Famous Quotes

Glossary
What is Philosophy?
Eastern Philosophy
Western Philosophy
African Philosophy

Submitted By: Mathew Guerrero

Submitted To: Sir Pana, Joseph P.
 Famous Quotes
The unexamined life is not worth living Socrates

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent Ludwig

Wittgenstein

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily William of Ockham

The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short Thomas Hobbes

I think therefore I am (Cogito, ergo sum) Ren Descartes

He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors Martin

Heidegger

We live in the best of all possible worlds Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational G. W. F. Hegel

God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him. Friedrich

Nietzsche

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide
Albert Camus

One cannot step twice in the same river Heraclitus

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals

and legislation Jeremy Bentham

To be is to be perceived (Esse est percipi) Bishop George Berkeley

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination Immanuel Kant

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience John Locke

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and
that share of glory which belongs to us Niccolo Machiavelli
 Liberty consists in doing what one desires John Stuart Mill

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground

whatever for supposing it true Bertrand Russell

Even while they teach, men learn Seneca the Younger

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance Socrates

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him Voltaire

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher

must learn not to be frightened by absurdities Bertrand Russell

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has

not already been said by one philosopher or another Ren Descartes

Leisure is the mother of philosophy Thomas Hobbes

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by

means of language Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is
to contradict other philosophers William James

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit
Aristotle

Only one man ever understood me, and he didnt understand me G. W.

F. Hegel

The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone John Locke

Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward Sren

Kierkegaard

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know Bertrand
Russell

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with

many a philosophic wreck Immanuel Kant
 Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human
pursuits William James

History is Philosophy teaching by examples Thucydides

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is

sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god Aristotle

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of
conversation Plato

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the
better designedly Francis Bacon

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
mistakenly attributed to Edmund Burke

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?

Friedrich Nietzsche

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong Bertrand

Russell

Religion is the sign of the oppressed ... it is the opium of the people
Karl Marx

Happiness is the highest good Aristotle

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no
conception of good and evil Baruch Spinoza

The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it Epicurus

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable G.

W. F. Hegel

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of
how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness Immanuel Kant

Man is condemned to be free Jean-Paul Sartre

 It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in
possession of truth John Locke

I dont know why we are here, but Im pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy
ourselves Ludwig Wittgenstein

That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is
worthless Plato

The only thing I know is that I know nothing Socrates

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds Voltaire (in parody
of Leibniz)

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the
nature of the one who prays Sren Kierkegaard

Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of
the last priest Denis Diderot

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once
in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things Ren Descartes

Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best
activity, which is contemplative Aristotle

I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature

Spinoza

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it Karl Marx

It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon

insufficient evidence W. K. Clifford

Virtue is nothing else than right reason Seneca the Younger

Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the

removal of desire Epictetus
 In everything, there is a share of everything Anaxagoras

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy

bringeth mens minds about to religion Sir Francis Bacon

The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his
pleasures Democritus

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational
creature John Locke

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself,

constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality John Stuart Mill

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through

weakness, and dies by accident Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is the measure of all things Protagoras

We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone St. Augustine

The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone John Locke

Glossary
This is a brief glossary of some of the general philosophical terms and basic
concepts used in philosophy to explain other concepts and doctrines, and which do not
have a page of their own in this website. It is not an exhaustive alphabetical listing of the
schools, doctrines, branches and concepts themselves.

Agency: the capacity for humans to make choices and to impose those choices on
the world.
 A posteriori: where knowledge is possible only subsequent, or posterior, to
certain sense experiences, in addition to the use of reason (empirical).

A priori: where knowledge is possible independently of, or prior to,

any experience, and requires only the use of reason (non-empirical).

Axiom: a proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be self-

evident and taken for granted.

Causality: the law that states that each cause has a specific effect, and that this
effect is dependent on the initial identities of the agents involved.

Consciousness: the faculty which perceives and identifies things that exist, and
the relationship between oneself and one's environment.

