at the University.
In 1273, Pope Gregory X named Bonaventure as Cardinal Bishop of Albano (Italy) despite the
fact that ten years earlier, he refused the post of the Archbishop of York. In 1274, he was
consecrated by the Pope in Lyon and resigned as minister general of the Franciscan Order. He
took part at the Council of Lyon later that year and played an important role in the church
reforms, reconciliation of the secular clergy and mendicants as well as in restoration of the
union between the Greek and Roman Catholic churches.
Mysterious Death
Bonaventure died during the Council of Lyon in 1274. The cause of death is unknown but
according to the chronicle of his secretary Peregrinus of Bologna, Bonaventure was poisoned.
He was buried in the Church of the Friars Minor at Lyons on the day of his death.
Philosophy and Works
Bonaventure’s greatest works are commentaries on the Bible and the Sentences (a textbook
that was written by Peter Lombard in the 12th century), followed by Breviloquium (“Summary”)
and De Reductione Artium Ad Theologiam (“On the Reduction of the Arts to to Theology”) which
reveal both his theological and philosophical views. These as well as later works such as
Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (“Journey of the Mind to God”) reveal that he followed the teachings
of St. Augustine but they also reveal the influence of ancient philosophers, most notably
Aristotle. Just like his personal life, his works reflect an outstanding ability to reconcile
contradictory traditions in both theology and philosophy which is why he was considered one of
the foremost scholars already by his contemporaries.
Bonaventure was both a theologian and philosopher but like all the philosophers of his time, he
was first a theologian and only then a philosopher. He considered philosophy inferior to theology
although he viewed philosophy in itself as the highest science. Bonaventure did not reject
Aristotle although he criticised his “defects”. He did, however, oppose the new ideas that
appeared in Scholasticism in the mid-13th century and remained loyal to the traditional view that
was based on the teachings of St. Augustine.
The “Commentaries on the Sentences” are traditionally viewed as Bonaventure’s greatest
masterpiece. The book that contains over four thousand pages is divided into four books and
deals with all the main questions of Scholasticism. Besides theological and philosophical works,
Bonaventure also wrote many works that are related to religious subjects, especially to the
Franciscans. In addition to re-codifying the constitution of the Order, he had also rewritten St.
Francis biography titled the Life of St. Francis of Assisi.
Some Bonaventure’s works are unfortunately lost, while many were wrongfully attributed to him.
Works that were attributed to Bonaventure but are thought or proven to be written by other
authors are referred to as Pseudo-Bonaventure. Examples include Centiloquium, Philomena,
Stimulus Amoris, The Legend of St. Clare, Biblia pauperum, Meditationes vitae Christi,
Theologia Mystica, Speculum Disciplinae and some others.

C. BOETHIUS
Anicius Manlius Severinus
Boëthius,[a] commonly
called Boethius[b] (/boʊˈiːθiəs/;
also Boetius /-ʃəs/; c. 477–524 AD),
was a Roman senator, consul, magister
officiorum, and philosopher of the early
6th century. He was born about a year
after Odoacer deposed the last Roman
Emperor and declared himself King of
Italy. Boethius entered public service
under Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great, who later imprisoned and executed him in 524 on
charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of
Philosophy, a philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues, which became one of
the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. As the author of
numerous handbooks and translator of Aristotle, he became the main intermediary
between Classical antiquity and following centuries.
Boethius (c. 480-524/525) was one of the most influential early medieval philosophers. His most
famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, was most widely translated and reproduced
secular work from the 8th century until the end of the Middle Ages. In the 9th century, Boethius’s
Consolation was also translated into Old English by King Alfred the Great (his authorship of the
9th century translation has recently been challenged) as well as later English by Geoffrey
Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales. Boethius is also credited with the spread of
encyclopedic learning and transferring classical Greek knowledge to medieval Europe despite
the fact that he didn’t manage to translate all works by Aristotle and Plato as he intended due to
his premature death.

Early Life
Little is known about Boethius’s life before his imprisonment and execution in the 520s.
He was born around 480 into an influential Roman aristocratic family of Anicii which
produced two Roman Emperors – Petronius Maximus (ruled 17 March – 31 May 455)
and Olybrius (ruled April or May – October 23 or November 2, 472) as well as several
Roman consuls. According to some authors, Pope Gregory the Great came from the
Anicii family as well.
Most authors believe that Boethius’s father was Manlius Boethius, Roman consul in 487
although many also think that his father may had been Boetios, the perfect of
Alexandria c. 476. It is known that Boethius lost his father at a young age and was
adopted by another influential aristocrat, Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus who is
thought to play an important role in Boethius’s interest in philosophy and literature by
introducing him to Greek-Latin learning and encouraging him to update it.
Where and by whom young Boethius was educated remains a matter of debate. The
fact that he was fluent in Greek made many scholars believe that he may had been
educated in Athens although many point out that a statement by Cassiodorus, a Roman
statesman and Boethius’s contemporary suggests that this wasn’t the case. Many
authors also suggest that young Boethius was educated by Ammonius in Alexandria,
especially those who think that his father may had been the perfect of Alexandria.
Others, however, note that there is no evidence for him ever leaving the Italian
peninsula.
Rise to Power and Downfall
Just like many of his ancestors, Boethius held important public offices in Rome. At the
time of his birth, however, the Western Roman Empire no longer existed. In 476, the
last Western Roman Emperor was deposed by a Germanic chieftain Odoacer who in
turn was killed by Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. When Boethius was appointed
consul in 510, the Italian peninsula was ruled by the Ostrogoths.
Thanks to his scholarly knowledge, Boethius’s soon gained royal affection and in 522,
he achieved appointment of his two sons, Boethius and Symmachus as joint consuls
which he considered as his greatest achievement. In the same year, himself was
appointed magister officiorum, the head of the government and court administration.
Boethius’s political career seemed bright before he lost Theodoric’s favour in 523. At the
Royal Council meeting in Verona in the same year, he spoke in defence of former
consul Caecina Decius Faustus Albinus who was accused of treason and conspiring
with the Byzantine Emperor Justin I. Boethius’s support to his colleague, however, didn’t
help either of the two because soon, Boethius was accused of the same crime. Three
men stepped forward as witnesses and confirmed the accusations against Boethius. He
was arrested and imprisoned in Pavia for one or two years before he was executed for
treason. He was buried in San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, an Augustinian church in Pavia.
Works and Influence
Boethius wrote his most influential work, the Consolation of Philosophy (Consolatio
Philosophiae), in the year (or two years) before his execution. The Consolation which is
traditionally viewed as the last great work of the Classical era had a major influence on
medieval philosophy but it also profoundly influenced early Renaissance thought in
Europe.
In the Consolation of Philosophy, written in a form of an imaginary dialogue with
philosophy, Boethius argues that there is a higher power and that all the suffering has
higher purpose. According to Boethius, the universe is ruled by divine love and true
happiness can be achieved not through power and money but by turning to otherworldly
virtues. This interpretation perfectly fitted with the Christian doctrine of humility and
played an important role in the later Christian philosophy of consolation according to
which suffering from evil will be rewarded in the afterlife.
Boethius’s lifelong project – to translate all works by Aristotle and Plato - was never
realised but he translated many works by Greek philosophers and helped transmit a
significant part of the Greek knowledge to medieval Europe. Some of his most important
translations include De Topicis Differentiis and De Arithmetica, while De Institutione
Musica, a treatise on ancient music remained the most important work on Western
music for nearly one millennium.

D. ALBERT THE GREAT

Albertus Magnus[4] (before 1200 –
November 15, 1280), also known
as Saint Albert the Great and Albert of
Cologne, was
a German Catholic Dominican friar and
bishop. Later canonised as a Catholic
saint, he was known during his lifetime
as Doctor universalis and Doctor
expertus and, late in his life,
the sobriquet Magnus was appended to
his name.[5] Scholars such as James A.
Weisheipl and Joachim R. Söder have
referred to him as the greatest German
philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages.[6] The Catholic Church distinguishes him
as one of the 36 Doctors of the Church.

1. Life of Albert the Great

The precise date of Albert’s birth is not known. It is generally conceded that he was born
into a knightly family sometime around the year 1200 in Lauingen an der Donau in
Germany. He was apparently in Italy in the year 1222 where he was present when a
rather terrible earthquake struck in Lombardy. A year later he was still in Italy and
studying at the University of Padua. The same year Jordan of Saxony received him into
the Dominican order. He was sent to Cologne in order to complete his training for the
order. He finished this training as well as a course of studies in theology by 1228. He
then began teaching as a lector at Cologne, Hildesheim, Freiburg im Breisgau,
Regensburg, and Strassburg. During this period he published his first major work, De
natura boni.
Ten years later he is recorded as having been present at the general chapter of the
Dominican Order held in Bologna. Two years later he visited Saxony where he
observed the appearance of a comet. Some time between 1241 and 1242 he was sent
to the University of Paris to complete his theological education. He followed the usual
prescription of lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In addition he began
writing his six part Summa parisiensis dealing with the sacraments of the Church, the
incarnation and resurrection of Christ, the four coevals, human nature, and the nature of
the good. He took his degree as master of theology in 1245 and began to teach
theology at the university under Gueric de Saint-Quentin. St. Thomas Aquinas became
his student at this time and remained under Albert’s direction for the next three years. In
1248 Albert was appointed regent of studies at the studium generale that was newly
created by the Dominican order in Cologne. So Albert, along with Thomas Aquinas, left
Paris and went to Cologne. Thomas continued his studies under Albert in Cologne and
served as magister studium in the school as well until 1252. Then Thomas returned to
Paris to take up his teaching duties while Albert remained in Cologne, where he began
to work on the vast project he set himself of preparing a paraphrase of each of the
known works of Aristotle.
In 1254 the Dominican order again assigned Albert a difficult task. He was elected the
prior provincial for the German-speaking province of the order. This position mandated
that Albert spend a great deal of his time traveling throughout the province visiting
Dominican convents, priories, and even a Dominican mission in Riga. This task
occupied Albert until 1256. That year he returned to Cologne, but left the same year for
Paris in order to attend a General Chapter of his order in which the allegations of
William of St. Amour’s De periculis novissimorum temporum against mendicant orders
were considered. A little later Pope Alexander IV asked Albert to go to Anagni in order
to speak to a commission of Cardinals who were looking into the claims of William.
While engaged in this charge Albert completed his refutation of Averroistic psychology
with his De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas. Afterwards Albert departed for another
tour of the province of Germany. In 1257 he returned to the papal court, which was now
located in Viterbo. He was relieved of his duties as prior provincial and returned again to
Cologne as regent of studies. He continued to teach until 1259 when he traveled to
Valenciennes in order to attend a General Chapter of his order. At that time, along with
Thomas Aquinas, Peter of Tarentasia, Bonhomme Brito, and Florent de Hesdin, he
undertook on behalf of his order an extensive discussion of the curriculum of the
scholastic program used by the order.
The next year of his life found Albert once again appointed to an onerous duty. In
obedience to the wishes of the pope Albert was consecrated a bishop of the Church and
sent to Ratisbon (modern Regensburg) in order to undertake a reform of abuses in that
diocese. Albert worked at this task until 1263 when Pope Urban IV relieved him of his
duties and asked Albert to preach the Crusade in the German speaking countries. This
duty occupied Albert until the year 1264. He then went to the city of Würzburg where he
stayed until 1267.
Albert spent the next eight years traveling around Germany conducting various
ecclesiastical tasks. Then in 1274 while he was traveling to the Council of Lyons Albert
received the sad news of the untimely death of Thomas Aquinas, his friend and former
student of many years. After the close of the Council Albert returned to Germany. There
is evidence that he traveled to Paris in the year 1277 in order to defend Aquinas’
teaching, which was under attack at the university. In 1279, anticipating his death he
drew up his own last will and testament. On November 15, 1280 he died and was buried
in Cologne. On December 15, 1931 Pope Pius XI declared Albert both a saint and a
doctor of the Church. On the 16th of December 1941 Pope Pius XII declared Albert the
patron saint of the natural sciences.
2. Philosophical Enterprise
An examination of Albert’s published writings reveals something of his understanding of
philosophy in human culture. In effect he prepared a kind of philosophical encyclopedia
that occupied him up to the last ten years of his life. He produced paraphrases of most
of the works of Aristotle available to him. In some cases where he felt that Aristotle
should have produced a work, but it was missing, Albert produced the work himself. If
he had produced nothing else it would be necessary to say that he adopted the
Aristotelian philosophical-scientific program and subordinated it to the Neoplatonic
tradition. Albert’s intellectual vision, however, was very great. Not only did he
paraphrase “The Philosopher” (as the medievals called Aristotle) but Porphyry,
Boethius, Peter Lombard, Gilbert de la Porrée, the Liber de causis, and Ps.-Dionysius.
He also wrote a number of commentaries on the Bible. In addition to all of this work of
paraphrasing and commenting, in which Albert labored to prepare a kind of unified field
theory of medieval Christian intellectual culture, he also wrote a number of works in
which he developed his own philosophical-scientific-theological vision. Here one finds
titles such as De unitate intellectus, Problemata determinate, De fato, De XV
problematibus, De natura boni, De sacramentis, De incarnatione, De bono, De quattuor
coaequaevis, De homine, and his unfinished Summa theologiae de mirabilis scientia
Dei.
Albert’s labors resulted in the formation of what might be called a Christian reception of
Aristotle in the Western Europe. Albert himself had a strong bias in favor of Neo-
Platonism,and his work on Aristotle shows him to have had a deep understanding of the
Aristotelian program. Along with his student Thomas Aquinas he was of the opinion that
Aristotle and the kind of natural philosophy that he represented was no obstacle to the
development of a Christian philosophical vision of the natural order. In order to establish
this point Albert carefully dissected the method that Aristotle employed in undertaking
the task of expounding natural philosophy. This method, Albert decided, is experientially
based and proceeds to draw conclusions by the use of both inductive and deductive
logic. Christian theology, as Albert found it taught in Europe rested firmly upon the
revelation of Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers. Therefore, he reasoned, the two
domains of human culture are distinct in their methodology and pose no threat to each
other. Both can be pursued for their own sake. Philosophy was not to be valued only in
terms of its ancillary relation to theology. As recent research has shown, Albert
subordinated his use of Aristotle to his understanding of the Neoplatonic view of reality
that he found in the writings of Pseudo Dionysius and the Liber de causis. He saw all of
reality in terms of the Neoplatonic categories of exit and return, which he referred to in
his writings with the terms exitus, perfectio, and reductio. This schema gave him a
framework into which he could develop the scientific insights of Aristotle.
3. Logic
Albert carefully prepared a paraphrase of Aristotle’s Organon (the logical treatises in the
Aristotelian corpus). He then used the results of this paraphrase to address the problem
of universals as he found it discussed in the philosophical literature and debates of the
medieval philosophical culture. He defined the term universal as referring to “ … that
which, although it exists in one, is apt by nature to exist in many.”[1] Because it is apt to
be in many, it is predicable of them. (De praed., tract II, c. 1) He then distinguished
three kinds of universals, those that pre-exist the things that exemplify them (universale
ante rem), those that exist in individual things (universale in re), and those that exist in
the mind when abstracted from individual things (universale post rem).
4. Metaphysics
Albert’s metaphysics is an adaptation of Aristotelian metaphysics as conditioned by a
form of Neo-Platonism. His reading the Liber de causis as an authentic Aristotelian text
influenced his understanding of Aristotle. It seems that Albert never realized the Neo-
Platonic origin of the work. As with the other works of Aristotle he prepared a
paraphrase of the work entitled De causis et processu universitatis, and used it as a
guide to interpreting other works by Aristotle. However, he also used the writings of
Pseudo-Dionysius to correct some of the doctrine found in the Liber de causis.
5. Psychology and Anthropology
Albert’s interest in the human condition is dominated by his concern with the
relationship of the soul to the body on the one hand and the important role that the
intellect plays in human psychology. According to Albert, man is identified with his
intellect.[8] With regard to the relationship between the soul and the body Albert appears
to be torn between the Platonic theory which sees the soul as a form capable of existing
independently of the body and the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory which reduces the
soul to a functional relationship of the body. With respect to human knowing, for
example, he maintains the position that the human intellect is dependent upon the
senses.[9] In order to resolve the conflict between the two views Albert availed himself of
Avicenna’s position that Aristotle’s analysis was focused on the function and not the
essence of the soul. Functionally, Albert argues, the soul is the agent cause of the body.
“Just as we maintain that the soul is the cause of the animated body and of its motions
and passions insofar as it is animated,” he reasons, “likewise we must maintain that the
lowest intelligence is the cause of the cognitive soul insofar as it is cognitive because
the cognition of the soul is a particular result of the light of the intelligence.”[10] Having
been created in the image and likeness of God it not only governs the body, as God
governs the universe, but it is responsible for the very existence of the body, as God is
the creator of the world. And just as God transcends his creation, so does the human
soul transcend the body in its interests. It is capable of operating in complete
independence of corporeal functions. This transcendental function of the soul allows
Albert to focus on what he believes is the essence of the soul—the human intellect.
6. Albertus Magnus and the Sciences
In the first section of his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics Albertus Magnus discusses
the possibility of the study of natural science. If science could only study particulars,
Albert argues, then there would be no science in the sense of the demonstration of
necessary causes because there would be as many sciences as there are particulars.
But particulars, Albert goes on to point out, belong to definite kinds (species) and these
can be studied because their causes can be demonstrated. Species have common
attributes and a determined subject of which the attributes can be determined with
necessity. Thus science is possible.
7. Ethics
Albert’s ethics rests on his understanding of human freedom. This freedom is expressed
through the human power to make unrestricted decisions about their own actions. This
power, the liberum arbitrium, Albert believes is identified neither with the intellect nor the
will. He holds this extraordinary position because of his analysis of the genesis of
human action. In his treatise on man (Liber de homine) he accounts for human action as
beginning with the intellect considering the various options for action open to a person
at a given moment in time. This is coupled by the will desiring the beneficial outcome of
the proposed event. Then the liberum arbitrium chooses one of the options proposed by
the intellect or the object of the will’s desire. The will then moves the person to act on
the basis of the choice of the liberum arbitrium. Brutes do not have this ability, he
argues, and must act solely on their initial desire. Hence they have no power of free
choice. In his later writings, however, Albert eliminates the first act of the will. But even
so he distinguishes the liberum arbitrium from both the will and the intellect, presumably
so that it can respond to the influences of both these faculties equally. Thus the way to
ethics is open.
7. Ethics
Albert’s ethics rests on his understanding of human freedom. This freedom is expressed
through the human power to make unrestricted decisions about their own actions. This
power, the liberum arbitrium, Albert believes is identified neither with the intellect nor the
will. He holds this extraordinary position because of his analysis of the genesis of
human action. In his treatise on man (Liber de homine) he accounts for human action as
beginning with the intellect considering the various options for action open to a person
at a given moment in time. This is coupled by the will desiring the beneficial outcome of
the proposed event. Then the liberum arbitrium chooses one of the options proposed by
the intellect or the object of the will’s desire. The will then moves the person to act on
the basis of the choice of the liberum arbitrium. Brutes do not have this ability, he
argues, and must act solely on their initial desire. Hence they have no power of free
choice. In his later writings, however, Albert eliminates the first act of the will. But even
so he distinguishes the liberum arbitrium from both the will and the intellect, presumably
so that it can respond to the influences of both these faculties equally. Thus the way to
ethics is open.

