Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Western philosophy

Western Philosophy

The Western line runs from the Latin schools of the Middle Ages to the present. It took its texts from Greece and Rome, and Aristotle’s Arabic commentators with them from the Islamic world.

Its words for the work changed with it. The Latin word kept its Greek sense. Hugh of St Victor: “Philosophia est amor sapientiae … philos enim Graece, amor dicitur Latine, sophia, sapientia”, philosophy is the love of wisdom, for philos in Greek is love in Latin, sophia wisdom; more fully, “Philosophia est disciplina omnium rerum humanarum atque divinarum rationes plene investigans”, the discipline that fully investigates the reasons of all things human and divine (Didascalicon II.1, I.4). His book begins “Omnium expetendorum prima est sapientia”, of all things to be sought, wisdom is the first. Natural philosophy was the name of the work on nature, in Bacon’s division of philosophy into divine, natural and human and in the title of Newton’s Principia (1687), the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In German the subject was Weltweisheit, world-wisdom, earthly wisdom set against the wisdom of God, which Wolff defined as a science of all possible things and Gottsched called “eine unvollkommene Weisheit”, an imperfect wisdom. Then the word was Wissenschaft, any grounded body of knowledge. Kant asked whether metaphysics could go “den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft”, the sure path of a science (Critique of Pure Reason, B VII); Fichte called his philosophy a doctrine of science, Wissenschaftslehre; and Hegel wanted philosophy to lay aside its name of love of knowing and become actual knowing.

The West also mapped knowledge, and placed philosophy on each map. Hugh: “Philosophia dividitur in theoricam, practicam, mechanicam et logicam. hae quattuor omnem continent scientiam”, philosophy divides into the theoretical, the practical, the mechanical and the logical, and these four contain all knowledge (II.1); the seven liberal arts are called trivium and quadrivium “eo quod his, quasi quibusdam viis, vivax animus ad secreta sophiae introeat”, because by these, as by roads, the lively mind enters the secrets of wisdom (III.3). On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, traditionally Bonaventure’s, though his authorship has been questioned, counts four lights; the third, “lumen cognitionis philosophicae”, the light of philosophical knowledge, “interiores causas et latentes inquirit”, inquires into inner and hidden causes, and the book ends “omnes cognitiones famulantur theologiae”, all kinds of knowledge serve theology. Descartes drew a tree, metaphysics its roots, physics its trunk, and medicine, mechanics and morals its branches. Bacon sorted learning by the faculties: “history to his memory, poesy to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason”; d’Alembert took the plan into the Encyclopédie and called the whole “une espece de Mappemonde”, a kind of world map (Preliminary Discourse).

The West sorted its own past too. Kant closed the Critique of Pure Reason with a “history of pure reason” that sorts his predecessors by object, origin and method: Aristotle at the head of the empiricists, Plato of the noologists, Wolff the dogmatist, Hume the sceptic. Alberto Vanzo has traced how the later division of early modern philosophy into rationalists and empiricists grew from such sketches of Kant’s, as Reinhold corrected and extended them and Tennemann and Buhle filled them out, to become the standard account only around 1900. The historians of philosophy described their own work. For Tennemann it “is the science which details the efforts of the human understanding to realise the idea of philosophy, by exhibiting them in their mutual dependency” (Manual, §13, tr. Johnson); for Hegel, “Die Geschichte der Philosophie stellt uns die Galerie der edlen Geister dar, welche durch die Kühnheit ihrer Vernunft in die Natur der Dinge, des Menschen und in die Natur Gottes gedrungen [sind]”, the history of philosophy shows us the gallery of noble minds who by the boldness of their reason have penetrated the nature of things, of man and of God (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, introduction).

The thinkers also said why philosophy’s view of itself changed. Kant ended his history of reason on the way still left: “Der kritische Weg ist allein noch offen”, the critical path alone is still open. For Hegel philosophy changes with its age: it is “ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt”, its own time apprehended in thoughts. For Comte the mind passes through “three methods of philosophizing”, the theological, the metaphysical and the positive (tr. Martineau). From the 1830s on the cause named was the sciences: in a review of 1834 now attributed to Whewell, science “loses all traces of unity”; Windelband left philosophy only “die Prinzipien selbst”, the principles themselves; Ortega looked back on “el «terrorismo de los laboratorios»”, the terrorism of the laboratories; and for Russell a subject ceases to be called philosophy once “definite knowledge” of it “becomes possible”.

The line

English without a named translator is rendered from the original; English quoted through another source is that source’s.

Reading the other traditions

Claims of an end

From the nineteenth century there have been claims that philosophy has ended or should end, and questions whether its task could ever be finished.