History Of Reason and Philosophy
35,000 BC: Humans raise their IQs to 100; Cro-Magnons become capable of full Reason and
sophisticated subtle thought; Philosophy becomes theoretically possible; true wisemen and
sages emerge; but owing to the primitive cultures and tribal lifestyles of the era, many
geniuses become dubious medicine-men and witch-doctors
3500 BC: as Homo sapiens sapiens form cities, mythology and polytheism emerge; this is a
distinct improvement from previous raw superstitionism and massive ignorance; this new
phenomenon and proto-philosophy, tho' largely untrue, is somewhat benevolent in creation
and application; mythology contains much wisdom and insight into the world and human
affairs -- particularly for the educated, virtuous, perceptive, and honest; polytheism
provides truth-seeking humans with useful allegorical explanations of the nature of the
universe, life, humanity, consciousness, free will, mammals, animals, astronomy,
agriculture, and the seasons; mythology and polytheism also provide man with creation
myths (for philosophic context) and legendary heroes (for literary inspiration); some
wisemen and sages become proto-philosophers; many geniuses become fairly-virtuous priests
and guardians of the sacred temples
600 BC: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus and far eastern Ionia invent reason
and philosophy and science; rationality and sophisticated subtle thinking is off to a
wonderful start; but no other society or era, however wise or advanced, ever repeats this
Greek intellectual achievement independently - they just copy it; the early philosophic
thinkers and "lovers of wisdom" all tend to be scientists, such as physicists, chemists,
and astronomers; these glorious "physici" (as Aristotle later put it) seem to start
philosophy off 100% legitimate, right, and true; they're pure reasonists who evidently
feature no self-delusion, mental sabotage, deliberate confusion, evasion, or
newly-invented irrationality
550 BC: anti-philosophy, religion, unreason, and pure evil begin; almost immediately after
Miletus, the Hegelian Antithesis to reason and philosophy has been generated and loosed
upon the world; proto-religion and proto-god emerge with the mystery cults of Eleusis and
Orpheus; these horrors are centered, probably not accidentally, in far western Ionia; pure
irrationality and limitless mental evil begins; this last features intellectual evasion
and disobedience due to dishonesty or cowardice or both; this evil involves a refusal to
see the truth, listen to reason, trust the senses, consider the evidence, and obey the
conclusions of the independent mind of the Sacred Self; it also consists of vast lies to
the Sacred Self and others
525 BC: Pythagoras discovers much about numbers, math, music, and other intellectual
things; but he also turns philosophy into a cult; this is the first 'rational' version of
the proto-religion above -- but it isn't the last; the French Revolution (about 1800) and
the Objectivist Revolution (about now) would later repeat this sin
500 BC: Hericlitus advances the intellectual complexity of philosophy considerably, mostly
with paradoxical epigrams
475 BC: Parmenides makes philosophy more complex, nuanced, and powerful still; but the
subject now becomes genuinely tricky and open to abuse (like today); philosophy is now
much more vulnerable to lies and intellectual fraud
450 BC: many good philosophers emerge like Empedocles and Anaxagoras, plus the prescient
Atomists like Democritus and Leucippus; they raise issues still worth thinking about
today; but many bad philosophers also appear, like many of the Sophists, and especially
the nihilistic Gorgias and Protagorus
425 BC: Socrates makes his heroic appearance as possibly the world’s first true
philosopher -- or at least the first great one; he's intensely rational, logical,
questioning, and wide-ranging; but this wiseman and sage is a bit too much of a sophist
and skeptic; eventually, in deep old age, he rather-pointlessly lets himself be martyred,
which probably forms the prototype for future anti-philosophy i.e. religion
375 BC: Plato expands the range of philosophy dramatically with his great creativity and
fertile imagination; he's unprecedentedly great, but also highly irrational on a broad
range of issues; Plato ends up supporting a kind of religion in philosophy and tyranny in
politics -- and you can't get any worse than these two; Plato invents, among other things,
irrational unreal insensate "platonic forms"; this rather ridiculous "problem of
universals" bedevils philosophy ever after (2400 years and counting!); when full
anti-philosophy, intellectual evil, and religion finally emerges, this ultimate
superstitionism is known as "Plato for the masses" which is an antecedent to Karl Marx's
also-accurate "opiate of the masses"; religion is a primitive belief-system and irrational
intellectual travesty which simply tortures reason, true philosophy, and genuine
sophisticated subtle human thought
333 BC: Aristotle is far and away the best philosopher ever; he's almost 100% rational and
