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Articles

The Key Ideas of Western Philosophy

John Greenbank searches history for answers to persistent questions.

The history of philosophy must be understood as a series of serious intellectual and moral claims about fundamental issues. For instance, holding any belief involves the sacrifice of all alternatives to it, so does that imply that holding any belief must be a matter of certainty? Can we be certain of anything? Furthermore, if we adopt a belief without examining it, do questions of intellectual and personal integrity arise? Is seeking truth itself inevitably also an ethical matter?

The thinkers of ancient Greece laid the foundations of what has become Western philosophy. One of the earliest was Xenophanes (570-480 BC) who claimed that human knowledge has the character of belief, in that we cannot ‘know’ reality. At the personal moral level, there is the question of how best to live one’s life, conceived by the Greeks as eudaimonia – ‘the good life’. Philosophical answers have since ranged from promoting a search for personal happiness to having a selfless sense of duty of service to others.

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