Contingency: the status of facts that are not logically necessarily true or
false (the possibility of something happening or not happening).

Deductive Reasoning: reasoning that proceeds from general principles or

premises to derive particular information (what follows necessarily from given
premises).

Dialectic: the exchange of arguments and counter-arguments, respectively

advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses), in arriving
at a conclusion (synthesis).

Emergence: the way complex systems and patterns arise (emerge) out of
a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.

Entity: something that has a distinct and separate existence, although not
necessarily a material existence.

Essence: the attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally

is, and that it has necessarily.

Existence: the state or fact of existing or being (the continuance in being or life).

Fallacy: any sort of mistake in reasoning or inference (essentially, anything

that causes an argument to go wrong).
 Formal Language: an organized set of symbols which can be precisely defined in
terms of just the shapes and locations of those symbols, without any reference to
any meanings or interpretations.

Forms (Platonic Forms): the universal concepts or ideas which make all of the
phenomenal world intelligible (the essences of objects, rather than
their physical forms or appearances).

Freehought: the general philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be
formed on the basis of science and logic, and should not be influenced
by emotion, authority, tradition, or dogma.

Free Will: the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from
among various alternatives.

Hermeneutics: the study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of

texts (often the Bible).

Hylomorphism: the theory which conceptually

identifies substance as matter and form, such that substances are conceived as
forms inhering in matter.

Identity: whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of

possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a
different type (essentially, whatever makes something the same or different).

Inductive Reasoning: reasoning that proceeds from particular information to

derive general principles (arriving at a
reliable generalization from observations).

Infinite Regress: a causal relationship transmitted through an indefinite number

of terms in a series, with no term that begins the causal chain (going back through
a chain forever).

Instantiation: the representation of an idea in the form of

an instance or example of it.

Law of Non-Contradiction: the basic law of logic which states that it is not
possible for something to be and not be at the same time.

Monad: an unextended, indivisible and indestructible entity that is the basic

constituent of physical reality.
 Natural Language: a language that is spoken, written, or signed by humans
for general-purpose communication (ordinary language as opposed
to formal or constructed languages).

Normative: indicative of how things should or ought to be (as opposed

to positive or descriptive).

Noumenon: the intellectual conception of a thing as it is in itself, not as it is

known through perception (c.f. Phenomenon).

Object: a thing, an entity or a being, that can have properties and

bear relations to other objects. They are usually types of particulars, but there
can also be abstract objects.

Ontology: the study of conceptions of reality, existence and the nature of being.

Paradox: a statement or sentiment that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to

common sense, and yet is perhaps true in fact, or a statement that is actually
self-contradictory (and therefore false) even though it appears true.

Particular: a concrete individual object which cannot be copied without

introducing new distinct particulars.

Phenomenon: a thing as it appears to be, as constructed by the mind

and perceived by the senses (c.f. Noumenon).

Predicate: that which is affirmed or denied concerning the subject of

a proposition (i.e. how we describe the subject of a proposition). The predicate is
one of the two main constituents of a sentence (the other being the subject),
containing the verb and its complements.

Premise: one of the propositions in a deductive argument. Essentially, it is

a claim that is a reason for, or objection against, some other claim.

Property: an attribute or abstraction characterizing an object, but distinct from

the object which possesses it.

Proposition: the content or meaning of an assertion or declarative sentence,

which is capable of being either true or false.

Qualia: properties of sensory experiences, or the nebulous concept of "the way

things seem to us".
 Scientific Method: the collection of data
through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing
of hypotheses.

Social Contract: that idea people give up some rights to a government and/or
other authority in forming nations in order to jointly preserve or maintain social
order and security.

Society: a collection or grouping of individuals with some shared interactions

and common interests.

Substance: the unchanging essence of a thing, that exists by itself, and which
has attributes and modes which, however, may change.

Syllogism: a logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is

inferred from two others (the premises) of a certain form.

