Western philosophy - Hedonism, Atomism, Epicurus

Western philosophy

Table of Contents

Introduction
The nature of Western philosophy
- The Western tradition
- General considerations
  - Ways of ordering the history
  - Factors in writing the history
  - Shifts in the focus and concern of Western philosophy
Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy
- The pre-Socratic philosophers
  - Cosmology and the metaphysics of matter
    - Monistic cosmologies
    - Pluralistic cosmologies
  - Epistemology of appearance
  - Metaphysics of number
  - Anthropology and relativism
- The seminal thinkers of Greek philosophy
  - Socrates
  - Plato
    - Life
    - Philosophy
  - Aristotle
    - Philosophy
    - Disciples and commentators
- Hellenistic and Roman philosophy
  - Stoicism
  - Epicureanism
  - Skepticism
  - Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism
Medieval philosophy
- The early Middle Ages
  - Augustine
  - Boethius
  - The Greek Fathers of the Church and Erigena
  - Anselm
  - Bernard de Clairvaux and Abelard
- The transition to Scholasticism
  - Arabic thought
  - Jewish thought
- The age of the Schoolmen
  - Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon
  - William of Auvergne
  - Bonaventure
  - Albertus Magnus
  - Thomas Aquinas
  - Averroists
- The late Middle Ages
  - John Duns Scotus
  - William of Ockham
  - Meister Eckehart
  - Nicholas of Cusa
Renaissance philosophy
- Political philosophy
- Humanism
- Philosophy of nature
Modern philosophy
- The rise of empiricism and rationalism
  - The empiricism of Francis Bacon
  - The materialism of Thomas Hobbes
  - The rationalism of Descartes
  - The rationalism of Spinoza and Leibniz
- Literary forms and sociological conditions
- The Enlightenment
  - Classical British empiricism
    - Reason in Locke and Berkeley
    - Basic science of human nature in Hume
  - Nonepistemological movements in the Enlightenment
    - Materialism and scientific discovery
    - Social and political philosophy
    - Professionalization of philosophy
  - Critical examination of reason in Kant
  - Literary forms
- The 19th century
  - The idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
  - Positivism and social theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx
  - Independent and irrationalist movements
Contemporary philosophy
- Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead
- Western Marxism
- Analytic philosophy
  - The formalist tradition
    - Logical atomism
    - Logical positivism
    - Naturalized epistemology
    - Identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism
  - The informalist tradition
    - Common-sense philosophy
    - Ordinary-language philosophy
    - Speech-act theory
- Continental philosophy
  - The phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger
  - The existentialism of Jaspers and Sartre
  - Recent trends

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The thought of Zeno’s contemporary Epicurus (341–270 bce) also constituted a philosophy of defense in a troubled world. Nevertheless, it has been considered—in many respects justly—the opposite of Zeno’s thought. Whereas Zeno proclaimed that the wise person tries to learn from everybody and always acknowledges his debt to earlier thinkers, Epicurus insisted that everything he taught was original to himself, though it is obvious that his physical explanation of the universe is a simplification of Democritus’s atomism. And whereas the Stoics had taught that pleasure and pain are of no importance for a person’s happiness, Epicurus made pleasure the very ...(100 of 35939 words)

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