Philosophy teaches methods of life and explains the sense of our existence. It combines such branches as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethic rules. The main principle of this science is “to start with something very simple, but to end with so paradoxical that no one will believe it”. The history of Western philosophy is subdivided into three major periods:
- Ancient philosophy;
- Medieval philosophy;
- Modern philosophy.
Ancient philosophy is focused on such notions as Reason and Inquiry. Socrates is considered to be the Father of Western ancient philosophy and his method of inquiry developed the main idea of the earlier philosophers. He was the first to study major moral concepts: justice, wisdom, courage. Socrates firmly believed that every person should strive for better actions and his deductions were the background of the whole discipline. Such representatives of the ancient period as Plato and Aristotle have the reputation of one of the most authoritative and wise philosophers of that time; they believed that knowledge gained through senses is confused and false. All of these prominent thinkers of the ancient period left their knowledge for would-be philosophers as a background and soil for new ideas.
Medieval philosophy covers the Middle Ages of history and it is the time when ancient philosophy was discovered again. This period is characterized by theological problems, the existence of God, problems of knowledge, and individuation. The thinkers of this period did not consider themselves to be philosophers and recognized only God; they would have never put their investigation above God. The most influential philosophers of the Medieval period are considered to be Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Boethius, and some others. Augustine was one of the Church Fathers and he contributed to the development of theological philosophy a lot by studying the truth, God, and meaning of history. Together with Augustine, a great contribution to the development of philosophy made Boethius translated plenty of works of ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato; due to him, this period is sometimes called the Boethian period.
Modern philosophy includes early modern philosophy and later one. This period unites the works of outstanding thinkers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant (early modern period), and Fichte, Schelling, W. James, and many others. This period covers the time up to 1960. Immanuel Kant is considered to be one of the most prominent thinkers of his time; he provided philosophy with different theories of freedom and God ideas, studied metaphysics, and developed categories of understanding.
Since 1960 one can study contemporary philosophy which covers our present time. It is closely connected with relations between natural science theories and ideas of humanities. Such philosophers as Wittgenstein and Dewey are famous in the present day.
It is difficult to cover all the periods of Western philosophy history and describe the prominent ideas of its thinkers. But the book Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser gives a full description of the complex development of Western philosophy and allows understanding the ideas chronologically presented by the thinkers, to perceive the main thoughts of the philosophy as a science and it is really easy to read and to understand the major problems viewed by the philosophers at different periods of time.
References
Samuel, Enoch, Stumpf and James, Fieser Socrates to Sartre and Beyond (A History of Philosophy), 2002.