E. THOMAS AQUINAS
Saint, Theologian, Priest (c. 1225–1274)

Italian Dominican theologian Saint

Thomas Aquinas was one of the most
influential medieval thinkers of
Scholasticism and the father of the
Thomistic school of theology.

Synopsis

Philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas was born circa 1225 in Roccasecca,
Italy. Combining the theological principles of faith with the philosophical principles of
reason, he ranked among the most influential thinkers of medieval Scholasticism. An
authority of the Roman Catholic Church and a prolific writer, Aquinas died on March 7,
1274, at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova, near Terracina, Latium, Papal States,
Italy.

Early Life

The son of Landulph, count of Aquino, Saint Thomas Aquinas was born circa 1225 in
Roccasecca, Italy, near Aquino, Terra di Lavoro, in the Kingdom of Sicily. Thomas had
eight siblings, and was the youngest child. His mother, Theodora, was countess of
Teano. Though Thomas's family members were descendants of Emperors Frederick I
and Henry VI, they were considered to be of lower nobility.

Before Saint Thomas Aquinas was born, a holy hermit shared a prediction with his
mother, foretelling that her son would enter the Order of Friars Preachers, become a
great learner and achieve unequaled sanctity.

Following the tradition of the period, Saint Thomas Aquinas was sent to the Abbey of
Monte Cassino to train among Benedictine monks when he was just 5 years old. In
Wisdom 8:19, Saint Thomas Aquinas is described as "a witty child" who "had received a
good soul." At Monte Cassino, the quizzical young boy repeatedly posed the question,
"What is God?" to his benefactors.
Saint Thomas Aquinas remained at the monastery until he was 13 years old, when the
political climate forced him to return to Naples.

Education

Saint Thomas Aquinas spent the next five years completing his primary education at a
Benedictine house in Naples. During those years, he studied Aristotle's work, which
would later become a major launching point for Saint Thomas Aquinas's own
exploration of philosophy. At the Benedictine house, which was closely affiliated with the
University of Naples, Thomas also developed an interest in more contemporary
monastic orders. He was particularly drawn to those that emphasized a life of spiritual
service, in contrast with the more traditional views and sheltered lifestyle he'd observed
at the Abbey of Monte Cassino.

Circa 1239, Saint Thomas Aquinas began attending the University of Naples. In 1243,
he secretly joined an order of Dominican monks, receiving the habit in 1244. When his
family found out, they felt so betrayed that he had turned his back on the principles to
which they subscribed that they decided to kidnap him. Thomas's family held him
captive for an entire year, imprisoned in the fortress of San Giovanni at Rocca Secca.
During this time, they attempted to deprogram Thomas of his new beliefs. Thomas held
fast to the ideas he had learned at university, however, and went back to the Dominican
order following his release in 1245.

From 1245 to 1252, Saint Thomas Aquinas continued to pursue his studies with the
Dominicans in Naples, Paris and Cologne. He was ordained in Cologne, Germany, in
1250, and went on to teach theology at the University of Paris. Under the tutelage of
Saint Albert the Great, Saint Thomas Aquinas subsequently earned his doctorate in
theology. Consistent with the holy hermit's prediction, Thomas proved an exemplary
scholar, though, ironically, his modesty sometimes led his classmates to misperceive
him as dim-witted. After reading Thomas's thesis and thinking it brilliant, his professor,
Saint Albert the Great, proclaimed in Thomas's defense, "We call this young man a
dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world!"

Theology and Philosophy

After completing his education, Saint Thomas Aquinas devoted himself to a life of
traveling, writing, teaching, public speaking and preaching. Religious institutions and
universities alike yearned to benefit from the wisdom of "The Christian Apostle."

At the forefront of medieval thought was a struggle to reconcile the relationship between
theology (faith) and philosophy (reason). People were at odds as to how to unite the
knowledge they obtained through revelation with the information they observed naturally
using their mind and their senses. Based on Averroes's "theory of the double truth," the
two types of knowledge were in direct opposition to each other. Saint Thomas Aquinas's
revolutionary views rejected Averroes's theory, asserting that "both kinds of knowledge
ultimately come from God" and were therefore compatible. Not only were they
compatible, according to Thomas's ideology, but they could also work in collaboration:
He believed that revelation could guide reason and prevent it from making mistakes,
while reason could clarify and demystify faith. Saint Thomas Aquinas's work goes on to
discuss faith and reason's roles in both perceiving and proving the existence of God.
Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that the existence of God could be proven in five ways,
mainly by: 1) observing movement in the world as proof of God, the "Immovable Mover";
2) observing cause and effect and identifying God as the cause of everything; 3)
concluding that the impermanent nature of beings proves the existence of a necessary
being, God, who originates only from within himself; 4) noticing varying levels of human
perfection and determining that a supreme, perfect being must therefore exist; and 5)
knowing that natural beings could not have intelligence without it being granted to them
it by God. Subsequent to defending people's ability to naturally perceive proof of God,
Thomas also tackled the challenge of protecting God's image as an all-powerful being.

Saint Thomas Aquinas also uniquely addressed appropriate social behavior toward
God. In so doing, he gave his ideas a contemporary—some would say timeless—
everyday context. Thomas believed that the laws of the state were, in fact, a natural
product of human nature, and were crucial to social welfare. By abiding by the social
laws of the state, people could earn eternal salvation of their souls in the afterlife, he
purported. Saint Thomas Aquinas identified three types of laws: natural, positive and
eternal. According to his treatise, natural law prompts man to act in accordance with
achieving his goals and governs man's sense of right and wrong; positive law is the law
of the state, or government, and should always be a manifestation of natural law; and
eternal law, in the case of rational beings, depends on reason and is put into action
through free will, which also works toward the accomplishment of man's spiritual goals.

Combining traditional principles of theology with modern philosophic thought, Saint

Thomas Aquinas's treatises touched upon the questions and struggles of medieval
intellectuals, church authorities and everyday people alike. Perhaps this is precisely
what marked them as unrivaled in their philosophical influence at the time, and explains
why they would continue to serve as a building block for contemporary thought—
garnering responses from theologians, philosophers, critics and believers—thereafter.

Major Works

A prolific writer, Saint Thomas Aquinas penned close to 60 known works ranging in
length from short to tome-like. Handwritten copies of his works were distributed to
libraries across Europe. His philosophical and theological writings spanned a wide
spectrum of topics, including commentaries on the Bible and discussions of Aristotle's
writings on natural philosophy.

While teaching at Cologne in the early 1250s, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote a lengthy
commentary on scholastic theologian Peter Lombard's Four Books of Sentences,
called Scriptum super libros Sententiarium, or Commentary on the Sentences. During
that period, he also wrote De ente et essentia, or On Being and Essence, for the
Dominican monks in Paris.

In 1256, while serving as regent master in theology at the University of Paris, Aquinas
wrote Impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, or Against Those Who Assail the Worship
of God and Religion, a treatise defending mendicant orders that William of Saint-Amour
had criticized.

Written from 1265 to 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica is largely
philosophical in nature and was followed by Summa Contra Gentiles, which, while still
philosophical, comes across to many critics as apologetic of the beliefs he expressed in
his earlier works.
Saint Thomas Aquinas is also known for writing commentaries examining the principles
of natural philosophy espoused in Aristotle's writings: On the Heavens, Meteorology, On
Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics, among
others.

Shortly after his death, Saint Thomas Aquinas's theological and philosophical writings
rose to great public acclaim and reinforced a strong following among the Dominicans.
Universities, seminaries and colleges came to replace Lombard's Four Books of
Sentences with Summa Theologica as the leading theology textbook. The influence of
Saint Thomas Aquinas's writing has been so great, in fact, that an estimated 6,000
commentaries on his work exist to date.

Later Life and Death

In June 1272, Saint Thomas Aquinas agreed to go to Naples and start a theological
studies program for the Dominican house neighboring the university. While he was still
writing prolifically, his works began to suffer in quality.

During the Feast of Saint Nicolas in 1273, Saint Thomas Aquinas had a mystical vision
that made writing seem unimportant to him. At mass, he reportedly heard a voice
coming from a crucifix that said, "Thou hast written well of me, Thomas; what reward
wilt thou have?" to which Saint Thomas Aquinas replied, "None other than thyself,
Lord."

When Saint Thomas Aquinas's confessor, Father Reginald of Piperno, urged him to
keep writing, he replied, "I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that
all I have written now appears to be of little value." Saint Thomas Aquinas never wrote
again.

In January 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas embarked on a trip to Lyon, France, on foot to
serve on the Second Council, but never made it there. Along the way, he fell ill at the
Cistercian monastery of Fossanova, Italy. The monks wanted Saint Thomas Aquinas to
stay at the castle, but, sensing that his death was near, Thomas preferred to remain at
the monastery, saying, "If the Lord wishes to take me away, it is better that I be found in
a religious house than in the dwelling of a layperson."

Often called "The Universal Teacher," Saint Thomas Aquinas died at the monastery of
Fossanova on March 7, 1274. He was canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323.
 F. DUNS SCOTUS

