CONTENTSIntroduction 9Pythagoras 17Confucius 19Heracleitus 25Parmenides 26Zeno of Elea 27Socrates 28Democritus 35Plato 37Aristotle 47Mencius 54Zhuangzi 55Pyrrhon of Elis 57Epicurus 57Zeno of Citium 60Philo Judaeus 62Epictetus 65Marcus Aurelius 66Nagarjuna 69Plotinus 71Sextus Empiricus 72Saint Augustine 74Hypatia 79Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius 80Śan. kara 83Yaqūb ibn Ish.āq as. -S. abāh. al-Kindī 85Al-Fārābī 86Avicenna 89Rāmānuja 92Ibn Gabirol 95Saint Anselm of Canterbury 96al-Ghazālī 98Peter Abelard 100Averroës 103Zhu Xi 105Moses Maimonides 108Ibn al-‘Arabī 112

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Shinran 114Saint Thomas Aquinas 117John Duns Scotus 122William of Ockham 125Niccolò Machiavelli 128Wang Yangming 133Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint

Alban (or Albans), Baron of Verulam 134

Thomas Hobbes 139René Descartes 143John Locke 150Benedict de Spinoza 160Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 165Giambattista Vico 168George Berkeley 171Charles-Louis de Secondat,

baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu 175

David Hume 179Jean-Jacques Rousseau 182Immanuel Kant 188Moses Mendelssohn 194Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de

Caritat, marquis de Condorcet 197

Jeremy Bentham 199Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel 200Arthur Schopenhauer 206Auguste Comte 209John Stuart Mill 211Søren Kierkegaard 214Karl Marx 218Herbert Spencer 223Wilhelm Dilthey 226William James 227Friedrich Nietzsche 230Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege 236Edmund Husserl 238

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Henri Bergson 241John Dewey 244Alfred North Whitehead 247Benedetto Croce 250Nishida Kitarō 252Bertrand Russell 254G.E. Moore 263Martin Buber 264Ludwig Wittgenstein 269Martin Heidegger 275Rudolf Carnap 279Sir Karl Popper 285Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno 286Jean-Paul Sartre 287Hannah Arendt 292Simone de Beauvoir 295Willard Van Orman Quine 297Sir A.J. Ayer 299Wilfrid Sellars 303John Rawls 305Thomas S. Kuhn 308Michel Foucault 309Noam Chomsky 314Jürgen Habermas 317Sir Bernard Williams 320Jacques Derrida 327Richard Rorty 330Robert Nozick 332Saul Kripke 336David Kellogg Lewis 339Peter (Albert David) Singer 341Glossary 345Further Reading 347Index 349

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PytHagoras (b. c. 580, Samos, Ionia [now in Greece]—d. c. 500 BCE , Metapontum, Lucania [now in Italy])

Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher and mathema-tician. Born in what is modern-day Greece,

Pythagoras migrated to southern Italy about 532 BCE , apparently in an effort to escape the merchant and ter-ritorial ruler Samos’s tyrannical ways. After he arrived in southern Italy, Pythagoras proceeded to establish his ethical and political academy at Croton (now Crotone, Italy). At this academy, he founded the Pythagorean brotherhood, which, although religious in nature, for-mulated principles that influenced the thought of Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. In addition, it contributed to the development of mathematics and Western rational philosophy. Pythagoreans followed a very structured way of life. They believed that the human soul resided in a new human or animal body after a person died.

It is diffi cult to distinguish Pythagoras’s teachings from those of his disciples. None of his writings have survived, and Pythagoreans invariably supported their doctrines by indiscriminately citing their master’s authority. Pythagoras, however, is generally credited with the theory of the functional signifi cance of numbers in the objective world and in music. Other discoveries often attributed to him (e.g., the incommensurability of the side and diagonal of a square, and the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles) were probably developed only later by the Pythagorean school. More probably the bulk of the intellectual tradition originating with Pythagoras himself belongs to mystical wisdom rather than to scientifi c scholarship.

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Pythagoras demonstrating his Pythagorean theorem in the sand using a stick. © Photos.com/Jupiterimages

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7 Confucius 7

ConfuCius(b. 551, Qufu, state of Lu [now in Shandong province, China]—d. 479 BCE, Lu)

Confucius was China’s most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist. His ideas have exerted an

enormous influence on China and other civilizations of East Asia.

Confucius’s life, in contrast to his tremendous importance, seems starkly undramatic—or, as a Chinese expression has it, “plain and real.”

Although the facts about Confucius’s life are scanty, they do establish a precise time frame and historical context. Confucius was born in the 22nd year of the reign of Duke Xiang of Lu (551 BCE). The traditional claim that he was born on the 27th day of the eighth lunar month has been questioned by historians, but September 28 is still widely observed in East Asia as Confucius’s birthday. It is an official holiday, “Teachers’ Day,” in Taiwan.

