Western philosophy

Ways of ordering the history

The writing of the history of philosophy is controlled by a variety of cultural habits and conventions.

The ensuing article on the history of Western philosophy is divided into five sections—ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary. A threefold distinction between ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy was prevalent until recent times and is only as old as the end of the 17th century. This distinction slowly spread to historical writing in all fields and was given definitive influence in philosophical writing through the series of lectures on the history of philosophy that Hegel delivered first at Jena, then at Heidelberg, and finally at Berlin between 1805 and 1830. In the century after Hegel, it was taken for granted as standard practice, though a host of cultural assumptions is implied by its use.

Treatment of the total field of the history of philosophy has been traditionally subject to two types of ordering, according to whether it was conceived primarily as (1) a history of ideas or (2) a history of the intellectual products of human beings. In the first ordering, certain ideas, or concepts, are viewed as archetypal (such as matter or ... (200 of 38,563 words)