31 Facts About Western philosophy

Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world.

Scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology.

The discovery of consonant intervals in music by the group enabled the concept of harmony to be established in Western philosophy, which suggested that opposites could together give rise to new things.

Western philosophy claimed the was in fact composed of multiple sources, giving rise to the model of the four classical elements.

Western philosophy focused on issues of human life: eudaimonia, justice, beauty, truth, and virtue.

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Western philosophy thought that eudaimonia could be achieved by living according to human nature, which is to live with reason and virtue, defining virtue as the golden mean between extremes.

Various schools of Western philosophy proposed various and conflicting methods for attaining eudaimonia.

Medieval Western philosophy roughly extends from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance.

Western philosophy's influence dominated medieval philosophy perhaps up to the end of era and the rediscovery of Aristotle's texts.

Western philosophy was influenced by newly discovered Aristotle, and aimed to reconcile his philosophy with Christian theology.

Western philosophy defined a material substance as the combination of an essence and accidental features, with the essence being a combination of matter and form, similar to the Aristotelian view.

Western philosophy had been inspired to take this approach by the philosophy of Hume, who argued that the mechanisms of the mind gave people the perception of cause and effect.

Late modern Western philosophy is usually considered to begin around the pivotal year of 1781, when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason appeared.

German Western philosophy exercised broad influence in this century, owing in part to the dominance of the German university system.

Western philosophy's philosophy was based on absolute idealism, with reality itself being mental.

Western philosophy's legacy was divided between the conservative Right Hegelians and radical Young Hegelians, with the latter including David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach.

Western philosophy believed that any act could be measured by its value in this regard through the application of felicific calculus.

Since the Second World War, contemporary Western philosophy has been divided mostly into analytic and continental traditions; the former carried in the English speaking world and the latter on the continent of Europe.

The perceived conflict between continental and analytic schools of Western philosophy remains prominent, despite increasing skepticism regarding the distinction's usefulness.

Western philosophy's stance was one of anti-psychologism, arguing that logical truths were independent of the human minds discovering them.

Wittgenstein, Russell's 'disciple', argued that the problems of Western philosophy were simply products of language which were actually meaningless.

Western philosophy argued that verificationism was logically incoherent, promoting instead falsificationism as the basis for science.

Western philosophy further noted that subjective experience posed the hard problem of consciousness.

Ethics in 20th century analytic Western philosophy has been argued to have began with Moore's Principia Ethica.

Recently, the experimental Western philosophy movement has sought to reappraise philosophical problems through social science research techniques.

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Some influential figures in contemporary analytic Western philosophy are: Timothy Williamson, David Lewis, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, John McDowell, Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, and Patricia Churchland.

Analytic Western philosophy has sometimes been accused of not contributing to the political debate or to traditional questions in aesthetics.

Continental Western philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe.

Process Western philosophy is a tradition beginning with Alfred North Whitehead, who began teaching and writing on process and metaphysics when he joined Harvard University in 1924.

However, other sources state that process Western philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus continental methods in contemporary Western philosophy.

Pyrrho was directly influenced by Buddhism in developing his Western philosophy, which is based on Pyrrho's interpretation of the Buddhist three marks of existence.