liberal; his range of issues seems limitless; his truth-seeking technique of calm,
methodical, relentless searching -- augmented by cold dissecting logic -- seems implacable
and inexorable; truth essentially is forced to surrender and reveal herself to him; but
this pure reasonist is wisely or cowardly silent on the subject of polytheism and
ominously growing proto-religion; later, the emerging anti-philosophy and anti-reason
tries to murder him, as it did Socrates, but he successfully flees for his life
300 BC: Epicureanism and Stoicism are invented; these are instances of applied
Aristotelianism, with an emphasis on ethics and how to be happy, called "eudemonianism";
these are full, mature, sophisticated, subtle philosophies which are still applicable to
today, and which are far better than their mostly religious or non-existent rivals and
modern alternatives; Epicureanism and Stoicism almost entirely skip and take for granted
the intricate, abstruse, ingenious metaphysics and epistemology of Aristotle -- that part
of his thought which he evidently found so tedious and difficult; this is almost
completely understandable, but it turns out to be a huge mistake; the Epicureans and
Stoics think that all these issues have been clarified and settled for all time, and thus
they can now concentrate almost all of their effort on the 'important' stuff of morality
and daily living; but ultimately they end up surrendering the field of the abstract to the
irrational; and yet this tedious, obscure, recherché abstract stuff is -- believe it or
not -- what ultimately rules the world; proto-religion sees this vulnerability and gap,
and then leaps into the breach to form full religion
200s BC: philosophy is in serious decline in Greece as platonism, neo-platonism,
sophistry, skepticism, and extreme pyrrhonian skepticism start to take over; Pyrrho,
Arcesilaus, and Carneades dominate this period and all are basically dreadful as thinkers
and intellectuals; all three are extreme knowledge-is-impossible skeptics and dogmatists;
all are highly irrational and illiberal; religion gains terribly during this time -- it
starts to separate out from the 'philosophy' above and form a separate phenomenon
75 BC to 175 AD: the center of the deep-thought and philosophical world has shifted from
medium-size Greece to giant-size Rome; reason and philosophy are practically reborn; this
period is dominated by Lucretius, a rediscovered Aristotle, Epictetus, and Marcus
Aurelius; all are highly reasonist and still worth reading today; this is the last gasp of
good philosophy before the anti-philosophy takes over
175 AD to 275 AD: Sextus Empiricus promotes a truly stunning level of extremist, Pyrrhoist
skepticism; Origen trys to synthesize philosophy and religion -- especially neo-Platonism
and Stoicism with Christianity; Plotinus does likewise but is influenced by all the
mystery cults (religions), including Zarathustraism and Hinduism; Plotinus denies
Christianity but is later a huge influence on Augustine; Sextus, Origen, and Plotinus
together simply crush reason and philosophy -- and they haven't recovered since
late 200s AD: rational and/or deep thinking in human affairs go into steep decline;
philosophy becomes amazingly similar to religion -- and almost a handmaiden to it; if
localized Judaism previous to this was never a full religion, then internationalist
Christianity now certainly is; most of the former semi-benign mystery cults and
proto-religions -- like Mithraism, Zarathustraism, Cybele worship, Isis worship, etc. --
are now full religions; all six above are highly similar and tend to be in heavy
competition with each other but not with philosophy; this last is already intellectually
bankrupt, defeated, and merely waiting to be replaced; serious thinkers no longer bother
to argue for the existence of a monotheistic god -- they simply assume it
400: the pure anti-philosophy, religion, and evil of the mystery cult Christianity has won
out in Rome; "philosopher" and "saint" Augustine mocks and trivializes the fall of the
greatest country in the history of the world, at the heartless hands of unreason; the Dark
Age millennium has begun
500: Boethius is an out-of-context relic and left-over remnant from Rome, civilization,
culture, philosophy, and reason; he's still somewhat impressive and empathetic -- but
mainly as a walking corpse; philosophy and religion are now identical
late 600s: the Dark Age creates the worst anti-philosophy ever: Islam; by the 700s this
hyper-evil has amazingly conquered all of Arabia and parts of Europe and India; the
intellectual and spiritual damage to the planet is enormous
850: John the Scot is another out-of-context anachronism; he's actually fairly
sophisticated and good -- out of sheer human perversity, it seems; but John is also
culturally absolutely impotent, and a meaningless oasis of reason in an effectively
limitless desert of faith
1000s and 1100s: Avicenna and Averroes are, surprisingly, two pretty good Islamic
Aristotelian philosophers; but their situation is absolutely impossible, so they
accomplish little that is original, and look over their shoulder ceaselessly
