The Philosophy Book Big Ideas Simply Explained By
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MIND IMAGINATION HAS NO DECIDES WE ONLY THINK WHEN EVERYTHING THE UNIVERSE GENDER WE ARE CONFRONTED HAS NOT ALWAYS WITH PROBLEMS TO BE IS TO BE EXISTED PERCEIVED MAN IS I THINK AN ANIMAL THEREFORE MAN WAS BORN FREE, THAT MAKES YET EVERYWHERE I AM HE IS IN CHAINS BARGAINS MAN IS THE MEASURE OF THE ALL THINGS PHILOSOPHY MAN IS A BOOK MACHINE BIG IDEAS SIMPLY EXPLAINED HAPPY IS HE WHO MAN IS AN HAS OVERCOME INVENTION OF HIS EGO RECENT DATE THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS THERE IS OVER HIS OWN NOTHING BODY AND MIND, OUTSIDE OF ACT AS IF WHAT LIFE WILL BE LIVED YOU DO MAKES ALL THE BETTER IF THE INDIVIDUAL THE TEXT A DIFFERENCE IT HAS NO MEANING IS SOVEREIGN THE PHILOSOPHY BOOK THE PHILOSOPHY BOOK LONDON, NEW YORK, MELBOURNE, MUNICH, AND DELHI DK LONDON DK DELHI First American Edition 2011 Published in the United States by PROJECT ART EDITOR PROJECT ART EDITOR DK Publishing Anna Hall Neerja Rawat 375 Hudson Street SENIOR EDITOR ART EDITOR New York, New York 10014 Sam Atkinson Shriya Parameswaran 11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 EDITORS ASSISTANT ART EDITORS Cecile Landau, Andrew Szudek, Showmik Chakraborty, Devan Das, 001–176426–Feb/2011 Sarah Tomley Niyati Gosain, Neha Sharma Copyright © 2011 EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MANAGING ART EDITOR Dorling Kindersley Limited Manisha Majithia Arunesh Talapatra US EDITORS All rights reserved Liza Kaplan, Rebecca Warren PRODUCTION MANAGER Without limiting the rights under MANAGING ART EDITOR Pankaj Sharma copyright reserved above, no part Karen Self DTP MANAGER/CTS of this publication may be reproduced, MANAGING EDITOR Balwant Singh stored in or introduced into a retrieval Camilla Hallinan system, or transmitted, in any form, or DTP DESIGNERS by any means (electronic, mechanical, ART DIRECTOR Bimlesh Tiwary, Mohammad Usman Philip Ormerod photocopying, recording, or otherwise), DTP OPERATOR without the prior written permission of ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Neeraj Bhatia both the copyright owner and the Liz Wheeler above publisher of this book. PUBLISHER Jonathan Metcalf styling by Published in Great Britain by Dorling STUDIO8 DESIGN Kindersley Limited. ILLUSTRATIONS A catalog record for this book is James Graham available from the Library of Congress. PICTURE RESEARCH DK books are available at special Ria Jones, Myriam Megharbi discounts when purchased in bulk ISBN 978-0-7566-6861-7 for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Printed and bound in Singapore PRODUCTION EDITOR For details, contact: DK Publishing by Star Standard Luca Frassinetti Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, PRODUCTION CONTROLLER New York, New York 10014 or Discover more at Sophie Argyris [email protected]. www.dk.com CONTRIBUTORS WILL BUCKINGHAM JOHN MARENBON A philosopher, novelist, and lecturer, Will Buckingham A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, is particularly interested in the interplay of philosophy John Marenbon studies and writes on medieval and narrative. He currently teaches at De Montfort philosophy. His books include Early Medieval University, Leicester, UK, and has written several Philosophy 480–1150: An Introduction. books, including Finding our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories. MARCUS WEEKS DOUGLAS BURNHAM A writer and musician, Marcus Weeks studied philosophy and worked as a teacher before embarking A professor of philosophy at Staffordshire University, on a career as an author. He has contributed to many UK, Douglas Burnham is the author of many books books on the arts and popular sciences. and articles on modern and European philosophy. OTHER CONTRIBUTORS CLIVE HILL The publishers would also like to thank Richard A lecturer in political theory and British history, Osborne, lecturer of philosophy and critical theory at Clive Hill has a particular interest in the role of Camberwell College of Arts, UK, for his enthusiasm the intellectual in the modern world. and assistance in planning this book, and Stephanie Chilman for her help putting the Directory together. PETER J. KING A doctor of philosophy who lectures at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, UK, Peter J. King is the author of the recent book One Hundred Philosophers: A Guide to the World’s Greatest Thinkers. CONTENTS 10 INTRODUCTION 46 The life which is unexamined is not THE MEDIEVAL worth living THE ANCIENT Socrates WORLD 250–1500 WORLD 50 Earthly knowledge is 700 BCE–250 CE but shadow Plato 72 God is not the parent 56 Truth resides in the world of evils 22 Everything is made around us Aristotle St. Augustine of Hippo of water Thales of Miletus 64 Death is nothing to us 74 God foresees our free Epicurus thoughts and actions 24 The Dao that can be told Boethius is not the eternal Dao 66 He has the most who is Laozi most content with the least 76 The soul is distinct Diogenes of Sinope from the body