Shifts in the focus and concern of Western philosophy
Any adequate treatment of individual figures in the history of philosophy tries to utilize this threefold division of logical, sociological, and individual factors; but in a synoptic view of the history of philosophy in the West, one is particularly aware of the various shifts of focus and concern that philosophy has sustained and, indeed, of the often profound differences in the way that it defines itself or visualizes its task from age to age or from generation to generation.
Philosophy among the Greeks slowly emerged out of religious awe into wonder about the principles and elements of the natural world. But as the Greek populations more and more left the land to become concentrated in their cities, interest shifted from nature to social living; questions of law and convention and civic values became paramount. Cosmological speculation partly gave way to moral and political theorizing, and the preliminary and somewhat fragmentary questionings of Socrates and the Sophists turned into the great positive constructions of Plato and Aristotle. With the political and social fragmentation of the succeeding centuries, however, philosophizing once again shifted from the norm of civic involvement to problems of salvation and survival in a chaotic world.
The dawn of Christianity brought to philosophy new tasks. St. Augustine (354–430)—the philosophical bishop of Hippo—and the Church Fathers used such resources of the Greek tradition as remained (chiefly Platonism) to deal with problems of creation, of faith and reason, and of truth. New translations in the 12th century made much of Aristotle’s philosophy available and prepared the way for the great theological constructions of the 13th century, chiefly those of the Scholastic philosophers St. Bonaventure (c. 1217–74), St. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–80), St. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon (c. 1220–92), and John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308). The end of the Middle Ages saw a new flowering of the opposite tendencies in the nominalism of William of Ockham (c. 1285–c. 1347) and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1327).
The Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance. Universalism was replaced by nationalism. Philosophy became secularized. The great new theme was that of the mystery and immensity of the natural world. The best philosophical minds of the 17th century turned to the task of exploring the foundations of physical science, and the symbol of their success—the great system of physics constructed by Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727)—turned the philosophers of the Enlightenment to epistemology and to the examination of the human mind that had produced so brilliant a scientific creation. The 19th century, a time of great philosophical diversity, discovered the irrational, and in so doing prepared the way for the 20th-century oppositions between logical atomism and phenomenology and between logical positivism and existentialism.
Although the foregoing capsule presentation of the history of philosophy in the West follows a strict chronology, it does not do justice to the constant occurrence and recurrence of dominant strands in the history of thought. It would also be possible to write the philosophical history of the Middle Ages simply by noting the complicated occurrence of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines, of the Renaissance according to the reappearance of ancient materialism, Stoicism, and skepticism, and of the 18th century in terms of the competing claims of rationalist and empiricist principles. Thus, chronology and the interweaving of philosophical systems cooperate in a history of philosophy.