Italy Secondaria di secondo grado – classe 4ª Philosophy

1. From the origins to Hegel

Ancient philosophy · Late antiquity and Middle Ages · Scientific revolution and method · Modern political thought · German idealism · Other modern thinkers

• Ancient Philosophy: From the First Questions to Stoicism – Philosophy means 'love of wisdom'. Around 600 BCE Greek thinkers began to explain nature by reason (logos) instead of myth. The Presocratics searched for the first principle (arche): water, air, fire, unchanging being or atoms. Then the Sophists and Socrates turned to human life, and Socrates died for his questioning (told in Plato's Apology). Plato taught the theory of Forms; Aristotle built logic and science from observation. Later Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics, and Romans like Cicero and Seneca, asked how to live a good, calm life.
• Medieval Philosophy: Faith and Reason from Augustine to Ockham – Medieval philosophy covers roughly 400 to 1450 CE. Its big question was how faith (what religion teaches) and reason (what we can work out by thinking) fit together. Augustine taught that truth is found within, lit by God, and that faith seeks understanding. Boethius passed on Greek logic. Islamic and Jewish thinkers such as Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides studied Aristotle deeply, and their work reached Europe through Latin translations. In the new universities, scholasticism used a careful question-and-answer method. Anselm argued for God from the idea of the greatest possible being. Thomas Aquinas joined Aristotle with Christian faith: reason and faith are two floors of one house, and reason can show that a first cause exists (the five ways). In the 1300s William of Ockham urged simple explanations (Ockham's razor), and faith and reason began to separate, opening the way to the Renaissance and modern science.
• The Scientific Revolution: How Science Learned to Test Ideas – Between about 1540 and 1700, thinkers in Europe changed how people study nature. Copernicus put the Sun at the centre, Galileo used a telescope to collect evidence, Kepler found that orbits are ellipses, and Newton explained the sky and the Earth with one law of gravity. Bacon and Descartes described a new method based on observation, experiment, reason and maths. This is the Scientific Revolution.
• Social Contract Theory: Why Do People Obey a Government? – Social contract theory says that a government gets its power from an agreement among the people, not from God or force. Thinkers imagine a 'state of nature' with no government, then ask what people would agree to. Hobbes said people give almost all power to a strong ruler for safety. Locke said government is limited and must protect life, liberty and property, or people may replace it. Rousseau said the people together are sovereign and the 'general will' should make the law.
• Modern Philosophy: Humanism to Leibniz and Spinoza – Between 1350 and 1850 thinkers moved from humanism and the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, to Romanticism. Bacon built knowledge from experiments, Pascal reasoned about chance and the heart, Vico saw history in ages, Diderot gathered knowledge in the Encyclopédie, Spinoza saw one substance and Leibniz many monads.