Stages of philosophy

In this lesson from a TEACHER we briefly summary of the history of philosophy, as well as its stages more important. Do you know that etymologically, it means "love of wisdom"? Well, with this you can already get an idea of ​​what philosophy is and what a philosopher is. Philosophy is the desire for knowledge and the philosopher, the one who pursues it. Thus, the philosopher, unlike the sage, who already has knowledge, seeks knowledge, without having yet achieved it.

Throughout the history of philosophy, different schools and streams philosophical. But they all have something in common. Philosophy has its own features that distinguish it from other disciplines.

If you want to know more about the different stages of philosophy, keep reading this article by a TEACHER. Start the class!

Index

1. Main stages of philosophy
2. Classical Antiquity, from the 7th century BC to the 5th century AD
3. Middle Ages, from the 5th to the 15th century
4. Modern Age, from the 15th to the 18th century
5. Contemporary age, from the 19th century to the present

Philosophy has its origin in Classic Greece and supposes the step from myth to logosBefore his birth, natural phenomena were explained from mythological narratives of a magical nature, such as The Iliad and Homer's Odyssey or Hesiod's Theogony. At that time, there was no distinction between science and poetry. Everything is subject to random and at the will of the gods. The first philosophers, still conserve some mythical element, that with time, myth and philosophy they radically separate.

Logos, Means word or reason and philosophy was born precisely when Greek thinkers began to search for a rational explanation about the world, which is why it eliminates the gods. Furthermore, they realize that godsThey have the same vices and virtues as humans. Therefore, they cannot be the origin of everything there is.

The greek spirit, meanwhile, your situation geographic strategic, which favored commercial and cultural exchange, or good weather, could be decisive for the birth of philosophy to take place there and not elsewhere.

Next we will briefly expose the different stages of philosophy.

This stage of philosophy goes from the end from the 7th century BC to the 5th century AD and here we have the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

The pre-Socratics they wonder about him Arche, the first principle and source of everything else, which at times was an element and at other times, a mixture of them. They include: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus and Democritus.

• Socrates, Plato's teacher, among others, he did not write anything, but his philosophy reaches our days through his best disciple. He served as inspiration many later philosophers and was noted for his great sense of Justice and the law. The sophists were contemporaries of Socrates, teachers of the oratory who charged to teach the art of virtue or earring, which was a source of criticism. The most important are Protagoras and Gorgias.
• PlatoSocrates' favorite disciple and one of the greatest philosophers of all time, he was the creator of a complex philosophical system covering several fields: ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, anthropology, psychology, cosmology... his work is written in the form of dialogue and was the founder of the Academy.
• Aristotle, was a disciple of Plato and the philosopher who has contributed the most to the history of philosophy, influencing thinkers from classical antiquity to today.

It is the stage of philosophy comprised between the 5th and 15th centuries, specifically, from the fall of the Roman Empire until 1492, coinciding with the conquest of the American continent. Medieval philosophy collects the values ​​of the Christianity, as well as the doctrines Neoplatonic and artistotelian, God being the central theme of all of it.

Medieval philosophy is divided into two great stages:

• Patristics (Fathers of the Church), whose main representative is Saint Augustine of Hippo and that extends to the 5th century.
• Scholasticism (philosophy of schools), with Holy Thomas Aquinas as a benchmark and that ends in the 13th century.

The modern philosophy breaks with all previous tradition. The ancients values they are not worth it, it is necessary to find new ones. The human being begins to be the center of the universe, and religion is replaced by reason.

During the Renaissance, there is a return to classics and the humanist movement was born, whose. The human being begins to occupy the place of God as the center of the universe and reason replaces faith. Philosophers humanists most important were Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Michel de Montaigne, Tomas Moro, Juan Luís Vives ...

The Scientific revolution, begins in the 1543 century when Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and ends in 1687 when Newton publishes his Princito mathematica. These thinkers use a new method based on experiment: the cientific method.

At the same time, there is a change in mentality that will change the way we see the world. The earth is no longer the center of the Milky Way, but is the sun, and the earth revolves around it, a theory that is supported by the research of Copernicus and also of Galileo.

During modernity, three philosophical currents coexist:

1. The rnationalism, whose main representatives are Descartes (father of modern philosophy), Spinoza and Leibniz;
2. The andmpirismo, current represented by Locke and Hum
3. The criticismof Kant that ends the Illustration, who defended the preponderant value of the reason as the only way for him progress of the human being and society, progress that was understood, at that time, as unstoppable. Thinkers illustrated they were also Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.

We end this summary of the stages of philosophy by talking about contemporary philosophy. The Scientific Revolution gives way to Industrial Revolution 19th century. It is the time of the big factories, of the big cities. Society is made technological and women start to work. Child exploitation is normalized.

At the same time, two well differentiated classes emerge: the bourgeois capitalist and the worker, the proletariat and the proletariat. The class difference implied an economic difference and submission of the working class to the capitalist. Marx was the first to speak of the alienation and exploitation of workers. Thus he proposes the communist revolution that will end capitalism and class difference.

Another current of the century XIX, was the positivist, represented by Comte or the vitalist, by Nietzsche y Ortega y Gasset. Darwin publishes his theoryof evolution and Freud revolutionizes anthropology and psychiatry with the psychoanalysis and his theories about the unconscious.

Already in the century XX arise different philosophical schools among which stand out: existencialism of Heidegger, Sartre and Beauvoir; the hermeneutics from Gadamer; the Fanalytical philosophy from Wittgenstein; the Frankfurt school, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcusse or the postmoderniSaint by Derrida and Lyotard.

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Reale, G and Antiseri, D. History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought. Ed. Herder. 1995