Tabula Rasa: the idea that individual human beings are born with no innate
mental content, but their knowledge is built up gradually from
their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world (literally, "blank
slate").

Teleology: the belief that events occur with a natural purpose or design, or in order
to achieve some specific goal.

Theodicy: an attempt to reconcile the existence of evil or suffering in the world

with the belief in an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent God.

Theology: the study of the nature of God and religious truth, which seeks
to justify or support religious claims.

Theorem: a statement which has been proven to be true by a

rigorous argument.

Universal: a property of an object, which can exist in more than one place at
the same time (e.g. the quality of "redness").

Virtue: the moral excellence of a person, or any trait valued as being good.

Zeitgeist: the intellectual and cultural climate of an era (literally, "the spirit of
the age").
 What is Philosophy?
At its simplest, philosophy (from the Greek or phlosopha,
meaning the love of wisdom) is the study of knowledge, or
"thinking about thinking", although the breadth of what it covers is
perhaps best illustrated by a selection of other alternative
definitions:

the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live

(ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential
natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge
(epistemology); and what are the correct principles of
reasoning (logic) (Wikipedia)

investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality,

knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than
empirical methods (American Heritage Dictionary)

the study of the ultimate nature of existence, reality, knowledge

and goodness, as discoverable by human reasoning (Penguin
English Dictionary)

the rational investigation of questions about existence and

knowledge and ethics (WordNet)

the search for knowledge and truth, especially about the

nature of man and his behaviour and beliefs (Kernerman
English Multilingual Dictionary)

the rational and critical inquiry into basic principles (Microsoft

Encarta Encyclopedia)

the study of the most general and abstract features of the

world and categories with which we think: mind, matter,
reason, proof, truth, etc. (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy)
 careful thought about the fundamental nature of the world, the
grounds for human knowledge, and the evaluation of human
conduct (The Philosophy Pages)

As used originally by the ancient Greeks, the term "philosophy"

meant the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and comprised
ALL areas of speculative thought, including the arts, sciences and
religion.

Philosophical questions (unlike those of the sciences) are

usually foundational and abstract in nature. Philosophy is done
primarily through reflection and does not tend to rely
on experiment, although the methods used to study it may
be analogous to those used in the study of the natural sciences.

In common usage, it sometimes carries the sense of unproductive

or frivolous musings, but over the centuries it has produced some of
the most important original thought, and its contribution
to politics, sociology, mathematics, science and literature has
been inestimable. Although the study of philosophy may not yield
"the meaning of life, the universe and everything", many
philosophers believe that it is important that each of us examines
such questions and even that an unexamined life is not worth
living. It also provides a good way of learning to think more clearly
about a wide range of issues, and its methods of analyzing
arguments can be useful in a variety of situations in other areas of
life.

Philosophy is such a huge subject that it is difficult to know how

to break it down into manageable and logical sections. Perhaps the
most basic overall split at the highest level is geographical,
between Eastern Philosophy and Western Philosophy (with,
arguably, African Philosophy as a possible third branch at this level).

This website is mainly concerned with an analysis of Western

Philosophy. There are 4 common ways in which Western
Philosophy can be usefully broken down or organized:
 By Branch / Doctrine

By Historical Period

By Movement / School

By Individual Philosophers

Eastern Phiosophy
Eastern Philosophy refers very broadly to the various philosophies of
Asia. Notable among these are:

Indian Philosophy Korean Philosophy

Chinese Philosophy Japanese Philosophy

The term sometimes also includes Middle Eastern traditions of

philosophical thought, including:

Persian Philosophy Babylonian Philosophy

Arabic Philosophy Jewish Philosophy

The distinction between Western and Eastern is of course

somewhat arbitrary and artificial, and in some some respects
even misleading. For example, Indian and Chinese philosophies are at
least as distinct from each other as they are from Western Philosophy.