Avicenna 26 Number is the ruler of forms and ideas 67 The goal of life is living 80 Just by thinking about God Pythagoras in agreement with nature we can know he exists Zeno of Citium St. Anselm 30 Happy is he who has overcome his ego 82 Philosophy and religion Siddhartha Gautama are not incompatible Averroes 34 Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles 84 God has no attributes Confucius Moses Maimonides 40 Everything is flux 86 Don’t grieve. Anything Heraclitus you lose comes round in another form 41 All is one Parmenides Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi 42 Man is the measure of 88 The universe has not all things Protagoras always existed Thomas Aquinas 44 When one throws to me a peach, I return to him 96 God is the not-other a plum Mozi Nikolaus von Kues 45 Nothing exists except 97 To know nothing is atoms and empty space the happiest life Democritus and Leucippus Desiderius Erasmus RENAISSANCE THE AGE OF AND THE AGE REVOLUTION OF REASON 1750–1900 1500–1750 146 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty 102 The end justifies the means is absurd Voltaire Niccolò Machiavelli 148 Custom is the great guide 108 Fame and tranquillity of human life David Hume can never be bedfellows Michel de Montaigne 154 Man was born free yet everywhere he is in chains 186 Every man takes the limits 110 Knowledge is power Jean-Jacques Rousseau of his own field of vision Francis Bacon for the limits of the world 160 Man is an animal that Arthur Schopenhauer 112 Man is a machine makes bargains Thomas Hobbes Adam Smith 189 Theology is anthropology Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach 116 I think therefore I am 164 There are two worlds: René Descartes our bodies and the 190 Over his own body and external world mind, the individual 124 Imagination decides Immanuel Kant is sovereign everything Blaise Pascal John Stuart Mill 172 Society is indeed a contract 126 God is the cause of all Edmund Burke 194 Anxiety is the dizziness things, which are in him of freedom Benedictus Spinoza 174 The greatest happiness Søren Kierkegaard for the greatest number 130 No man’s knowledge Jeremy Bentham 196 The history of all hitherto here can go beyond his existing society is the experience John Locke 175 Mind has no gender history of class struggles Mary Wollstonecraft Karl Marx 134 There are two kinds of truths: truths of reasoning 176 What sort of philosophy 204 Must the citizen ever and truths of fact one chooses depends on resign his conscience Gottfried Leibniz what sort of person one is to the legislator? Johann Gottlieb Fichte Henry David Thoreau 138 To be is to be perceived George Berkeley 177 About no subject is there 205 Consider what effects less philosophizing than things have about philosophy Charles Sanders Peirce Friedrich Schlegel 206 Act as if what you do 178 Reality is a historical makes a difference process Georg Hegel William James 241 Only as an individual can THE MODERN man become a philosopher WORLD Karl Jaspers 1900–1950 242 Life is a series of collisions with the future José Ortega y Gasset 214 Man is something to be surpassed 244 To philosophize, first one Friedrich Nietzsche must confess Hajime Tanabe 222 Men with self-confidence come and see and conquer 246 The limits of my language Ahad Ha’am are the limits of my world Ludwig Wittgenstein 223 Every message is made of signs 252 We are ourselves the 268 Existence precedes Ferdinand de Saussure entities to be analyzed essence Martin Heidegger Jean-Paul Sartre 224 Experience by itself is not science Edmund Husserl 256 The individual’s only true 272 The banality of evil moral choice is through Hannah Arendt 226 Intuition goes in the very self-sacrifice for the direction of life community 273 Reason lives in language Henri Bergson Tetsuro Watsuji Emmanuel Levinas 228 We only think when we are 257 Logic is the last scientific 274 In order to see the world confronted with problems ingredient of philosophy we must break with our John Dewey Rudolf Carnap familiar acceptance of it Maurice Merleau-Ponty 232 Those who cannot 258 The only way of knowing remember the past are a person is to love them 276 Man is defined as condemned to repeat it without hope a human being and George Santayana Walter Benjamin woman as a female Simone de Beauvoir 233 It is only suffering that 259 That which is cannot makes us persons be true Herbert Marcuse 278 Language is a social art Miguel de Unamuno Willard Van Orman Quine 260 History does not belong 234 Believe in life to us but we belong to it 280 The fundamental sense of William du Bois Hans-Georg Gadamer freedom is freedom from chains Isaiah Berlin 236 The road to happiness lies 262 In so far as a scientific in an organized diminution statement speaks about 282 Think like a mountain of work Bertrand Russell reality, it must be Arne Naess falsifiable Karl Popper 240 Love is a bridge from 284 Life will be lived all the poorer to richer knowledge 266 Intelligence is a moral better if it has no meaning Max Scheler category Theodor Adorno Albert Camus.