John Duns Scotus (1265/66–

1308) was one of the most important
and influential philosopher-theologians
of the High Middle Ages. His brilliantly
complex and nuanced thought, which
earned him the nickname “the Subtle
Doctor,” left a mark on discussions of
such disparate topics as the semantics
of religious language, the problem of
universals, divine illumination, and the nature of human freedom. This essay first lays
out what is known about Scotus's life and the dating of his works. It then offers an
overview of some of his key positions in four main areas of philosophy: natural theology,
metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and ethics and moral psychology.
The life of John Duns the Scot
‘Scotus’ identifies Scotus as a Scot. His family name was Duns, which was also the
name of the Scottish village in which he was born, just a few miles from the English
border. We do not know the precise date of his birth, but we do know that Scotus was
ordained to the priesthood in the Order of Friars Minor—the Franciscans—at Saint
Andrew's Priory in Northampton, England, on 17 March 1291. The minimum age for
ordination was twenty-five, so we can conclude that Scotus was born before 17 March
1266. But how much before? The conjecture, plausible but by no means certain, is that
Scotus would have been ordained as early as canonically permitted. Since the Bishop
of Lincoln (the diocese that included Oxford, where Scotus was studying, as well as St
Andrew's Priory) had ordained priests in Wycombe on 23 December 1290, we can place
Scotus's birth between 23 December 1265 and 17 March 1266.
Scotus studied philosophy and then theology at Oxford beginning some time in the
1280s. In the academic year 1298–99 he commented on the first two books of
the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Scotus left Oxford for Paris, probably in 1302, and
began lecturing on the Sentences again (we think in the order Book I, Book IV, Book II,
Book III). In June 1303 Scotus was expelled from France along with eighty other friars
for taking Pope Boniface VIII's side in a dispute with King Philip IV of France. After
Boniface died in October 1303 the king allowed the exiled students and masters to
return, so Scotus could have returned in the late fall of 1303 to resume his lectures on
the Sentences. Scotus became Doctor of Theology in 1305 and was Franciscan regent
master at Paris in 1306–07. He was transferred to the Franciscan studium at Cologne,
probably beginning his duties as lector in October 1307. He died there in 1308; the date
of his death is traditionally given as 8 November.
1.2 Scotus's works
It is generally agreed that Scotus's earliest works were his commentaries on the Old
Logic: questions on Porphyry's Isagoge and Aristotle's Categories, two sets of questions
on Peri hermeneias, and De sophisticis elenchis. These probably date to around 1295;
the Quaestiones super De anima is also very likely an early work (the editors date it to
the late 1280s or early 1290s). Scotus's other Aristotelian commentary, the Quaestiones
super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, seems to have been started early; but Books VI
through IX are all late or were at least revised later in Scotus's career. Scotus also wrote
an Expositio on Aristotle's Metaphysics. It had been unidentified for centuries but was
recently identified and edited by Giorgio Pini.
Things really get complicated when we come to Scotus's commentaries on the four
books of Sentences of Peter Lombard, since he commented on the Sentences more
than once and revised his lectures over a long period; the relations among the various
versions that have come down to us are not always clear. Certainly
the Lectura presents us with Scotus's Oxford lectures on Books I and II of
the Sentences in 1298–99. There is an Ordinatio (i.e., a version prepared for publication
by the author himself) of lectures at Oxford, based in part on the Lectura and on
material from his lectures in Paris. The Ordinatio, which Scotus seems to have been
revising up to his death, is generally taken to be Scotus's premier work; the critical
edition was at last completed in 2013. Finally, Scotus lectured on the Sentences at
Paris, and there are various Reportationes of these lectures. A critical edition is in
progress; at present we have a transcription of a reasonably reliable manuscript of Book
I. Although the Paris lectures themselves were later than the Oxford lectures, it seems
probable that parts of the Ordinatio—Book IV and perhaps also Book III—are later than
the corresponding parts of the Reportatio.
In addition to these works, we have 46 short disputations called Collationes dating from
1300–1305, a late work in natural theology called De primo principio, and Quaestiones
Quodlibetales from Scotus's days as regent master (either Advent 1306 or Lent 1307).
Finally, there is a work called Theoremata. Though doubts have been raised about its
authenticity, the recent critical edition accepts it as a genuine work of Scotus.
2. Natural Theology
2.1 Some methodological preliminaries
2.2 Proof of the existence of God
2.3 Divine infinity and the doctrine of univocity
3. Metaphysics
3.1 The subject matter of metaphysics
3.2 Matter and form, body and soul
3.3 Universals and individuation
4. Theory of Knowledge
4.1 Sensation and abstraction
4.2 Intuitive cognition
4.3 The attack on skepticism and illuminationism
5. Ethics and Moral Psychology
5.1 The natural law
5.2 The will, freedom, and morality
 G.PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

``````` Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) is,

after Marsilio Ficino, the best known
philosopher of the Renaissance: his Oration on
the Dignity of Man is better known than any
other philosophical text of the fifteenth century.
Pico was also remarkably original—indeed,
idiosyncratic. The deliberately esoteric and
aggressively recondite character of his thought
may help explain why Renaissance philosophy
has had so small a place, until recently, in the
canonical history of the discipline as accepted by Anglophone philosophers.

Life
Pico was born on February 24, 1463, to a noble Italian family, the counts of Mirandola
and Concordia near Modena in the Emilia-Romagna north of Tuscany. At the age of
fourteen he left for Bologna, intending briefly to study canon law, but within two years he
moved to Ferrara and shortly afterward to Padua, where he met one of his most
important teachers, Elia del Medigo, a Jew and an Averroist Aristotelian. By the time he
left Padua in 1482, he had also felt the attraction of the Platonism being revived by
Marsilio Ficino, and by 1484 he was corresponding with Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo
de’Medici about poetry.
In 1485 he traveled from Florence to Paris, the citadel of Aristotelian scholasticism.
Before he left, at the age of twenty-two, he had made his first important contribution to
philosophy—a defense of the technical terminology which since Petrarch’s time had
incited humanist critics of philosophy to attack scholastic Latin as a barbaric violation of
classical norms. Having refined his literary talent while developing his philosophical
skills, Pico issued his manifesto in the form of a letter to the renowned Ermolao
Barbaro, using the occasion and the genre to show, like Plato in the Phaedrus, how
rhetoric could equip a philosopher to defend his calling against rhetorical assault.
After a short stay in Paris, Pico returned to Florence, and then Arezzo, where he caused
a scandal by abducting a young woman named Margherita, already married to Giuliano
Mariotto de’ Medici. Despite the support that came from Lorenzo de’ Medici, the
commotion that followed and then a plague kept Pico on the move, just at the time he
was writing a Commento on a love poem by Girolamo Benivieni and planning his larger
scheme of philosophical concord. At its core this project aimed to secure human
happiness by way of a philosophical harmony between Platonists and Aristotelians. But
in keeping with Pico’s immense ambition, the scope of the effort became global, striving
to join all schools of thought in a single symphony of philosophies. Pico planned to
underwrite a magnificent conference on this theme in Rome early in 1487, and in
preparation he assembled 900 theses from numerous authorities—ancient and
medieval, pagan and Christian, Moslem and Jewish. He had these Conclusions printed
in Rome at the end of 1486, and to introduce them he composed a work of eventually
immense fame, the Oration on the Dignity of Man—as it came to be called.
Intervention by the Holy See derailed Pico’s plans and blocked the conference. Innocent
VIII appointed a commission that first declared six of the theses suspect and
condemned seven others, then rejected Pico’s clarifications and repudiated all thirteen.
When the Apology that Pico hastily published provoked Innocent to denounce all nine
hundred Conclusions, the audacious young Count left for Paris, but at the pope’s
request he was detained by French authorities and briefly jailed. By the summer of 1488
he was back in Fiesole as the guest of Lorenzo, to whom in 1489 he dedicated a short
work called Heptaplus, on the Sevenfold Account of the Six Days of Genesis.
Since 1483 Pico had a third of the income produced by his family’s estates, which along
with his Mirandola property he transferred in 1491 to his nephew Gianfrancesco, who
was to become an important philosopher in his own right and an early voice for the
revival of scepticism as an instrument of Christian faith. At this time, however, even after
the dust had settled on the provocative Conclusions, contemporaries were unsure of the
elder Pico’s orthodoxy, and the Kabbalist exegesis of Genesis in the Heptaplus—tame
though it is by Pico’s earlier standards—could scarcely restore their confidence.
Meanwhile, Pico pursued safer philological inquiries with Poliziano, who received the
dedication of a fragment On Being and the One in 1492. Even though De ente et
uno was meant as the first installment of the great work that would prove Plato’s thought
in concord with Aristotle’s, not everyone accepted Pico’s position harmoniously—least
of all Antonio Cittadini, a Pisan professor who was still fighting about it with
Gianfrancesco Pico two years after his uncle’s death.
In 1493 Pico achieved reconciliation with a higher authority when Alexander VI
pardoned him for his earlier misadventures. By this time he had already grown close to
Girolamo Savonarola, the fearsome millenarian preacher who had recently become
Prior of the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence. Pico had known the
prophetic friar for some time, but now Savonarola was on his way to establishing a
theocratic tyranny in Florence. Growing ever more saintly, Pico disposed of more of his
property, giving some to the Church and some to his family, as his habits became less
and less worldly. He was working hard on another huge project, the
unfinished Disputations Against Divinatory Astrology, when death (hastened by poison,
some said) came to him on November 17, 1494. Florence fell to the French armies of
Charles VIII on the same day, ending the dazzling age of Florentine culture that Pico’s
blazing genius made all the brighter, though only briefly. Ficino, a steadier spirit,
survived him by five years.
Works and Reputation
Pico’s modern fame comes mainly from a speech that he never gave, the Oration on the
Dignity of Man that got its title only after he died. He wrote the Oration in 1486 to
introduce his 900 Conclusions, having chosen the capital of Christendom as just the
place to dispute the outrageous theological novelties advertised by them—including the
claim that magic and Kabbalah are the best proofs of Christ’s divinity. The Pope
quashed Pico’s rash project, but not before the Conclusions were already in print. To
make matters worse, Pico then defended them in an unsubmissive Apology that printed
half of the original, and not yet published, Oration—though not the half that later
became famous. As a whole, and mainly because its language is enigmatic,
the Oration was less inflammatory than the Conclusions; it first appeared in the
collection of his uncle’s works (Commentationes) published by Gianfrancesco Pico in
1496. Gianfrancesco, the main source of biographical information about the elder Pico,
says that his uncle thought little of the speech, regarding it as a piece of juvenilia. For
the next three centuries, few of Pico’s readers were moved to challenge this verdict,
despite the author’s continuing fame. Until post-Kantian historians of philosophy were
charmed by it, the Oration was largely (though not entirely) ignored, in part because of
its publishing history.
Shortly after 1450, Giannozzo Manetti had completed a book On Human Worth and
Excellence, which—unlike Pico’s speech—really is about dignitas as that word had
been used by ancient Romans and medieval Christians: what they meant by it was
‘rank,’ ‘status,’ ‘value’ or ‘worth,’ not what Kant would mean later
by Würde. Manetti’s dignitas was still essentially a Christian notion made less
otherworldly by the example of ancient sages like Cicero and by the changed conditions
of Italian life in the fifteenth century. The last part of Manetti’s book is an attack on a
twelfth-century treatise On Human Misery by Cardinal Lotario dei Segni, before he
became Pope Innocent III. Manetti took his lead from two contemporaries—Antonio da
Barga and Bartolomeo Facio—who had already written about his topic but in much
more conventional ways. Pico’s speech pays no attention at all to these three earlier
texts on dignitas because dignitas is not his subject. Instead, he wanted to convince
people to use magic and Kabbalah in order to change themselves into angels.
Except as part of Pico’s collected works, the Latin text of the Oration was printed only
once before the 1940s, when the first translation into English also appeared, just after
the first Italian version in 1936. What readers saw on the title-page of the
1496 Commentationes was simply A Very Elegant Oration, which in 1530—in the only
separately published Latin text of the pre-modern era—expanded into On Man by
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, explaining the loftier mysteries of sacred and human
philosophy. Meanwhile, the front-matter of the five collected editions or reprints between
1498 and 1521 stayed with the 1496 formulation, Oratio quaedam elegantissima, which
in 1557 finally became On the Dignity of Man in a Basel collection and, in a Venice
edition of the same year, A Very Elegant Oration on the High Nobility and Dignity of
Man. The two other early modern collections of 1572 and 1601 used a new format that
no longer listed contents by title at the front of the book.
The British Library Catalog, which has about 1300 entries for books by Erasmus
published by 1700, has about 100 for Pico. During the same period, when Marsilio
Ficino’s De vita libri tres went through more than thirty editions, Pico’s Latin Oration—far
better known to modern readers than Ficino’s Three Books on Life—got almost no
attention from publishers. Of the five dozen or so Pico titles that found a publisher by
1700, about half were collections of letters. The first two, called Golden Letters, were
incunabular editions, and the letters also figured prominently in early collections of
Pico’s works, whose front-matter listed Ficino, Poliziano and other cultural celebrities
with whom Pico corresponded
Two things made Pico’s Latin letters a durable commercial hit: celebrity and education.
Since Latin was still the main medium of learned communication in the late seventeenth
century, when Isaac Newton published his Principia in that undead language, educated
people kept writing letters in Latin and used writers like Pico as models. And Pico was
attractive not only because of his elegant style but also because he had been a celebrity
in his own lifetime and remained so in Newton’s day. He stayed famous in three ways:
as a critic of astrology; as an expert on Kabbalah; and as the amazing Pico—as the
Phoenix who blazed through a brief life in the triple glare of an old aristocratic society, a
new mandarin culture of classical scholarship and, in his last years, the millenarian
fantasies of Savonarola’s Florence. Noble origins, fashionable friends, physical beauty,
prodigious learning, capacious memory, scholarly journeys, youthful sins, trouble with
the Church, eventual repentance and a pious death: these are the motifs of the family
hagiography by his nephew that have kept Giovanni Pico famous for being famous over
the centuries.
Because he died so young, Pico finished very little and published less: the
vernacular Commento was neither completed nor published by him;
the Conclusions are just bare statements of theses; half of the rushed Apology was
lifted from the unpublished Oration; On Being and the One is a small piece of a larger
effort to harmonize Plato and Aristotle; and Gianfrancesco found the
unfinished Disputations Against Astrology bundled with his dead uncle’s papers. Unless
we count the two epistolary essays on poetry and philosophical language, the only
substantial and completed work that Pico gave to the world in his lifetime was
the Heptaplus (1489), a Kabbalist commentary on the first 26 verses of Genesis.
That topic, called Ma’aseh Bereshit or the Work of the Beginning, was a favorite of
Menahem Recanati, Abraham Abulafia and other Kabbalists whom Pico knew through
learned Italian Jews, including Elia del Medigo, Flavius Mithridates and Yohanan
Alemanno. Kabbalah, which Pico saw as the holier Hebrew analog of the gentile
‘ancient theology’ revealed by Marsilio Ficino, is provocatively on display in the 900
Conclusions: 119 of them, including the final and culminating 72, are Kabbalist theses—
outlandishly Kabbalist from a Christian point of view. Pico’s project, part of a search for
harmonies connecting all the world’s wisdom traditions, was to ground primary doctrines
of Christology and trinitarian theology in Kabbalah, which he traced to the oral Torah
confided to Moses and passed on in secret through Esdras and other sages. Because
of its Mosaic origin, Kabbalah was holier to Pico than the pagan wisdom that Ficino had
traced to Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, in ancient Chaldaea and Egypt, where
Ficino found the beginnings of Platonic philosophy. Pico was the first Christian who had
the expertise, including a little Hebrew and Aramaic, to back up the astonishing claims
that would make Kabbalah the core of the ancient theology.
Although Kabbalist writings had first appeared in the twelfth century, Christians before
Pico knew almost nothing about them. The Kabbalah that he discovered for the Latin
West is a theory as well as a practice, at bottom a kind of biblical hermeneutics. And for
some Kabbalists, then and now, textual theorizing underwrites a spiritual practice whose
aim is mystical ascent for the excitation of prophetic or messianic states by various
techniques, including magic and theurgy. Many Kabbalists believe that the Hidden God,
called the Infinite, reveals himself not only in the Bible but also through ten emanations
or attributes, the Sefirot. Hypostasized in myths, made concrete by images and
symbolized by letters and numbers, the Sefirot are at the core of Kabbalist speculation,
whose other major focus is the names of God and their resonance in words of scripture.
Kabbalists regard the meaning of God’s sacred speech, the Hebrew text of the Bible, as
infinite, finding significance even in its smallest particles—not only the divine words but
also their letters (which are also numbers) and even the shapes of those letters. The
most powerful words are God’s names, the holiest of which, the Tetragrammaton,
cannot be uttered; written as YHWH, it is pronounced Adonai, a spoken name
like Elohim, Ehyeh, El Shaddai and others used of God in the Hebrew Bible. Other
words of great power are the names of the Sefirot, which are unknown, as such, to the
Bible; they are names not of God but of aspects or manifestations or emanations of
divinity.
Since God in his highest essence remains hidden, finite beings can know the Infinite
only in so far as it descends from its secret heights. The last moments of that descent
make up the world of common human awareness. The first moments, far beyond the
reach of ordinary perception, are the ten Sefirot. Much of the literature of Kabbalah tries
to describe the Sefirot, often as shown in Figure 1, where all ten
(designated S1 through S10) are arranged in a diagram or ‘tree.’ The major names in
Hebrew of S4, for example, are Gedullah and Hesed, meaning Greatness and Love or
Piety, rendered by Pico as Amor or Pietas. The divine name usually associated
with S4 is El, but Pico knew that Kabbalists use many other words and names
(Abraham, Michael, the South, Water) to describe S4. The terminology that Pico used
for the Sefirot, which he called ‘numerations’ in Latin, is displayed in more detail
in Figure 2.
S1 Keter
Crown
Fatum Supremum
’Ehyeh
S3 Binah S2 Hochmah
Intelligence Wisdom
Intelligentia Sapientia
YHWH (’Elohim) Yah
S5 Gevurah/Din S4 Gedullah/Hesed
Power/Judgment Greatness/Love or Piety
Potentia/Judicium Amor or Pietas
’Elohim ’El
 S6 Tiferet/Rahamim
Beauty/Compassion
Tipheret/Clementia
YHWH (’Adonay)
S8 Hod S7 Netsah
Majesty Endurance
Decor Eternitas
’Elohim Tseb’aot YHWH Tseb’aot
S9 Tsaddiq/Yesod
Righteous/Foundation
Justus/Fundamentum
’El Hay/Shaddai
S10 Malkut/ ‘Atarah
Kingdom/Diadem
Regnum
’Adonai
FIGURE 1. The Ten Sefirot
S1 Fatum Supremum
Father, Unity
Lord of the Nose
aleph, hu
S2 Sapientia
S3 Intelligentia
Son, Christ, Jesus,
Holy Spirit, Reason
Messiah, Intellect
Green Line, Jubilee,
Beginning, Eden,
Repentance, Love
Fear
beth, he, scin
beth, iod
S5 Judicium,Potentia S4 Amor, Pietas
Isaac, Gabriel Abraham, Michael
North, Fear, Fire South, Love, Water
S6 Tipheret, Clementia
Son, Christ, Jesus, Messiah
Jacob, Uriel
East, Sun, Day, Shining Mirror,
Heaven
vav
S8 Decor S7 Eternitas
S9 Fundamentum, Justus
Redeemer, Water
nun, ze
S10 Regnum
Holy Spirit
David, Raphael, Israel, Sabbath
West, Bride, Daughter, Dwelling,
Moon, Night, Unshining Mirror, Fear
Red Heifer, Hind With One Horn,
Pure Wine, Sea
tav, he
FIGURE 2. Pico’s Sefirot (Numerations)
Pico was the first Christian to treat knowledge of Kabbalah as valuable. Flavius
