The Story of Philosophy

About this book

There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, whichevery student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from theheights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain. Most of us have known somegolden days in the June of life when philosophy was in fact what Plato calls it, "that deardelight"; when the love of a modestly elusive Truth seemed more glorious, incomparably, than the lust for the ways of the flesh and the dross of the world. And there is always somewistful remnant in us of that early wooing of wisdom. So much of our lives is meaningless, aself-cancelling vacillation and futility; we strive with the chaos about us and within; but wewould believe all the while that there is something vital and significant in us; could we butdecipher our own souls. We want to understand; we are like Mitya in The BrothersKaramazov - "one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions"; wewant to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out ofthe maelstrom of daily circumstance. We want to know that the little things are little, and thebig things big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever -"in the light of eternity." We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smileeven at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizingand harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. Truth will not make us rich, but it will make usfree.This book is not a complete history of Philosophy. It is an attempt to humanize knowledgeby centering the story of speculative thought around certain dominant personalities. Certainlesser figures have been omitted in order that those selected might have the space required tomake them live. Hence the inadequate treatment of the half-legendary pre-Socratics, theStoics and Epicureans, the Scholastics, and the epistemologists. The author believes thatepistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well-nigh ruined it; he hopes for thetime when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of thescience of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the syntheticinterpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and processof experience itself. Analysis belongs to science, and gives us knowledge; philosophy mustprovide a synthesis for wisdom.