LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Like most academic disciplines, the goal of philosophy is to get closer to the truth. Logic, reasoning, and argumentation are the predominant methods used. But unlike many…
Figure 5.1 Buddhist monks debating at the Sera Monastery in Mysore, India. (credit: modification of “Monks at Sera Monastery 24” by Esther Lee/Flickr, CC BY 2.0) Chapter Outline 5.1 Philosophical Methods for Discovering Truth 5.2 Logical Statements 5.3 Arguments 5.4 Types of Inferences 5.5 Informal Fallacies Within…
Historiography and the History of Philosophy Scholars adopt three main approaches to the history of philosophy. The presentist approach to the history of philosophy examines philosophical texts for the arguments they contain and judges whether their conclusions remain relevant for…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Greek and Roman imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa brought Jews—and later, Christians—into the intellectual sphere of Hellenism. Early on, Jewish and Christian scholars incorporated…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Egyptian Origins of Classical Philosophy The understanding that the roots of classical thought lie, at least in part, in Egypt is as old as the ancient Greeks themselves. In The Histories…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: We will begin our discussion of the history of philosophy and the historiography of philosophy, or the study of how to conduct history pertaining to philosophy, with…
Figure 4.1 The pharaoh Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti, and their children are blessed by the god Aten, represented by the sun. The Egyptian conception of Aten as the source of all that existed was influential in the metaphysics embraced by the Greeks.…
Indigenous Philosophy When humans shift from religious answers to questions about purpose and meaning to more naturalistic and logical answers, they move from the realm of myth to reason. In Greek, this movement is described as a move from mythos…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: In 2013, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery—Chinese characters on a stone axe dating to 5,000 years ago (Tang 2013). Previously, the earliest known Chinese characters had been…
LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to: The philosophical depth and richness of Indian philosophy rivals that of European philosophy, and to do justice to it would require a book-length survey. Still, this introductory…