Confucius’s family name was Kong and his personal name Qiu, but he is referred to as either Kongzi or Kongfuzi (Master Kong) throughout Chinese history. The adjectival “Confucian,” derived from the Latinized Confucius, is not a meaningful term in Chinese, nor is the term Confucianism, which was coined in Europe as recently as the 18th century.

Confucius’s ancestors were probably members of the aristocracy who had become virtual poverty-stricken commoners by the time of his birth. His father died when Confucius was only three years old. Instructed first by his mother, Confucius then distinguished himself as an indefatigable learner in his teens.

Confucius had served in minor government posts managing stables and keeping books for granaries before he married a woman of similar background when he was

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19. It is not known who Confucius’s teachers were, but he made a conscientious effort to fi nd the right masters to teach him, among other things, ritual and music. His mastery of the six arts—ritual, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and arithmetic—and his familiarity with the classical traditions, notably poetry and history, enabled him to start a brilliant teaching career in his 30s.

In his late 40s and early 50s Confucius served fi rst as a magistrate, then as an assistant minister of public works, and eventually as minister of justice in the state of Lu . It is likely that he accompanied King Lu as his chief minister on one of the diplomatic missions. Confucius’s political career was, however, short-lived. At 56, when he realized that his superiors were uninterested in his policies, Confucius left the country in an attempt to fi nd another feudal state to which he could render his service. Despite his political frustration he was accom-panied by an expanding circle of students during this self-imposed exile of almost 12 years. His rep-utation as a man of vision and mission spread. Indeed, Confucius was perceived as the heroic conscience who knew realistically that he might not succeed but, fired by a righteous passion, continuously did the best he could. At the age of 67 he returned home to teach and to preserve his

Painting of Chinese philosopher Confucius. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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cherished classical traditions by writing and editing. He died in 479 BCE, at the age of 73. According to the Records of the Historian, 72 of his students mastered the “six arts,” and those who claimed to be his followers numbered 3,000.

The Analects

The story of Confucianism does not begin with Confucius. Nor was Confucius the founder of Confucianism in the sense that Buddha was the founder of Buddhism and Christ the founder of Christianity. Rather Confucius considered himself a transmitter who consciously tried to reanimate the old in order to attain the new. He proposed revitalizing the meaning of the past by advocating a ritualized life. Confucius’ love of antiquity was motivated by his strong desire to understand why certain life forms and institutions, such as reverence for ancestors, human-centred religious practices, and mourning ceremonies, had survived for centuries. His journey into the past was a search for roots, which he perceived as grounded in humanity’s deepest needs for belonging and communicating. He had faith in the cumulative power of culture. The fact that traditional ways had lost vitality did not, for him, diminish their potential for regeneration in the future. In fact, Confucius’ sense of history was so strong that he saw himself as a con-servationist responsible for the continuity of the cultural values and the social norms that had worked so well for the idealized civilization of the Western Zhou dynasty.

The Lunyu (Analects), the most revered sacred scripture in the Confucian tradition, was probably compiled by the succeeding generations of Confucius’ disciples. Based primarily on the Master’s sayings, preserved in both oral and written transmissions, it captures the Confucian spirit in form and content in the same way that the Platonic dialogues embody the pedagogy of Socrates.

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The purpose of compiling these distilled statements centring on Confucius seems not to have been to present an argument or to record an event but to offer an invitation to readers to take part in an ongoing conversation with the Master.

Confucius’ life as a student and teacher exemplified his idea that education was a ceaseless process of self-realization. When one of his students reportedly had difficulty describing him, Confucius came to his aid:

“Why did you not simply say something to this effect: he is the sort of man who forgets to eat when he engages himself in vigor-ous pursuit of learning, who is so full of joy that he forgets his worries, and who does not notice that old age is coming on?”

Confucius was deeply concerned that the culture (wen) he cherished was not being transmitted and that the learning (xue) he propounded was not being taught. His strong sense of mission, however, never interfered with his ability to remember what had been imparted to him, to learn without flagging, and to teach without growing weary.

The community that Confucius created was a scholarly fellowship of like-minded men of different ages and differ-ent backgrounds from different states. They were attracted to Confucius because they shared his vision and to varying degrees took part in his mission to bring moral order to an increasingly fragmented world. This mission was difficult and even dangerous. Confucius himself suffered from joblessness, homelessness, starvation, and occasionally life-threatening violence. Yet his faith in the survivability of the culture that he cherished and the workability of the approach to teaching that he propounded was so steadfast that he convinced his followers as well as himself that heaven was on their side.