Mithridates, his most prolific Jewish informant, translated (and mistranslated) thousands
of pages of Kabbalah into Latin for him. Large portions of the Oration, drawing on these
texts, are also informed by Kabbalah in ways that no contemporary Christian could have
detected—least of all a Christian who lacked the clues provided by
the Conclusions. The esoteric intention of Pico’s thought, proclaimed emphatically in
the Oration, is the feature that most distances it from the whole project of post-Cartesian
philosophy in the West and also from earlier philosophies outside the Platonic tradition.
Wishing not just to mystify but also to provoke, Pico succeeded and paid the price of the
Church’s censure.
Theology, spirituality and philosophy—all in the broadest sense—are the main topics of
Pico’s Kabbalah, which shows (or hints) how God reveals himself in the Sefirot, the
divine names and the words of scripture. In the 72 Kabbalist theses at the end of
the Conclusions, this revelation becomes Christology and Trinitarian theology. From a
Kabbalist point of view, the Sefirot and the divine names are actors in dramas of
theology, cosmology, anthropology and angelology whose major themes are exile,
death, atonement and redemption, stories that Pico transposes onto the Christian
Trinity, with Jesus Christ, the Messiah, as the saving hero.
Accordingly, leading points of spiritual practice in the Conclusions are prayer, prophecy
and ascent to mystical union with God, which is also the main topic of the Oration,
where Pico makes positive use of magic and theurgy as steps toward the ascent.
The Conclusions, which confirm this endorsement of magic, also show in greater detail
than the Oration why Pico links magic with Kabbalah. He sees it as a spiritual technique
which, like the higher theurgy of the Neoplatonic philosophers, locates and opens routes
to God which ordinarily are unknown to humans. The practice of Kabbalah starts with
theory because these hidden channels of divinity must be disclosed and interpreted
before they can be used: spirituality follows hermeneutics.
Technical details of hermeneutics are the most obscure material in the Conclusions,
especially Pico’s speculations about Hebrew words and letters. Language is the
gateway to wisdom, the elements of language are letters and numbers, and these signs
proliferate in secret codes. Pico’s genius and ambition, which the Church would see as
impudence, attracted him to this provocative theology of the hidden word, whose
enigmas and ambiguities encouraged his fascination with the esoteric. The larger
Kabbalist project of the Conclusions, and hence of the Kabbalah in the Oration, is
Christological and Trinitarian. The smaller exhibitions of Kabbalah that Pico uses to
support his grand theory focus on particular Biblical texts, which are also illuminated by
the Gentile wisdom of the ancient theologians.
Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and other ancient theologians
are among the authorities from whom Pico derives his 900 theses, but so are Aquinas,
Albertus and other scholastics, Averroes, Avicenna and other Muslims as well as Plato,
Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus and the Greek commentators. The Conclusions are, among
other things, an egregious advertisement of Pico’s learning in a catalog of philosophical
propositions which are often challenging to orthodoxy and sometimes paradoxical—a
word that Pico himself used to describe some of his propositions, whose ancestors were
the quodlibetal theses debated in medieval universities. He ascribed only the last group
of about 500 to himself, attaching the first set of roughly 400 to ancient and medieval
authorities, among whom were the Kabbalists—by far the least familiar to Pico’s
contemporaries.
In the Heptaplus of 1489 we can still hear the Kabbalist voice of the Conclusions, but
mainly because Pico’s earlier works since the Commento of 1485–6 have prepared us
to listen for it. Although all these texts discuss Kabbalah more openly than
the Heptaplus, they seem to have made little impression on Pico’s contemporaries.
Roberto Salviati, a well informed Florentine who knew Pico well, called
the Heptaplus “the first fruits of his studies” when he arranged to have it printed. That
Salviati thought the Commento, Conclusions and Apology negligible or embarrassing is
more likely than that he did not know those works. Simple ignorance is likelier in the
case of the Oration, which Pico’s nephew would later describe as having been kept out
of circulation by his uncle. For readers whom Kabbalah might alienate,
the Heptaplus was not much of a threat because Pico had sanitized it. (For the best
account of the Heptaplus, see the book by Crofton Black (2006).
Although Genesis was not as attractive to Christian interpreters as Job or the Psalms,
explicating the creation narrative of Gen. 1:1–26 had been a task of hermeneutics since
the great hexameral commentaries of Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose. Like all of the
Bible, the creation story was thought to have three layers of meaning beyond its literal
or ‘historical’ sense: allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The standard view was
that “history talks about events, allegory about how one thing is understood from
another, tropology discusses morals, … and anagogy is the spiritual meaning … that
leads to higher things.” The Heptaplus proposes and practices a new kind of allegory, a
method derived from the structure of creation itself and directed toward a new type of
anagogy or ascent to supreme bliss (felicitas) in the Godhead.
Pico provides the key to his system only in the last part of the Heptaplus, which seems
to be an appendix tacked on to the work—just another display of the author’s virtuoso
skill in Hebrew. But to learned Jews of the day, whether they were Kabbalist or not,
Pico’s analysis of the Hebrew letters of the first word of Genesis (Bereshit, “In the
beginning”) would have seemed crude and simple-minded. Only from a Christian
perspective was there anything exotic in it, and its main effect on Christians would have
been to dazzle them with art.
This seemingly extraneous ending is actually a grand and arcane finale. It hints at a
secret that no Christian of Pico’s day could have grasped: that Moses himself, the
author of the creation story, had passed through 49 Gates of Understanding—7 × 7—on
his way to the fiftieth, the supreme and final Gate to union with God. The 49 preliminary
Gates are all the compartments of creation, which in turn demonstrate Pico’s new
allegorical method by exemplifying it: the universe of existence is also the universe of
understanding that shows the path to mystical union.
Although Pico does not explain the Gates in the 900 Conclusions, he does mention
them in a way that gave later scholars, like Johann Reuchlin, the clues that they needed
to find such enigmas in Kabbalist texts and then decipher them. The short version of the
story is that Wisdom, the second Sefirah (S2; see Fig. 1) builds the palace of
Intelligence (S3) and carves 50 Gates into it, 7 revealed in each of the 7
lower Sefirot (S1-7) and another one unrevealed. The 50 Gates, also called the Jubilee,
correspond to the 50-year festival ordained in Leviticus but also to a millenarian Great
Jubilee of 50,000 years, when the 7 sabbatical cycles or weeks of 7,000 years come to
an end. After the lower Sefirot collapse into S3 in a final millennium, the cycle starts
again, having been completed in that last generation of a thousand years—in the
Sabbath of the Shekinah (S10). This Sabbath, the seventh day of rest after the six days
of creation, is Pico’s ultimate allegory of mystical union, the secret encoded not only in
the letters of Bereshit but also in the sevenfold structure of the Heptaplus itself.
But who knew or could have known? In 1489, when the Heptaplus was published, its
only informed readership was the handful of learned Jews in Italy who could also read
Latin—the very people who had taught Pico himself enough Kabbalah to fill
his Conclusions with it. In the Heptaplus, however, even where its structure and content
obviously depend on Kabbalah, Pico suppresses what the Jews had taught him, until
the final exposition of Bereshit that could only have baffled Christian readers if it did not
offend them. As in his earlier works, Pico intends to mystify because he believes that
the highest and most sacred wisdom must not be divulged in plain language. He wants
God’s secrets to be understood only by an élite clever enough to unravel the allegories
that conceal them. The surprising thing, in the Western tradition of philosophy, is that
Pico thinks of this project as philosophical.
Despite Pico’s effort to keep Kabbalah so well hidden in the Heptaplus that Christians
would not reject the book outright, it was the extravagant and explicit theosophy of
the Conclusions, framed posthumously by the Oration, that made him the patriarch of
Christian Kabbalah. Reuchlin and other masters of this new syncretism looked back to
Pico as their model; German theologians and biblical scholars were still debating his
theses when the young Immanuel Kant began teaching in Königsberg. But by the end of
the eighteenth century, Kant had so thoroughly revolutionized philosophy that its history
had to be reformulated in Kantian terms. In practice, the task was to update the
huge Critical History of Philosophy produced by Jacob Brucker in 1742, where the
eclectic Brucker describes Pico as that worst of all monsters, a Platonizing, Judaizing
syncretist. Half a century later, Wilhelm Tennemann began the revisionist History of
Philosophy (1798–1819) in which Pico makes his first appearance as a proto-Kantian
advocate of human freedom and dignity.
In the first few pages of the Oration—pages read more often than any other product of
Renaissance Latin humanism—God tells Adam that he, alone of all creatures, can
make himself what he wants to be. Fascinated by this stirring prelude to a longer
speech, Tennemann, and many readers after him, have taken Pico’s oratorical prelude
as evidence of a morality grounded, like Kant’s, in human freedom and dignity. Having
gathered strength during the nineteenth century, and having acquired a romantic patina,
this view of Pico—and, by implication, of Renaissance humanism—reached its peak
with the great Neo-Kantian of his age, Ernst Cassirer. When Cassirer and Paul
Kristeller, also a Kantian, came to the United States, they brought their Kantian Pico
with them, launching his long career in university textbooks of ‘Western Civilization’ after
World War II. Meanwhile, Eugenio Garin had published what is still the most important
book on Pico in the Fascist Italy of 1937, just before the racial laws were put into force.
The most conspicuous pages of the Oration, celebrated by Garin and many others as
the humanist charter of human freedom and dignity, are just the first few. Assured by
them that we can be what we want to be, we are then told—contrary to the usual
interpretation of the Oration—that what we must be is not human at all. We must
become angels—bodiless, sexless and ultimately, that most unromantic of all
conditions, selfless in the strictest sense. Cherubim, the next-to-highest angels, are the
first higher stage that we must reach, and to achieve that lofty state we must shed not
only the body that imprisons us but also the identity and personality that distinguish us
from all other individuals and from God. Mystical union with God is Pico’s final goal, and
extinguishing the self is a necessary consequence of achieving it. “Let a holy ambition
possess our spirit,” Pico writes.
Let us climb for the heights, panting; and let us strive with all our might to reach them,
since we can do it if we will it. Let us scorn the things of earth, let us despise those of
heaven, and then, leaving behind whatever is of the world, let us fly up to the
hypercosmic court nearest the most exalted divinity…. As we emulate the Cherubic life
on earth, checking the impulses of the emotions through moral knowledge, dispelling
the darkness of reason through dialectic, let us cleanse the soul by washing away the
dirt of ignorance and vice so that the emotions will not rage in fury nor reason go mad
and foolish. Then let us flood the soul, purified and well tempered, with the light of
natural philosophy so that finally we may perfect it with knowledge of divinity…. [Then]
we will fully enjoy the peace that we have longed for—the holiest peace, the
unbreakable bond, the friendship of the single-souled wherein all our spirits do not so
much converge in the one mind above every mind as in some unsayable way emerge
as absolutely one. This is that friendship which the Pythagoreans say is the end of all
philosophy. This is that peace which God gives on high and angels descending to earth
have announced to men of good will so that through this peace these same men,
ascending to heaven, might be made into angels…. Ever forgetful of herself, [the soul]
will wish to die in herself that she might live in her spouse, in whose sight the death of
his saints is most precious—death, I say, if one should use the word ‘death’ for that
fullness of life whose contemplation the sages have said is the aim of philosophy….
Lifted now to the topmost height of her watchtower, for all eternity looking out without
interruption over what is, what will be and what has been, we shall sing prophecies like
Phoebus, and, gazing up at primeval beauty, we shall be its winged lovers, until at last,
with a love that cannot be described, driven wild by desire and transported beyond
ourselves like burning Seraphs, full of divine power, we shall be ourselves no longer,
but shall be Him, the very one who made us.
At the lowest level of a self-annihilating paideia, the mystic starts as a philosopher—with
ethics, logic, natural philosophy and theology—before ascending through the arcana of
magic and Kabbalah to drown the self in the abyss of divinity. This is not a Kantian
project, and the Oration on the Dignity of Man that locates the human condition in
human freedom and dignity is a text created by us post-Kantians, not by Giovanni Pico.
The outline of the Oration given below is also not Pico’s. Its seven parts may or may not
be what he had in mind, but from the layout of the 900 Conclusions it is clear that he
thought along numerological lines. Moreover, the title and organization of
the Heptaplus show that 7 was a particularly meaningful number to him—like so many
other seekers of secrets. The full title is Heptaplus, on the Sevenfold Account of the Six
Days of Genesis, surely an invitation to ponder arithmetical mysteries. Since this work
of 1489 restates a theme—ascending to felicitas or supreme happiness—that had
occupied Pico since the Commento of 1485–6, it would not be surprising to find that its
sevenfold structure derives from earlier writings, including the Oration. That famous
speech can be analyzed as follows:

1. Man is the greatest wonder because he can choose to transform himself.

2. In order to choose well, however, he must emulate the angels.
3. In order to emulate the angels, he must learn how to live the angelic life—
specifically, the Cherubic life.
4. This lesson, a curriculum, can be learned from the ancient fathers, who are
i. Paul and Dionysius
ii. Jacob
iii. Job
iv. Moses
v. The ancient theologians (Orpheus, Socrates, Plato, Plotinus)
vi. Pythagoras
vii. Zoroaster, the Chaldaeans, Abraham and Jeremiah
5. Because it is philosophy that leads to the Cherubic life, Pico proclaims himself a
philosopher.
6. And the study of philosophy has also led Pico to other new doctrines, notably
magic and Kabbalah.
7. Therefore, despite the complaints of his critics, Pico will undertake his
philosophical disputation.
The lesson taught seven times in the central part of the Oration (part 4 above) is a
curriculum whose felicitous goal is mystical union with God: first elaborated by the
ancient Neoplatonists, it was taken up by the Church Fathers and became a
commonplace of Christian mysticism, though Pico would also have found it in such
Kabbalist texts as the commentary on the Song of Songs by Levi ben Gerson. The
student starts with moral philosophy and then moves through dialectic and natural
philosophy toward theology, until discursive thought gives way to ecstasy, pure
contemplation and finally unification. The stages of this paideia are

1. moral philosophy
2. dialectic
 3. natural philosophy
4. theology
5. magic
6. Kabbalah
7. mystical union
Magic and Kabbalah are preliminary to union in this process but still important. By
propelling the soul through the heavens toward supercelestial divinity, magic assists the
transition from natural philosophy to natural theology and beyond, while Kabbalah,
which rises higher than any discursive theology, changes humans into angels purged of
all traces of matter and thus prepared for henôsis or absolute unification with God. The
philosophical theory behind this spirituality goes back to the Greek Commentators on
Aristotle and becomes more explicit in Avicenna, Averroes and other Muslim sages. In
philosophical terms that were certainly controversial, but far more familiar than
Kabbalah, Pico’s aim was conjunction with the Agent Intellect.
In Pico’s lifetime, of course, even his less obscure views about mystical union were little
known because the texts were either not published or not comprehensible to a Latin
readership. Gianfrancesco Pico, in the Life of Pico that accompanies the
correspondence that the nephew also edited, tried to rescue his uncle’s reputation. The
final item in Pico’s bibliography, the Disputations Against Astrology is, like the letters,
problematic in its textual history because of Gianfrancesco’s involvement in its
publication. (The best account of the Disputations is the article by Anthony Grafton
listed in Pichiana by Quaquarelli and Zanardi.)
The unfinished Disputations is a long and unwelcoming book, made all the more
forbidding by its ragged presentation and reliance on so many obscure and technical
sources; much of it repeats and reinforces ancient and medieval objections to astrology.
Pico extends Ptolemy’s doubts about a few astrological practices, for example, into a
broader restriction on celestial influences, which he finds either too diffuse or too slight
to be the basis of precise predictions. He exposes the claims made by astrologers who
often contradicted themselves and violated the canons of reason and experience that
the sciences must rely upon. The logical, methodological and epistemological
complaints compiled by Pico had been well known since before the ancient sceptics
recorded their objections. Pico’s real breakthrough was to use humanist philology as a
new weapon against astrology, which he does not reject categorically.
Part of astrology’s credibility was its pedigree, its long descent from sages of ancient
Chaldaea and Egypt. The Oration and Conclusions authenticate this genealogy by
reinforcing it with the even more venerable tradition of Kabbalah. Like Kabbalah,
astrology was also made plausible by classicism, the new humanist culture that
measured the authority of a doctrine by its age. Since astrology could claim a record of
observing planets and stars over several millennia, it had stood the test of primordial
time as its experience accumulated.
In the Disputations that he did not live to finish, Pico now rejected this static mytho-
history. Calling on new techniques of biblical and historical chronology, he relocated
such cardinal figures as Zoroaster in the human landscape of historical time, thus
making them subject to what would later be called ‘historical criticism.’ Pico’s critical
sense was far from modern, however. When he attacked Chaldaean stargazers as
ignorant and superstitious, part of what he found credulous was their obsession with
mathematics. Although Pico’s attitude to mathematics was scarcely progressive,
following the Aristotelian convention, his Disputations eventually attracted Kepler’s
attention, as well as praise from the later historians and philologists who used his re-
dating of the Eastern sages to greatly diminish—if not to eliminate—the allure of the
ancient theology.
Pico’s least eccentric work of philosophy is the little treatise On Being and the One: it
takes an Aristotelian position against a Neoplatonic distinction between being and the
One that made the latter higher than the former in the order of the All. In effect, since
Marsilio Ficino had developed just such a position, Pico’s essay was a challenge to the
older philosopher, who saw it as such, and objected politely. Pico’s larger purpose was
to harmonize Aristotle with Plato, which had also been the goal of many of the ancient
commentators on Aristotle, most of whom were Neoplatonists themselves. But Pico was
not Platonic enough to suit Ficino, just as he was not Aristotelian enough for doctrinaire
Aristotelians. The future was on Pico’s side, however, inasmuch as most of the
Aristotelianism of the sixteenth century would be eclectic, though not as concordist as
Pico would have liked. Eclectic critics of the Enlightenment, like Jacob Brucker,
despised Pico’s concordism and called it “syncretism.”
Ficino’s irenic disposition also encouraged concordism, which was more than just
compatible with the historiography of philosophy—the ancient theology—that he
promoted in all his works as a way to Christianize the heritage of pagan wisdom. In
general, Ficino welcomed Pico as a junior ally in that same cause, as evidenced by the
warm personal language of the correspondence between the two thinkers. It is striking,
however, that Ficino’s letters, published by him in his own lifetime, in 1495, testify better
to his friendship with Pico than Pico’s letters, published in 1496 by his nephew,
Gianfrancesco, who also prepared the Disputations for the press in that same year. A
close reading of both epistolaries suggests that the younger Pico—who was at least as
close to Savonarola as his uncle—intervened to make the elder Pico’s letters, as they
appeared in the collected works that the nephew edited in 1496, underwrite the
pious Life that introduces the whole collection.
The Pico of that Life is a Savonarolan saint who came almost too late to salvation but
finally rejected the world, the flesh and the devil. This is not the Pico who traveled to