late 1000s: "saint" Anslem is another pretty good Aristotelian who is overwhelmingly
limited by his fundamentally Christian/anti-philosophy beliefs; he tries to demonstrate
the existence of god by purely rational means and ends up inventing the rather lame
"ontological" "proof"; Anslem founds "Scholasticism," a kind of well-educated and rational
approach to, and methodology about, religion and philosophy; it's positively hopeless and
intellectually fraudulent, but probably a semi-decent good try
early 1100s: Peter Abelard is a truly fiery logician and reasonist professor in the
universities of Paris, despite also being loyally religious; his fierce dedication to the
truth makes him wildly popular with the students, and wildly unpopular with his fellow
teachers and authorities -- especially the religious ones; eventually he suffers
unspeakably and is forced to retire
mid 1200s: "saint" Thomas Aquinas is the best religious philosopher ever, and positively
the last sincere and confident one (his literary counterpart from this period is Dante);
he finds reason/philosophy/science and faith to be equally valid techniques for
discovering the truth; after him, all serious intellectualizing is some variant of
internal hypocrisy and external suppression because philosophy and anti-philosophy have
now begun to diverge, as in classical times; truth-seeking/telling is now accurately
considered highly "dangerous"; Aquinas essentially rejects Platonism and neo-Platonism in
favor of Aristotelianism; but this very quietly undercuts and spells a kind of doom for
"Plato for the masses" i.e. religion and Christianity; still, Aquinas proves to be the
best Scholastic thinker ever, and by 1879 his clever philosophy (sic) is papally declared
to be official Catholic doctrine
late 1200s: "saint" Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus are decent-enough philosophers and
Aristotelians who semi-sincerely try to reconcile philosophy and anti-philosophy -- but
utterly without success
1300: the stunningly-evil religion-created Dark Age ends in Italy; reason and philosophy
have a new chance and lease on life there
early 1300s: Englishman William of Occam proves the power and resilience of reality and
truth even in the midst of a terrible cultural/philosophical blackness; despite being a
true Christian, he promotes reasonism and experimentation as the best methodology for
determining truth; despite being about 400 years away from the Scientific Method, and
about 500 from serious philosophical atheism, William even manages to reject a great deal
of the ontological pretentions and metaphysical trickeration of Aristotle; he emphatically
embraces the good parts of Aristotle, but is smart, virtuous, and intellectually
sophisticated enough to recognize much of Aristotle's weaknesses, especially his empty
linguistics, which hasn't much truth or usefulness
1500: the stunningly-evil religion-created Dark Age ends in Europe; reason and philosophy
have a new chance and lease on life there; highly-advanced Italy feels guilty about its
strikingly liberal culture, and then mostly dissolves into absurd, idiosyncratic, petty
religious disputes
early 1500s: Disiderius Erasmus and Niccolo Machiavelli are true intellectuals and wise
polymaths who lay the groundwork in the Renaissance for the return of Greek-type,
Roman-type true philosophers
early 1600s: Francis Bacon is the first of the four great liberal, rational, empiricist
philosophers from England; his powerful reasonism, coupled with a certain deep hostility
to religion, inaugurates the Enlightenment
around 1640: Rene Descartes is a rather irrational thinker who reintroduces philosophic,
fundamentalist, and foolish skepticism to the world
mid 1600s: Thomas Hobbes is the second of the four great liberal, rational, empiricist
English philosophers; his rather saturnine views nevertheless solidly deepen and advance
the Age of Reason
1670s: Blaise Pascal and Benedictus de Spinoza are two pretty good and deep philosophers
who, owing to their insistent religiosity, end up contributing very little to the
Enlightenment
1687: Isaac Newton -- reasonist Englishman number three -- publishes his revolutionary
'Principles of Mathematics'; it reveals the three laws of gravitation and demonstrates
that they apply thruout the entire universe; people never look at reality, the world,
themselves, or their lives the same again; Newton is mainly a scientist, but he advances
the cause of philosophy and rational thinking/understanding immensely and perhaps
irreversibly; people now have a confidence and trust in reason which makes them personally
greater and which changes their psychology forever
1690: John Locke publishes two long books: 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' and
'Of Civil Government: The Second Treatise'; he does for philosophy what Newton does for
science; the entire immense universe seems imminently and completely understandable -- as
it is; this last of the four great Englishmen represents the height of rational liberal
human thinking and culture
