Philosophers in a Nutshell

I just purchased the e-book The Philosophy Book by Will Buckingham for $1.99 on Amazon, and I found the table of contents to be a wonderful overview of the major philosophers in history, using a single line to capture the essence of each. Of course, no philosopher but can be summarized in one line, but what this TOC does is give you a taste of what that philosopher is all about. There are several here that I have never heard of, but am greatly intrigued to research further based on the line chosen.

For example, Miguel de Unamuno’s “It is only suffering that makes us persons” and Tetsuro Watsuji’s “The individual’s only true moral choice is through self-sacrifice for the community,” which resonates strongly with the theme of my favorite film, Ikiru, by Akira Kurosawa.

It is also interesting historically to see the evolution of the thought processes that dominates each era, beginning with the broad strokes of the earth and its place in the universe in the ancient world, followed by the medieval world, in which half of the philosophers mention God, then the age of reason and its focus on knowledge and truth, to the age of revolution where things turn inward in self-examination, and finally the modern and contemporary age and their various approaches to love, morality, and language. Which ones are your favorites? Which ones are the most intriguing?

THE ANCIENT WORLD

Thales of Miletus – Everything is made of water

Lao Tzu – The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao

Pythagoras – Number is the ruler of forms and ideas

Siddhartha – Happy is he who has overcome his ego

Confucius – Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles

Heraclitus – Everything is flux

Parmenides – All is one

Protagoras – Man is the measure of all things

Mozi – When one throws to me a peach, I return to him a plum

Democritus & Leucippus – Nothing exists except atoms and empty space

Socrates – The life which is unexamined is not worth living

Plato – Earthly knowledge is but shadow

Aristotle – Truth resides in the world around us

Epicurus – Death is nothing to us

Diogenes of Sinope – He has the most who is most content with the least

Zeno of Citium – The goal of life is living in agreement with nature

 

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD

St. Augustine – God is not the parent of evils

Boethius – God forsees our free thoughts and actions

Avicenna – The soul is distinct from the body

St. Aneselm – Just by thinking about God we can know he exists

Averroes – Philosophy and religion are not incompatible

Moses Maimonides – God has no attributes

Rumi – Don’t grieve; anything you lose comes around in another form

Thomas Aquinas – The universe has not always existed

Nikolaus von Keus – God is the not-other

Desiderius Erasmus – To know nothing is the happiest life

 

RENAISSANCE AND THE AGE OF REASON

Niccolo Machiavelli – The end justifies the means

Michel de Montaigne – Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows

Francis Bacon – Knowledge is power

Thomas Hobbes – Man is a machine

Rene Descartes – I think, therefore I am

Blaise Pascal – Imagination decides everything

Benedictus Spinoza – God is the cause of all things, which are in him

John Locke – No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience

Gottfried Leibniz – There are two kinds of truths: truths of reasoning and truths of fact

Georege Berkeley – To be is to be perceived

 

THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

Voltaire – Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd

David Hume – Custom is the great guide of human life

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Man was born free yet everywhere he is in chains

Adam Smith – Man is an animal that makes bargains

Immanuel Kant – There are two worlds: our bodies and the external world

Edmund Burke – Society is indeed a contract

Jeremy Bentham – The greatest happiness for the greatest number

Mary Wollstonecraft – Mind has no gender

Johann Gottlieb Fichte – What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is

Friedrich Schlegel – About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy

Georg Hegel – Reality is a historical process

Arthur Schopenhauer – Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world

Ludwig Feuerbach – Theology is anthropology

John Stuart Mill – Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign 

Soren Kierkegaard – Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom

Karl Marx – The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles

Henry David Thoreau – Must the citizen ever resign his conscience to the legislator?

Charles Sanders Pierce – Consider what effects things have

William James – Act as if what you do makes a difference

 

THE MODERN WORLD

Friedrich Nietzsche – Man is something to be surpassed

Ahad Ha’am – Men with self-confidence come and see and conquer

Ferdinand de Saussure – Every message is made of signs

Edmund Husserl – Experience by itself is not science

Henri Bergson – Intuition goes in the very direction of life

John Dewey – We only think when we are confronted with problems

George Santayana – Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

Miguel de Unamuno – It is only suffering that makes us persons

William du Bois – Believe in life

Bertrand Russell – The road to happiness lies in an organized diminution of work

Max Scheler – Love is a bridge from poorer to richer knowledge

Karl Jaspers – Only as an individual can man become a philosopher

Jose Ortega y Gasset – Life is a series of collisions with the future

Haijime Tanabe – To philosophize, first one must confess

Ludwig Wittgenstein – The limits of my language are the limits of my world

Martin Heidegger – We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed

Tetsuro Watsuji – The individual’s only true moral choice is through self-sacrifice for the community

Rudolph Carnap – Logic is the last scientific ingredient of philosophy

Walter Benjamin – The only way to know a person is to love them without hope

Herbert Marcuse – That which is cannot be true

Hans-Georg Gadamer – History does not belong to us but we belong to it

Karl Popper – In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable

Theodor Adorno – Intelligence is a moral category

Jean-Paul Sartre – Existence precedes essence

Hannah Arendt – The banality of evil

Emmanuel Levinas – Reason lives in language

Maurice Merleau-Ponty – In order to see the world we must break with our familiar acceptance of it

Simone de Beauvoir – Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female

Willard Van Orman Quine – Language is a social art

Isaiah Berlin – The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains

Arne Naess – Think like a mountain

Albert Camus – Life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning

 

CONTEMPORARY

Roland Barthes – Language is a skin

Mary Midgley – How would we manage without a culture?