Rome a few years before to take on the whole world in a failed philosophical
extravaganza; nor the Pico who bungled an attempt to carry off a married woman
whose husband was named Medici—no less; nor the Pico with whom Ficino bantered
about his missteps and misfortunes in letters loaded with astro-mythological allusions. It
may be that the disasters of 1486–7 chastened the young nobleman enough to explain
the muffling of Kabbalah in the Heptaplus and the jarring recantation that we find in
the Disputations. But since the editor of the Disputations, Gianfrancesco Pico, also
edited the letters that he selected to underwrite a tendentious Life of his uncle, and
since Gianfrancesco himself was not just a devout fideist but also a prodigiously
productive scholar and an original thinker, we should not dismiss the possibility that
the Disputations ought to be read more as a pendant to the nephew’s Life of Pico than
as proof of penitence in a final phase of his uncle’s
 EARLY MODERN PERIOD

A.RENE DESCARTES

(born March 31, 1596, La Haye,

Touraine, France—died February 11,
1650, Stockholm, Sweden), French
mathematician, scientist, and
philosopher. Because he was one of the
first to abandon
scholastic Aristotelianism, because he
formulated the first modern version
of mind-body dualism, from which stems
the mind-body problem, and because he
promoted the development of a new
science grounded in observation and
experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy. Applying an original
system of methodical doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from authority,
the senses, and reason and erected new epistemic foundations on the basis of
the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the dictum “I think,
therefore I am” (best known in its Latin formulation, “Cogito, ergo sum,” though originally
written in French, “Je pense, donc je suis”). He developed a metaphysical dualism that
distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the
essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysics is
rationalist, based on the postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God, but
his physics and physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and
empiricist.

Philosophical work[edit]
Further information: Cartesianism
Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single first principle: I think. Thought cannot be
separated from me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of
Philosophy). Most notably, this is known as cogito ergo sum (English: "I think, therefore
I am"). Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone
must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his
existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that
is in and of itself proof that he does exist."[70] These two first principles—I think and I
exist—were later confirmed by Descartes' clear and distinct perception (delineated in
his Third Meditation): that I clearly and distinctly perceive these two principles,
Descartes reasoned, ensures their indubitability.
Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in
what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have
previously been unreliable. So Descartes determines that the only indubitable
knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is what he does, and his power must
come from his essence. Descartes defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what happens in me
such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is
thus every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious.[71] He gave
reasons for thinking that waking thoughts are distinguishable from dreams, and that
one's mind cannot have been "hijacked" by an evil demon placing an illusory external
world before one's senses.[72]
And so something that I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by
the faculty of judgment which is in my mind.
In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge,
discarding perception as unreliable and, instead, admitting only deduction as a method.

B.NICOLO MECHIAVELLI

(/ˌmækiəˈvɛli/, Italian: [nikkoˈlɔ

mmakjaˈvɛlli]; 3 May 1469 – 21 June
1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician,
historian, philosopher, writer, playwright
and poet of
the Renaissance period.[2][3][4] He has
often been called the father of
modern political
philosophy[5][6] and political
science.[7] For many years he served as
a senior official in the Florentine
Republic with responsibilities in
diplomatic and military affairs. He wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His
personal correspondence is of high importance to historians and scholars. [8] He worked
as secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512,
when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his best-known work The Prince (Il
Principe) in 1513, having been exiled from city affairs.
Work

Machiavelli's best known work, "Il Principe" ("The Prince"), was written in some haste in
1513 while in exile on his farm outside Florence, and was dedicated to Lorenzo
de'Medici in the hope of regaining his status in the Florentine Government. However, it
was only formally published posthumously in 1532. In it, he described the arts by which a
Prince (or ruler) could retain control of his realm. A "new" prince has a much more
difficult task than a hereditary prince, since he must stabilize his newfound power and
build a structure that will endure, a task that requires the Prince to be publicly above
reproach but privately may require him to do immoral things in order to achieve his goals.
He outlined his criteria for acceptable cruel actions and pointed out the irony in the fact
that good can come from evil actions.

Although "The Prince" did not dispense entirely with morality nor advocate
wholesale selfishness or degeneracy, the Catholic Church nevertheless put the work on
its index of prohibited books, and it was viewed very negatively by many Humanists,
such as Erasmus. It marked a fundamental break between Realism and Idealism.
Although never directly stated in the book, "the end justifies the means" is often quoted
as indicative of the Pragmatism or Instrumentalism that underlies Machiavelli's
philosophy. He also touched on totalitarian themes, arguing that the state is merely
an instrument for the benefit of the ruler, who should have no qualms at using whatever
means are at his disposal to keep the citizenry suppressed. Unlike Plato and Aristotle,
though, Machiavelli was not looking to describe the ideal society, merely to present a
guide to getting and preserving power and the status quo.

His other major contribution to political thought, the "Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito
Livio" ("Discourses on Livy") was begun around 1516 and completed in 1518 or 1519. It
was an exposition of the principles of republican rule, masquerading as
a commentary on the work of the famous historian of the Roman Republic. It constitutes
a series of lessons on how a republic should be started and structured, including the
concept of checks and balances, the strength of a tripartite structure, and the superiority
of a republic over a principality or monarchy. If not the first, then it was certainly the most
important work on republicanism in the early modern period.

C.THOMAS HOBBES

(/hɒbz/; 5 April 1588 – 4

December 1679), in some older
texts Thomas Hobbes of
Malmesbury,[4] was
an English philosopher, considered to
be one of the founders of
modern political philosophy.[5][6] Hobbes
is best known for his 1651
book Leviathan, which expounded an
influential formulation of social
contract theory.[7] In addition to political
philosophy, Hobbes also contributed to
a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry,
the physics of gases, theology, ethics, and general philosophy.
DEATH
In October 1679 Hobbes suffered a bladder disorder, and then a paralytic stroke, from
which he died on 4 December 1679, aged 91.[26] His last words were said to have been
"A great leap in the dark", uttered in his final conscious moments.[27] His body was
interred in St John the Baptist's Church, Ault Hucknall, in Derbyshire.[28]

Political Philosophy
This is Hobbes's picture of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily
led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile
as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence.
When we act, we may do so selfishly or impulsively or in ignorance, on the basis of faulty
reasoning or bad theology or others' emotive speech.

What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature - that is, of us?
Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The
best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. The
worst, on Hobbes's account, is what he calls the "natural condition of mankind," a state
of violence, insecurity and constant threat. In outline, Hobbes's argument is that the
alternative to government is a situation no one could reasonably wish for, and that any
attempt to make government accountable to the people must undermine it, so threatening
the situation of non-government that we must all wish to avoid. Our only reasonable
option, therefore, is a "sovereign" authority that is totally unaccountable to its subjects.
Let us deal with the "natural condition" of non-government, also called the "state of
nature," first of all.

D.BERNEDICT SPINOZA
(/bəˈruːk spɪˈnoʊzə/,[10][11] Dutch: [baːˈru
x spɪˈnoːzaː]; born Benedito de
Espinosa, Portuguese: [bɨnɨˈðitu ðɨ
ʃpiˈnɔzɐ]; later Benedict de Spinoza; 24
November 1632 – 21 February 1677)
was a Jewish-Dutch philosopher
of Portuguese Sephardi origin.[9] One of
the early thinkers of
the Enlightenment[12] and
modern biblical criticism,[13] including
modern conceptions of the self and the
universe,[14] he came to be considered
one of the great rationalists of 17th-
century philosophy.[15] Inspired by the
groundbreaking ideas of René Descartes, Spinoza became a leading philosophical
figure of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinoza's given name, which means "Blessed", varies
among different languages. In Hebrew, it is written ‫ברוך שפינוזה‬. His Portuguese name
is Benedito "Bento" de Espinosa or d'Espinosa. In his Latin works, he used
Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza.

Philosophy
These are the fundamental concepts with which Spinoza sets forth a vision of Being,
illuminated by his awareness of God. They may seem strange at first sight. To the
question "What is?" he replies: "Substance, its attributes, and modes".
— Karl Jaspers[87]
Spinoza argued that God exists and is abstract and impersonal.[9] His view of God is
what Charles Hartshorne describes as Classical Pantheism.[88] Spinoza has also been
described as an "Epicurean materialist,"[79] specifically in reference to his opposition to
Cartesian mind-body dualism. This view was held by Epicureans before him, as they
believed that atoms with their probabilistic paths were the only substance that existed
fundamentally.[89][90] Spinoza, however, deviated significantly from Epicureans by
adhering to strict determinism, much like the Stoics before him, in contrast to the
Epicurean belief in the probabilistic path of atoms, which is more in line with
contemporary thought on quantum mechanics.[91][89] Spinoza's system imparted order
and unity to the tradition of radical thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing
against "received authority." He contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e.,
everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules
governing the whole of the reality that surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza
viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality,[79] namely a single,
fundamental substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that
is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or
modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and
that the complex chain of cause-and-effect is understood only in part. His identification
of God with nature was more fully explained in his posthumously
published Ethics.[9] Spinoza's main contention with Cartesian mind–body dualism was
that, if mind and body were truly distinct, then it is not clear how they can coordinate in
any manner. Humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, which is a result
of their awareness of appetites that affect their minds, while being unable to understand
the reasons why they desire what they desire and act as they do.
Spinoza contends that "Deus sive Natura" is a being of infinitely many attributes, of
which thought and extension are two. His account of the nature of reality then seems to
treat the physical and mental worlds as intertwined, causally related, and deriving from
the same Substance. It is important to note that, in Parts 3 through 4 of the Ethics,
Spinoza describes how the human mind is affected by both mental and physical factors.
He directly contests and denies dualism. The universal Substance emanates both body
and mind; while they are different attributes, there is no fundamental difference between
these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant solution to the mind–body
problem known as neutral monism. Spinoza's system also envisages a God that does
not rule over the universe by Providence, by which it can and does make changes, but a
God that is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Spinoza
argues that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any
other order than is the case,";[92] he directly challenges a transcendental God that
actively responds to events in the universe. Everything that has and will happen is a
part of a long chain of cause-and-effect, which, at a metaphysical level, humans are
unable to change. No amount of prayer or ritual will sway God. Only knowledge of God
provides the best response to the world around them. Not only is it impossible for two
infinite Substances to exist (two infinities being absurd),[93] God as the ultimate
Substance cannot be affected by anything else, or else it would be affected by
something else, and not be the fundamental, all-pervasive Substance.
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that
happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is
fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know that we are determined and
to understand why we act as we do. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we
do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects
(internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This
process allows us to become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in
the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must
necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will, despite
strongly believing that they do. This illusionary perception of freedom stems from human
consciousness, experience, and indifference to prior natural causes. Humans think they
are free, but they ″dream with their eyes open″. For Spinoza, our actions are guided
entirely by natural impulses. In his letter to G. H. Schuller (Letter 58), he wrote: "men
are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are
determined."[94]
This picture of Spinoza's determinism is illuminated by this famous quote in Ethics: ″the
infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that
by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight;
the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which
when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. … All believe that they speak by a free
command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which
they have to speak.″[95] Thus for Spinoza morality and ethical judgement like choice is
predicated on an illusion. For Spinoza, ″Blame″ and ″Praise″ are nonexistent human
ideals only fathomable in the mind because we are so acclimatized to human
consciousness interlinking with our experience that we have a false idea of choice
predicated upon this.
Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism inasmuch as both
philosophies sought to fulfil a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain
happiness. Spinoza, however, differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect:
He utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. On the contrary,
he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former
being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held
that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion,
thus anticipating one of the key ideas of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.[96]
Ethical philosophy
Spinoza shared ethical beliefs with ancient Epicureans, in renouncing ethics beyond the
material world, although Epicureans focused more on physical pleasure and Spinoza
more on emotional wellbeing.[97] Encapsulated at the start in his Treatise on the
Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione) is the core of
Spinoza's ethical philosophy, what he held to be the true and final good. Spinoza held
good and evil to be relative concepts, claiming that nothing is intrinsically good or bad
except relative to a particularity. Things that had classically been seen as good or evil,
Spinoza argued, were simply good or bad for humans. Spinoza believes in a
deterministic universe in which "All things in nature proceed from certain [definite]
necessity and with the utmost perfection." Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's
world, and nothing is contingent.
Given Spinoza's insistence on a completely ordered world where "necessity"
reigns, Good and Evil have no absolute meaning. The world as it exists looks imperfect
only because of our limited perception.

E.JOHN LOCKE

FRS (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28

October 1704) was an
English philosopher and physician,
widely regarded as one of the most
influential of Enlightenment thinkers and
commonly known as the "Father
of Liberalism".[9][10][11] Considered one of
the first of the British empiricists,
following the tradition of Sir Francis
Bacon, he is equally important to social
contract theory. His work greatly
affected the development
of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American
revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are
reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Philosophy From Religion
Locke's concept of man started with the belief in creation.[70] Like philosophers Hugo
Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, Locke equated natural law with the
biblical revelation.[71][72][73] Locke derived the fundamental concepts of his political theory
from biblical texts, in particular from Genesis 1 and 2 (creation), the Decalogue,
the Golden Rule, the teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul the Apostle.[74] The
Decalogue puts a person's life, their reputation, and property under God's protection.
Locke's philosophy on freedom is also derived from the Bible. Locke also derived basic
human equality from the Bible, including the equality of the sexes, the starting point of
the theological doctrine of Imago Dei.[75] To Locke, one of the consequences of the
principle of equality was that all humans were created equally free and therefore
governments needed the consent of the governed.[76] Locke compared the English
Monarchy's rule over the British people to Adam's rule over Eve in Genesis, which was
appointed by God.[77]
Following Locke's philosophy, the American Declaration of
Independence founded human rights partially on the biblical belief in creation. Locke's
doctrine that governments need the consent of the governed is also central to the
Declaration of Independence.

F.DAVID LOCKE

FRS (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28

October 1704) was an
English philosopher and physician,
widely regarded as one of the most
influential of Enlightenment thinkers and
commonly known as the "Father
of Liberalism".[9][10][11] Considered one of
the first of the British empiricists,
following the tradition of Sir Francis
Bacon, he is equally important to social
contract theory. His work greatly
affected the development
of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American
revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are
reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Locke’s Political Philosophy
John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the
modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men
are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally
subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty,
and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society.
Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for
understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where
people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government
in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and
property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the
rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be
resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus also important for his
defense of the right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and
the separation of legislative and executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration,
Locke denied that coercion should be used to bring people to (what the ruler believes is)
the true religion and also denied that churches should have any coercive power over
their members. Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as
the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.
For a more general introduction to Locke’s history and background, the argument of
the Two Treatises, and the Letter Concerning Toleration, see Section 1, Section 4,
and Section 5, respectively, of the main entry on John Locke in this encyclopedia. The
present entry focuses on seven central concepts in Locke’s political philosophy.

G. IMMANUEL KANT
(/kænt/;[15] German: [ʔɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant, -
nu̯ɛl];[16][17] 22 April 1724 – 12 February
1804) was an
influential German philosopher[18] in
the Age of Enlightenment. In his
doctrine of transcendental idealism, he
argued that space, time,
and causation are mere sensibilities;
"things-in-themselves" exist, but their
nature is unknowable.[19][20] In his view,
the mind shapes and structures