1696: Pierre Bayle publishes his clever 'Historical and Critical Dictionary' in rather
backward France; he's a unique, heroic, and amusing individual -- an intensely rational
man who pretends to be intensely religious; he violently, nakedly juxtaposes the
traditional religious beliefs of his day against growing European reasonism, especially
from England; he faithfully always sides up with the anti-philosophy, but the way he does
it renders the views of religious authority deeply foolish; his sagacious protected method
of bashing god is warmly embraced by most European intellectuals and aristocrats for
almost a century
early 1700s: catholic Bishop Berkeley moves strongly against the Enlightenment, well
before it even has a chance to flower; he's a powerfully illiberal irrationalist and
subjectivist who reintroduces and 'improves' upon Platonic "idealism"; Berkeley says
matter is non-existent and only appears real as a product of human perception, and only
then due to god's observing mind as a base; all this is literally irrational nonsense, but
intelligent people unfortunately take it seriously, and tend to find it interesting and
"thought-provoking"
mid 1700s: catholic David Hume continues the illiberal and senseless irrationalism of
Berkeley; he builds upon certain errors of the empiricist Locke to create a radical
skepticism even worse than Pyrrho from two millennia previous
mid 1700s: Voltaire perhaps isn't a true philosopher, but he's a prolific writer in all
fields, and a polymath and high liberal who's the leading thinker and influence of his
day; as such, he's frequently jailed, banished, and threatened by the governmental and
anti-philosophical authorities; one of his mottoes is "Crush the infamy!" referring to
organized religion and religion in general; his 1733 'Letter Concerning the English
Nation' promotes English-style liberalism, especially in regard to science and philosophy;
in improving life, Voltaire emphasizes the importance of liberal culture, morals, manners,
and commerce over the accepted alternatives of governmental acts, war, and religion
mid 1700s: if Voltaire provided the learning of the Age of Reason in France, Denis Diderot
provided the fire; this reasonist materialist philosopher and outright hero was the
leading light behind the magnificent voluminous pro-reason 'Encyclopedie' -- and often at
great personal risk to himself
mid 1700s: Jean Jacques Rousseau probably isn't a true philosopher either, but he's a
prolific writer, polymath, and influential thinker who tends to counter the reasonist
philosophy and liberal culture championed by Voltaire
late 1700s: catholic Immanual Kant continues and culminates the illiberal and senseless
irrationalism of Berkeley and Hume; he says the universe is fundamentally completely
unknowable, and promotes instead such unreasonist philosophical travesties as "noumena,"
"things-in-themselves," and "a priori knowledge"; Kant basically emerges as the worst
philosopher and human being ever; the damage done by his poorly-reasoned, poorly-written,
incredibly-tedious, absolutely-incomprehensible "Critiques" and other books is beyond all
description
mid 1800s: John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spenser are two good-guy philosophes with somewhat
interesting ideas, but aren't rational enough to really advance philosophy or liberal
culture
1880s: Freidrich Nietzsche is a dynamic, brilliant, and heroic writer and thinker; in the
midst of the philosophical/cultural Dark Age, he's the first great philosopher ever to be
a pure atheist, and take a hard line against anti-philosophy institutions and culture; he
also writes the inspiring, heroic novel 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
early 1900s: Bertrand Russell is the second philosophical great to be a pure atheist, and
take a hard line against religious institutions and culture; he also writes the
nearly-incomprehensible 'Principles of Mathematics' despite being a normally pellucid
writer
mid 1900s: Jean-Paul Sartre is the third great philosopher of the modern age, and he
continues the fine tradition and pure atheism of Nietzsche and Russell; no-one realizes it
yet, but the writing is on the wall for the anti-philosophy for the first time in human
history; the strictly reasonist world of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes is about to
return -- and better than ever; Sartre also writes the nearly incomprehensible 'Being and
Nothingness'
late 1900s: Ayn Rand is the [first Jew - G], and the fourth great philosopher of the
modern age, and she's stunningly opposed to the anti-philosophy which is religion; Rand is
intensely in the Aristotelian tradition, and is the greatest reasonist and liberal to
date; unfortunately, she proves to be as much a cult-leader as a leader of an intellectual
movement; Rand also writes at least two magnificent allegorical/mythological novels which
articulate and illustrate her ingenious philosophy and the ideal of liberal culture
2002: the concept of pure liberalism emerges for the first time
http://www.pureliberal.com/historyofphilosophy.html
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