the history of philosophy ac grayling review

Grayling observes that this period of philosophy was marked by trying to formulate “a systematic, inclusive theory that brought all phenomena together into a single explanatory framework constrained by…observable facts.” Pythagoras’s mathematical theorems are valid today, and supposedly the inscription over his school’s door was “All is number.” Parmenides speculated on change, being and becoming, while Zeno and his paradoxes considered time and space. They speculated on the planets, the tides, and storms, always seeking to find natural causation for things. The Pre-Socratics such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Pythagoras got things rolling, and although their attempts did not get everything right, it was a huge step up from inquiring of Apollo what it all meant. Grayling, a distinguished British academic, has written a first-rate guide to the wisdom of the ages, starting with the Greeks, who invented rational inquiry, spurning myth in favor of attempting to figure out matters by observation, cause and effect, and logic rather than implicating the gods. “The search for wisdom,” “the quest for the meaning of life,” or “the proper understanding of how language works when it tries to describe reality,” would all be working definitions for different philosophers.Ī.C. Unlike disciplines such as chemistry or sociology, whose practitioners could readily state a definition of what they study, philosophy’s problems begin with what to call itself. The job of a philosopher is not for the faint of heart people expect wisdom when all you can give them is some brief moment of disillusion. At question time someone stood to pose a long-winded query that was plainly not to solicit information, but for the questioner to be able to say, “As Quine and I once discussed…” Quine grew impatient with the rambling disquisition, and when the man finally finished and asked if Quine would agree, the great man looked at him and gave a witheringly monosyllabic “NO,” then moved on to someone else. That, if nothing else, would encourage one to focus on the essential and disregard the superfluous. Perhaps the most distinguished American philosopher of the 20th century and a longtime Harvard professor, his main fields of inquiry were logic and the philosophy of language. I went to hear Willard Van Orman Quine speak in Cambridge several years before he died in 2000 at age 92. Grayling’s history is an excellent tour for the curious and a refresher for everyone who had Philosophy 101 and wants to remember why it was so moving at the time.

The history of philosophy ac grayling review