experience, with all human experience
sharing certain structural features. He
drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly objects can
be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is therefore independent
from objective reality.[21] Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and
that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to
have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields
of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.
Moral philosophy

Immanuel Kant
Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
In Groundwork, Kant' tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational[86] knowledge of
morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason",
which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any
principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of
experience (in the second part of The Metaphysic of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the
"Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the
demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are
principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be
obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law.
The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be
assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the
categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the
appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical
imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end
in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or
purpose.[87] Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not
based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to
act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness of being
happy".[88] Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational
agents.[89]
Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation;
it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires[90] In Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical
imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. [91] In the same book, Kant stated:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it
should become a universal law.[92]
According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical
maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without
exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it
appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For
example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstances—because, by
permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is
the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the
universalizability principle.
Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without
moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it;
otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an
action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when
value is attached to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-
utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that
considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept
that is an axiom in economics:[93]
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by
something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and
therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the
condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere
relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in
original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature
of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, ("Let justice be done, though
the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the
rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual
Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer
Entwurf"), Appendix 1
 NINETEENTH CENTURY

A.JEREMY BANTHAM

(/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4

February 1747][2] – 6 June 1832) was an
English philosopher, jurist, and social
reformer regarded as the founder of
modern utilitarianism.[3][4]
Bentham defined as the "fundamental
axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is
the greatest happiness of the greatest number
that is the measure of right and wrong."[5][6] He
became a leading theorist in Anglo-
American philosophy of law, and a political
radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated
for individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of
expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay)
the decriminalising of homosexual acts.[7][8] He called for the abolition of slavery, capital
punishment and physical punishment, including that of children.[9] He has also become
known as an early advocate of animal rights.[10][11][12][13] Though strongly in favour of the
extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural
rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them
"nonsense upon stilts".[3][14] Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

Moral Philosophy
As Elie Halévy (1904) notes, there are three principal characteristics of which constitute
the basis of Bentham's moral and political philosophy: (i) the greatest happiness principle,
(ii) universal egoism and (iii) the artificial identification of one's interests with those of
others. Though these characteristics are present throughout his work, they are particularly
evident in the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, where Bentham is
concerned with articulating rational principles that would provide a basis and guide for
legal, social and moral reform.
To begin with, Bentham's moral philosophy reflects what he calls at different times "the
greatest happiness principle" or "the principle of utility"—a term which he borrows from
Hume. In adverting to this principle, however, he was not referring to just the usefulness
of things or actions, but to the extent to which these things or actions promote the general
happiness. Specifically, then, what is morally obligatory is that which produces the
greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, happiness being
determined by reference to the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. Thus,
Bentham writes, "By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or
disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to
have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or,
what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness." And
Bentham emphasizes that this applies to "every action whatsoever" (Ch. 1). That which
does not maximize the greatest happiness (such as an act of pure ascetic sacrifice) is,
therefore, morally wrong. (Unlike some of the previous attempts at articulating a universal
hedonism, Bentham's approach is thoroughly naturalistic.)
Bentham's moral philosophy, then, clearly reflects his psychological view that the primary
motivators in human beings are pleasure and pain. Bentham admits that his version of
the principle of utility is something that does not admit of direct proof, but he notes that
this is not a problem as some explanatory principles do not admit of any such proof and
all explanation must start somewhere. But this, by itself, does not explain why another's
happiness—or the general happiness—should count. And, in fact, he provides a number
of suggestions that could serve as answers to the question of why we should be
concerned with the happiness of others.

First, Bentham says, the principle of utility is something to which individuals, in acting,
refer either explicitly or implicitly, and this is something that can be ascertained and
confirmed by simple observation. Indeed, Bentham held that all existing systems of
morality can be "reduced to the principles of sympathy and antipathy," which is precisely
that which defines utility. A second argument found in Bentham is that, if pleasure is the
good, then it is good irrespective of whose pleasure it is. Thus, a moral injunction to
pursue or maximize pleasure has force independently of the specific interests of the
person acting. Bentham also suggests that individuals would reasonably seek the general
happiness simply because the interests of others are inextricably bound up with their own,
though he recognized that this is something that is easy for individuals to ignore.
Nevertheless, Bentham envisages a solution to this as well. Specifically, he proposes that
making this identification of interests obvious and, when necessary, bringing diverse
interests together would be the responsibility of the legislator.

Finally, Bentham held that there are advantages to a moral philosophy based on a
principle of utility. To begin with, the principle of utility is clear (compared to other moral
principles), allows for objective and disinterested public discussion, and enables
decisions to be made where there seem to be conflicts of (prima facie) legitimate interests.
Moreover, in calculating the pleasures and pains involved in carrying out a course of
action (the "hedonic calculus"), there is a fundamental commitment to human equality.
The principle of utility presupposes that "one man is worth just the same as another man"
and so there is a guarantee that in calculating the greatest happiness "each person is to
count for one and no one for more than one."
For Bentham, then, there is no inconsistency between the greatest happiness principle
and his psychological hedonism and egoism. Thus, he writes that moral philosophy or
ethics can be simply described as "the art of directing men's action to the production of
the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view."

Political Philosophy
Bentham was regarded as the central figure of a group of intellectuals called, by Elie
Halévy (1904), "the philosophic radicals," of which both Mill and Herbert Spencer can be
counted among the "spiritual descendants." While it would be too strong to claim that the
ideas of the philosophic radicals reflected a common political theory, it is nevertheless
correct to say that they agreed that many of the social problems of late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century England were due to an antiquated legal system and to the
control of the economy by a hereditary landed gentry opposed to modern capitalist
institutions. As discussed in the preceding section, for Bentham, the principles that govern
morals also govern politics and law, and political reform requires a clear understanding
of human nature. While he develops a number of principles already present in Anglo-
Saxon political philosophy, he breaks with that tradition in significant ways.
In his earliest work, A Fragment on Government (1776), which is an excerpt from a longer
work published only in 1928 as Comment on Blackstone's Commentaries, Bentham
attacked the legal theory of Sir William Blackstone. Bentham's target was, primarily,
Blackstone's defense of tradition in law. Bentham advocated the rational revision of the
legal system, a restructuring of the process of determining responsibility and of
punishment, and a more extensive freedom of contract. This, he believed, would favor
not only the development of the community, but the personal development of the
individual.
Bentham's attack on Blackstone targeted more than the latter's use of tradition however.
Against Blackstone and a number of earlier thinkers (including Locke), Bentham
repudiated many of the concepts underlying their political philosophies, such as natural
right, state of nature, and social contract. Bentham then attempted to outline positive
alternatives to the preceding "traditionalisms." Not only did he work to reform and
restructure existing institutions, but he promoted broader suffrage and self (that is,
representative) government.

B.GEORG WILHEM
FRIEDRICH HEGEL
(/ˈheɪɡəl/,[26][27] German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm
ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡl̩ ];[27][28][29][30][31] August 27,
1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German
philosopher and an important figure
of German idealism. He achieved wide
recognition in his day and—while primarily
influential within the continental tradition of
philosophy—has become increasingly
influential in the analytic tradition as
well.[32] Although Hegel remains a divisive
figure, his canonical stature within Western
philosophy is universally recognized.

Philosophical work
Freedom
Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broad
tradition that includes Plato and Immanuel Kant. To this list, one could
add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Plotinus, Jakob Böhme,
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them
from materialists like Epicurus and Thomas Hobbes and from empiricists like David
Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having
important ontological implications for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is
what generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic and Timaeus) of the soul as
having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess.
While Aristotle criticizes Plato's "Forms", he preserves Plato's cornerstones of the
ontological implications for self-determination: ethical reasoning, the soul's pinnacle in
the hierarchy of nature, the order of the cosmos and an assumption with reasoned
arguments for a prime mover. Kant imports Plato's high esteem of individual sovereignty
to his considerations of moral and noumenal freedom as well as to God. All three find
common ground on the unique position of humans in the scheme of things, known by
the discussed categorical differences from animals and inanimate objects.
In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as
"by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this
topic".[58] In his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel's concern with
Kantian topics such as freedom and morality and with their ontological implications is
pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant's dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel
aims to subsume it within "true infinity", the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff), "Spirit" and
"ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible, rather than
remaining a brute "given".
The reason why this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel's
method in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia is to begin with basic concepts like
"Being" and "Nothing" and to develop these through a long sequence of elaborations,
including those already mentioned. In this manner, a solution that is reached in principle
in the account of "true infinity" in the Science of Logic's chapter on "Quality" is repeated
in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit" and "ethical life" in the third volume
of the Encyclopedia.
In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against
reductive or eliminative programs like those of materialism and empiricism. Like Plato,
with his dualism of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant pursues the mind's ability to
question its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of "duty" (or, in
Plato's case, "good") which transcends bodily restrictiveness. Hegel preserves this
essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of infinity going beyond the finite (a
process that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought"),[59]:133–136, 138 the
universal going beyond the particular (in the Concept) and Spirit going beyond Nature.
Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately) his argument in the "Quality"
chapter of the "Science of Logic". The finite has to become infinite in order to achieve
reality. The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so the subjective and objective
must achieve synthesis to become whole. This is because as Hegel suggests by his
introduction of the concept of "reality",[59]:111 what determines itself—rather than
depending on its relations to other things for its essential character—is more fully "real"
(following the Latin etymology of "real", more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite
things do not determine themselves because as "finite" things their essential character
is determined by their boundaries over against other finite things, so in order to become
"real" they must go beyond their finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of
itself").[59]:145
The result of this argument is that finite and infinite—and by extension, particular and
universal, nature and freedom—do not face one another as two independent realities,
but instead the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former.[59]:146 Rather
than stress the distinct singularity of each factor that complements and conflicts with
others—without explanation—the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular
and universal and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible as a progressively
developing and self-perfecting whole.
Progress
The mystical writings of Jakob Böhme had a strong effect on Hegel.[60] Böhme had
written that the Fall of Man was a necessary stage in the evolution of the universe. This
evolution was itself the result of God's desire for complete self-awareness. Hegel was
fascinated by the works of Kant, Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang Goethe and by
the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture and society seemed to Hegel fraught
with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of
knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and
faith, or the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to
take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive,
evolving, rational unity that in different contexts he called "the absolute Idea" (Science
of Logic, sections 1781–1783) or "absolute knowledge" (Phenomenology of Spirit, "(DD)
Absolute Knowledge").
According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and
manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a
dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality—consciousness, history,
philosophy, art, nature and society—leads to further development until a rational unity is
reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up
(Aufhebung) to a higher unity. This whole is mental because it is mind that can
comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of
comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental
order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious
rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full
self-consciousness. The rational, self-conscious whole is not a thing or being that lies
outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the
philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who through their own
understanding bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself. Hegel's
thought is revolutionary to the extent that it is a philosophy of absolute negation—as
long as absolute negation is at the center, systematization remains open, and makes it
possible for human beings to become subjects.[61]
"Mind" and "Spirit" are the common English translations of Hegel's use of the German
"Geist". Some[who?] have argued that either of these terms overly "psychologize"
Hegel,[citation needed] implying a kind of disembodied, solipsistic consciousness
like ghost or "soul". Geist combines the meaning of spirit—as in god, ghost, or mind—
with an intentional force. In Hegel's early philosophy of nature (draft manuscripts written
during his time at the University of Jena), Hegel's notion of "Geist" was tightly bound to
the notion of "Aether", from which Hegel also derived the concepts of space and time,
but in his later works (after Jena) he did not explicitly use his old notion of "Aether"
anymore.[62]
Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was
the notion of identity in difference—that is, that mind externalizes itself in various forms
and objects that stand outside of it or opposed to it; and that through recognizing itself in
them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations so that they are at one and the
same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity in difference, which is
intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal
feature differentiating Hegel's thought from that of other philosophers.[citation needed]
Civil society
Hegel made the distinction between civil society and state in his Elements of the
Philosophy of Right.[63] In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "bürgerliche
Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a
more inclusive community) was a stage in the dialectical relationship that occurs
between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macro-community of the state and the micro-
community of the family.[64] Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers,
to the political left and right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's civil
society as an economic base;[65] to the right, it became a description for all non-state
(and the state is the peak of the objective spirit) aspects of society, including culture,
society and politics. This liberal distinction between political society and civil society was
followed by Alexis de Tocqueville.[65] In fact, Hegel's distinctions as to what he meant by
civil society are often unclear. For example, while it seems to be the case that he felt
that a civil society such as the German society in which he lived was an inevitable
movement of the dialectic, he made way for the crushing of other types of "lesser" and
not fully realized types of civil society as these societies were not fully conscious or
aware—as it were—as to the lack of progress in their societies. Thus, it was perfectly
legitimate in the eyes of Hegel for a conqueror such as Napoleon to come along and
destroy that which was not fully realized.
State
Hegel's State is the final culmination of the embodiment of freedom or right (Rechte) in
the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The State subsumes family and civil society
and fulfills them. All three together are called "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit). The State
involves three "moments". In a Hegelian State, citizens both know their place and
choose their place. They both know their obligations and choose to fulfill their