Ancient Babylonian philosophy can be considered Eastern in some ways,

but it almost certainly had a strong influence on Greek,
particularly Hellenistic, philosophy. It can be argued
that Persian, Arabic and Jewish philosophies are much closer in nature to
Western philosophy than Eastern, and the geographical and historical
links are much closer.

In many cases, the philosophical schools are indistinguishable from the

various religions which gave rise to them (or vice versa).
Very broadly speaking, according to some commentators, Western society
strives to find and prove "the truth", while Eastern society accepts the
truth as given and is more interested in finding the balance. Westerners
put more stock in individual rights; Easterners in social responsibility. It
has been argued that the essence of the Eastern world view is the
awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things, which are
inseparable parts of a cosmic whole.

Western Philosophy
Western Philosophy refers to philosophical thinking in the Western
or Occidental world, (beginning with Ancient Greece and Rome,
extending through central and western Europe and, since Columbus,
the Americas) as opposed to Eastern or Oriental philosophies
(comprising Indian, Chinese, Persian, Japanese and Korean
philosophies) and the varieties of indigenous philosophies.

In general, this website is limited to a discussion of Western

Philosophy, although a brief overview of Eastern
Philosophy and African Philosophy are also provided.

Over the centuries, Western Philosophy has strongly influenced and

been influenced by Western religion, science, mathematics and
politics. Indeed, in ancient times, the word "philosophy" was used to
mean ALL intellectual endeavours, and, as late as the 17th Century,
the natural sciences (physics, astronomy, biology) were still referred to
as branches of "natural philosophy".

It has also influenced (and in turn been influenced by) the teachings of
the Abrahamic religions (Jewish philosophy, Christian philosophy,
and Islamic philosophy).

Very broadly speaking, according to some commentators, Western

society strives to find and prove "the truth", while Eastern
society accepts the truth as given and is more interested in finding
the balance. Westerners put more stock in individual rights;
Easterners in social responsibility.

There are 4 common ways in which Western Philosophy can be

usefully broken down or organized:

By Branch / Doctrine

By Historical Period

By Movement / School

By Individual Philosophers

African Philosophy
African Philosophy is a disputed term, partly because it is not clear if it refers
to philosophies with a specifically African theme or context (such as
distinctively African perceptions of time, personhood, etc.), or just any
philosophizing carried out by Africans (or even people of African descent).

One of the earliest works of political philosophy was the Maxims of the
Egyptian official and philosopher Ptah-Hotep as early as the 24th
Century B.C. The Egyptian Hellenistic philosopher Plotinus of the 3rd
Century B.C. is credited with founding ther Neoplatonist school of philosophy.

Ethnophilosophy treats African philosophy as consisting in a set of shared

beliefs, values, categories and assumptions that are implicit in
the language, practices and beliefs of African cultures (or the uniquely
African world view). Ths argues that the fundamental assumptions about
reality are reflected in the languages of Africa. For example, E. J. Alagoa
argues for the existence of an African philosophy of history stemming
from traditional proverbs from the Niger Delta.

Some African philosophers (such as the Senegalese Lopold Senghor) have

argued for the concept of negritude, including the idea that the distinctly
African approach to reality is based on emotion and artistry rather than
logic, although the idea is highly contentious.
Philosophical sagacity is a sort of individualist version of ethnophilosophy, in
which one records the beliefs of certain special members of a community
(sages) who have a particularly high level of knowledge and understanding of
their cultures' world-view. However, it becomes difficult to distinguish between
a bona fide philosophy and a mere local belief, or just a history of ideas.

The professional philosophy trend argues that the whole concept of a

particular way of thinking, reflecting, and reasoning is relatively new to most
of Africa, and that African philosophy is really just starting to grow. An
example of this growth is the Kawaida project, created by Maulana Karenga,
an ongoing search for African models of excellence in the seven core areas
of culture: history; spirituality and ethics; social organization; political
organization; economic organization; creative production (art, music,
literature, dance, etc.) and ethos.