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Questions tagged [history-of-philosophy]

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The history of philosophy is the study of philosophical ideas and concepts through time. Issues specifically related to history of philosophy might include (but are not limited to): How can changes in philosophy be accounted for historically? What drives the development of thought in its historical context? To what degree can philosophical texts from prior historical eras be understood even today?

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Something that I've noticed is that, although it seems relatively rare for philosophers to make substantive distinctions between "Morals" and "Ethics," this distinction is ...
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Socrates took his duty towards his state very seriously, he participated in three wars in infantry, showed no signs of trying to avoid taking part in bloodshed, which obviously must have looked ...
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Voltaire is "turning over in his grave" when he hears what is happening on modern western websites devoted to philosophy, where everyone with high enough "reputation" is caringly &...
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To my knowledge, the idea of humanity in a "state of nature" first appears in western philosophy around the time of Hobbes and Locke, which perhaps not coincidentally is shortly after ...
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Please don't just jump and say no. I do realize that the question is a bit trolling, but do try to actually answer it please.
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I'm interested in identifying contemporary thinkers who could be seen as similar to Blaise Pascal in terms of style, themes, or philosophical outlook. Pascal was known for combining deep theological ...
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TL;DR Ibn al-Haytham may have articulated a rigorous experimental method centuries before Bacon. Should the history of scientific philosophy be updated to better reflect this? We typically associate ...
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Immanuel Kant’s writings include racial hierarchies (e.g., Anthropology, 7:213), and John Locke's Fundamental Constitutions explicitly uphold slavery. Yet in philosophical discussions, their ethical ...
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The classic quote (citation: Internet) from Alfred North Whitehead states: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to ...
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To start with I must confess I am very new to philosophy since I am still in high school. Hence I am very sorry if this seems a stupid question. Throughout my reading of both philosophical works and ...
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Aristotle was considered the most influential Greek philosopher in the Medieval era. In Europe, Scholasticism was based on his philosophy and Thomas Aquinas interpretation of it. Even in the Muslim ...
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In a post on whether or not Socrates actually said the things in the dialogues (post linked to here), one of the answers made the following statement: This, however, should not surprise us because ...
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I was reading a text about Aristotle that states: "Aristotle is the founder not only of philosophy as a discipline with distinct areas or branches, but, still more generally, of the conception of ...
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Isn't most of what philosophers have offered, from the advent of philosophy until today, merely opinions? Justified opinions, but not proven. If they happen to present a proven opinion, then it will ...
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Edit: I realize my original question came out the wrong way; what I intended the focus to be was the core philosophical argument about the epistemology of divine revelation and secularism, rather than ...
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Jacques Maritain dates one source of Christian humanism to the Renaissance period in his book Humanisme Intégral (1936). Among secular humanists, some seem to reject the idea that there really is any ...
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Throughout known history (the last 3 thousand years), the most common philosophical as well as casual answer would be No or Yes?
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I'm curious to read a book length work that helps me understand something about the motivations of 19th c. continental philosophers. This might be a history-of-philosophy kind of book, or maybe a ...
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I have seen several incidents where people arguing over free will would accuse each other redefining the concept of free will in order to win an argument. I may have also been at some point convinced ...
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Has Western philosophy been historically overall scientifically realist? This article (Ladyman 2018) points that there is often a back and forth movement between scientific realism and anti-realism, ...
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Throughout history, philosophy has played a significant role in shaping societies, morality, and intellectual debates. For example, during the Golden Age of Islam in the Abbasid Caliphate, ...
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Dialogues that contain something like an objective argument, like the Republic, or the Parmenides, would be philosophy in the sense we understand it today, but what about the Timaeus, or even the ...
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What is the historical origin of the mental categorization or anthropomorphization of conscience as a kind of semi-person distinct from, subordinate to, and constitutive of the self? To clarify: as ...
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A few months ago I picked up a title on Stoicism, and it surprised me that the centerpiece of the philosophy seemed to be living in accord with nature in order to achieve eudaimonia (good spirit, ...
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How did C. S. Peirce graphically represent a syllogism? Analogously to how Venn did? For example, his Existential Graphs can prove Leibniz's Præclarum Theorema (Splendid Theorem) (source).
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