obligations. An individual's "supreme duty is to be a member of the state" (Elements of
the Philosophy of Right, section 258). The individual has "substantial freedom in the
state". The State is "objective spirit" so "it is only through being a member of the state
that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life" (section 258).
Furthermore, every member both loves the State with genuine patriotism, but has
transcended mere "team spirit" by reflectively endorsing their citizenship. Members of a
Hegelian State are happy even to sacrifice their lives for the State.
Heraclitus
According to Hegel, "Heraclitus is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite
and first grasped nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process. The origin of
philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus. His is the persistent Idea that is the same in
all philosophers up to the present day, as it was the Idea of Plato and Aristotle". [66] For
Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood the nature of the
infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the inherent contradictoriness and
negativity of reality; and to have grasped that reality is becoming or process and that
"being" and "nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel,
Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his being a true (in Hegel's terms "speculative")
philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth and therefore expressed
himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract and limited nature of common sense and
is difficult to grasp by those who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in
Heraclitus he had an antecedent for his logic: "[...] there is no proposition of Heraclitus
which I have not adopted in my logic".[67]
Hegel cites a number of fragments of Heraclitus in his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy.[68] One to which he attributes great significance is the fragment he
translates as "Being is not more than Non-being", which he interprets to mean the
following:
Sein und Nichts sei dasselbe
Being and non-being are the same.
Heraclitus does not form any abstract nouns from his ordinary use of "to be" and "to
become" and in that fragment seems to be opposing any identity A to any other identity
B, C and so on, which is not-A. However, Hegel interprets not-A as not existing at all,
not nothing at all, which cannot be conceived, but indeterminate or
"pure" being without particularity or specificity.[69] Pure being and pure non-being or
nothingness are for Hegel pure abstractions from the reality of becoming and this is also
how he interprets Heraclitus. This interpretation of Heraclitus cannot be ruled out, but
even if present is not the main gist of his thought.
For Hegel, the inner movement of reality is the process of God thinking as manifested in
the evolution of the universe of nature and thought; that is, Hegel argued that when fully
and properly understood, reality is being thought by God as manifested in a person's
comprehension of this process in and through philosophy. Since human thought is the
image and fulfillment of God's thought, God is not ineffable (so incomprehensible as to
be unutterable), but can be understood by an analysis of thought and reality. Just as
humans continually correct their concepts of reality through a dialectical process, so
God himself becomes more fully manifested through the dialectical process of
becoming.
For his god, Hegel does not take the logos of Heraclitus but refers rather to
the nous of Anaxagoras, although he may well have regarded them the same as he
continues to refer to god's plan, which is identical to God. Whatever the nous thinks at
any time is actual substance and is identical to limited being, but more remains to be
thought in the substrate of non-being, which is identical to pure or unlimited thought.
The universe as becoming is therefore a combination of being and non-being. The
particular is never complete in itself, but to find completion is continually transformed
into more comprehensive, complex, self-relating particulars. The essential nature of
being-for-itself is that it is free "in itself;" that is, it does not depend on anything else
such as matter for its being. The limitations represent fetters, which it must constantly
be casting off as it becomes freer and more self-determining.[70]
Although Hegel began his philosophizing with commentary on the Christian religion and
often expresses the view that he is a Christian, his ideas of God are not acceptable to
some Christians even though he has had a major influence on 19th- and 20th-century
theology.
Religion
As a graduate of a Protestant seminary, Hegel's theological concerns were reflected in
many of his writings and lectures.[71] Hegel's thoughts on the person of Jesus
Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his posthumously
published Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Part 3, Hegel is shown as being
particularly interested with the demonstrations of God's existence and the ontological
proof.[72] He espouses that "God is not an abstraction but a concrete God [...] God,
considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to generate the Son, has to distinguish
himself from himself; he is the process of differentiating, namely, love and Spirit". This
means that Jesus as the Son of God is posited by God over against himself as other.
Hegel sees both a relational unity and a metaphysical unity between Jesus and God the
Father. To Hegel, Jesus is both divine and human. Hegel further attests that God (as
Jesus) not only died, but "[...] rather, a reversal takes place: God, that is to say,
maintains himself in the process, and the latter is only the death of death. God rises
again to life, and thus things are reversed".
The philosopher Walter Kaufmann has argued that there was great stress on the sharp
criticisms of traditional Christianity appearing in Hegel's so-called early theological
writings. Kaufmann admits that Hegel treated many distinctively Christian themes and
"sometimes could not resist equating" his conception of spirit (Geist) "with God, instead
of saying clearly: in God I do not believe; spirit suffices me".[73] Kaufmann also points
out that Hegel's references to God or to the divine—and also to spirit—drew on classical
Greek as well as Christian connotations of the terms. Kaufmann goes on:
In addition to his beloved Greeks, Hegel saw before him the example of Spinoza and, in
his own time, the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, who also liked to speak of
gods and the divine. So he, too, sometimes spoke of God and, more often, of the divine;
and because he occasionally took pleasure in insisting that he was really closer to this
or that Christian tradition than some of the theologians of his time, he has sometimes
been understood to have been a Christian.[74]
According to Hegel himself, his philosophy was consistent with Christianity.[75] This led
Hegelian philosopher, jurist and politician Carl Friedrich Göschel [de] (1784–1861) to
write a treatise demonstrating the consistency of Hegel's philosophy with the Christian
doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. Göschel's book on this subject was
titled Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der
spekulativen Philosophie: eine Ostergabe (Berlin: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot,
1835).[76][77][78]
Hegel seemed to have an ambivalent relationship with magic, myth and Paganism. He
formulates an early philosophical example of a disenchantment narrative, arguing that
Judaism was responsible both for realizing the existence of Geist and, by extension, for
separating nature from ideas of spiritual and magical forces and
challenging polytheism.[79] However, Hegel's manuscript "The Oldest Systematic
Program of German Idealism" suggests that Hegel was concerned about the perceived
decline in myth and enchantment in his age, and that he therefore called for a "new
myth" to fill the cultural vacuum.[80]
Hegel continued to develop his thoughts on religion both in terms of how it was to be
given a 'wissenschaftlich', or "theoretically rigorous," account in the context of his own
"system," and, most importantly, with how a fully modern religion could be understood
 C. ARTHUR SCHOPEHAUER

(/ˈʃoʊpənhaʊ.ər/;[15] German: [ˈaʁtʊʁ

ˈʃoːpn̩haʊ̯ɐ]; 22 February 1788 – 21
September 1860) was a
German philosopher. He is best known for
his 1818 work The World as Will and
Representation (expanded in 1844),
wherein he characterizes
the phenomenal world as the product of a
blind and insatiable metaphysical
will.[16][17] Proceeding from
the transcendental idealism of Immanuel
Kant, Schopenhauer developed
an atheistic metaphysical and ethical
system that has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical
pessimism,[18][19][20] rejecting the contemporaneous post-Kantian
philosophies of German idealism.[21][22] Schopenhauer was among the first thinkers
in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Eastern
philosophy (e.g., asceticism, the world-as-appearance), having initially arrived at similar
conclusions as the result of his own philosophical work.

Philosophy
The world as representation
Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as a continuation of that of Kant, and used the
results of his epistemological investigations, that is, transcendental idealism, as starting
point for his own:
My philosophy is founded on that of Kant, and therefore presupposes a thorough
knowledge of it. Kant's teaching produces in the mind of everyone who has
comprehended it a fundamental change which is so great that it may be regarded as an
intellectual new-birth. It alone is able really to remove the inborn realism which proceeds
from the original character of the intellect, which
neither Berkeley nor Malebranche succeed in doing, for they remain too much in the
universal, while Kant goes into the particular, and indeed in a way that is quite
unexampled both before and after him, and which has quite a peculiar, and, we might
say, immediate effect upon the mind in consequence of which it undergoes a complete
undeception, and forthwith looks at all things in another light. Only in this way can
anyone become susceptible to the more positive expositions which I have to give. [162]
Kant had argued the empirical world is merely a complex of appearances whose
existence and connection occur only in our representations.[163] Schopenhauer
reiterates this in the first sentence of his main work: "The world is my representation."
We do not draw empirical laws from nature, but prescribe them to it.[164]
Schopenhauer praises Kant for his distinction between appearance and the things-in-
themselves that appear, whereas the general consensus in German Idealism was that
this was the weakest spot of Kant's theory,[165] since according to Kant causality can find
application on objects of experience only, and consequently, things-in-themselves
cannot be the cause of appearances, as Kant argued. The inadmissibility of this
reasoning was also acknowledged by Schopenhauer. He insisted that this distinction
was a true conclusion, drawn from false premises.[166]
Theory of perception
In November 1813 Goethe invited Schopenhauer for research on his Theory of Colours.
Although Schopenhauer considered colour theory a minor matter,[167] he accepted the
invitation out of admiration for Goethe. Nevertheless, these investigations led him to his
most important discovery in epistemology: finding a demonstration for the a priori nature
of causality.
Kant openly admitted that it was Hume's skeptical assault on causality that motivated
the critical investigations of Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he gives an elaborate proof to
show that causality is given a priori. After G. E. Schulze had made it plausible that Kant
had not disproven Hume's skepticism, it was up to those loyal to the project of Kant to
prove this important matter.
The difference between the approach of Kant and Schopenhauer was this: Kant simply
declared that the empirical content of perception is "given" to us from outside, an
expression with which Schopenhauer often expressed his dissatisfaction. [168] He, on the
other hand, was occupied with: how do we get this empirical content of perception; how
is it possible to comprehend subjective sensations limited to my skin as the objective
perception of things that lie outside of me?[169]
The sensations in the hand of a man born blind, on feeling an object of cubic shape, are
quite uniform and the same on all sides and in every direction: the edges, it is true,
press upon a smaller portion of his hand, still nothing at all like a cube is contained in
these sensations. His Understanding, however, draws the immediate and intuitive
conclusion from the resistance felt, that this resistance must have a cause, which then
presents itself through that conclusion as a hard body; and through the movements of
his arms in feeling the object, while the hand's sensation remains unaltered, he
constructs the cubic shape in Space. If the representation of a cause and of Space,
together with their laws, had not already existed within him, the image of a cube could
never have proceeded from those successive sensations in his hand.[170]
Causality is therefore not an empirical concept drawn from objective perceptions, but
objective perception presupposes knowledge of causality. Hereby Hume's skepticism is
disproven.[171]
By this intellectual operation, comprehending every effect in our sensory organs as
having an external cause, the external world arises. With vision, finding the cause is
essentially simplified due to light acting in straight lines. We are seldom conscious of the
process that interprets the double sensation in both eyes as coming from one object;
that turns the upside down impression, and that adds depth to make from the
planimetrical data stereometrical perception with distance between objects.
Schopenhauer stresses the importance of the intellectual nature of perception; the
senses furnish the raw material by which the intellect produces the world as
representation. He set out his theory of perception for the first time in On Vision and
Colors,[165] and in the subsequent editions of Fourfold Root an extensive exposition is
given in § 21.
The world as will[edit]
Main article: The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer developed a system called metaphysical voluntarism.
The kernel and chief point of my doctrine, its Metaphysic proper, is this, that what Kant
opposed as thing-in-itself to mere appearance (called more decidedly by me
"representation") and what he held to be absolutely unknowable, that this thing-in-itself,
I say, this substratum of all appearances, and therefore of the whole of Nature, is
nothing but what we know directly and intimately and find within ourselves as will; that
accordingly, this will, far from being inseparable from, and even a mere result of,
knowledge, differs radically and entirely from, and is quite independent of, knowledge,
which is secondary and of later origin; and can consequently subsist and manifest itself
without knowledge: that this will, being the one and only thing-in-itself, the sole truly
real, primary, metaphysical thing in a world in which everything else is only appearance,
i.e., mere representation, gives all things, whatever they may be, the power to exist and
to act; ... is absolutely identical with the will we find within us and know as intimately as
we can know any thing; that, on the other hand, knowledge with its substratum, the
intellect, is a merely secondary phenomenon, differing completely from the will, only
accompanying its higher degrees of objectification and not essential to it; ... that we are
never able therefore to infer absence of will from absence of knowledge.
— On the Will in Nature, Introduction
For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension,
so was all human action in the world. Einstein paraphrased his views as follows: "Man
can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants." [citation needed] In this
sense, he adhered to the Fichtean principle of idealism: "The world is for a subject."
This idealism so presented, immediately commits it to an ethical attitude, unlike the
purely epistemological concerns of Descartes and Berkeley. To Schopenhauer, the Will
is a blind force that controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but
ultimately all observable phenomena—an evil to be terminated via mankind's
duties: asceticism and chastity.[172] He is credited with one of the most famous opening
lines of philosophy: "The world is my representation." Friedrich Nietzsche was greatly
influenced by this idea of Will, although he eventually rejected it.

D. JHON STUART MILL

(20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873)[8], usually

cited as J. S. Mill, was a British
philosopher, political economist, and civil
servant. One of the most influential thinkers
in the history of classical liberalism, he
contributed widely to social theory, political
theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the
most influential English-speaking
philosopher of the nineteenth
century",[9] Mill's conception
of liberty justified the freedom of the
individual in opposition to unlimited state
and social control.[10]
Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his
predecessor Jeremy Bentham. He contributed to the investigation of scientific
methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on the writings of others,
notably William Whewell, John Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out
for Mill by Alexander Bain. Mill engaged in written debate with Whewell.
Economic philosophy
Mill's early economic philosophy was one of free markets. However, he accepted
interventions in the economy, such as a tax on alcohol, if there were
sufficient utilitarian grounds. He also accepted the principle of legislative intervention for
the purpose of animal welfare.[73] Mill originally believed that "equality of taxation" meant
"equality of sacrifice" and that progressive taxation penalised those who worked harder
and saved more and was therefore "a mild form of robbery".[74]
Given an equal tax rate regardless of income, Mill agreed that inheritance should be
taxed. A utilitarian society would agree that everyone should be equal one way or
another. Therefore, receiving inheritance would put one ahead of society unless taxed
on the inheritance. Those who donate should consider and choose carefully where their
money goes – some charities are more deserving than others. Considering public
charities boards such as a government will disburse the money equally. However, a
private charity board like a church would disburse the monies fairly to those who are in
more need than others.[75]
Later he altered his views toward a more socialist bent, adding chapters to his
Principles of Political Economy in defence of a socialist outlook, and defending some
socialist causes.[76] Within this revised work he also made the radical proposal that the
whole wage system be abolished in favour of a co-operative wage system.
Nonetheless, some of his views on the idea of flat taxation remained, [77] albeit altered in
the third edition of the Principles of Political Economy to reflect a concern for
differentiating restrictions on "unearned" incomes, which he favoured, and those on
"earned" incomes, which he did not favour.[78]
Mill's Principles, first published in 1848, was one of the most widely read of all books on
economics in the period.[79] As Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations had during an earlier
period, Mill's Principles dominated economics teaching. In the case of Oxford
University it was the standard text until 1919, when it was replaced
by Marshall's Principles of Economics.

E. SOREN KEIRKAGAARD

(/ˈsɒrən ˈkɪərkəɡɑːrd/ SORR-ən KEER-kə-

gard, also US: /-ɡɔːr/ -⁠gor, Danish: [sɶːɐ̯n̩
ˈkʰiɐ̯kəkɒːˀ] ( listen); 5 May 1813 – 11 November
1855)[6] was a Danish philosopher, theologian,
poet, social critic and religious author who is
widely considered to be the
first existentialist philosopher.[7][8] He wrote critical
texts on organized

religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion,

displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work
deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete
human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice
and commitment.[9] He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and
philosophers of his time, and thought
that Swedenborg,[10] Hegel,[11] Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian
Andersen were all "understood" far too quickly by "scholars".

Philosophical criticism
Kierkegaard's famous philosophical 20th-century critics include Theodor
Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. Non-religious philosophers such as Jean-Paul
Sartre and Martin Heidegger supported many aspects of Kierkegaard's philosophical
views,[263] but rejected some of his religious views.[264][265] One critic wrote that Adorno's
book Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic is "the most irresponsible book ever
written on Kierkegaard"[266] because Adorno takes Kierkegaard's pseudonyms literally
and constructs a philosophy that makes him seem incoherent and unintelligible. Another
reviewer says that "Adorno is [far away] from the more credible translations and
interpretations of the Collected Works of Kierkegaard we have today." [112]
Levinas' main attack on Kierkegaard focused on his ethical and religious stages,
especially in Fear and Trembling. Levinas criticises the leap of faith by saying this
suspension of the ethical and leap into the religious is a type of violence (the "leap of
faith" of course, is presented by a pseudonym, thus not representing Kierkegaard's own
view, but intending to prompt the exact kind of discussion engaged in by his critics). He
states: "Kierkegaardian violence begins when existence is forced to abandon the ethical
stage in order to embark on the religious stage, the domain of belief. But belief no
longer sought external justification. Even internally, it combined communication and
isolation, and hence violence and passion. That is the origin of the relegation of ethical