Thomas Kuhn – Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory

John Rawls – The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance

Richard Wollheim – Art is a form of life

Paul Feyerabend – Anything goes

Jean-Francois Lyotard – Knowledge is produced to be sold

Frantz Fanon – For the black man, there is only one destiny and it is white

Michel Foucault – Man is an invention of recent date

Noam Chomsky – If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion

Jurgen Habermas – Society is dependent upon a criticism of its own traditions

Jacques Derrida – There is nothing outside of the text

Richard Rorty – There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves

Luce Irigaray – Every desire has a relation to madness

Edward Said – Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires

Helene Cixous – Thought has always worked by opposition

Julia Kristeva – Who plays God in present-day feminism?

Henry Odera Oruka – Philosophy is not only a written enterprise

Peter Singer – In suffering, the animals are our equals

Slavoj Zizek – All the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure

Film Review: Room

Lenny Abrahamson’s film Room held me completely captive for its first hour, then left me stranded on the side of the road in its second. The film is an adaptation of the novel by Emma Donaghue, and towards the end I found myself almost losing interest, the magnetic pull having weakened, and thinking back to the magical time Jack (Jacob Tremblay) spent in seclusion with his mother, “Ma” (Brie Larson). Just then, as if the film had read my mind, Jack and Ma returned to the Room, at the request of Jack, so that he may bid farewell to each of the objects there, which he calls by name as if they were intimate friends–which, of course, they were: “Good-bye Lamp, good-bye Table.” My wish had been granted. But it was bitter-sweet. The return to Room was short-lived, a mere homage to a place that held such significance, especially for Jack.

Jack is molded by his time spent in Room, and although life outside Room is wildly infinite in its offerings, he seems to adapt quickly to this new reality and longs to return from whence he came. Jack’s “Room,” over time, begins to resemble the womb, and even Plato’s cave. His emergence, rolled up like a cigar inside a rug, is just as dramatic as a fetus being born (Jack’s disguise as being dead enables him to escape from the room). It is his first time outside Room, and when we see Jack see a sunlight-filled blue sky for the first time, it is one of the most exceptional cinematic moments in the last decade of film. Everything has carefully and strategically built up to this moment, and it is followed by a powerful and emotional reunion with Jack and Ma. It is exactly one hour of exceptional film, with a beginning, middle, and end. Where to go from here? The first half of the film is so strong that the second half feels at times like an extended epilogue. It does not rob the film of its provocative and emotive power, however, and there are some interesting moments.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, one of the prisoners chained inside is freed to explore the world outside the cave, wherein he had only been able to see shadows of what was real. His exploration of the world leads him a new reality that far outshines the one he experienced in the cave. He ultimately finds the Sun — the source of all living things. Upon returning to the cave, the prisoner has attempts to communicate to the other prisoners the things he has seen. They become hostile and resist his attempts to free them. Plato’s allegory says many things, but among the foremost of these is that man is both desperately curious about the Truth of things, yet at the same time does not want the responsibility of knowing those truths. He will seek, and he will reject what he finds. If he is a Truth-seeker, his is a lonely course. If he is a Truth-teller, others will reject what he says. Either way, this venture into the true nature of things is an exclusive and painful one.

So it is that Jack sees first, before anything else, the sky and the sunlight within that sky, a few umbilical-like telephone wires streaming overhead as he looks up from the bed of the moving pickup truck. The music is brilliantly understated and rhythmically, steadily calm, in a wonderfully restrained move by Abrahamson (I keep hearing the first explosive notes of The Cure’s “Plainsong” during this revelatory moment.) Jack’s eyes have been opened. He experiences a kind of second birth, a kind of enlightenment. Although circumstances have led Jack to experience the actual world in a delayed fashion by being secluded for his entire childhood up until this point, the moment itself is significant because of what it suggests for the average person: that we can wake up to reality in the same way if we just open our eyes. This is no different from the Buddhist idea of nirvana or Christ’s teaching that the kingdom of God is within you, and heaven is not a place, but an experience to be had here on Earth.

It’s also important to consider that Jack’s rebirth does not necessarily lead to joy or freedom. If anything, there is a recovery period followed by a painful integration into this new reality. A similar experience happens to the narrator at the end of Joyce’s wonderful short story “Araby.” Clarity of our existence is often a painful experience. It is the blissful blindness that comes with remaining in the darkness of the cave, of the womb, that we must let go of and come to mourn.