phenomena to secondary status and the contempt of the ethical foundation of being
which has led, through Nietzsche, to the amoralism of recent philosophies."[267]
Levinas pointed to the Judeo-Christian belief that it was God who first
commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and that an angel commanded Abraham to
stop. If Abraham were truly in the religious realm, he would not have listened to the
angel's command and should have continued to kill Isaac. To Levinas, "transcending
ethics" seems like a loophole to excuse would-be murderers from their crime and thus is
unacceptable.[268][incomplete short citation] One interesting consequence of Levinas' critique is
that it seemed to reveal that Levinas viewed God as a projection of inner ethical desire
rather than an absolute moral agent.[269] However, one of Kierkegaard's central points
in Fear and Trembling was that the religious sphere entails the ethical sphere; Abraham
had faith that God is always in one way or another ethically in the right, even when He
commands someone to kill. Therefore, deep down, Abraham had faith that God, as an
absolute moral authority, would never allow him in the end to do something as ethically
heinous as murdering his own child, and so he passed the test of blind obedience
versus moral choice. He was making the point that God as well as the God-Man Christ
doesn't tell people everything when sending them out on a mission and reiterated this
in Stages on Life's Way.
I conceive of God as one who approves in a calculated vigilance, I believe that he
approves of intrigues, and what I have read in the sacred books of the Old Testament is
not of a sort to dishearten me. The Old Testament furnishes examples abundantly of a
shrewdness which is nevertheless well pleasing to God, and that at a later period Christ
said to His disciples, “These things I said not unto you from the beginning … I have yet
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” – so here is a teleological
suspension of the ethical rule of telling the whole truth.
— Soren Kierkegaard, "Quidam's Diary" from Stages on Life’s Way, 1845. Lowrie
translation, 1967, pp. 217–218.
Sartre objected to the existence of God: If existence precedes essence, it follows
from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or
perfect. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-
soi (a being-for-itself; a consciousness) who is also an en-soi (a being-in-itself; a
thing) which is a contradiction in terms.[264][270] Critics of Sartre rebutted this
objection by stating that it rests on a false dichotomy and a misunderstanding of the
traditional Christian view of God.[271] Kierkegaard has Judge Vilhelm express the
Christian hope this way in Either/Or:
Either, "the first" contains promise for the future, is the forward thrust, the endless
impulse. Or, "the first" does not impel the individual; the power which is in the first
does not become the impelling power but the repelling power, it becomes that which
thrusts away. .... Thus – for the sake of making a little philosophical flourish, not with
the pen but with thought-God only once became flesh, and it would be vain to
expect this to be repeated.
— Soren Kierkegaard, Either – Or II, 1843. Lowrie translation 1944, 1959, 1972,
pp. 40–41.
Sartre agreed with Kierkegaard's analysis of Abraham undergoing anxiety
(Sartre calls it anguish), but claimed that God told Abraham to do it. In his
lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre wondered whether Abraham ought
to have doubted whether God actually spoke to him.[264] In Kierkegaard's view,
Abraham's certainty had its origin in that "inner voice" which cannot be
demonstrated or shown to another ("The problem comes as soon as Abraham
wants to be understood").[272] To Kierkegaard, every external "proof" or
justification is merely on the outside and external to the
subject.[273] Kierkegaard's proof for the immortality of the soul, for example, is
rooted in the extent to which one wishes to live forever.[274]
Faith was something that Kierkegaard often wrestled with throughout his writing
career; under both his real name and behind pseudonyms, he explored many
different aspects of faith. These various aspects include faith as a spiritual goal,
the historical orientation of faith (particularly toward Jesus Christ), faith being a
gift from God, faith as dependency on a historical object, faith as a passion, and
faith as a resolution to personal despair. Even so, it has been argued that
Kierkegaard never offers a full, explicit and systematic account of what faith
is.[69] Either/Or was published 20 February 1843; it was mostly written during
Kierkegaard's stay in Berlin, where he took notes on Schelling's Philosophy of
Revelation. According to the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Religion,
Either/Or (vol. 1) consists of essays of literary and music criticism, a set of
romantic-like-aphorisms, a whimsical essay on how to avoid boredom, a
panegyric on the unhappiest possible human being, a diary recounting a
supposed seduction, and (vol. II) two enormous didactic and hortatory ethical
letters and a sermon.[72][73] This opinion is a reminder of the type of controversy
Kierkegaard tried to encourage in many of his writings both for readers in his
own generation and for subsequent generations as well.
Kierkegaardian scholar Paul Holmer[275] described Kierkegaard's wish in his
introduction to the 1958 publication of Kierkegaard's Edifying Discourses where
he wrote:
Kierkegaard's constant and lifelong wish, to which his entire literature gives
expression, was to create a new and rich subjectivity in himself and his readers.
Unlike any authors who believe that all subjectivity is a hindrance, Kierkegaard
contends that only some kinds of subjectivity are a hindrance. He sought at once
to produce subjectivity if it were lacking, to correct it if it were there and needed
correction, to amplify and strengthen it when it was weak and undeveloped, and,
always, to bring subjectivity of every reader to the point of eligibility for Christian
inwardness and concern. But the Edifying Discourses, though paralleling the
pseudonymous works, spoke a little more directly, albeit without authority. They
spoke the real author's conviction and were the purpose of Kierkegaard's
lifework. Whereas all the rest of his writing was designed to get the readers out
of their lassitude and mistaken conceptions, the discourses, early and late, were
the goal of the literature.

— Edifying Discourses: A Selection, 1958. Introduction by Paul Holmer. p.

xviii.[276]
Later, Naomi Lebowitz explained them this way: The edifying discourses are,
according to Johannes Climacus, "humoristically revoked" (CUP, 244, Swenson,
Lowrie 1968) for unlike sermons, they are not ordained by authority. They start
where the reader finds himself, in immanent ethical possibilities and aesthetic
repetitions, and are themselves vulnerable to the lure of poetic sirens. They force
the dialectical movements of the making and unmaking of the self before God to
 undergo lyrical imitations of meditation while the clefts, rifts, abysses, are
everywhere to be seen.

F. FREDERICH NIETZSCHE
(/ˈniːtʃə, ˈniːtʃi/,[8][9] German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm
ˈniːtʃə] ( listen) or [- ˈniːtsʃə];[10][11][12] 15
October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a
German philosopher, cultural
critic, composer, poet, philologist,
and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has
exerted a profound influence on modern
intellectual history.[13][14][15][16][17] He began his
career as a classical philologist before turning
to philosophy. He became the youngest ever
to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at
the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of
24.[18] Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to
health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core
writing in the following decade.[19] In 1889 at age 44, he suffered a collapse and
afterward, a complete loss of his mental faculties.[20] He lived his remaining years
in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth
Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.

Philosophy
Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and provocative ideas, his philosophy generates
passionate reactions. His works remain controversial, due to their varying
interpretations and misinterpretations. In the Western philosophy tradition, Nietzsche's
writings have been described as the unique case of free revolutionary thought, that is,
revolutionary in its structure and problems, although not tied to any revolutionary
project.[131] His writings have also been described as a revolutionary project in which his
philosophy serves as the foundation of a European cultural rebirth. [132][133]
Apollonian and Dionysian
The Apollonian and Dionysian is a two-fold philosophical concept, based on certain
features of ancient Greek mythology: Apollo and Dionysus. Even though the concept is
famously related to The Birth of Tragedy, the poet Hölderlin had already spoken of it,
and Winckelmann had talked of Bacchus. One year before the publication of The Birth
of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote a fragment titled "On Music and Words".[134] In it, he
asserted the Schopenhauerian judgment that music is a primary expression of the
essence of everything. Secondarily derivative are lyrical poetry and drama, which
represent mere phenomenal appearances of objects. In this way, tragedy is born from
music.
Nietzsche found in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the
pessimism found in the so-called wisdom of Silenus. The Greek spectators, by looking
into the abyss of human suffering depicted by characters on stage, passionately and
joyously affirmed life, finding it worth living. A main theme in The Birth of Tragedy was
that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian Kunsttrieben ("artistic impulses") forms
dramatic arts, or tragedies. He goes on to argue that this fusion has not been achieved
since the ancient Greek tragedians. Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity and
logic, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion and ecstasy.
Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one
side, and passion and chaos on the other formed principles that were fundamental to
the Greek culture:[135][136] the Apollonian side being a dreaming state, full of illusions;
and Dionysian being the state of intoxication, representing the liberations of instinct and
dissolution of boundaries. In this mold, man appears as the satyr. He is the horror of the
annihilation of the principle of individuality and at the same time someone who delights
in its destruction.[137] Both of these principles are meant to represent cognitive states
that appear through art as the power of nature in man.[138]
The relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian juxtapositions is apparent, in the
interplay of tragedy: the tragic hero of the drama, the main protagonist, struggles to
make order (in the Apollonian sense) of his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) fate, though
he dies unfulfilled in the end. Elaborating on the conception of Hamlet as an intellectual
who cannot make up his mind, and therefore is a living antithesis to the man of action,
Nietzsche argues that a Dionysian figure possesses knowledge to realize that his
actions cannot change the eternal balance of things, and it disgusts him enough not to
be able to make any act at all. Hamlet falls under this category—he has glimpsed the
supernatural reality through the Ghost, he has gained true knowledge and knows that
no action of his has the power to change this.[139][140] For the audience of such drama,
this tragedy allows them to sense an underlying essence, what Nietzsche called
the Primordial Unity, which revives Dionysian nature. He describes this primordial unity
as the increase of strength, experience of fullness and plenitude bestowed by frenzy.
Frenzy acts as an intoxication, and is crucial for the physiological condition that enables
making of any art.[141] Stimulated by this state, a person's artistic will is enhanced:
In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees,
whatever wills is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this
state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his
perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art.
Nietzsche is adamant that the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles represent the apex of
artistic creation, the true realization of tragedy; it is with Euripides, he states, that
tragedy begins its Untergang (literally "going under" or "downward-way," meaning
decline, deterioration, downfall, death, etc.). Nietzsche objects to Euripides' use
of Socratic rationalism and morality in his tragedies, claiming that the infusion
of ethics and reason robs tragedy of its foundation, namely the fragile balance of the
Dionysian and Apollonian. Socrates emphasized reason to such a degree that he
diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. Plato continued with this
path in his dialogues, and the modern world eventually inherited reason at the expense
of artistic impulses that could be found only in the Apollonian and Dionysus dichotomy.
This leads to his conclusion that European culture from the time of Socrates had always
been only Apollonian and thus decadent and unhealthy.[142] He notes that whenever
Apollonian culture dominates, the Dionysian lacks the structure to make a coherent art,
and when Dionysian dominates, the Apollonian lacks the necessary passion. Only the
beautiful middle, the interplay of these two forces, brought together as an art,
represented real Greek tragedy.[143]
An example of the impact of this idea can be seen in the book Patterns of Culture,
where anthropologist Ruth Benedict uses Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and
"Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thoughts about Native American cultures.[144] Carl
Jung has written extensively on the dichotomy in Psychological Types.[145] Michel
Foucault has commented that his own book Madness and Civilization should be read
"under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry". Here Foucault references Nietzsche's
description of the birth and death of tragedy and his explanation that the subsequent
tragedy of the Western world was the refusal of the tragic and, with that, refusal of the
sacred.[146] Painter Mark Rothko was influenced by Nietzsche's view of tragedy, which
were presented in The Birth of Tragedy.
Perspectivism
Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal
perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth. Nietzsche
himself rejected the idea of objective reality, arguing that knowledge is contingent and
conditional, relative to various fluid perspectives or interests.[149] This leads to constant
reassessment of rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to
the circumstances of individual perspectives.[150] This view has acquired the
name perspectivism.
In Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims that a table of values hangs above
every great person. He points out that what is common among different peoples is the
act of esteeming, of creating values, even if the values are different from one people to
the next. Nietzsche asserts that what made people great was not the content of their
beliefs, but the act of valuing. Thus the values a community strives to articulate are not
as important as the collective will to see those values come to pass. The willing is more
essential than the intrinsic worth of the goal itself, according to Nietzsche. "A thousand
goals have there been so far," says Zarathustra, "for there are a thousand peoples.
Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity
still has no goal." Hence, the title of the aphorism, "On The Thousand And One Goals".
The idea that one value-system is no more worthy than the next, although it may not be
directly ascribed to Nietzsche, has become a common premise in modern social
science. Max Weber and Martin Heidegger absorbed it and made it their own. It shaped
their philosophical and cultural endeavor, as well as their political understanding.
Weber, for example, relies on Nietzsche's perspectivism by maintaining that objectivity
is still possible—but only after a particular perspective, value, or end has been
established.[151][152]
Among his critique of traditional philosophy of Kant, Descartes and Plato in Beyond
Good and Evil, Nietzsche attacked thing in itself and cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore
I am") as unfalsifiable beliefs based on naive acceptance of previous notions
and fallacies.[153] Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts Nietzsche in a high place in the
history of philosophy. While criticizing nihilism and Nietzsche together as a sign of
general decay,[154] he still commends him for recognizing psychological motives behind
Kant and Hume's moral philosophy.

G. KARL MARX

(German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14

March 1883) was a
German philosopher, economist, historian,
sociologist, political
theorist, journalist and socialist
revolutionary.
Born in Trier, Germany, Marx
studied law and philosophy at university. He
married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843.
Due to his political publications, Marx
became stateless and lived in exile with his
wife and children in London for decades,
where he continued to develop his thought
in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings,
researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the
1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital. His
political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual
economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and
a school of social theory.
Philosophy and social thought
Marx's polemic with other thinkers often occurred through critique and thus he has been
called "the first great user of critical method in social sciences".[215][216] He criticised
speculative philosophy, equating metaphysics with ideology.[222] By adopting this
approach, Marx attempted to separate key findings from ideological biases.[216] This set
him apart from many contemporary philosophers.[18]
Human nature
Further information: Marx's theory of human nature

The philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, whose ideas on dialectics
heavily influenced Marx
Like Tocqueville, who described a faceless and bureaucratic despotism with no
identifiable despot,[223] Marx also broke with classical thinkers who spoke of a single
tyrant and with Montesquieu, who discussed the nature of the single despot. Instead,
Marx set out to analyse "the despotism of capital".[224] Fundamentally, Marx assumed
that human history involves transforming human nature, which encompasses both
human beings and material objects.[225] Humans recognise that they possess both
actual and potential selves.[226][227] For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins
with an experience of internal alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a
realisation that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart
an object to be apprehended.[227] Marx further argues that by moulding nature[228] in
desired ways[229] the subject takes the object as its own and thus permits the individual
to be actualised as fully human. For Marx, the human nature – Gattungswesen,
or species-being – exists as a function of human labour.[226][227][229] Fundamental to
Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that in order for a subject to come to
terms with its alienated object it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in
the subject's world.[230] Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps the nature of work and
comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own
work",[231] but characterises Hegelian self-development as unduly "spiritual" and
abstract.[232] Marx thus departs from Hegel by insisting that "the fact that man is a
corporeal, actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities means that he has
actual, sensuous objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that he can
only express his life in actual sensuous objects".[230] Consequently, Marx revises
Hegelian "work" into material "labour" and in the context of human capacity to transform
nature the term "labour power".[90]
Labour, class struggle and false consciousness
Further information: Labour theory of value
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto[233]
Marx had a special concern with how people relate to their own labour power.[234] He
wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation.[235] As with the
dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more
materialist conception.[234] Capitalism mediates social relationships of production (such
as among workers or between workers and capitalists) through commodities, including
labour, that are bought and sold on the market.[234] For Marx, the possibility that one
may give up ownership of one's own labour – one's capacity to transform the world – is
tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss. [234] Marx
described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce,
commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and
their behaviour merely adapt.[236]
Commodity fetishism provides an example of what Engels called "false
consciousness",[237] which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By
"ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at
a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see as universal and
eternal.[238] Marx and Engels's point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-
truths, as they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that
one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of
food or manufactured goods, but also the production of ideas (this provides one
possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary
to their own interests).[90][239] An example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding
of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface[240] to his 1843 Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
CONTEMPORARY PERIOD